Voters' Reasoning Processes and Media Influences during the Persian Gulf War Author(s): Zhongdang Pan and

Gerald M. Kosicki Source: Political Behavior, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Mar., 1994), pp. 117-156 Published by: Springer Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/586485 Accessed: 10/11/2009 16:44
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=springer. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Springer is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Political Behavior.

http://www.jstor.org

Political Behavior, Vol. 16, No. 1, 1994

VOTERS' REASONING PROCESSES AND MEDIA INFLUENCES DURING THE PERSIAN WAR GULF
Zhongdang Pan and Gerald M.Kosicki
Voters engage in complex reasoning processes in deriving their policy preferences. Such reasoning processes take place in the environment of media helping to construct the discourse of an issue. To demonstrate the reasoning processes and media influences on the processes, this study analyzes the panel data gathered from a national probability sample before and after the Persian Gulf War. The results show a process of forming one's support of the Bush administration's Gulf War policies that involved feelings toward Bush, patriotic feelings, and acceptance of the official statements of U.S. foreign policy goals. These positive contributors are all related to heavier exposure to television news. Respondents' level of public affairs information and exposure to newspaper public affairs functioned as a contingent factor in the reasoning processes: Those at the upper half of the scale showed a greater emphasis on ideology and negative emotional reactions to the destruction of the war in forming their support of the Bush administration's Gulf War policies. The importance of the homogeneity in the discourse of the issue is further demonstrated by the effects of the news media exposure on higher likelihood of dissent concerning the end of the war.

The Persian Gulf War was, and still is, regarded by many as the only indisputably "just war" since World War II. Despite floundering public approval ratings during the uncertain period of October 1990 and early January 1991, American public opinion poll data showed enormous popular support for President George Bush's decision of sending U.S. troops to the Gulf and his conduct of the war (cf. Mueller 1993). According to the Gallup polls, by late February 1991, 80 percent of the respondents interviewed claimed that the situation in the Mideast was worth going to war over. At the same time, Bush's popularity soared: The percentage of people "apZhongdang Pan, The Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, 3620 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6220; Gerald M. Kosicki, Schoolxof Journalism, The Ohio State University, 242 West 18th Avenue, Columbus, OH 43210. 117
0190-9320/94/03(X)-0117$07.(X)/(? 1994 Plenuml Publishing (Cororation

118

PANAND KOSICKI

proving" Bush's performance as president registered at 87 percent, a 27 percent increase from the level in early August 1990. While the news media and public opinion polls amassed signs of the glory of "winning" the war and the popularity of President Bush, critics were castigating the media for being propaganda tools for the administration (e.g., Jhally, Lewis, and Morgan 1991; Kellner 1992). Whatever the merits of such commentaries in terms of media performance, however, the issue of audience effects requires more careful consideration. Popular commentaries of media effects regarding the war seem to rest upon scattered or even suspect empirical evidence or popular beliefs of powerful, direct media effects on how members of the public would perceive the conflict and how they would experience the conflict in both cognitive and affective domains. Against this background, this study is designed to examine one research question: How did members of the American public reason about the Gulf conflict and form their decisions whether to support their commander-inchiefs handling of the Gulf crisis? To answer this question, this study draws upon data from the National Election Study's 1990-91 panel/pilot study. It examines the contributions of a set of cognitive and affective factors to four different measures of support of Bush's handling of the Gulf crisis: voters' approval ratings of Bush's handling of the Gulf crisis before and after the war, support before and after the war for sending U.S. troops to the Gulf, the postwar approval of stopping the fighting after liberating Kuwait, and the postwar opinion on taking quick actions to aid the Kurdish people. HOW DO VOTERSREASON? In searching for an answer to our research question, we began with a recent treatise by Sniderman, Brody, and Tetlock (1991). In this work, they take voters' reasoning processes as the central focus and offer a fresh perspective on how voters form their opinions, even though voters often show limited opinion consistency and stability and low levels of knowledge (Converse 1964; Neuman 1986). Sniderman et al.'s formulation of voters' reasoning processes has three important features: population heterogeneity in policy reasoning conditioned on political sophistication, use of various "cognitive heuristics," and a reasoning chain linking abstract principles and concrete opinions concerning specific issues. The "heterogeneity" thesis states that people make up their minds by considering different factors and/or placing different weights on these factors. One crucial contingent factor is political sophistication, an abstract "bundle"concept (Sniderman et al. 1991: 21) indicating the levels of cogni-

VOTERS' REASONING WAR PROCESSES DURING PERSIAN GULF

119

tive resources that individuals can mobilize in their political reasoning. In their study, the Sniderman team, using years of formal schooling as a surrogate measure of political sophistication, shows that, across a variety of issues, those with higher levels of education take a more cognitive approach in their reasoning, as evidenced by greater strengths in the relationships between ideological orientation, principles, and concrete policy preferences. In contrast, those with lower levels of education tend to take a more affective approach in deriving their opinions For example, they are more likely to rely on affect toward a social group in forming their opinions concerning racial equality. The "heuristic"thesis is based on the view that voters are cognitive economizers in processing political information. They take cognitive shortcuts in processing information and in forming their policy preferences and opinions. In the cognitive literature, heuristics refer to simple "rules of thumb" that function as surrogates for the immediate logical premises from which one derives preference and judgmental inferences (Tversky and Kahneman 1974).' One heuristic discussed in Sniderman et al.'s work is pertinent to this study: the "likabilityheuristic." This notion refers to one's affect toward a social group or the differences in one's levels of affect toward two opposing candidates being a basis for one's judgments of policies related to the social group or for one's preference of a candidate. The Sniderman team shows that politically less sophisticated people are able to use this heuristic effectively. The "reasoning chain" thesis assumes that voters' reasoning process parallels the logical procedure of moving from abstract and general to concrete and specific. This notion has its roots in the literature on the static models of voters' belief systems or structures (Converse 1964; Peffley and Hurwitz, 1985; Feldman 1988). But it turns such a static model into a dynamic model of voters deriving their opinions on public polices from abstract principles and other cognitive and affective factors that may serve as logical premises. Starting from this simple idea, it is then possible to formulate a causal model of voters' cognitive calculus in opinion formation. Applying these ideas to the Gulf War issue, we can derive three hypotheses: Hi-Voters with conservative ideological orientations were more supportive of the Bush administration's policies. H--Voters who expressed more positive feelings toward Bush were more supportive of the administration's policies. H3-Levels of political sophistication functioned as a contingent variable in that those with higher levels of political sophistication tended to reveal a stronger relationship between ideological orientation and

120

PANAND KOSICKI

support for the Bush administration's policies and those with lower levels of political sophistication were more likely to use affect toward Bush as a "likability heuristic," indicated by a stronger relationship between affect toward Bush and support for his Gulf policies. When applying Sniderman et al.'s theoretical framework to studying voters' reasoning processes concerning the Gulf War, two additional factors need to be considered: differences in issue culture and media influences. The Gulf conflict was unique on these two aspects compared with the domestic policy issues examined in Sniderman et al. Issues differ in how they are defined, presented, and signified by political elites. The totality of such issue discourse and its interaction with public sentiment may be called an "issue culture," which marks the dynamic movements of an issue in the historical current and the influences of various political players (Gamson 1988; Gamson and Modigliani 1989). More specifically, the relative importance of abstract ideological principles and the "likability heuristic" in voters' reasoning process may depend on the degrees of their relevance, which in turn are contingent on how the issue is presented and defined (Lau, Smith and Fiske 1991) and the plurality of political discourse concerning the issue (Brody 1991; Zaller 1992). Historically, a major international conflict involving U.S. troops, pride, and prestige is often a cue for unity and a reason for significant increases in popular support for the commander-in-chief (Hugick and Gallup 1991; but see Brody 1991). In forming opinions concerning the administration's policies related to such conflicts, voters may rely more heavily on the principles (e.g., patriotism, supporting the president) that cut across the ideological spectrum. The Gulf crisis was a classic example of such a potential "rally event"U.S. troops, prestige, pride, credibility, and patriotism were all on the line. But it was able to achieve its tremendous "rallying"influence in part because of the monolithic nature of the political discourse concerning the issue (see Dennis et al. 1991; Kellner 1992; Taylor 1992). The Bush administration successfully used the media to portray the conflict as the peaceloving people of the world rising up against an aggressive, evil dictator threatening democracy. For example, Dennis et al. (1991) observed via a crude quantitative content analysis of news reports of several major newspapers that from the beginning, the rhetoric concerning the conflict was full of righteousness, indicated by the types of historical exemplars (e.g. Hitler, Vietnam) used, the almost exclusive reliance on official sources, the consensual condemnation of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the dehumanization of Saddam Hussein, and the press operation within the Pentagon's reporter pooling system (see also Taylor 1992).

REASONING VOTERS' PROCESSES DURING PERSIAN GULF WAR

121

9I3-V4W

POLLS
Situationin Midcast Worth Fighung for -Bush's Job Performance *

7/11-14/91

Bush's Handhngof the Gulf Crsis

FIG. 1. Publicopiniontrendsduringthe Gulfconflict. This hegemonic characteristic of the issue culture was clearly revealed by the reported fear among the politicians in Washington that opposing the war would be a political liability in the 1992 elections. The point is further illustrated by the aggregate public opinion trends between early August 1990 and July 1991 shown in Figure 1. The figure shows the proportions of respondents interviewed by the Gallup organization in the 17 separate cross-sectional national polls who gave affirmative answers to three questions: approval of Bush's job performance, approval of Bush's handling of the Gulf crisis, and whether the situation in the Middle East was worth going to war over. The temporal patterns of public opinions showed significant plurality in terms of the U S. options and support of Bush's handling of the crisis between early November 1990 and early January 1991 (see Mueller 1993). Such plurality might reflect the heated debate during this period over the best course of action to take. While showing this feature, Figure 1 also illustrates two important points. One is that there was a clear acceptance of the administration's definition of the issue at the initial stage of the crisis, reflected by the overwhelming support of Bush's handling of the crisis in August 1990. The same pattern appeared immediately after the war started. Another point is that during this period, the overall approval of Bush's job performance is almost perfectly correlated with the approval of his handling of the Gulf crisis and the belief that the situation in the Gulf was worth going to war over. The Gulf crisis issue defined the presidency in voters' minds during this period (Krosnick and Brannon 1992; Iyengar and Simon 1993). One implication of this issue culture is that voters' ideological orientations may play a less decisive role in the formation of voters' policy preferences concerning the issue, especially in their support for their commander-in-chief, compared to the issues examined in Sniderman et al.'s

