Strategy in Information and Influence Campaigns

How Policy Advocates, Social Movements, Insurgent Groups, Corporations, Governments and Others Get What They Want

Jarol B. Manheim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136842177
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Information and influence campaigns are a particularly cogent example of the broader phenomenon we now term strategic political communication. If we think of political communication as encompassing the creation, distribution, control, use, processing and effects of information as a political resource, then we can characterize strategic political communication as the purposeful management of such information to achieve a stated objective based on the science of individual, organizational, and governmental decision-making. IICs are more or less centralized, highly structured, systematic, and carefully managed efforts to do just that.

Strategy in Information and Influence Campaigns sets out in comprehensive detail the underlying assumptions, unifying strategy, and panoply of tactics of the IIC, both from the perspective of the protagonist who initiates the action and from that of the target who must defend against it. Jarol Manheim's forward-looking, broad, and systematic analysis is a must-have resource for scholars and students of political and strategic communication, as well as practitioners in both the public and private sectors.

1
Points of Origin

The government of one country trying to influence the economic, military or other policies of another. Environmentalists trying to influence the practices of a corporation. A labor union trying to influence the behaviors of an employer. An insurgent movement trying to gain supporters by legitimizing itself. A company trying to gain an advantage over a competitor in the marketplace. An advocacy group trying to influence legislators to change public policy. In these and many other efforts, one of the most common forms of engagement is through the conduct of some form of information and influence campaign.

For the moment, let us define the information and influence campaign (IIC) as an effort by one party, through some combination of communication and action, to change the behavior of another party to its advantage. Such campaigns are commonplace these days—they are undertaken by, or targeted against, such diverse entities as governments, international organizations, labor unions, nongovernmental advocacy organizations, corporations, or even insurgent groups—and they have about them the feel of a distinctly contemporary phenomenon. But like all such complex and sophisticated patterns of human behavior, the campaigns we observe today are the products of evolution. They build on a history of innovation, trial and error, redesign, adaptation to events and new technologies, responses to changing expectations, and all the other factors that make politics so much fun, whether as a spectator sport or as a profession. Before turning our attention to the principal focus in this volume, the strategies and tactics that characterize contemporary IICs, then, let us pause to consider these points of origin. We’ll do that by looking at three examples that happen to fall at 100-year intervals.

The World’s First Social Justice Campaign, 1787–1807 ¹

On the afternoon of Tuesday, May 22, 1787—precisely three days before delegates across the ocean convened the Philadelphia Convention or, as it is known today, the Constitutional Convention, to draft the eponymous document—another group came together at a printing shop in London. These twelve men, too, had a mission. Spearheaded by a young clergyman, Thomas Clarkson, who remained a driving force throughout, they met to form the first national advocacy association, the Society to Effect the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and in the process to initiate a grassroots social movement of a sort unknown in its time, and whose innovations resound to this day.

At the time, the trade in human beings was more rule than exception, and though moral outrage was oft expressed, it generally had little practical impact. That was about to change. Those at the May meeting, and others who soon joined their cause, launched one of the world’s first comprehensive information and influence campaigns. Among them were Clarkson, who traveled widely in the following years organizing and agitating for change; Olaudah Equiano, an articulate former slave whose testimony regarding his personal experiences gave a face to the issue; John Newton, a repentant slave ship captain best remembered today as the composer of the hymn “Amazing Grace”; Granville Sharp, propagandist and pamphleteer; budding young industrialist and designer Josiah Wedgwood; and parliamentarian and eventual front-man for the movement William Wilberforce.

Their campaign—and that’s what it was—was remarkable for its imagination, its organization, its breadth, its diversity, and its sheer inventiveness. The campaign was a faith-based effort, finding early and continuing support among Quaker communities, which lent it an immediate aura of moral authority. While one might assume today that an anti-slavery movement would hardly need additional moral garb, social values were different in the eighteenth century and this religious grounding, eventually to be augmented with support by other faiths, was an important anchor point. Though many persons at the time did, in fact, regard slavery as a moral evil, it was nonetheless an evil in the abstract and thus easily opposed in principle without requiring action. By recruiting and lending prominence to the aforementioned Olaudah Equiano, the Society personified slavery as a real, concrete evil, and one requiring remediation.

