Do Campaign Communications Matter for Civic Engagement

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