Handbook of Political Communication Research

Lynda Lee Kaid

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135650940
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Handbook of Political Communication Research is a benchmark volume, defining the most important and significant thrusts of contemporary research and theory in political communication. Editor Lynda Lee Kaid brings together exemplary scholars to explore the current state of political communication research in each of its various facets. Reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of political communication scholarship, contributions represent research coming from communication, political science, journalism, and marketing disciplines, among others. The Handbook demonstrates the broad scope of the political communication discipline and emphasizes theoretical overviews and research synthesis, with each chapter providing discussion of the major lines of research, theory, and findings for the area of concern. Chapters are organized into sections covering: *The theoretical background, history, structure, and diversity of political communication; *Messages predominant in the study of political communication, ranging from classical rhetorical modes to political advertising and debates; *News media coverage of politics, political issues, and political institutions; *Public opinion and the audiences of political communication;*European and Asian perspectives on political communication; and*Trends in political communication study, including the Internet, and its role in changing the face of political communication.
As a comprehensive and thorough examination of the political communication discipline--the first in over two decades--this Handbook is a "must-have" resource for scholars and researchers in political communication, mass communication, and political science. It will also serve readers in public opinion, political psychology, and related areas.

PART I
THEORIES AND APPROACHES TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

CHAPTER 1
Theoretical Diversity in Political Communication

Everett M. Rogers
University of New Mexico

Note: The late Steven H. Chaffee originally planned to write this chapter, which is dedicated to his memory.

In the 2000 election, almost every political candidate running for office at every level (presidential, state, county, city, and local) had an active Web site. This fact indicates the current importance of Internet-related communication technologies in political communication and suggests how this specialty field has evolved since its beginnings earlier in the past century in the hands of Walter Lippman, Harold Lasswell, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, and other forefathers and founders of communication study. Despite the growth of television in the 1950s and the Internet in the 1990s, which altered the channels of communication carrying political messages to the U.S. public, certain human communication processes involved in changing political behavior have remained much the same.

A long-lasting, stable set of theoretical themes has dominated the study of political communication, rather than any single, overarching theory. Nevertheless, the theoretical diversity of political communication displays certain common themes, such as a lasting concern with communication effects. Our purpose here is to synthesize these diverse theoretical perspectives, showing how they have evolved over the years, with an emphasis on their beginnings. Although the field of political communication began by studying the effects of print media and radio on individuals’ voting choice, such as in the 1940 Erie County Study (described later), the field has expanded to include additional aspects of communication and political behavior.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

The beginnings of communication study, mass communication, and political communication are intertwined. All shared a common intellectual interest in the effects of mass media communication, and the forefathers and founders of these fields included the same set of scholars. From the early period of what was later to be identified as communication study, scholars focused on changes in political behavior (such as voting) as one of their main dependent variables of study.

Walter Lippmann and Public Opinion

Some observers consider Walter Lippmann’s (1922) Public Opinion a founding document for communication study. Lippmann was a contemporary scholar with the political scientist Harold Lasswell in studying propaganda and public opinion. During World War I, Lippmann served as a propaganda leaflet writer for the Allied Army in France. During the era when communication study was getting under way in the 1920s and 1930s, until the 1950s or 1960s, propaganda constituted one important stream of communication scholarship. World War I represented a conflict in which both combatants used propaganda extensively, and the public perceived propaganda techniques as being dangerously powerful. This perception was based mainly on anecdotal evidence and on exaggerated claims by governments, rather than on scientific analysis. The public’s fear of powerful propaganda served to attract the attention of early scholars like Lippmann and Lasswell. In fact, the field that was later to be called “mass communication” was termed “public opinion and propaganda” (or approximately similar names) in the 1930s. For example, Lasswell taught a course by this name at the University of Chicago (Rogers, 1994).

Lippmann (1922) also did early thinking and writing about what later was called the agenda-setting process, with his insightful chapter on “The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads.” Lippmann contrasted what agenda-setting scholars were later to call “real-world indicators” (which index the seriousness of some social problem) with peoples’ perceptions of the issue (later called the public agenda). Walter Lippmann pioneered in conducting one of the first scholarly content analyses, of The New York Times coverage of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Lippmann and Merz (1920) found an anti-Bolshevik bias in this news coverage, which led Lippmann to become skeptical about how the average member of the American public could form an intelligent opinion about important issues of the day. Walter Lippmann was called the most gifted and influential political journalist of the 20th century. At the same time, he was a key analyst of propaganda and public opinion, and of agenda-setting.