122

PANAND KOSICKI

study (e.g., racial equality and the civil rights of homosexuals). In comparison, affect, measured as either positive feelings toward Bush or more general patriotic feelings, should have stronger and more uniform effects on voters' support for their president and his war policies. The second but related factor that needs to be considered involves media influences that are external to voters' cognition. Through their analysis of public opinion poll data as well as news content data involving a large number of public policy issues, Page and Shapiro (1992) show that popular presidents had a significant impact on the shape and direction of public opinion; so did news commentators and experts sought after by the news media. The point was reinforced by Brody (1991) in his analysis of the historical data of presidential job performance ratings. Further, it has been shown by at least one study that as far as foreign policy issues are concerned voters are especially willing to grant the president the authority in defining the issues and to comply with the position advocated by the president (Hurwitz 1989). Based on such evidence, we expect that the news media coverage of the Gulf crisis had significant effects on voters' opinions concerning the war. The effects may take the routes of raising the salience of the Gulf War issue and priming the accessibility of certain considerations in voters' minds (Iyengar and Simon 1993). Another route of strong media effects on voters' opinion formation during the Gulf Crisis may be the homogeneity of news coverage of the crisis. Many media critics commented and some presented evidence to show that during the Gulf crisis, the news media were managed by the administration and the military; they failed to present dissenting voices; they carried the policy discourse concerning the war within a very narrow spectrum; they glorified and fictionalized the war through their presentations of the videogame images of "smart bombs" hitting targets with pinpoint accuracy; and they operated as the administration's cheerleader (Kellner 1992; Taylor 1992; Gerbner 1992). These features of media coverage helped frame the issue in terms of good versus evil and justice versus aggression, arousing feelings of nationalistic pride and patriotism, and constructing a reality perception of the war as being unreal and painless (e.g. Gerbner 1992). The main thrust of these arguments is that when the mass media failed in their information function by focusing primarily on patriotic emotions, human dramas, spectacular images, and the president's rhetoric, they had deprived the public of its ability to engage in policy reasoning utilizing sufficient cognitive resources (e.g., Jhally, Lewis, and Morgan 1991). If these arguments have empirical merit, we should expect positive effects of exposure to TV news on voters' support of the president's Gulf policies and on their positive affect toward the commander-in-chief. We also should expect positive effects of increased exposure to news media in

WAR DURING PERSIAN GULF PROCESSES REASONING VOTERS'

123

general on accepting the administration's rationale for its Gulf policies: to deter aggression and to protect democracy from the threat of a dictator. However, the consensual media discourse concerning the Gulf crisis collapsed after the war was over. No systematic content analysis has been done to document the news coverage of the postwar euphoria and trauma. Our observation is that the national euphoria during March and April of 1991 was soon replaced by reports of Saddam Hussein's brutal crush of the Shiite and Kurdish rebellions as well as U.S. inaction. Questions were raised as to whether the war was stopped too soon and whether the U.S. and its allies should provide humanitarian aid to the Kurdish refugees and take further military actions against Saddam Hussein. The point to be made here is that on these aspects of the postwar consequences, there was no longer a "consensual elite discourse" (Zaller 1992). Because these questions were raised primarily by the media and they had little corresponding "objective" reality to American publics, they presented a unique situation to test media effects not confounded by official propaganda campaigns. To test these ideas, we identified four measures of support of the administration's Gulf War policies: support sending the U.S. troops to the war, support stopping the war after liberating Kuwait, support taking quick actions to aid the Kurdish people, and approval of Bush's handling of the Gulf crisis. We expect strong media effects on all four variables, but in different directions. The media acted to rally the public to support Bush's handling of the Gulf crisis until the end of the war, then created dissent among the voters for Bush's having ended the war too soon and not taking decisive actions to aid the Kurdish people. Built upon Sniderman et al.'s research, the analysis focuses on voters' reasoning process as it is depicted in the causal model shown in Figure 2.2 The model has a distinct feature of explicitly depicting a reasoning chain

Positive affect toward Blush

FIG. 2. A temporalreasoning chain model of approving Bush'sGulfpolicy.

124

PANAND KOSICKI

(Sniderman et al. 1991): the factors are arranged from left to right based on both levels of abstraction and time of measurement. Ideological conservatism and the prewar measure of positive affect toward Bush are placed on the far left. They are hypothesized to be caused directly only by the demographic variables, which are exogenous to this reasoning process. Both of these factors are hypothesized to affect support of the Bush administration's policies as they are specified in H1 and H2. To the right of these factors, we locate two sets of postwar measures of cognitive and affective factors. The model posits direct causal paths from ideological conservatism, positive affect toward Bush, and prewar approval of Bush's handling of the Gulf crisis to these factors. These paths can be seen as indications of the filtering or selective perception mechanism (Iyengar, 1990), which functions not only in "limiting what one takes in" but also in restricting what is retrieved from one's memory.' This model also postulates that voters formed their opinions concerning Bush's handling of the Gulf crisis by weighing different foreign policy goals and considering their affective reactions related to the war. These variables are thus placed as immediate causes leading to changes in approving Bush's handling of the Gulf crisis before and after the war. The time of measurement strengthens the causal order specified in the reasoning chain notion. Mass media exposure variables are placed as external influences that have direct effects on affect toward Bush, pre- and postwar approvals of Bush's handling of the Gulf crisis, and the foreign policy goals and affective reactions. Based on the theoretical rationale outlined earlier, this model projects the following additional hypotheses: H4The intensified homogeneous portrayal of the Gulf crisis until the end of the war had a powerful impact on voters' reasoning about the issue in some specific ways. H4,,-The political goals of U.S. foreign policy and patriotic feelings had positive effects on an increased support of Bush's Gulf War policies during the war. H41,-Exposure to TV news had positive effects on positive affect toward Bush as well as heightened patriotic feelings, while exposure to newspaper public affairs and TV news both had positive effects on increased emphasis on the political goals of U.S. foreign policy. H4,.-Because of the euphoria and fictionalization of TV coverage of the war, exposure to TV news would lead to less intensive negative emotional reactions to the destruction of the war. H4,1-Exposure to TV news and newspaper public affairs had direct and positive effects on voters' support of the war policies, indicated by

REASONING PROCESSES VOTERS' DURING PERSIAN WAR GULF

125

increased support of sending the U.S. troops to the Gulf and increased approval of Bush's handling of the Gulf crisis. H.5-- Because of the media constructions of the postwar trauma after the war, exposure to TV news and newspaper public affairs had direct positive effects on voters' opinions that the war was ended too soon and the U.S. should take quick actions to aid the Kurdish people. The model also was estimated by allowing differential strengths of the cognitive and affective oriented paths contingent on levels of political sophistication. Considering the unique issue culture of the Persian Gulf conflict, H3 is reformulated as an issue-specific alternative: H--The roles played by both ideological orientation and the "likability heuristic" in voters' reasoning process during the Gulf conflict are unique in that ideological orientation was not strongly related to increased support of Bush's Gulf War policies and there was no difference in the effects of positive affect toward Bush and patriotic feelings on increased support of Bush's Gulf War policies between high and low political sophistication groups. METHODS Data This study reports the analysis of panel data gathered by the National Election Studies as part of the 1990 election study and the 1991 pilot study. In the NES 1990 study, 2,000 randomly selected respondents across the nation were interviewed between November 7, 1990, and January 26, 1991, with 97 percent of the interviews completed before January 5. Limited questions directly related to the Persian Gulf conflict were asked. These respondents were contacted again between June 4, and July 31, 1991. Among them, 1,385, or more than 69 percent, completed the second interviews. In this wave, more questions related to the Gulf conflict were asked. For more details about the sample design and characteristics, see Miller and National Election Studies (1991a, 1991b). The time period covered by the panel ensures that we have a before and after design with the Gulf War being the intervention between the before and after measures. As we can see from the Gallup poll data shown in Figure 1, a major shift in public opinion trends occurred immediately after the coalition forces initiated the military offensive. By early April 1991, public support for the war and approval of Bush's handling of the Gulf situation, although eroded somewhat, remained at a very high level. Addi-

126

PANAND KOSICKI

tional Gallup poll data show that public approval of Bush's handling of the situation in the Gulf region remained at the 80 percent level by mid-July (Gallup and Newport 1991). The decline in support of the war and in approving Bush's handling of the Gulf crisis created a small difficulty in looking at pre- and postwar changes. Including the opinions on the ending of the war and the postwar Kurdish condition would help clarify some potentially hard-to-interpret findings.

Measures
Four dependent variables were used and two of them were measured in both waves with identical wording. These are approval of the decision to send the U.S. troops to the Gulf (measured in both waves), approval of Bush's handling of the Gulf crisis (measured in both waves), whether it was right for the U.S. and its allies to stop fighting after liberating Kuwait, and whether the U.S. should take quick actions to aid the Kurds. The latter two variables were measured only in the post-war wave. To be consistent across all four dependent measures and to ease the threat of ceiling effects in estimating the change models on the first two dependent variables,' a 0-1 dichotomous scale was used for all four variables, with 1 being the affirmative answer in each case.5 Two sets of variables used came only from the postwar wave: two affective scales and two foreign policy goal scales. The scale of emotional reactions to the war was based on factor analysis of six affective items measuring how people felt during the war:' upset during the war, sympathetic to the Iraqi people, worried that the fighting might spread, angry at Saddam Hussein, disgusted at killing, and afraid for the American troops. All these items were measured on a three-point scale (1 = "not feeling it" and 3 = "feeling it strongly"). They measured emotional reactions among individuals who realized the reality of the war, which, according to some media critics, was not shown in television news coverage of the war. Factor analysis yielded a single factor that accounted for nearly 36 percent of the total variance. Factor scores were used in all subsequent analysis. Another affective scale is patriotism, measured by two questions. One (V2417) asked the respondents to indicate on a four-point scale (1 = "not very good" and 4 = "extremely good") how they felt when they saw the American flag flying. The other question (V2418) asked respondents to indicate on a similar four-point scale (1 = "not very strong" and 4 = "extremely strong") how strongly they loved the U.S. The two items were highly correlated (r = .58, p < .001). They were thus averaged into a single patriotism index. The second set of factors was based on questions asking the respondents

