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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
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