Lippmann was important in identifying the role of the mass media in public opinion formation in a democracy. He argued that the media, whose freedom was protected by the First Amendment, were crucial in creating a free marketplace of ideas. “The value of participatory democracy, active and widespread popular participation informed by a free and responsible press, serves as an important impetus to political communication research” (McLeod, Kosicki, & McLeod, 2002, p. 215). Study of political communication was stimulated from its beginnings by a normative concern about the need for a free press and an informed public in society.

Harold Lasswell and Propaganda Analysis

The study of media effects as part of an ongoing research program began with the scholarly work of Harold Lasswell, a political scientist at the University of Chicago who specialized in the investigation of propaganda. Lasswell’s Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Chicago, later published as a book (Lasswell, 1927), content analyzed the effects of propaganda messages by the Germans versus the French, British, and Americans in World War I. Lasswell formalized the methodology of content analysis of media messages. He is known for his five-question model of communication: Who says what to whom via which channels with what effects? This conceptualization was to influence early communication study toward the investigation of media effects, a preoccupation that has continued, to at least some degree, to the present day. Although Lasswell earned his doctorate in political science, his scholarly interests ranged widely, and in the latter part of his career, after he left the University of Chicago, he specialized to an increasingly greater degree in communication research. During World War II, Lasswell, with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, led a research team at the U.S. Library of Congress charged with content analyzing Allied and Axis propaganda messages in the media.

In 1944, the owner of Time–Life Corporation, Henry Luce, provided funding for a 3-year study of the mass media in the United States by the Commission on Freedom of the Press. The 13-member Commission, chaired by Robert Hutchins, President of the University of Chicago, included Lasswell as an influential member. The Commission was concerned about the growing concentration of U.S. media ownership and the decreasing degree of newspaper competition. The Commission report stressed the value of First Amendment freedoms for the media as being essential for an informed public in a functioning democracy.

Paul F. Lazarsfeld and the Erie County Study

Another key forefather of communication study was Paul F. Lazarsfeld, an émigré scholar from Austria, who spent much of his scholarly career at Columbia University. Trained in mathematics, Lazarsfeld became an important toolmaker for social science research on mass communication effects. He led the Radio Research Project, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1937, which explored the effects of radio on American audiences. Lazarsfeld transformed the Radio Research Project into the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University, arguably the most noted university-based research institute of its day, and one specializing in communication research. With his sociological colleague Robert K. Merton, Lazarsfeld developed the research method of focus group interviews (Rogers, 1994), a data-gathering technique initially utilized to study U.S. government radio spots urging the American public to plant Victory Gardens, collect scrap iron and used rubber, and buy war bonds. These federal government campaigns, essentially a form of domestic propaganda, were designed and evaluated by a set of communication scholars drawn from various social sciences, including Lasswell, Lazarsfeld, Wilbur Schramm, and others.

Lazarsfeld led the first quantitative studies of voting behavior, with his most well-known inquiry being the 1940 Erie County Study, which in certain respects represented the most important pioneering investigation of political communication. Lazarsfeld and his colleagues conducted 600 personal interviews each month for 6 months until the November 1940 presidential election. This study was carried out in Erie County, Ohio, selected by the Columbia University researchers as a representative American county. At the time, the prevailing conception was one of powerful media effects, a perception based loosely on historical events like the role of the Hearst newspapers in leading the United States into the Spanish American War, the panic resulting from Orson Welles’ “Invasion from Mars” radio broadcast in 1937, and Hitler’s use of propaganda as World War II began in Europe.

So Lazarsfeld intended that the Erie County Study investigate the importance of the direct effects of the media in determining how people voted in a presidential election. The main dependent variable of study was voting behavior, a reflection of Lazarsfeld’s background in conducting market research (in fact, Lazarsfeld was one of the founders of market research in America). As Chaffee and Hockheimer (1985, p. 274) stated, “The vote was taken to be the ultimate criterion variable, as if it were the most important political act a person can perform. This focus on voting has been followed by many researchers since the 1940s. . . .” No one would deny that voting is a crucial aspect of political behavior, but contributions of time and money to a political campaign, personal statements to others in support of a candidate, display of campaign buttons and posters, and other political actions are also important (Chaffee & Hockheimer, 1985). The main independent variables of study in the Erie County project, in addition to exposure to newspapers and news magazines and radio (the main media of the day in 1940), were individuals’ socioeconomic status and political party identification.