PERSIAN DURING GULF WAR VOTERS' REASONING PROCESSES

127

to evaluate on a three-point scale (1 = "not important at all" and 3 = "very important") the importance of five specific objectives as goals of U.S. foreign policy.7 These objectives included securing adequate energy supplies, preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, reducing environmental pollution around the world, protecting weaker nations against foreign aggression, and helping to bring a democratic form of government to other nations. Factor analysis of these items revealed two correlated factors (r = .19, p < .01) accounting for more than 55 percent of the total variance. Goals related to energy, nuclear proliferation, and environment loaded on the first factor, which we called "functional goals." The second factor contained the goals of protecting weaker nations and helping to bring democracy, which we labeled "political goals." The factor scores were used in all subsequent analyses.8 The other variables used in this study came exclusively from the firstwave survey. Feeling toward George Bush was measured on a 100-point feeling thermometer scale (V134). This scale was transformed into a 10point scale in the data analysis. The seven-point ideological orientation scale was built based on two standard measures in the first wave (V406, V407), with one being "extremely liberal" and seven being "extremely conservative." Many survey questions were pulled together to create the public affairs media use measures. Because the first-wave survey focused on the 1990 election, a large portion of the limited media use questions dealt with exposure or attention to campaign stories or programs. However, a strong argument can be made that most people do not change their stable media use habits, other than at times of life transition or heightened social conflict (Chaffee and Choe 1981; Ball-Rokeach and DeFleur 1976). If so, these measures were reasonable approximations of normal news media exposure. If anything, they underestimated the amount of media exposure during the Gulf War (Pan et al. forthcoming). In addition, if information reception and retention are the key mechanisms of any expected media effects, exposure to media public affairs content will be measured more meaningfully if the indices include the retention of the information that can only result from the mass media (Zaller 1992). For our purposes, media variables must indicate not simply the overt behavior of watching TV news or reading a newspaper, but also the information retention quality of such behavior. Based on such arguments, we selected seven measures to create the media use indices. Five of them are direct measures of media exposure or attention,9 including attention to newspaper articles about the 1990 campaign (0 = "none" and 4 = "a great deal"), number of campaign programs on TV watched (0 = "none"and 3 = "a good many"), attention to TV news about the campaign (0 = "none" and 4 = "a great deal"), days per week

128

PANAND KOSICKI

reading a newspaper, and days per week watching TV news. The sixth measure is based on the question (V321) asking the respondents to indicate on a four-point scale (1 = "hardly at all" and 4 = "most of the time") how closely they followed "what's going on in government and public affairs." The seventh measure is the sum of the correct answers to the eight questions testing the respondents' knowledge of the political offices held by six news personalities and which party had the majority in the House and the Senate prior to the 1990 election."' The seven variables were submitted to a factor analysis, which yielded two correlated factors (r = .37, p < .001). The two factors accounted for more than 61 percent of the total variance. The first factor consisted of the two newspaper variables, following public affairs, and political knowledge. It was called the "newspaper public affairs information"factor. The second factor consisted of the three remaining television variables and was thus called the "TV news exposure" factor. Clearly, the first factor represents information-related media (primarily newspaper) use as well as levels of information about current affairs. In our judgment, it is a better proxy of levels of cognitive resources than education in considering how individuals take different routes in their policy preference reasoning (see Sniderman et al. 1991). Therefore, this factor was used in classifying individuals into high and low political sophistication groups. The second factor, although it measures TV news exposure and attention directly, may be differentiated from the first one both conceptually and empirically: Those who use a newspaper for public affairs information may have some different characteristics than those who mainly use television for the same purposes. More importantly, because of its visual dimension, exposure to television news may be related to quite different cognitive and affective experiences (see Meyrowitz 1990; Schudson 1990) and many critics of television news coverage of the war at least implicitly assumed more powerful effects of television (e.g. Kellner 1992; Gerbner 1992). Six demographic variables were used in the analysis: age; gender (1 = male, 2 = female); education, as measured by years of formal schooling; occupation, measured by Duncan's socioeconomic index (Stevens and Cho 1985); family income (1 = none or less than $2,999, 23 = $90,000 or more); and race (1 = black, 0 = other)." Analysis All the analyses were based on the 1,385 respondents who completed interviews in both waves. However, those who did not give an opinion on any one of the four dependent measures were excluded from the analysis involving that variable.

VOTERS' REASONING PROCESSES DURING PERSIAN GULF WAR

129

The analysis proceeded in a step-by-step fashion. Because the four dependent variables were all measured on a dichotomous scale, logit regression models were estimated. On the two measured in both waves, the baseline model involves the prewar measure of the dependent variable and the six demographic variables. The simple predictive model then involves adding the respondent's feelings toward Bush and ideological orientation to the baseline model. And finally, the complete model involving foreign policy goals and affective responses were introduced as additional predictors. This series of logit models provides estimates of all the direct effects of the reasoning factors on policy opinions depicted in Figure 2. These steps were repeated with each of the two subsamples defined by public affairsinformation levels. The remaining paths depicted in Figure 2 were estimated via a path model. The part of the analysis provides an assessment of the roles of ideological orientation, feelings toward Bush, and the two media variables in voters' reasoning process that are not captured by the logit regression models. That is, they also operate via foreign policy goals and affective responses. Each model was evaluated on a set of conventional criteria. A pseudo-R2 was computed for each logit regression model. The hierarchically nested models were tested via the R2 increment. The purpose here was not to choose from alternative models because we are applying the "reasoning chain" model. Instead, the purpose here was to examine (1) the empirical values-as indicated by the increased predictive power-of adding the foreign policy goal and affective response variables to the model and (2) how these additional variables mediate the effects of ideological orientation and positive affect toward Bush. In all models fitted, the six demographic variables were included as the exogenous variables with direct causal paths to all the factors in the model except the postwar measure of approving Bush's handling of the Gulf crisis or supporting sending the U.S. troops to the
Gulf.
12

RESULTS Direct Effects on Policy Opinion The NES data revealed significant changes between pre- and postwar surveys in the support of sending U.S. troops to the Gulf and the approval of Bush's handling of the Gulf crisis. The level of support measured by these two variables remained very high at the time of the postwar survey. Almost 85 percent of the respondents expressed their approval of Bush's handling of the Gulf crisis, a 23 percent increase from the prewar survey (p < .001), and similarly, almost 80 percent of the sample expressed their

130

PANAND KOSICKI

support of the decision of sending the U.S. troops to the Gulf, an 18 percent increase from the prewar survey (p < .001). The opinions were more evenly divided on the other two dependent measures, with 54 percent agreeing with the administration to stop the fighting after liberating Kuwait and 53 percent expressing their desire for more quick actions to aid the Kurds. The initial tests of the H1 and H2 involved fitting the cross-sectional logit regression models with ideological self-placement and feeling toward Bush as two endogenous predictors controlling for the six demographic variables. Across the total of six models, ideological self-placement was found to have significant effects only in two of them. It showed a significant positive effect on postwar approval of Bush's handling of the Gulf crisis (B = .230, p < .01) and a significant negative effect on the call for quick actions to aid Kurds (B = - .131, p < .01). Feeling toward Bush, on the other hand, had significant positive effects on Bush approval and support for sending U.S. troops to the Gulf in both pre- and postwar models. It showed no effects on support for stopping the fighting and taking actions to aid Kurds. These results are retained in the complete models, which include the foreign policy goals, affective responses, and media use variables. The estimates of these complete models are shown in Tables 1 and 2. For each dependent variable, the tables show regression coefficients in the final equation, the corresponding changes in the probability of giving an affirmative answer, and the incremental R2 (pseudo-R2, see Maddala 1983; Hosmer and Lemeshow 1989: pp. 145-149) for each bloc of predictors. ' Table 1 shows the estimates of the two temporal models of the two dependent variables that were measured in both pre- and postwar surveys. Table 2 shows the estimates of the two cross-sectional models of the two dependent variables that were only measured in the postwar survey. Looking across the two tables, we can see that the first two dependent variables, approving Bush's handling of the Gulf crisis and support for sending U.S. troops to the Gulf, were by and large similarly predicted by the variables in the models. But the other two variables concerning the end of the fighting and aid to the Kurds were very different. Self-identified conservatives showed greater increase in their approval of Bush's handling of the Gulf crisis and were less likely to endorse the idea of taking quick actions to help the Kurds. At best, the evidence provides only a partial support for Hi, which stated significant effects of ideological conservatism on all four variables. In comparison, feeling positive toward Bush was a stronger predictor. It had significant effects on increased approval of Bush's handling of the Gulf crisis and support for sending U.S. troops to the Gulf. This shows a strong support for H2. But on ending the war and providing aid to the Kurds, feeling toward Bush was completely irrelevant.

VOTERS' REASONING PROCESSES PERSIAN DURING WAR GULF TABLE 1. Predicting Changes in Support of the Gulf War Policies' Approving Bush's Crisis Handlinig B P(y=I) Stability (prewar measure) 1.399* * (.216) .175*
(.082) .278** (.042) 8.09%**

`1311

Support Sending Troops to the Gulf

B P(! = I)

.302

1.613** (.180) .085 (.075)

173**

.334

Ide?ologiy annI Affect

Ideological conservatism Feeling toward Bush

Apseudo-R2 Media public affairs

.038
.041

.021 .034

(.037)

Newspaper pulblic affairs exposure TV p)ublicaffairs exposure

1pseuido-R2 Goals of foreign policies

(Yo ~. 'i e
.294*

-.072
-

(.118)
-.0)64 .016

-.121 (.103) .080

- .030

.020

(.099)

(.089) .68%*~
-.024 .087

Functional goals Political goals

Affective responses Emnotional reactions to the war

.095 (.096)
,357**

.211**
(.078) .537** (.087)

.052
.126

(.095)
-.206*
- .051

- .229*

- .057

Patriotic feelings Apseudo-JR"

(.011) .715** (.149) 4.45%**

1,337

.066

(.097) .694** (.136) 6.35%** 1,331

.067

1. In 1)otlhmtoolels, pretvar mtteasture thtedependent carialbleani(I the six dlemogrraphic the of variables, age, gentder. occupational prestige, eduticationi, famly incomte, an,ld raice (black versus others), tvere iutcld(ed(15asconitrol varialbles. A pseudo R is definled as 1 - L,,1L), odel (with only the intercept) anidL,, is the log whlere L, is the log likelihlood f'romthe mill mi likeliliood from the mlodlel with b)oth tlse intercept and p)predictors. Its interpretatt)n is 2 analogouis to Rh in linear regressioni. The hirstApseudo-R in the talble is analogous to the percent of' additional variance accotlnite(l for l)y i(leologvyamdI feehniigtoward Buish after the anid dtemiogrraphicis stalbility. Each of' the othler Apseuldo in the talble is analogouisto the "o percent of' additionial variaince accouinitedfor albove the preCviol%s The cell restricte(l mnodel. are entries in the "B"columlni logit regression coeff'icieints andlthe cell entries in the -p, = column are the corresponding coeflicients in predicting the prolbability of' ani aflfirmative aniswer. Stanidarderrors for the logit coeff'icienits in p)arentheses. are * p-- .05' < .01 **p)

