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240 POLITICAL EFFECTS
summer. Only about a quarter of the voters made their decisions during the
supposed period of the campaign. Yet political messages seemed little involved
even in their decisions. On the whole, late deciders and switching voters paid
less attention to the campaign than did more stable ones. Findings concerning the
tendency of voters to expose themselves selectively to political messages, i.e. to
attend more to political spokesmen and messages with which they agreed than to
those of the opposite side, also emerged from this study.
Later in Britain, Trenaman and McQuail (1961) conducted a most carefully
designed study of the General Election campaign of 1959. According to their
findings, attitudes (as distinct from votes) did undergo a definite swing (in fact
favouring the Conservatives), yet no significant association could be found
between that movement of opinion and how the voters had followed the election
campaign through any of the communication channels they used. In the authors’
words: ‘within the frame of reference set up in our experiment, political change
was neither related to the degree of exposure nor to any particular programmes
or argument put forward by the parties’ (p. 191).
The image of an election campaign as an occasion for parties and leaders
effectively to persuade and influence voters seemed, then, to have been exploded
by these and similar studies. Little wonder that two social scientists were moved
to remark when discussing this vein of research: ‘After each national election
students of political behaviour comment on how little effect the mass media
appear to have had on the outcome’ (Lang and Lang, 1966, p. 455).
REINFORCEMENT AS THE MAIN EFFECT
The leading investigators of campaign communication did not stop short,
however, at presenting their finding of little or no communication effect on the
voters. They also sought to explain why this was so. Out of these efforts emerged
the reinforcement doctrine of political communication impact. This doctrine had
several dimensions.
First, the typical outcome of the communication experience was succinctly
expressed by Joseph Klapper (1960) in his overview of the then available literature
on media effects: ‘Persuasive mass communication functions far more frequently
as an agent of reinforcement than as an agent of change’ (p. 15). In other words,
Klapper maintained, when people are exposed to mass media coverage of
political affairs they are more likely to be confirmed in their existing views than
to be fitted out with new or modified ones.
Second, Lazarsfeld and his colleagues, in their study of the 1940 Presidential
election, described the spirit in which voters supposedly attended to political
materials thus:
Arguments enter the final stage of decision more as indicators than as
influences. They point out, like signboards along the road, the way to turn
in order to reach a destination which is already predetermined…. The