Challenging political communication and marketing research: the measurement of implicit attitudes in the age of scandals

Abstract

In the field of political communication and marketing, the differentiation between explicit and implicit attitudes offers a radically new research perspective. This chapter aims to guide the understanding of how implicit attitudes can determine the reliability of forecasts with regards to the effects of political information and electoral behavior, due to the complexity of the mental processes that regulate media priming. To exemplify this new approach, we firstly discuss the importance of considering the two attitudinal dimensions through the academic literature that studied the effects of the spontaneous responses of voters in electoral polls. Secondly, we underline the importance of measuring the implicit attitudes of both decided and undecided voters and offer an illustration of how this procedure may be undertaken through an experimental technique, the Implicit Association Test (IAT), taking as reference the case of voter's ambivalence towards corruption