132

PANAND KOSICKI

The two sets of intermediating variables, foreign policy goals and affective responses, revealed their predictive power across all four models. Only on support for stopping the fighting did they contribute less than 1 percent of the variance. Table 1 shows that both the emphasis on the political goals of U.S. foreign policy such as protecting weaker nations against aggression and bringing a democratic form of government to other nations and patriotic feelings had significant positive effects on increased approval of Bush's handling of the Gulf crisis and increased support for sending U.S. troops to the Gulf. The effects range from nearly 7 percent to more than 12 percent increases in the likelihood of moving toward the support position between the preand postwar surveys. The evidence strongly supports H4,. Emotional reactions to the destruction, killings, and stress of the war played a negative factor, leading to more than a 5 percent decrease in the likelihood of moving toward the support position in both models. The two dependent variables differ in the roles played by the "functional goals" of U.S. foreign policy. While emphasizing these goals showed no relationship to approval of Bush's handling of the Gulf crisis, it would lead to more than a 5 percent increase in the likelihood of moving to support for sending U.S. troops to the Gulf. The results in Table 2 show the roles played by the foreign policy goals and affective responses in the other two models. Those who emphasized political goals and showed more intensive patriotic feelings were much less satisfied with ending the war without toppling Saddam Hussein. But more intensive emotional reactions to the war were related to support for ending the fighting. On aiding the Kurds, both types of foreign policy goals contributed to the likelihood of endorsing quick actions, as was the emotional reactions to the war. Together, the evidence seemed to suggest an irony: While the administration succeeded in rallying public support for its hawkish policies during the Gulf crisis by permeating interventionist ideas and arousing patriotic emotions, these factors also became seeds of the criticisms for its policies at the end of the war. Newspapers seemed to have played a negative role on the two dependent variables examined in Table 1, although the effects do not appear robust. Increased exposure to newspaper public affairs information led to decreases in the likelihood of moving toward approving Bush's handling of the Gulf crisis and support for sending U.S. troops to the Gulf. Exposure to TV news showed no effect on either variable. The evidence is directly opposite to H4l1, which predicts direct positive effects of both media use variables. We will return to this point later. The results shown in Table 2 painted a rather different picture of media effects. In this case, the two media variables showed significant effects on

VOTERS'REASONING PROCESSESDURING PERSIANGULFWAR TABLE 2. Predicting Support of the Gulf War Policies' Support Stopping the Fighting
B P(!/ = 1)

`133

Should Act Quickly to Aid the Kurds B P(!/ = 1)

Ideology anf( Affect Ideological conservatism Feeling toward Bush Lpseudo-R 2 Media puIblic alffairs Newspaper publlic affairs exposure TV public affairs exposure
Lpseudo-RI2

-.079

-O .019

.1*

.026 - . ()5

(.051) .050 (.027) .11%

(.051)
.012 - .021 (.026) .44%*

-.
-

190("* (.071)
.

.047

135k

-.034

(.063) .F56%**~'

.236** (.070) .153* (.063) 1. 15%**

.058

.038

Goals offforeign policies Functional goals Political goals

-.066

.016

(.060)
.

148'*

-.037

(.060)
Affective responses Eimotional reactions to the war Patriotic feelings
Apseuido-R2
-

.187** (.060) .218** (.060)

.257**

.046 .054

.132* (.063)
.231*
(. 103)

.033 -.051

.063 .00)5

(.063)
.018

(.0)10)
2.14%** 1,:370

1,384

1. In 1)othmodels, the prewwar measure of the depelndlentVarialble and the six demographic varialbles,age, gendler, occuipationalprestige, e(ltlcaitioni, fiamilyiniComiie, anliIratce(black versois others), were inclutdedas cointrolvariahles. A p)selldo-R2 is d(I ente(l as 1 - L,/LA), whlere 1L0is the log likelihood froimthe nutll mnodel is (with only the intercept) and L,,p the log likelihioodI froimthe model with 1)0ththe intercept aiid )) I)redictors.Its interpretation is anaiilogous R to in linear regression. The f'irst Apsetido-R2 in the talbleis analogouisto the percent of additional variance accounte(I for Iby ideology and feeling toward Buish a fter thte demographics and stalbility. Eacihof the other Apseudo-R12s ill the talble is anlalogouis the percenttof'additional to variance accounted fIr albove the previotis restricted mnodlel. The cell enitries in the "B" the columlniare logit regression coefhicients anid the cell enitries in the "p**, = 1" cotlnimnatre aniswer. Standard corresponding coefhcieints in predicting the probability of' an afl'rmnative errors for the logit coefficienits are in parentheses.
p **I .05,

.01

134

PANAND KOSICKI

both dependent variables, as we predicted in H.. Higher levels of exposure to newspaper and television reduced the likelihood of supporting the decision to end fighting after liberating Kuwait and increased the likelihood of endorsing quick actions to aid the Kurds. The two media variables were among the strongest predictors in both models.

Disaggregated

Estimates

Disaggregating the foreign policy goals and emotional reaction indices would serve two purposes. One is to help validate the indices as they have been used in the analysis reported so far. The other is to help locate the sources of their effects or lack of effects at the individual item level. The results from the disaggregated analysis show that they do not change anything we have said so far with regard to voters' reasoning process, but they do help locate the effects of the foreign policy goals and emotional reaction factors. On approving Bush's handling of the Gulf crisis, the small negative effect of the functional goals came mainly from pollution reduction, which would lead to more than an 8 percent (p <.10) reduction in the likelihood of postwar approval. To secure the nation's energy supply, one of the three items forming the functional goal index, showed an insignificant positive effect on Bush approval and a significant effect on the support for sending troops to the Gulf (B = .280, p < .05). The negative impact on Bush approval and support for sending U.S. troops by the emotional reaction index came primarily from a general feeling of emotional upset. This item alone would reduce the likelihood of postwar Bush approval or support for sending U.S. troops to the Gulf by 10 percent. These effects were reduced somewhat by other items in the index. On Bush approval, it was fear for U.S. troops (B = .295, p < .10). On support for sending troops to the Gulf, it was anger at Saddam Hussein (B = .484, p < .01). On support for ending the fighting, feeling upset, sympathy to Iraqi people, and disgust at killings, all contributed to the positive effect shown by the emotional reaction index. But the overall estimate disguised the negative effect of being angry at Saddam Hussein, which would have led to more than a 9 percent reduction in the likelihood of supporting an end to the fighting. On support for taking actions to aid the Kurds, sympathy toward Iraqi people was the main positive contributor, leading to more than a 9 percent increase in the likelihood of supporting taking actions. But feeling upset in general during the war was a negative factor, although not powerful enough to offset the effect of sympathy toward the Iraqi people.

VOTERS' REASONING WAR PROCESSES DURING PERSIAN GULF

135

Contingent Effects on Policy Opinions

To test H.3and H6, the same models were fitted to the subsamples created by dividing the sample into the high and low public affairsinformation groups. The cross-sectional partial models (models with only ideology and feeling toward Bush as two endogenous predictors) showed some differences between high and low information groups. On both Bush approval and support for sending troops to the Gulf, the effects of ideological conservatism turned from insignificant negative to positive and even reached a significant level on postwar Bush approval. Consistently, those with higher levels of public affairs information showed a positive relationship between conservatism and Bush approval and support for sending the U.S. troops to the Gulf, consistent with H3. But none of the differences between the high and low information groups was near the conventional significance level. Feeling toward Bush also showed a tighter relationship with both Bush approval and support for sending troops to the Gulf in the high information group. In the postwar models, the differences between the high and low information groups reached the .05 level. This part of the evidence is contrary to the prediction in H3. Results from the complete models were shown in Tables 3 and 4, but the results in Table 4 show no evidence contributing to H3 or He. Table 3 shows the results of the temporal models. These models produced no clear evidence of greater reliance on ideology among those with higher levels of information. Consistent with the cross-sectional evidence, feeling toward Bush showed stronger effects on approving Bush's handling of the Gulf crisis (A = .146, p < .05) and on support for sending troops to the Gulf (A = .142, p < .05). Facing such evidence, we will have to reject H3 and will accept the part of Hi6 on no ideological effect and reject the part on homogeneous effects of affect toward Bush. We now turn to the parameter estimates associated with the foreign policy goals and affective responses shown in Tables 3 and 4. In Table 3, across both models, emphasis on the political goals of U.S. foreign policy showed somewhat stronger effects on the likelihood of moving toward a support position among those with higher levels of information. There was even a significant difference between the two groups in terms of the effects of functional goals on support for sending U.S. troops to the Gulf (A = -.354, p < .05). This evidence is consistent in spirit with H3 and H6 in that considering foreign policy goals in opinion formation requires cognitive resources, similar to using ideological principles. Also consistent in spirit with H3 but not H6 is the observation that patriotic feelings showed marginally stronger effects among those with lower levels of information in both models. Although patriotic feeling may not be equated with the "lik-

TABLE 3. Predicting Changes in Support of the Gulf War Policies by Levels of Public Affair Low Public Affairs Info. APRVBUSH USTROOPS B P(! =i) P(, = I 1.914** (.361) .205 (.135) .206** (.061) -.282 (.238) -.025 (.146) .371 1.856** (.281) -.(X)3 (.119) .100* (.050) -. 168 (.197) .097 (.125) .365

O ~B Stability (prewar mieasure) Ideology alndAffect Ideological conservatism Feeling toward Bush Media public affairs Newspaper public affairsexposure TV public affairsexposure

AP B

1.052 (.292

.043 .037

-.(X) .023

.158 (. 109 .352 (.064

-.069 -.(X)6

-.042 .024

-.477 (.263 -.144 (.143

Goals of foreign policies Functional goals Political goals Affective responses

Emiotional reactioins to the war Patriotic feelings Apscuido-R'

.189

.046
.079

(.130) .326* (.136) .2.56 (.168) .706**

(.223)

.259** (.1(X))
.461**

.063 .11

(.118) .063 .066 .064 (.144) .763** (.194)

8.57%**

.04 (.15 .40 (.14

.016 .063

-.479*

6.69%** 661

662

(.15 .67 (.21 17.94 676

and famiiilv inicomie, race (hiack versuisothiers), were includ(edI comitrol as varialbles.The

1. In 1)othmiodlels, prewar mieaisure thie dependent variab)le the of and the six demographic variab)les, a

AIpSetndo-I_ iS a

ahove and hevonid demiograiphics stal)ility. The enitries in the "B"columniiatre the and logit regr-ession coe errors. The enitries in the "p(,, I column are corresp)ondingprob)abilities o)fgivinig an aflirm stani(dar(1 APIIVBUSH = Ipostwar iieasuire of approving Bushi's handin(iig of'thieGuiii' risis; USTII(OPS = p)ostwVa the troops5 the Gulf'. to p .05; **-.01 ?

