Page 62 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 41

THE EFFECTS OF POLITICAL COMMUNICATION
political bosses did through the patronage system. Also, consultants
can’t enforce voter discipline or the voting behaviour of elected
officials. There is no empirical evidence of a direct causal rela-
tionship between watching a commercial or series of commercials
and voting. Consultants further argue that they make elections more
open and provide access for reporters to candidate strategy, views
and campaign information.
(1990, p. 68)

The masses, it is argued, were hardly part of the political process before
universal suffrage became a reality. Even after the majority of citizens gained
the right to vote they were still relatively ignorant about political issues. The
rise of the mass media, and television in particular, has brought the masses
into the political process to an historically unprecedented degree. And the
masses, such voices insist, are not so stupid as to be the passive victims of
crude manipulation.
In any case, the argument continues, why shouldn’t media performance be
a legitimate criterion of political fitness, in a world where media are so
fundamental to the political process? Critics of the media’s expanded role,
from this point of view, are simply expressing a modern variant of John Stuart
Mill’s argument against universal suffrage which, as we noted earlier stated
that the masses should be deprived of the vote because they were inferior
educationally and intellectually. The rise of the internet and its growing role
in political communication has, in any case, rendered the alleged passivity of
the electorate more problematic. Politicians and parties now routinely use
YouTube to post campaign messages and advertisements, but these are
subverted by online users – ‘mashed’ up, re-edited, digitally retouched – in
ways which satirise and mock the sender. Political communication on the
internet is vulnerable to the interventions of digital content-generating users
to a degree never true of ‘old’ media, centralised and top-down as they were.

CONCLUSION

The debate introduced here will recur in subsequent chapters, as we examine
the communication strategies and tactics of political actors in greater detail.
Beyond argument, we may state at this point, is the notion that political
communication is too important to be ignored by those with a concern for
the workings of modern democracies.
The precise nature of its effects – behavioural or attitudinal, short-,
medium- or long-term, direct or indirect, social or psychological – may still
elude social scientists and observers of the political scene, but political actors
themselves – those who are striving to influence society in directions con-
sistent with the furthering of their interests – are acting on the assumption

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