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Abstract:
For a long time the Swiss people have been opposed to a genuine, institutional, integration into the EU system. Three recent ballots (1992-2001) on EU integration projects have confirmed that only bilateral, economic, non-integrative agreements may rally a majority of Swiss voters. However beyond these structural invariants, my analysis attempts to assess the capacity of referendum campaigns to ‘prime’ the ingredients of voting decisions. Based on survey data and a sample of media campaign information, I investigate the degree of congruity between campaign issues and individual voting motives. I establish that the voting motives of integration opponents reflect the issues of ‘no’ campaigns more substantially than do the motives of supporters with respect to the issues of ‘yes’ campaigns. From this baseline the level of arguments-motives congruity is traced to differences in five possible moderators of priming: media exposure; time of voting decision (as a surrogate measure for attention to the campaign); affective involvement in the issues; political predispositions; and political awareness.
The analysis provides strong confirmation of the hypothesized effect of political awareness, whereby more knowledgeable voters systematically use voting motives that rank higher in the media hierarchy — in both linguistics areas and for both ‘yes’ and ‘no’ sides. By contrast the effect of the other moderators is apparently more contingent on particular circumstances. Relatively well-known issues and arguments (i.e. many ‘no’ issues) tend to gain prominence in people’s minds through the selective filter of affective dispositions, namely the personal significance of ballots and the general attitude toward EU integration. On the contrary less salient or familiar issues (i.e. like many ‘yes’ issues) have to make their way through primarily cognitive, attentional barriers. Besides on occasion, too much media exposure may
even swamp the effect of campaign messages and actually reduce priming effects. On the whole the results fit quite nicely with some recent research showing that cognitive and affective engagement exerts various and often opposite influences on priming effects, depending
on issues, on particular indicators, and on the specific mediators which the adopted measures supposedly regulate.
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