138

PANAND KOSICKI

ability heuristic," to the extent that they both reflect the affect-oriented route in policy reasoning (Sniderman et al. 1991), patriotic feeling can function as an affective heuristic, especially considering the ready availability of patriotism in American culture when an international crisis is at hand. Emotional reactions to the war operated differently from patriotic feelings. Table 3 shows that in both models the high and low information groups showed significant differences in the effects of this variable. Among the high information group, the expressed emotional reactions to the killing and destruction of the war were related to a much lower likelihood of approving Bush's handling of the Gulf crisis (A = -.735, p < .01) and supporting the decision to send U.S. troops to the Gulf (A = -.523, p < .01). The evidence suggested that the two types of affective responses operated in opposite directions and had differential weights in their effects among people with different levels of information. The evidence from the models shown in Table 4 provided mixed support for H3 or H6. On support for ending the fighting, the foreign policy goals and affective responses had almost no differential effect between the two groups. The only exception is patriotism, which had a stronger negative effect among the high information group (A = -.394, p < .05). On aiding the Kurds, however, there were several insignificant differences in effects. Both functional and political foreign policy goals had somewhat stronger effects among those with higher levels of information. This evidence is consistent with both H3 and H6 in spirit. So was the slightly stronger effect of emotional reactions to the war. But it is unclear why the heightened patriotic feeling would be a stronger predictor of opposing the end of the fighting among the high information group. A puzzle from Table 1 concerns the negative effects of exposure to newspaper public affairs information on Bush approval and support for sending troops to the Gulf, contrary to H5. Table 3 shows that such negative effects came more from those who had higher levels of public affairs information, although none of the coefficients related to the two media variables reached the .05 level. This part of the evidence suggested a clue about how to interpret the negative direct effects of newspaper exposure on the two support measures shown in Table 1. That is, the negative direct effects resulted mainly from more changes between the pre- and postwar interviews among those with lower levels of information." To test this possibility, the two subsamples were compared on their prewar support levels and the amount of change between the two waves. On Bush approval, no significant difference was found between the two groups in terms of their prewar levels. But the high information group changed only .55 points in Bush approval, while the low information group changed .77 points (p < .01). On sending troops to the Gulf, the high information

TABLE 4. Predicting Support of the Gulf War Policies by Levels of Public Affairs Informati Low Public AffairsInifo. AID)KURD)S STOPWAR B B y=1 y= )

ST
B

an(l I(leology/ Affect

Ideological conscrvatismn

.104

.025

- . 197k

-.042
-

Feelinig toward Buish Media puiblicaffairs Newspapcr puiblic affairsexposuire TV public affaiirs exposuire

(.080) .053 (.036)

301 *
-

(.079) .013
-

.M

.001

(.035) .074 .046 (.134) .152

(.089)

-.064 (.069 .057 (.040

-. -

.011
.038

(.140) .241** (.091)

.030

.164 (.171
.o68

-.059

(.092 .039 .050

Goalsof foreignpolicies
Fuinctionial goals Political goals Affective responses
Emiotionial reactionis to the war Patriotic feelinigs Apsetido-R'
-

- M8 .
-

(.078)
-

.145

.036

(.084) .138 (.1(X)) .015 (.153)

l. 70% *

.156* (.077) .203* (.083) .210*

(.096)

-.09-1 (.0 9 9
-

.144 (.087

.034 .00)4

.052 .031

.117 (.086

.130 (.145)
3.29%** 682

-.379**

692

(.142 1.75% 692

1. In 1)othmiodels,the six demographic varialbles,age, geni(ler,occupational p)restige, edutcationi, Itiunilv 2is inicludedas conitrolvariahles. The Apsetido-R analtogouis aidditionail to accouintedfor albove ani variancee enitries in the "B" columnii are logit regressioni coeflhcienits. The numbhers in the p)arentheses atrestandlardl er STOP~WAR= T aniswer.Thie dlependlentvariables atre: corresponding prolbabilitiesof givinigan afflirmaiitive the fighltinig the Kuirdishl was liberated. AIl)KURD)S = The U.S. shiouildact ojuiicklv aidi to after Kuwatit p 5 < .0-5 ; ) 5**p ?- .01

140

PANAND KOSICKI

group showed nearly 68 percent support for the decision while the low information group showed less than 56% support (p < .001) in the prewar survey. The low information group also changed more (A = 7.5 percent, p < .01). It is quite likely that those with higher levels of information were more sensitive to changes in the information environment and those with lower levels of information were more vulnerable to persuasive influences (Zaller 1992). By the time of the postwar survey, those with higher levels of information had already received enough information on the negative consequences of the war to modify their approval ratings of Bush's handing of the Gulf crisis, especially since by that time the Gulf crisis had gone beyond the original conflict ignited by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait to include why Iraq had dared to make the move, and Saddam Hussein's brutal oppression of the Shiite and Kurdish rebellions. To these people, although sending troops to the Gulf remained an action of standing up against aggression, how Bush handled the situation before and after that was open to question. In contrast, such information might not have reached those with lower levels of information still soaked in the hype of victory celebration by the time of the postwar survey. This media-oriented interpretation is particularly plausible in light of the strong media effects on the other two dependent variables concerning the postwar policies (Table 2) and the slight decline in Bush's approval ratings shown in Figure 1.

Additional Media Effects

Exposure to news media is also hypothesized to affect the intermediate factors in the reasoning process. This part of the results was shown in Table 5. Exposure to newspaper public affairs information was found to have rather limited effects. It led to a greater emphasis on the "functional goals" of U.S. foreign policy, slightly more intensive emotional reactions to the war, and heightened positive feelings toward Bush. These effects were concentrated primarily within the lower half of the distribution, as evidenced by the comparisons between the high and low information groups. Exposure to TV news was a much stronger predictor of the mediating variables in the reasoning chain model. More TV news exposure had significant effects on all five factors. It led to greater emphasis on both the "functional" and "political" goals of U.S. foreign policies, heightened patriotic feelings, more intensive emotional reactions to the war, and greater positive feelings toward Bush. Such powerful television effects are not surprising, given that to most members of the American public, the Gulf War was the first war that was fought on television in real time (Gerbner 1992).

REASONING PROCESSES VOTERS' DURING PERSIAN GULF WAR TABLE 5. Effects of Exposure to Public Affairs Media on Cognitive and Affective Responses to the War' Dependent Variables WHOLE SAMPLE Goals of U.S. foreign policy (T2) Functional goals Political goals Patriotic feeling (T2) Emotional reactions to the war (T2) Positive affect toward Bush (T1) LOW PUBLIC AFFAIRS EXPOSURE GROUP Goals of U.S. foreign policy (T2) Functional goals Political goals Patriotic feeling (To) Emotional reactions to the war (To) Positive affect toward Bush (TI) HIGH PUBLIC AFFAIRS EXPOSURE GROUP Goals of U.S. foreign policy (T2) Functional goals Political goals Patriotic feeling (To) Emotional reactions to the war (T2) Positive affect toward Bush (T1) Newspaper B p Television B

141

.154** (.033) -.004 (.033) .033 (.019) .059* (.030) .145* (.074)

.162
-.004

.056 .063 .066

.097** (.029) .116** (.029) .108** (.017) .162** (.026) .195** (.064)

.102 .123 .182 .175 .088

.264** (.070)
-.025

.156
-.016

(.064) .066 (.036) .125* (.054) .092 (.146)

.073
.090

.026

.119* (.044) .100* (.040) .146** (.023) .189** (.034) .203* (.092)

.110 .104 .250 .211 .090

-.031

-.020

(.066) .010 (.077)

-.013

.005
-.011

(.047) .164* (.075) .069 (.172)

.088 .016

.062 (.035) .131** (.041) .066* (.025) .150** (.040) .180* (.091)

.076 .134 .104 .150 .079

1. The parameters in this table are part of the model showi in Figure 2. The six demographic variables, age, gender, occupational p)restige, education, familv incomle, and race (black versus others), are included as control variables. The numbers in the parentheses are standard errors. )- .05; *p **) -- .01

142

PANAND KOSICKI

In the subgroup analysis, such powerful effects of TV news exposure remained strong or became even stronger among those with lower levels of public affairs information. There was an indication that among those with higher levels of information, greater amount of exposure to television news led to less emphasis on the "functional goals" (A = -.057, n.s.) but a greater emphasis on the "political goals" of U.S. foreign policies (A = .031, n.s.). Television news also seemed to intensify patriotic feelings among those with lower levels of information than among those with higher levels of information (A = .080, p < .05) and to generate stronger positive affect toward Bush (A = .023, n.s.). The results provided powerful support to the part of H41,concerning the effect of exposure to TV news: It heightened patriotic feelings, increased positive feelings toward Bush, and raised the level of salience of protecting weaker nations against aggression and bringing a democratic form of government to other nations as goals of U.S. foreign policy. But the results failed to support the part of H41,predicting a positive relationship between exposure to newspaper public affairs and greater emphasis on the "political goals" of the U.S. foreign policy. Exposure to these two media clearly shows different effects. The evidence is inconsistent with H4., which predicted reduced emotional reactions to the war associated with more television news viewing. On the contrary, exposure to television news helped elevate negative emotional reactions. Such evidence placed television at a very unique position in influencing voters' opinion formation on the Gulf War. It reinforced the notions that television played more important roles in constructing public opinion supportive of Bush's Gulf War policies and television as a medium appealed more strongly to viewers' affect and emotions. At the same time, it also showed television as having diverse effects on how viewers experienced the war. This latter point seemed to be neglected by most commentators critical of media coverage of the war.

