Agenda-building linkages between public relations and state news media during the 2010 Florida Senate Election

Please cite this article inpress as:Kiousis, S., et al.Agenda-building linkages betweenpublic relations and statenewsmedia

during the 2010 Florida Senate Election. Public Relations Review (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2015.07.009

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PUBREL-1428; No. of Pages3

Public Relations Review xxx (2015) xxx–xxx

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Public Relations Review

Research in brief

Agenda-building linkages between public relations and state

news media during the 2010 Florida Senate Election

Spiro Kiousis a,∗, Ji Young Kimb, Sarabdeep K. Kochhar c, Hyun-Ji Limd, Jung

Min Parke, Jin Sook Ime

a College of Journalism & Communications, University of Florida, PO Box 118400, Gainesville, FL 32611-8400, USA b University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA c Institute for Public Relations, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA d University of Miami, Miami, FL 33146, USA e University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32,611, USA

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:

Received 18 March 2015

Received in revised form 8 July 2015

Accepted 13 July 2015

Keywords:

Agenda building

Political public relations

Information subsidies

Social media

a b s t r a c t

Grounded in first- and second-level agenda building, this study examined the role of polit￾ical public relations in contributing to the news media agenda during the 2010 Florida

Senate Election involving three major candidates. The findings offered support for agenda

building at both the object (issues and stakeholders) and attribute levels of salience (issue

frames and candidate attributes) between candidate information subsidies and news cov￾erage. Some marked differences were observed across the different types of information

subsidies.

© 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

The Florida Senate Election was one of the most unique political races in the United States during the 2010 campaign

cycle as it involved three major candidates—Charlie Crist (Independent), Marco Rubio (Republican), and Kendrick Meek

(Democrat). A chief aspect to understanding the dynamics behind such large electoral change is to scrutinize the role of

political public relations efforts during the election campaign. Agenda-building and agenda-setting theories have offered

useful conceptualframeworks for understanding the role of campaign communications and media messages during elections

(Kiousis, Bantimaroudis, & Ban, 1999; Kiousis, Mitrook, Wu, & Seltzer, 2006; McCombs, Llamas, López-Escobar, & Rey, 1997;

McCombs & Shaw, 1972). The 2010 Florida Senate race provides an under-examined venue in political agenda-building

analyses because of its inclusion of a major third-party candidate and that the election is at the state-level in comparison

to the many national-level investigations prevalent in this area of scholarship. In addition, another distinctive quality of the

present inquiry is its integration of multiple campaign communication messages into the investigation as a replication of

only a few studies taking such an approach in an agenda-building context. The following hypotheses and a research question

are offered:

H1. The salience of issues in candidate public relations messages will be positively related to the salience of issues in state

media coverage of the Florida Senate Election.

∗ Corresponding author. Fax: +1 352 392 3919.

E-mail addresses: [email protected] (S. Kiousis), [email protected] (J.Y. Kim), [email protected] (S.K. Kochhar), [email protected] (H.-J.

Lim), [email protected] (J.M. Park), [email protected] (J.S. Im).

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2015.07.009

0363-8111/© 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.