ABSTRACT
Past research has increasingly demonstrated that public opinion often depends on how political elites choose to frame certain issues (Nelson and Oxley 1999; Jacoby 2000; Gershkoff and Kushner 2005) and on how the mass media conveys political messages (Iyengar, Peters, and Kinder 1982; Iyengar and Kinder 1987; Iyengar 1991; Jordan 1993; Jordan and Page 1992; Page 1996; Kinder 1998; Miller and Krosnick 2000; McCombs 2004). As Donald R. Kinder aptly remarks in a summary paper, a number of studies have assessed whether news and propaganda about public affairs infl uence “how citizens make sense of politics ( framing ), how citizens decide what is important in politics ( agenda setting ), and how citizens evaluate the policies and authorities that politics places before them ( priming )” (Kinder 2007: 155; italics in the original). Yet, in spite of the growing interest in the subject and in spite of recent research developments in understanding the interplay between political elites, mass media, and public opinion, the fl ow of infl uence between decision-makers and public opinion has been analysed more from a top-down than a bottom-up perspective.
