Page 56 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

THE EFFECTS OF POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

formulation and decision-making. Governments, and those who
aspire to govern, allow their principles to be diluted on the
recommendations of market researchers. Ideologies and value-
systems are abandoned on the altar of popularity, and the activity
of political persuasion becomes a cynical response to whatever this
week’s polls say. Not only policies, but leaders are selected and
jettisoned according to the whims of public opinion, regardless of
their intellectual qualities. The image of the leader, it is argued,
counts for more than his or her abilities; the smoothness of delivery
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of a political message for more than its content. The integrity of
politics, in short, is undermined.
Undoubtedly, image is perceived to be more important than it
once was. Ronald Reagan, it is universally accepted, was not a great
American president because of his ability to govern, but because of
how, with the assistance of his actor’s training, he articulated his
simple, homely messages. He was ‘the great communicator’ rather
than the great thinker. Conversely, Michael Foot, the Labour Party’s
leader from 1980 until 1983, was acknowledged by supporters and
opponents alike to have been a formidable intellectual and a skilful
party manager. In the age of television, unfortunately, he did not
look and sound ‘right’. After Labour’s 1983 defeat he was quickly
shunted off into back-bench retirement, to be replaced by the more
‘media-friendly’ Neil Kinnock.
The examples of Reagan, Foot (and, to a lesser extent perhaps,
the 1984 and 1988 US Democratic challengers for the presidency,
Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis) are regularly cited by those
who bemoan the ascendancy of the image as a deciding factor in
voting behaviour. The trend is alleged to represent a move away
from the rationality of the democratic ideal to a more irrational,
fickle political process in which the ‘real’ issues are marginalised by
trivial considerations of appearance and personality.
An opposing argument asserts that the importance of image is
overstated. How, such voices ask, did George Bush—Doonesbury’s
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‘invisible man’ —win the 1988 presidential election? How did John
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Major, whose Spitting Image puppet portrayed him with a deep
grey pallor, defeat the more charismatic Kinnock in 1992? The
suggestion here is that voters are in fact less vulnerable to
manipulation by glossy images than has become the received wisdom,
and that, in any case, one voter’s attractive, homely leader is another’s
synthetic conman. John Major’s success in the 1992 general election
has been attributed by some to the fact that he was not packaged in
the manner of a Reagan, Thatcher, or Kinnock, but stood for himself,

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