Page 53 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

POLITICS IN THE AGE OF MEDIATION

As a general rule, the effects of political communications of
whatever kind are determined not by the content of the message
alone, or even primarily, but by the historical context in which they
appear, and especially the political environment prevailing at any
given time. The ‘quality’ of a message, the skill and sophistication
of its construction, count for nothing if the audience is not
receptive. President Clinton’s media adviser in the 1996 re-election
campaign, Dick Morris, writes in his memoir that ‘if the public
won’t buy your basic premise, it doesn’t matter how much you
spend or how well your ads are produced; they won’t work’ (1997,
p. 152) (see Chapter 6).
The aforementioned are conceptual difficulties, arising from the
complexity of the communication process itself. They remind us
that successful communication of a message (political or otherwise)
cannot be taken for granted, but must be worked for by the sender.

The evidence
A further problem for political communication research concerns
the nature and quality of the evidence used to measure effects. There
are, in the final analysis, only three ways to assess the effects of
political communication on attitudes and behaviour. The first is
to ask people how they have responded to specific messages, and
then collate their responses into statistically significant aggregates,
usually in the form of public opinion polls. Second, one may observe
voting behaviour, relating this to the communication strategies of
the contestants in a political campaign. Third, one may conduct
experiments intended to isolate the effects of particular elements
of the communication process. Each of these data-gathering
techniques has its methodological limitations.

Surveys
Public opinion polling, for example, a technique which originated
with commercially motivated survey sampling in the 1930s,
depends for its accuracy on the application of sampling procedures
which permit the survey to be ‘representative’. The questions asked
of those polled must be carefully formulated so as to avoid distortion,
simplification and exaggeration of response. The timing of polls
must be taken into account and results interpreted cautiously, with
allowances made for a variety of potential sources of error. While
the best-known and most frequently used polling organisations,

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