To gain legitimacy and influence in the political sphere, the Society recruited Wilberforce, a prominent and respected Member of Parliament, who became its principal legislative voice. Not coincidentally, Wilberforce, a close friend of William Pitt, who served as Prime Minister during much of the period in question and encouraged his engagement with the issue, was an Anglican, and his involvement also served to insulate the movement against marginalization as a purely Quaker undertaking. The Society initiated petition drives—an accepted expression of public opinion in an era that lacked polling—eventually producing an estimated 103 such documents signed by somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 people that were submitted to Parliament in 1788 alone.

The slave trade was at heart an economic issue, driven by the demand for labor to produce agricultural products, principal among them sugar. The abolitionists took this head on, launching a consumer boycott in which some 300,000 Britons refused to purchase or eat slave-grown sugar. Other tactics included:

• research and fact-finding, primarily by Clarkson at the outset of the campaign, in anticipation of a Parliamentary inquiry into the question of slavery, and the development of narratives based on the horrors uncovered thereby,

• newspaper and magazine story placements,

• participation in commercial debating hall programs, the contemporaneous equivalent of talk radio (half of all advertised debates in 1788 dealt with the slave trade),

• cartoons and other forms of ridicule intended to demonize and reduce the acceptance of slave traders,

• publication of a children’s book about the evils of slavery, Little Truths Better than Great Fables, by William Darton,

• publication of books and essays on the moral and practical aspects of the issue by Clarkson and others, their translation into the principal languages of the slave-trade—French, Portuguese, Danish, Dutch, Spanish—and their international distribution to key markets,

• campaigns of correspondence including the production of 500–1000 copies of letters that amounted to a prototype for the contemporary newsletter, ongoing exchanges with American supporters of the movement (important since the emerging new nation across the Atlantic was a primary market for the slave trade), as well as personal letters to the kings of Sweden and Spain,

• display of the first anti-slavery painting (Execrable Human Traffick by George Morland) at the Royal Academy in London,

• design and printing of wall posters and their display in public houses across Britain (the best known being a portrayal of the accommodations on the slave ship Brookes, an image that is still widely used today),

• the production of medallions (precursors of today’s campaign buttons), used on snuff boxes and cufflinks by men and on hatpins by women, featuring a logo, designed by Josiah Wedgewood and praised by Benjamin Franklin, showing an African kneeling in chains, circled by the slogan, “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?”,

• celebrity endorsements,

• fundraising correspondence, the forerunner of today’s direct-mail appeals,

• lobbying Parliament, and, throughout the campaign

• meticulous scheduling, organization, and record-keeping, which has allowed historians to reconstruct the Society’s activities.

The result? In early 1807, after a twenty-year campaign, Parliament passed a bill abolishing the British slave trade by forbidding slave ships from departing British ports after May 1 of that year. On March 25, King George III assented, and the bill became law. The problem of slavery was by no means solved, but in fairly short order the slave trade, the object of the Society and its campaign, was greatly diminished.

A Justice Campaign of a Different Sort, 1887–1890 ²

In November 1887, Thomas Alva Edison wrote a letter to the New York State Death Penalty Commission, charged at the time with finding the most humane means of executing criminals, urging that the state adopt the electric chair for this purpose. Edison wrote, in part:

The best appliance in this connection is to my mind the one which will perform its work in the shortest space of time, and inflict the least amount of suffering upon its victim. This I believe can be accomplished by the use of electricity and the most suitable apparatus for the purpose is that class of dynamo-electric machine which employs intermittent currents. The most effective of these are known as “alternating machines,” manufactured principally in this country by Mr. Geo. Westinghouse, Pittsburgh.

(Essig, 2003: 117)

With this letter, America’s most famous inventor launched his latest innovation, a version of the information and influence campaign tuned to advance a set of private interests in a competitive environment.