Other Mechanisms in the Reasoning Chain

Table 6 presents the parameter estimates related to two important components of the complete reasoning chain model: the consistency between ideological orientation and affect (both affect toward the president and affective responses toward the symbols and reality of the war) and the filtering process of voters' ideological orientation, affect, and prior attitudes in their reasoning process. Again, we allowed for the possibility of divergence between the two groups with higher or lower levels of public affairs information through subsample analysis. The first part of Table 6 shows the results based on the whole-sample estimates. Other than the significant positive correlation between voters'

TABLE 6. Effects of Ideology, Affect Toward Bush, and Initial Bush Approval on Cognitive a

Ideological Conservatism Dependent Variables WHOLE SAMPLE Goals of U.S. foreign policy (T2) Functional goals Political goals Patriotic feeling (T2) c Emotional reactions to the war (T2) Positive affect toward Bush (T1l) LOW PUBLIC AFFAIRS EXPOSURE GROUP Goals of U.S. foreign policy (T2) Functional goals Political goals Patriotic feeling (T2) Emotional reactions to the war (T2) Positive affect toward Bush (Ti)2 B p

Positiv Towar B

-.050* (.024) .001 (.024) .045** (.014) -.020 (.022) .792** (.077)
-.024

-.059 .001 .083

-.024

.016 (.014) .042** (.014) .049** (.(H8) - .012 (.012)

.279

-.022 .002 .070 .035 .194

(.041) .002 (.037) .041 (.021) .032 (.032) .496*5 (.095)

.030 (.021) .014 (.019) .025* (.011) .(.)6 (.016)

TABLE 6. Continued

Ideological Conservatism Dependent Variables HIGH PUBLIC AFFAIRS EXPOSURE GROUP Goals of U.S. foreign policy (To) Functional goals Political goals Patriotic feeling (T2) Emotional reactions to the war (Tq) Positive affect toward Bush (Ti)2 B P

Positiv Towar B

- .068* (.027) - .011 (.031) .041* (.019) -.056 (.030) 1.071** (.120)

-.106 - .014 .083 -.071 .350

-.010 (.017) .073** (.020) .072** (.012) -.028 (.019)

1. The parameters this table are part of the model shown in Figure 2. The six demographic in va versusothers),are includedas controlvariables. numbers The education, familyincome,andrace(black No 2. Covariance correlation. causaldirectionis assumed. or 1 *p .05; **p < .01.

PROCESSES DURING PERSIAN GULF WAR REASONING VOTERS'

145

ideological orientation and their affect toward Bush, evidence for consistency in attitude structure is rather weak. This is indicated by the significant but small positive correlation between ideological conservatism and patriotic feelings and the lack of significant relationships between ideology and two of the other three factors. As we have shown in the previous tables, these factors played important roles in determining the increases in voters' approval of Bush's handling of the Gulf crisis and support for sending troops to the Gulf. There is some evidence of selectivity, however. One's prewar feeling toward Bush led to more ready acceptance of the administration's rationale for the war: protecting weaker nations against aggression and bringing democracy to other nations as goals of U.S. foreign policy. It also led to heightened patriotic feelings after the war. Prewar approval of Bush's handling of the Gulf crisis played a similar role in emphasizing the political goals of U.S. foreign policy. But it did not elevate patriotic feelings; rather, it led to less intensive negative emotional reactions to the war. The evidence suggests that the roles of prior attitudes and/or affect in voters' reasoning process might be: (1) anchoring voters' cognitive perceptions of and affective responses to the Gulf crisis and (2) operating as an easily accessible "frame"or "schema" that helped structure voters' experiences of the war mediated through television. The subgroup analysis shows that there is also clear, albeit limited, divergence among those who had high or low levels of public affairs information in this part of their reasoning process. There were indications in the second half of Table 6 that the voters with higher levels of information showed greater overall consistency in their reasoning process: ideological conservatism corresponded to less emphasis on the "liberal issues" such as environment and energy supply as goals of U.S. foreign policy (A = -.044, n.s.), stronger affection toward George Bush (A = .575, p < .001), and lower levels of negative reactions to the war (A = -.088, p < .05). The high information group also showed a greater consistency between their affect toward Bush before the war and their acceptance of the "political goals" of U.S. foreign policy (A = .049, p < .05), between affect toward Bush and patriotism (A = .047, p < .01), as well as between prior support of Bush's handling of the Gulf crisis and more importance placed on the "political goals" of U.S. foreign policy (A = .011, n.s.). Although many of these between-group divergences were rather small, they nevertheless revealed a tendency for more logical consistency in policy reasoning concerning the Gulf War among those with higher levels of public affairs information.

146

PAN AND KOSICKI

SUMMARY AND DISCUSSION

This study examined voters' reasoning processes in forming their support for the Bush administration's Gulf War policies. It places the individual cognitive processes in the context of issue culture, that is, the elite discourse that defined, presented, and signified the issue. The data analyzed have their limitations for our purposes. One limitation is that the explanatory variables were measured either in the prewar or postwar survey only. Consequently, our results left us with uncertainties in causal inferences. Further, constrained by the data, we were unable to examine the plausible reciprocal relationships among some of the reasoning chain factors. But the NES data also have their unique strengths. The four dependent variables represent different aspects of U.S. policies and the Gulf conflict. Support for sending troops to the Gulf and approving Bush's handling of the Gulf crisis represented supporting the U.S. policies on the conflict ignited by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Having both pre- and postwar measures of them allowed us to examine their changes during the war. The other two dependent variables, whether the coalitions should have stopped fighting and whether the U.S. should aid the Kurds, provide measures of how well voters felt that the U.S. achieved a clean end to the conflict. They helped complete the picture of voters' opinions on U.S. policies concerning the Gulf conflict. First, they helped us account for the fact that the postwar NES survey was conducted in June and July of 1991, when the nation started to reexamine the Gulf War policies and Bush's approval rating started to decline (see Figure 1). Second, they also provided a more complete account of the roles of the media in voters' reasoning process, because by the time of the NES postwar survey, there was no longer consensual discourse in the media and from the administration concerning the continued troubles linked to Iraq. The issue of the Gulf War is significantly different from those examined in Sniderman et al.'s treatise. None of the issues examined in their study had anything operating as a unifying emotional chord like patriotism, which may be partly responsible for creating the phenomenon of a "rallying event" (Hugick and Gallup 1991; Brody 1991). Nor did any of those issues grant almost automatic legitimacy to the president to supply the authoritative definition of the issue and the rationale of the policy treatment (Sigel 1966; Hurwitz 1989). In addition, as a number of detailed content analyses showed, right from the beginning, the Gulf conflict as an issue was presented with a consensual discourse (Dennis et al. 1991; Kellner 1992; Hallin and Gitlin 1992), despite the debate over the best tactics, that is, to give sanctions more time to work or to take military actions to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait.

PROCESSES DURING REASONING PERSIAN VOTERS' GULF WAR

147

These unique features of the issue make our results not directly comparable to those presented by Sniderman and his colleagues. However, recognizing these unique conditions of an issue helps enrich and broaden our understandings on how voters reason about public policy issues. Despite the limitations in the data, our results support four major conclusions: 1. The notion of a reasoning chain is a very useful way to model voters' reasoning process. The evidence presented in this study shows that voters did fall back on some abstract principles or notions when being asked to assess a policy or to evaluate the president's handling of the complex issue of the Gulf War. The reasoning chain notion does posit significant effects of ideology on policy opinions, but such effects are not necessarily direct (Sniderman et al. 1991; Peffley and Hurwitz 1985). Rather, many other cognitive and/or affective factors, which are more readily seen as relevant and more accessible in voters' minds, may serve as immediate premises for formulating opinion responses (Zaller and Feldman 1992). The "considerations" accessible in voters' minds and/or weighted more heavily in opinion responses may reveal consistent ideological orientations. Further, to many people, ideology serves only as one of the basic premises in thinking about public policies. Relevant affect could serve as another premise, especially if the policy issue is complex and/or has not yet been formulated explicitly in ideological terms or if a person does not have sufficient cognitive resources to link ideological principles to the concrete policy on a specific issue. Such theoretical arguments help us interpret the results shown in this study. First, there was evidence of a certain degree of consistency between overall ideological orientation as well as affect toward Bush and two of the dependent measures: approving Bush's handling of the Gulf crisis and supporting the decision of sending U.S. troops to the Gulf. Compared with the domestic issues examined in Sniderman et al.'s work (1991), ideological self-placement on a bipolar scale of liberalism versus conservatism had only rather weak direct effects on the two variables; it was nevertheless an important factor in the reasoning process through its effects on the mediating factors in the model and through its high correlations with affect toward Bush. Voters' prior affective state toward Bush and attitudes toward his handling of the Gulf crisis also filter, anchor, or structure their subsequent experiences and perceptions of the war. Second, those cognitive and affective variables placed after ideological orientation and Bush feeling thermometer in the causal sequence are shown to play significant roles in connecting the two more distant and/or abstract variables to the approval of Bush's handling of the Gulf crisis and the support for sending troops to the Gulf. These intervening mechanisms may be roughly divided into cognitive and affective routes (see Kuklinski et al., 1991). The population heterogeneity thesis would lead to expectations

148

PANAND KOSICKI

of differences among voters in relative weights given to one or another (Sniderman et al. 1991). In addition, these factors also help explicate how voters would think about the steps taken to end the fighting and to aid the Kurdish refugees who are among the victims of the war. These two topics, because of the divided elite discourse on them, appeared more complex to members of the mass public. Consequently, it was less obvious to them how to derive their opinions directly from their ideology and affect toward Bush. They were more likely to give their opinions based on salient considerations in their minds, which were shown by the direct media effects and their sympathy toward the Iraqi people. The lack of differentiations among the foreign policy goals in forming their opinions on these two questions showed the difficulties in crystallized cognitive reasoning. 2. The unique issue culture related to the Gulf War had some important implications for voters' reasoning processes. Issue culture is an empirical concept if it refers to measurable elite signification practices, that is, choices in symbolic devices and frames in issue packaging (Gamson 1988; Pan and Kosicki 1993), in media strategies, in degree of consensus among the elites (Zaller 1992), and in the levels of emotional intensity. The Gulf War issue was characterized by a high degree of elite consensus over the nature of the issue, the political symbols used to communicate about the issue, and the high degree of emotional intensity unified on patriotism. These characteristics of the issue culture stayed until after the nation had welcomed the return of the U.S. troops. Placed in this context, the results shown in this study become quite meaningful. First, affect and emotion played more important roles in determining voters' approval of Bush's handling of the crisis and support for sending U.S. troops to the Gulf, compared with the issues in a different issue culture. This point could not be tested directly in this study, but it could be inferred from the evidence of the powerful effects of positive affect toward Bush and patriotic feelings on the two dependent variables shown in Table 1. In comparison, ideological self-placement had rather limited effects, a result of the nonideological nature of the issue as it was defined in the prevailing discourse. Second, because of the monolithic nature of the political discourse concerning the war, at least until the postwar trauma began to be examined more closely in early April 1991, and the availability of patriotism as a unifying emotional cord, one would expect more ready acceptance of the official rationale or arguments for the Bush administration's policy initiatives. This expectation was supported by the roles played by the "political goals" of U.S. foreign policy and heightened patriotic feelings in voters' reasoning process concerning the war. One may go one step further to argue that such consequences of the issue culture might have in turn fur-

