ACTIVATION AND APPLICATION OF POLITICAL-PARTY STEREOTYPES - THE ROLE OF TELEVISION

Despite tremendous changes in the American political system, the two m ajor political parties continue to play an important role in mass poli tical behavior. In this article we investigate how the medium of infor mation presentation affects the likelihood that party images are activ ated and subsequently applied to process political candidate informati on. Conceptualizing party images as stereotypes, we use a two-stage ex perimental design to test several hypotheses about stereotype processi ng under different information conditions. We find that television enh ances the activation of party stereotypes for the more sophisticated, but inhibits activation for the less sophisticated. Once activated, ho wever, partisan stereotypes are used in an information-economizing way by both sophisticated and less sophisticated individuals to evaluate political candidates. However, television interferes with the ability of the less sophisticated to use policy information.