ABSTRACT
This classic quote describes the 1948 presidential election but applies just as well to today's electorate. The most dramatic of U.S. political events, the presidential campaign, draws relatively little interest until the final months and that interest, as indicated by public opinion polls and voter turnout, falls short of what some theorists suggest is necessary for a healthy democracy. For most people, contact with the political world comes from the mass media, traditionally mainstream sources such as newspapers, television, radio, and magazines, and a large number of studies have attempted to explore the link between exposure to these sources of information and the involvement people have with public officials and the major political institutions. This is not a trivial question, for involvement in its many forms can have dramatic effects on whether and how people think about politics and its actors. In studies of persuasion, for example, involvement affects not only whether attitude change takes place but how and when the process takes place. Indeed, the dominant models within social psychology view involvement or
personal relevance as a cornerstone in how or whether people deal with new information and communication. Other fields and traditions treat involvement differently. Political scientists tend to use involvement as a control variable, something to be held constant through multivariate techniques to test the influence of large sets of independent variables on their dependent variables of interest. Depending on their training, mass communication scholars often follow one of the two approaches discussed earlier. However, unlike the political science and social psychology traditions, mass communication scholars investigate the impact of media use on political involvement, hoping to discover what role the media play in how people view the political world.