VOTERS' DURING PERSIAN GULF REASONING PROCESSES WAR

149

ther perpetuated the uniformity of the discourse concerning the issue. The two dependent measures on the end of the fighting and aid to the Kurds served as a nice contrast, because by the time these topics were raised, there was no longer a monolithic issue culture. Rather, both the elites and the mass public were divided over not only the steps to take but also the interpretations of the problems facing the nation. Under such circumstances, some strong predictors of the support for the administration were no longer significant, or turned against the administration's positions. For example, emphasis on the political goals of the U.S. foreign policies and patriotism would reduce the support of the administration's decision to stop the fighting and the emphasis on the political goals would also lead to the critical view that the U.S. had not taken quick actions to aid the Kurds. Also, when the issue discourse was not consensual over the issue of aiding the Kurdish people, people seemed to see the relevance of both functional and political foreign policy goals and to rely on their humanitarian sympathy toward victims and disgust of killings to form their opinions. 3. The news media, especially television, played important but complex roles in constructing voters' experiences of the issue. Our data showed that exposure to television news did not lead directly to more enthusiastic approval of Bush's handling of the Gulf crisis. However, one could hardly escape from television's showing of the wonders of the "video-game" war and American pride, respect, and patriotism (Hallin and Gitlin 1992). Exposure to television news led voters to experience the Gulf crisis as the administration had defined it: It was a matter of principle, that is, deterring aggression and supporting democracy; and a matter of American pride and prestige, that is, patriotism. Very rarely do we see such significant effects of television news on the various facets of voters' reasoning process. No doubt, such powerful effects of television news exposure resulted partly from the homogeneity of the issue culture and partly the intense psychological involvement in the issue among the voters and the higher levels of exposure to the real-time coverage of the war (Pan et al. forthcoming; Gerbner 1992). But television news did not have unidimensional effects, as was often assumed in some popular commentaries of television's performance during the Gulf crisis. Our evidence showed that exposure to television news was also related to more intense emotional reactions to the reality of the war, e.g., feelings of disgust at the killing, feeling afraid for the troops, feeling sympathy for the Iraqi people, and so on. These emotions might also help to dampen the euphoria over the technological wonders, the apparent bloodlessness of the war, and the supposedly glorious victory. 4. The index of public affairs information, measured in terms of reading newspapers, following public affairs, and checking information levels, func-

150

PANAND KOSICKI

tioned as a reasonable proxy of political sophistication in terms of a contingent condition influencing voters' reasoning processes. It did not show many direct main effects on the key factors in voters' reasoning processes concerning the war. If anything, it showed negative direct effects on changes toward higher levels of support of the Bush administration's Gulf War policies. But it did influence what considerations voters weighted more heavily in their reasoning. The evidence showed that despite the relatively weak overall effects of ideology, voters with higher levels of public affairsinformation did show a greater consistency between their ideological principles and affect toward their commander-in-chief and a greater consistency between their perceived importance of the political goals of U.S. foreign policies and approval of Bush's handling of the Gulf crisis. Further, these people also showed a greater consistency between their affect toward Bush, prewar approval of Bush's handling of the Gulf crisis, and perceptions of and emotional reactions to the Gulf War. In comparison, those with lower levels of public affairs information relied more heavily on patriotic feelings to form their approval of Bush's handling of the Gulf crisis. The results do not suggest the empirical superiority of using levels of public affairs information as a proxy of political sophistication, compared with using formal years of schooling. In our sample, the index of public affairs information was significantly correlated with years of schooling (r = .451, p < .001). However, levels of public affairs information may come closer conceptually in measuring voters' cognitive resources in the domain of politics and public policies, which, in our view, are the basis of cognitive differentiation and integration, the two dimensions of political sophistication (Sniderman et al. 1991; Neuman 1986). Furthermore, although there is a small but significant portion of the voting population that is chronically ill-informed and apathetic to the political process (Hyman and Sheatsley 1947; Neuman 1986), political sophistication is not a stable individual trait as would be implied by years of formal schooling. It is beyond the scope of this paper to clarify the conceptual issues here. Future studies in this area need to employ more direct measures that will tap into not only voters' cognitive resources related to a specific issue but also their intellectual abilities in mobilizing these resources in their policy reasoning processes. The results clearly indicate that voters did take into consideration both principles and affect in their policy reasoning concerning the Gulf War. Their policy reasoning also was not free from the issue culture carried and permeated by the media. Considerations that voters accessed and weighed more heavily in forming their opinions were the ones salient in the media, both cognitive and affectve. Television, because of its audiovisual channels and the elements of conflict, drama, and emotion in the Gulf War issue,

PERSIAN DURING GULF WAR VOTERS' REASONING PROCESSES

151

showed greater influences than newspapers, especially on the affective considerations. But not all its effects led to unquestioned support of the administration's war policies. Meanwhile, the information-reception-oriented uses of newspapers tended to strengthen the roles of cognitive considerations in opinion formation. The results of this study also point out the political implications of strong media effects. When there was a consensus among the political and media elites before and during the war, such media effects resulted in rallying support for the administration. When elite consensus was not present concerning the postwar trauma, the media could have their effects different from the administration's official line. There are several recent articulations of the relationships between political elites and public opinions, for example, Page and Shapiro's (1992) notion of "collective deliberation" as a way of developing "rational, coherent, and stable" collective public opinion, and Zaller's (1992) idea of the influences of elite discourse in the information environment on public opinion. Our results provide a showcase of such complex relationships in the context of how voters reasoned about the Gulf War in forming their policy preferences. An Acknowleldgments. earlier version of this paper was presented at the 75th
Annual Convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, Montreal, Canada, August 1992. The authors wish to thank two anonyInous reviewers for their extremely helpful comments on the earlier version.

NOTES
1. One should note the conceptualsimilaritiesand differencesbetween the two ways of fiormulation in and "cognitiveheuristics"in TverskyanldKahnleman's conceptualizing deal with certainsimple decision Sniderman al.'s study. Although)bothformulations et and rulesandtheirfinctions in economizing information judgmenlts, processing anchoring Tverskyand Kahneman's formulation deals with universalcognitive economizingproare cesses or biases acrossall individuals.In comparison, Sniderman al.'s "heuristics" et closerto those in Chaiken's heuristicmodelof persuasion (1987),wherethe finctioningof et heuristicsis contingentupon a numberof factors.In Sniderman al.'s case. the continbroadlydetined. gent conditionis politicalsophistication 2. Partof the consideration formulating modelwas the availabilitv data.The point of in this will becomeclearerin the methodssection.
3. Selectivity may operate at various junctions in the message reception process: exposure, attention, perception, and retention (Hymaniand Sheatslev 1947). But it may Iberoughly conceived as consisting of "take-in"and "retrieval"mechanisms. While the first refers to individuals actively seeking infirmation to reinforce their prior attitudes or points of view (Frey 1986), the latter refers to active decoding of information based on prior cognitive representations (Fazio and Williams 1986; Higgins and King 1981; Iyengar 199); Wver and Srull 1981). However, this model is incapable of testing these specific ideas.

152

PANAND KOSICKI

4. We appreciate an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this strategy to ease concern alout ceiling effects. 5. The decision variable was measured by this (iqestion (V357 in the prewar wave and V2408 in the postwar wave): ")o you think we did the right thing in sending U.S. military torces to the Persian Gulf or should we have stayed out (1 = should have stayedl out, 2 depends, and 3 = did the right thing)? The Bush approval variable was mueasured via two lquestions (based on V359 and V360 in the prewar wave and V2410-V2412 in the postwar wave): "l)o ou approve or disapprove of the way George Bush is handling ("has handled" in the postwar wave) the crisis in the Persian Gulf? l)o you approve/disapprove strongly or not strongly (1 = disapprove strongly, 2 = disapprove, 3 = approve, 4 = approve strongly)? The other two variables were measured by the following two lquestions: (V2556) "Some people think that the U.S. and its allies should have continuied to fight Iraq until Saddam Hussein was driven f'roi power. (thers think that the U.S. was right to stol) fighting after Kuwait was liberated. What do you think? Should the war have continued or should it have stopped (1 = should have continued, 2 = don't know/neither/both, 3 = should have stopped)?" (V2557) "Here are two statements. Which is closer to voulrview? ()One,we did not act quickly enough to give aid to the Kurdish people after the fighting stopped; Two, the Kurdish situation is an internal Iraq(iprol)lem and we should not be involved at all (1 = we did not act (quickly enough, 2 = (lo't know/neither/both, 3 = we should not be involved at all)." 6. Based on V2518 to V2529. 7. Based on V2403 to V2407. 8. These indices were designed to improve the efficiency of' the data analysis and the reliability of the measures, and to provide a basis to discuss the results at a more abstract level. They will be examined in a disaggregated form to aid the interpretations. We thank an anonymous reviewer for raising the issue. 9. The variable numbers are V64, V66, V67, V71, V72. 10. The variable numbers are V395 to V403. The news personalities include l)an Quayle, George Mitchell, William Rehnquist, Mikael Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher, Nelson Mandela, and Tom Foley. The knowledge index has a reliability coefficient of .78 (Cronbach's alpha). 11. The variable numbers are V547, V.549, V552, V554, V602, V663, V664. When the family income value was missing, it was replaced by the valid response to the respondent s income were income. All missing values in education, occupational prestige, and familyv replaced by the predicted values obtained in regression models involving the other two variables, plus age and gender. 12. Three types of variables entered the model: constant background variables (e.g., demographics), potentially changing variables fixed at prewar measures (e.g., ideological orientation, feeling toward Bush, and news media uses), and changing variables (approving Bush's handling of the Gulf crisis, supporting sending the U.S. troops to the Gulf, importance of foreign policy goals and affective responses toward the war). A simple mixedeffect model of Bush approval would be (Hsiao 1986; Kessler and Greenberg 1981):

yi = PO,+ ix, + 13_tV + 3z + E,

,, yo = + + PXl + B*2ow P3:Z+ PIlY + P5,X2 + E2

(1)
(2)

where y is the Bush approval measure at t = 1, 2 respectively, x is a vector of changing variables measured at t = 1, 2 respectively; w is a vector of the potential changing vari-

VOTERS'REASONING PROCESSESDURING PERSIANGULFWAR

153

ables fixed at t = 1, their effects on yl and y2 may vary, indicated by 12 and 'B*2;and z is a vector of constant background variables. Assuming Po = o, PI = PI, 3 = P3, and subtracting (1) from (2), we have Ay = (P*2 32)w + 4lyl + P.5X2+ (Eo - El) (3)

Because only x2 was available in the data, xl was dropped from e(luations (1) and (2). A necessary assumption under the constraint of the data is xo = xl. Because y was measured on a 0-1 scale, Equation (3) was estimated via a logit model:
t(!/ + 4!1 eAJ2W' 131+P 5x + * + = I I?/=n 1+e),t. (4) 1+^u-^,^-^ + I + 135X.+ (4).* +e= 4l.

where, AP =

B*o -

E2;e* = E2 -

El.

