SELECTIVE EXPOSURE AND THE REINFORCEMENT HYPOTHESIS

Abstract

This article tests the traditional two-part hypothesis that partisan predispositions motivate a person to be selectively exposed to political campaign communications, which in turn serve to reinforce those original predispositions. Five hundred one pairs of adolescents and their parents in Wisconsin were interviewed both early and late in the 1980 presidential campaign year. There is some evidence of selective exposure among the adolescents, less among the parents. Exposure to the campaigns of both candidates is associated with greater liking at the end of the campaign, with precampaign liking controlled. These positive effects of exposure contradict the notion that “reinforcement” would include a “negative reinforcement” effect with regard to the opposition candidate. The positive effects do not interact statistically with party identification, which indicates that partisan predispositions do not heighten any presumed reinforcement effect of exposure. In only one of four tests of a causal model in which partisan predispositions are treated as exogenous to the campaign and selective exposure as endogenous is there an indirect path from predispositions to postcampaign liking via selective exposure. This finding, which is limited to the effect of party identification of the adolescents, is more readily explained as the result of a single-object orientation toward the political campaign than it is by the hypothesis that selective exposure is a mechanism for reinforcement.