Who killed civic engagement? During the last decade multiple voices on both sides of the
Atlantic have blamed campaign communications for fuelling public cynicism. In
particular, political actor accounts claim that links between politicians and voters have
been weakened by the adoption of professional marketing techniques, including the
mÈlange of spin, packaging and pollsters. In contrast, media actor accounts hold
journalistic practices in campaign coverage liable for growing public disengagement from
civic affairs, and this thesis has developed into something of an unquestioned orthodoxy
in the popular literature. The arguments are hardly new, but are these claims correct?
Previous work by the author has argued that the process of campaign communications by
politicians and journalists has not contributed towards civic disengagement (Norris
2000). This chapter, based on analysis of long-term trends in political communications in
American election campaigns from the Eisenhower era in 1952 until the Bush-Gore
contest in 2000, confirms that the indictment remains unproven. The chapter draws upon
fifty years of National Election Surveys. Many popular commentators suggest that the
American public was exceptionally disenchanted by the 2000 presidential election but, in
contrast, this chapter demonstrates that, (i) contrary to popular opinion, the electorate did
not display exceptional levels of disaffection in the 2000 campaign, in fact according to
the standard indicators, American faith and confidence in government has been
progressively restored in successive elections from 1994-2000; (ii) overall levels of
political activism, interest in elections and public affairs, and attention to the news media
display trendless fluctuations in successive American campaigns during the last twenty
years, not a steady secular decline; and lastly that (iii) at individual-level, channels of
campaign communications directly initiated by politicians and indirectly mediated by
journalists are positively associated with levels of civic engagement.
To develop this argument, Part I briefly summarizes the theoretical framework including
conceptual models of how the process of political communications in election campaigns
has been transformed over the years and theories about how these developments may
have fuelled public cynicism. Part II examines whether there has been a long-term decline in civic engagement in the United States, as many claim, monitoring trends in
party canvassing, campaign activism, political interest, trust in government, and attention
to the news media, drawing from the series of surveys in the American National Election
Studies. Part III examines the impact of attention to the campaign on public engagement,
with models conducted at individual-level. The conclusion outlines the theory of ëa
virtuous circleí to explain the pattern we find. Rather than mistakenly criticizing the
process of campaign communications, the study concludes that we need to understand
and confront more deep-rooted flaws in American democracy.
The Theoretical Framework
At the most general level, campaigns can best be understood as organized efforts to
inform, persuade, and mobilize. Using a simple model, campaigns include four distinct
elements: the messages that the campaign organization is seeking to communicate, the
channels of communication employed by these organizations, the impact of these
messages on their targeted audience, and the feedback loop from the audience back to the
organization. Some messages are conveyed directly from politicians to voters, such as
through door-to-door canvassing, advertising, and Internet websites, but most are
communicated indirectly via the prism of the news media. This process occurs within a
broader social and political environment. Effective campaigns also include a dynamic
feedback loop as campaign organizations learn about their targeted audience and adapt
their goals and strategies accordingly. Indeed the most dramatic effect of campaigns may
be evident at elite rather than mass levels, for example if electoral defeat leads towards
parties adopting new policies and leaders. Understood in this way, campaigns essentially
involve the interaction of political organizations, the news media as prime intermediary,
and the electorate. Studying these phenomena systematically is difficult because effective
research designs require analysis of dynamic linkages among all three levels and often
data is only available at one, namely post-election cross-sectional surveys of the electorate. Although we commonly think of elections as the prime arena for political campaigns in
fact these come in a variety shapes and forms, such as AIDS prevention and anti-smoking
campaigns by public health authorities, environmental recycling campaigns by
environmentalists, and attempts to win hearts and minds in the debate between
transnational advocacy groups and anti-globalization movements and government and
business proponents of free trade in the ëbattle for Seattleí or Quebec. Campaigns can be
regarded as ëpoliticalí when the primary objective of the organization is to influence the
process of governance, whether those in authority or public opinion and behavior. As
other chapters in this volume discuss, the primary impact of this process may be
informational, if campaigns raise public awareness and knowledge about an issue like the
dangers of smoking, or problems of the ozone layer. Or the effect of a campaign may be
persuasion in terms of reinforcing or changing public attitudes and values, such as levels
of support for the major parties or the popularity of leaders. Or campaigns may have an
effect upon mobilization, - the focus of this study ñ typified by behavior such as voting
turnout and party volunteer work. Many accounts emphasize how the process of
campaign communications has been transformed during the twentieth century, but
nevertheless the impact of these changes upon the contents of the messages has not been
well established, still less the impact of the process upon mobilizing or demobilizing the
general public.