To Lazarsfeld’s surprise, only 54 of his 600 respondents in the Erie County panel of voters shifted from one presidential candidate to another, and only a few of these switchers were directly influenced to do so by the media (Converse, 1987). Many of the voters had made up their minds before the electoral campaign began. Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet (1944) concluded that the media had minimal effects in the 1940 presidential election campaign. However, other scholars (e.g., Chaffee & Hockheimer, 1985) have questioned this conclusion, and so the matter seems to be dependent in part on interpretation and on the types of data that are considered (Rogers, 1994). In any event, Lazarsfeld and others postulated a twostep flow of communication in which opinion leaders with a relatively high degree of media exposure then passed along political information to their followers via interpersonal communication channels. This two-step flow model highlighted the complementary role that media and interpersonal communication often play in influencing an individual’s political decisions, a lead that has been pursued in later investigations up to the present (Rogers, 2002a).

In the several years following the Erie County study, communication scholars may have overemphasized the minimal effects of the mass media. A younger colleague of Lazarsfeld’s at the Bureau of Applied Research at Columbia University, sociologist Joseph Klapper (1960), concluded in his book The Effects of Mass Communication that the media seldom have direct effects. At the time, given the assumptions and methodologies of mass communication research, this conclusion seemed rather obvious. Later developments, however, led to questioning of this minimal effects conclusion.

Along with a follow-up to the Erie County Study, of the 1948 presidential election in a New York community (Berelson, Lazarsfeld, & McPhee, 1954), Lazarsfeld’s investigations were the first large-scale election research to give major attention to the role of the mass media and virtually the last for many years thereafter (Chaffee & Hockheimer, 1985). The University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research began a series of studies of presidential election voting, carrying on Lazarsfeld’s tradition of survey research on voting behavior. These national surveys, however, paid relatively little attention to the role of the mass media in voting decisions, concentrating instead on political party identification and socioeconomic variables in influencing voting (the importance of political parties in determining citizens’ voting behavior has faded in recent years, replaced by the media, especially television). Because these Michigan studies were national sample surveys, the role of personal communication networks in voting decisions was difficult or impossible to explore (Sheingold, 1973). The primary focus on the individual as the unit of response and the unit of analysis led to a deemphasis on network and other social influences on voting decisions and to lesser attention to larger systems (such as media institutions) in political communication research.

World War II and the Beginnings of Communication Study

World War II Washington, DC, was the gathering place for leading American social scientists who were to become the forefathers and founders of communication study. One important preceding event, however, was the year-long Rockefeller Foundation Communication Seminar, organized by Foundation official John Marshall and held monthly at the Rockefeller Foundation’s offices in New York City. Marshall’s letter of invitation to the Seminar’s participants was one of the first uses of the term mass communication (previously, such terms as public opinion or propaganda were used to refer to such study) (Rogers, 1994). The 12 regular participants in the Rockefeller Foundation Communication Seminar included Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Harold Lasswell, with the latter being the dominant intellectual force in the discussions. Lasswell’s five-question model of communication was developed at the Seminar. The primary concern of the Rockefeller Foundation Communication Seminar was to have been defining the newly emerging field of communication but centered increasingly on the approaching World War II, which began in September 1939 (as did the first of the Seminar’s monthly meetings). The Seminar was important in bringing together leading scholars with an interest in communication research and in forming a consensus about the priority questions that should be pursued. At the conclusion of the year-long series of Seminar sessions in New York, the participants held meetings with high government officials in Washington to brief them on the Seminar’s conclusions, including the role that the newly emerging field of communication could play in the ensuing world conflict.

World War II brought together a talented set of social scientists in Washington, DC, where they worked as consultants or employees of various wartime government agencies. Included were Lazarsfeld, Lasswell, sociologist Sam Stouffer, social psychologists Carl Hovland and Kurt Lewin, and Wilbur Schramm, who had been director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. These scholars shared a common interest in human communication study and in its application to wartime problems facing the United States. Their interaction in Washington led to the formation of a paradigm for mass communication study. These scholars were relatively more free of disciplinary barri...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction and Overview of the Field
• Part I Theories and Approaches to Political Communication
• Part II Political Messages
• Part III News Media Coverage of Politics, Political Issues, and Political Institutions
• Part IV Political Communication and Public Opinion
• Part V International Perspectives on Political Communication
• Part VI New Trends in Political Communication Channels and Messages
• About the Authors