According to the path model depicted in Figure 2, x.xalso was predicteld bl both w and z via linear multiple regression models. 13. Each logit regression coefficient B may l)e transformed into a vector of probabilities using the logit regression e(quation:
y/= I1) =

e(:.v

1 + e"'

where p(,,= ) = expected conditional probability of the ith respondent choosing the affirmative response (approve, a right decision, should have stopped the fighting, and take quick actions to aid Kurds respectively); i = 1, 2, 3, ... n, denotes individual respondents; x = a vector of p independent variables, with the first one being a constant, and 31 = a vector oft coefficients, with the first one representing the intercept. For each x, a vector of r(, = i may be obtained, which is then a linear function of x. The slope of this linear function expresses the percent of changes in the probability of giving an affirmative answer, given one unit change in x. This number is then presented in the table ()(, = I)) because of its ready interpretation in the linear regression fashion. The model is assessed via a log likelihood ratio test, - 2*(L,,- L)), where L, is the log likelihood finction of the equation with x as predictors and L,4is the log likelihoo(dfntction of the equation with only the constant. It has X2distribution with p - 1 degrees of freedom. Further, a simple equation, 1 - L,,II) can be used to obtain a statistic analogous to R2 in linear regression, called "pseudo-R2." Both the x2 and pseudo-R2 are additive statistics in nested models and thus can be used to test successive nested models. In this case, Equation (1) may lbe considered a full model with all p variables in x included and eliminating a subset of variables in x from an equation will lead to a more restrictive model. The most restrictive model has only the constant in the equation. We consider this most restrictive model as the "baseline"model. The improvement of adding predictors on top of the "baseline" model can be assessed by the increase of the log likelihood ratio of the less restrictive model over the more restrictive one. Let X 2 be the log likelihlood ratio from a restrictive model with j degrees of freedom and X,2 )e the log likelihood ratio from the less restrictive model with j + I degrees of freedom, where I denotes the numlberof additional predictors; we have AX2 = X\2 - X 2, which follows a X2 distribution, with I degrees of freedom. Also, Apseudo-R- may be

154

PANAND KOSICKI

s ol)tained as a difference between the pseiudo-R"' for the more and less restrictive models. 14. This interpretation is not the same as the ceiling effect interpretation, which refers to the statistical artifact resulting from the constraints over upward movement in the support scale among those with higher levels of information. Such constraints are revealed by the higher mdeans in the prewar measures and shrunken variance in the postwar melsures in the high-infoirmationgroup (see Kessler and Greenberg 1981). Neither condition is present in our data. We found no mean difference in the prewar measure of approving Bush's handling of the Gulf crisis (A = -.093, p = .388) between the two groups and somewhat greater variance among the high-infiormationgroup in the postwar measure of Bush approval (1.061 versus .861). On support for sending U.S. troops to the Gullft the highinformation group did have a higher mean in the prewar measure, but not a smaller variance in the postwar measure.

REFERENCES
Ball-Rokeach, S. J., and DeFleur,

media effects. Communication Research 3: 3-21. Brody, R. A. (1991). Assessing the President: The Media, Elite Opinion, and Public Support. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Chaffee, S. H., and Choe, S. Y. (1981). Newspaper reading in longitudinal perspecOlson, and 0. P. Herman (eds.), Social Influences: The Ontario Symposium 5 (pp. 3-39). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Converse, P. E. (1964). The nature of belief systems in mass politics. In 1). A. Apter (ed.), Ideology and Discontent. New York: Free Press. l)Dennis,E. E., Stebenne, D., Pavlik, J., et al. (1991). The Media at War: The Press attitude-perception and attitude-behavior relations: An investigation of the 1984 presidential election. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 51: .505-514. Feldman, S. (1988). Structure and consistency in public opinion: The role of core beliefs and values. American Journal of Political Science 32: 416-440. In Frey, D. (1985). Recent research on selective exposure to inforirmation. L. Berkowitz (ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 19 (pp. 41-80). New York:Academic Press. Gallup, G., Jr., and Newport, F. (1991). First anniversary of Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The Gallop Poll Monthly, July, pp. 34-35. Gamson, W. A. (1988). A constructionist approach to mass media and public opinion. Symbolic Interaction 11: 161-174. Gamson, W. A., and Modigliani, A. (1989). Media discourse and public opinion on nuclear power: A constructionist approach. American Journal of Sociology 95: 137. and Persian Gulf Conflict. New York: Gannett Foundation Media Center. Fazio, R. H., and Williams, C. J. (1986). Attitude accessibility as a moderator of the tive: Beyond structural constraints. Journalism Quarterly 58: 201-211. Chaiken, S. (1987). The heuristic model of persuasion. In M. P. Zanna, J. M.

M. L. (1976). A dependency

model of mass-

Gerbner, G. (1992). Persian Gulf War: The movie. In H. Mowlana, G. Gerbner, and H. I. Schiller (eds.), Triumph of the limage: The Media's War in the Persian Gulf' A Global Perspective (pp. 243-26.5). Boulder, CO: Westview. Hallin, D. C., and Gitlin, T. (1992). Prowess and community: The Gulf War as popular culture and as television drama. Paper presented at the 42nd Annual Conference of the International Communication Association, Miami, FL.

PERSIAN PROCESSES DURING GULF WAR REASONING VOTERS'

155

Higgins, E. T., and King, G. (1981). Accessibility of social constructs: Informationprocessing conse(quences of individual and contextual variability. In N. Cantor and J. F. Kihlstrom (eds.), Personality, Cognition, and Social Interaction. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaunm. Hosmer, D. W. & Lemeshow, S. (1989). Applied Logistic Regression. New York: Wiley Sons. Hsiao, C. (1986). Analysis of Panel Data. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hugick, L., and A. M. Gallup (1991). "Rally events" and presidential approval. The Gallup Poll Monthly, June, pp. 15-27. Hurwitz, J. (1989). Presidential leadership and public followership. In M. Margolis and G. Mauser (eds.), Manipulating Public Opinion: Essayls on Public Opinion as a Dependent Variable (pp. 222-249). Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole Publishing Company. Hvmanl, H., and Sheatslev, P. (1947). Some reasons why information campaigns fail. Public Opinion Quarterly 11: 412-423. velngar, S. (1990). Shortcuts to political knowledge: The role of selective attention and accessibility. In J. A. Ferejohn and J. H. Kuklinski (eds.), Information a(nd DemlocraticProcesses. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Ivengar, S., and Simon, A. (1993). News coverage of the Gulf crisis and public opinion: A survey of effects. Communication Research 20: 365-383. Jhlally,S., Lewis, J., and Morgan, M. (1991). The Gulf War: A study of the media, pul)lic opinion and public knowledge. Propaganda Review 8: 14-15, 50-52. Kellner, D. (1992). The Persian Gulf TV War. Boulder, CO: Westview. Kessler, R. C., and Greenberg, D. F. (1981). Linear Panel Analysis: Models of Quantitative Change. New York: Academic Press. Krosnick, J. A., and Brannon, L. A. (1992) The impact of war on the ingredients of presidential evaluations: George Bush and the Gulf conflict. Paper presented at the Conference on the Political Consequences of War. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, February 28, 1992. Kuklinski, J. J., Riggle, E., Ottati, V., et al. (1991). The cognitive and affective bases of political tolerance judgments. American Journal of Political Science .35: 1-27. Lau, R. R., Smith, R. A., and Fiske, S. T. (1991). Political beliefs, policy interpretations, and political persuasion. Journal of Politics 53: 644-675. Maddala, G. S. (1983). Limited-Dependent and Qualitative Variables in Econometrics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meyrowitz, J. (1990). Experiencing the news: Television's reconstruction of reality. In J. J. Stuhr and R. M. Cochran (eds.), Morals and the Media: Information, Entertainment, and Manipulation (pp. 35-60). Eugene, OR: University of Oregon Humanities Center. Miller, W. E., Kinder, D. R., Rosenstone, S. J., and the National Election Studies (1991a). American National Election Study, 1990: Post-Election Survey. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, Center for Political Studies (producer); Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (distributor). Miller, W. E., Kinder, D. R., Rosenstone, S. J., and the National Election Studies (1991b). American National Election Study: 1990-1991 Panel Study of the Political Consequences of War/1991 Pilot Study. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, Center for Political Studies (producer); Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (distributor).

156

PANAND KOSICKI

Mueller, J. (1993). American public opinion and the Gulf War: Some polling issues. Public Opinion Quarterly 57: 80-91. Neuman, W. R. (1986). The Paradox of Mass Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Page, B., and Shapiro, R. (1992). The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans' Policy Preference. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Pan, Z., and Kosicki, G. M. (1993). Framing analysis: An approach to news discourse. Political Communication 10: 55-75. Pan, Z., Ostman, R. E., Moy, P.. and Reynolds, P. (forthcoming). News media exposure and its learning effects during the Persian Gulf War. Journalism Quarterly. Peffley, M. A., and Hurwitz, J. (1985). A hierarchical model of attitude constraint. American Journal of Political Science 29: 871-890. Schudson, M. S. (1990). Visual culture and American politics: Do the eyes have it? In J. J. Stuhr and R. M. Cochran (eds.), Morals and the Media: Information, Entertainment, and Manipulation (pp. 15-33). Eugene, OR: University of Oregon Humanities Center. Sigel, R. S. (1966). Images of the American presidency-Part II of an exploration into popular views of presidential power. Midwest Journal of Political Science 10: 123-137. Sniderman, P. M., Brody, R. A., and Tetlock, P. E. (1991). Reasoning and Choice: Explorations in Political Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stevens, G., and Cho, J. H. (1985). Socioeconomic indexes and the new 1980 census occupational classification scheme. Social Science Research 14: 142-168. Taylor, P. M. (1992). War and the Media: Propaganda and Persuasion in the Gulf War. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Tversky, A., and Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science 185: 1124-1131. Wyer, R. W., Jr., and Srull, T. K. (1981). Category accessibility: Some theoretical and empirical issues concerning the processing of social stimulus information. In E. T. Higgins, C. P. Herman, and M. P. Zanna (eds.), Social Cognition: The Ontario Symposium Vol. 1 (pp. 161-197). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Zaller, J. (1992). The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zaller, J., and Feldman, S. (1992). A simple theory of the survey response: Answering questions versus revealing preferences. American Journal of Political Science 36:579-616.