Many fear that common developments in election campaigns have undermined their role
as mobilizing processes. The last decade has seen growing concern in the United States
about civic disengagement fuelling a half-empty ballot box. The common view is that,
faced with the spectacle of American elections, the public turns off, knows little, cares
less and stays home (Nye et al 1997; Ladd and Bowman 1998; Putnam 2000). Similar
fears are widespread in many other democracies (Pharr and Putnam 2000). The growth of
critical citizens is open to many explanations that have been explored elsewhere
(Norris1999), linking public confidence with levels of government performance and
value change in the political culture. One of the most popular accounts blames the process of political communications for public disengagement, especially the changing
role of politicians and journalists within election campaigns. The idea that typical
practices in campaign communications have fostered and generated civic malaise
originated in the political science literature in the 1960s, developed in a series of
scholarly articles in the post-Watergate 1970s, and rippled out to become the
conventional wisdom today. The chorus of critics is loudest in the United States but
similar echoes are common in Western Europe. There is nothing particularly novel about
these arguments but their widespread popular acceptance means that the evidence for
these claims deserves careful examination. Two main schools of thought can be
identified in the literature. Political actor accounts emphasize the decline of traditional
fare-to-face campaigns, eroding direct voter-politician linkages, and the rise of ëspiní and
strategic news management by politicians, reducing public trust in parties and confidence
in governments. Journalist actor accounts stress the shift within the news media towards
covering political scandal rather than serious debate, policy strategy rather than
substance, and conflict rather than consensus. These development can be regarded as
complimentary, with the shift towards strategic news management by government
prompting a journalistic reaction, or as two autonomous changes.
Campaign demobilization?
In theorizing about these developments, campaigns can be understood to have evolved
through three primary stages. Pre-modern campaigns are understood to display three
characteristics: the campaign organization is based upon direct and active forms of
interpersonal communications between candidates and citizens at local level, with shortterm,
ad-hoc planning by the party leadership. In the news media the partisan press acts
as core intermediary between parties and the public. And the electorate is anchored by
strong party loyalties. During this era, which predominated in Western democracies with
mass-branch party organizations at least until the rise of television in the 1950s, local
parties selected the candidates, rang the doorbells, posted the pamphlets, targeted the
wards, planned the resources, and generally provided all the machinery linking voters and candidates. For citizens the experience is essentially locally-active, meaning that most
campaigning is concentrated within communities, conducted through more demanding
activities like rallies, doorstep canvassing and party meetings.
Modern campaigns are defined as those with a party organization coordinated more
closely at central level by political leaders, advised by external professional consultants
like opinion pollsters. In the news media, national television becomes the principle forum
of campaign events, a more distant experience for most voters, supplementing other
media. And the electorate becomes increasingly decoupled from party and group
loyalties. Politicians and professional advisors conduct polls, design advertisements,
schedule the theme de jour, leadership tours, news conferences and photo opportunities,
handle the press, and battle to dominate the nightly television news. For citizens, the
typical experience of the election becomes more centrally-passive, in the sense that the
main focus of the campaign is located within national television studios, not local
meetings, so that he experience becomes more distant.
Lastly post-modern campaigns are understood as those where the coterie of professional
consultants on advertising, public opinion, marketing and strategic news management
become more co-equal actors with politicians, assuming an increasingly influential role
within government in a ëpermanentí campaign, as well as coordinating local activity
more tightly at the grassroots. The news media fragments into a more complex and
incoherent environment of multiple channels, outlets, and levels. And the electorate
becomes more dealigned in their party choices. The election may represent a return to
some of the forms of engagement found in the pre-modern stage, as the new channels of
communication allow greater interactivity between voters and politicians. Post-modern
types of communication can be conceptualized to fall somewhere between the locallyactive
dimension of traditional campaigns and the centrally-passive experience
characteristic of television-dominated elections. Case studies suggest that political
campaigns in many nations have been transformed by the widespread adoption of
political marketing techniques, although countries have not simply imported American
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