In point of fact, Edison was an opponent of capital punishment, and he wrote reluctantly, and only after the repeated urgings of Commissioner Alfred Porter Southwick, a Buffalo dentist and death penalty advocate. Southwick had qualified for membership on the Commission based in part on his own experiments, in which he gathered up many of the stray dogs that were at the time causing trouble in his home town and executed them with jolts of electricity, and in part on the fact that he had initiated, through a friend in the State Senate, the legislation establishing the Commission. Other members of the Commission included Elbridge T. Gerry, whose grandfather was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and attended the Constitutional Convention in 1787, and who himself was a prominent philanthropist and served as legal counsel to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and an obscure Albany lawyer named Matthew Hale. This august group began with a consideration of all of the ways that deserving criminals might be put to death. Their list included, among others:

• Beating with clubs

• Beheading

• Boiling in water

• Boiling in oil

• Boiling in melted sulfur

• Breaking on a wheel

• Burning

• Body illumination (tying the victim down, boring holes in his body, filling these with oil, and setting the oil alight)

• Burying alive

• Cannon, as in shooting from

• Crucifixion

• Dismemberment

• Drowning

• Exposure to wild beasts or snakes

• Flaying alive

• Garrote

• Guillotine

• Hanging

• Impalement

• Piercing with spikes in a device known as an iron maiden

• Poisoning

• Pressing to death

• Shooting, as by a firing squad

• Stabbing

• Stretching on the rack

• Stoning

• Strangling

• Suffocation

• Throwing from a cliff. (Essig, 2003: 91–96)

Perhaps not surprisingly, the Commission judged all of these methods to be inhumane to one degree or another, and cast about for some new means of execution. It considered, but then rejected, lethal injection with a hypodermic needle, on grounds that this might prejudice the public against the then emergent potential for delivering helpful medications by injection. (It was during the debate over this method that Dr. Southwick wrote to Edison asking his views of electrocution, the good doctor’s preferred methodology, so that he could buttress his views against the objections of Gerry, who favored the needle.) Then, and perhaps not surprisingly, since it had been constituted for precisely this purpose, the Commission settled on a high-tech solution to the problem: death by electrocution.

As the Wizard of Menlo Park weighed Southwick’s request, the soon-to-be-proverbial light bulb clicked on in his head. For Southwick had just presented Edison with a possible solution to his own most vexing problem, the competition posed by Westinghouse and his alternating-current electrical systems. If Edison could establish in the public mind the perception that Westinghouse’s alternating current system was dangerous to use, and hardly something one would want to introduce into one’s home, while his own direct current system was safe as could be, he stood to gain the upper hand in the emerging competition to electrify the country. And what better proof could there be than the decision by the State of New York to employ alternating current to kill?

Like many subsequent campaigns, this one was constructed on a body of belief and expectation that was already established in the public mind, and sought to position the protagonist—in this case, Mr. Edison— squarely atop the moral high ground, even as he moved to gain a tangible advantage.

On New Year’s Eve 1879 Edison had stirred the public imagination, not to mention generated quite a bit of excitement, with his legendary demonstration of electric lighting at his Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratory. Less than two years later, he had established a generating station and was laying conduit under Lower Manhattan, and on September 4, 1882, he flipped a switch that served only fifty-nine customers but lit the world. By 1887, he had 121 central generating stations in place.

But Edison had a problem. His entire system operated on direct current (DC), which had the advantage of being relatively safe, but the disadvantage of dissipating after traveling a very short distance—only about a mile. As a result, Edison’s power grid required the building of generating stations at the rate of approximately one per square mile—an expensive undertaking to say the least. That created an opening for competitors, and one principal adversary did emerge in the person of George Westinghouse. Westinghouse’s system employed a d...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Figures, Tables, and Boxes
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Points of Origin
• 2 Information and Influence Campaigns
• 3 Strategy and Tactics in Campaign Communication I: Winning the Argument
• 4 Strategy and Tactics in Campaign Communication II: Shaping the Decision
• 5 Networks and Netwaves: Organizing for Influence
• 6 Riding the Waves: Strategy and Tactics in Network Activation
• 7 Feeling the Pressure: The Dimensionality of Targets
• 8 Guarding the Castle: Deterring, Deflecting, Minimizing or Defeating Information and Influence Campaigns
• 9 Information, and Influence
• Appendix A Need to Know: Strategic Intelligence and Research in the Campaign
• Appendix B The IIC Knowledge Base: A Selective Bibliographic Inventory
• Notes
• Appendix C A Bibliography for IIC Strategy (Including Sources Cited)
• Author Index
• Subject Index