Issue Attention and Individual Voting Intentions : Survey Experiments of Selective Exposure in Simulated Election Campaigns

In this paper, we investigate whether and how election campaigns matter for party choice. We discuss how systematic changes in voting behavior may stem from the interaction between specific distributions of voter preferences along multiple policy-dimensions and cues generated by campaigns regarding which issues may become important in the future. Moreover, we discuss priming and framing effects activated by election campaigns, which may affect voting behavior systematically. We analyze data from two survey-experiments conducted on Norwegian voters. The results show that many voters change voting intentions when the focus of the election campaign changes, and that shifts within the electorate are quite systematic; specific, and different, parties gain tremendously when campaigns focus on either immigration or environmental issues. The individual-level characteristics of voters who are more likely to change parties are highly issue-dependent