Page 248 - Culture Society and the Media

238 POLITICAL EFFECTS

5. A broadening of focus away from the near-exclusive concentration of earlier
research on election campaigns, as sites of measurable political influence, to
the study of political effects of media coverage in a variety of more everyday
non-election circumstances as well.

This last point merits further elaboration. Since highly influential impressions of
the scope of the mass media to affect voters’ political views have often stemmed
from research into election campaigns (in the United States and elsewhere), it is
worth noting some of the properties that explain their attraction as a repeated
object of study. To begin with, an election is a special, infrequent, yet quite
decisive event, during which members of the electorate are subjected to greater
outpourings of overtly political communication than at almost any other time. This
enables researchers to prepare their fieldwork well in advance. It also produces
an outcome (i.e. votes cast for different political parties) which is known, exact,
measurable and can be readily related to measures of other variables. Findings of
successive campaigns can also be related to each other, thus yielding
measurements of trends over time. Moreover, since an election campaign is an
occasion for the launching of intensive attempts at persuasion, researchers can
not only observe how voters sample and react to the various political offerings,
but also put their theories about such processes to a stringent empirical test.
Two limitations of this focus have also attracted criticism. One is that it directs
attention to short-term effects (over the campaign period) at the expense of the
more gradual cumulation over a longer span of time of media influences on
people’s political beliefs. Another is that it deals only with manifestly political
messages and ignores the more diffuse but possibly more pervasive ideological
implications of other forms of media content—such as soap operas, family
comedies, adventure serials, advertisements, etc. Some social scientists, however,
have attempted to counteract these shortcomings. For example, long-term panel
designs, involving interviews with the same voters across several elections, are
becoming more common. And at least one major American research programme
is devoted to the task of what its initiators call ‘cultivation analysis’, i.e. an attempt
to determine how far certain descriptions of social reality, shown by content
analysis to be projected frequently in popular television programmes of all kinds,
are accepted as valid by heavy viewers of the medium. Meanwhile, the field
continues to develop partly (though not so exclusively as in previous times)
through studies of campaign effects. This is understandable, for when citizens
are placed in a situation of electoral choice, a whole host of political orientations
—information levels, attitudes to parties and leaders, impressions of the issues of
the day, policy preferences, perceptions of the wider political system—are
brought to the surface and exposed to possible influence.