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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 241
political predispositions and group allegiances set the goal; all that is read
and heard becomes helpful and effective in so far as it guides the voter
towards his already chosen destination. The clinching argument thus does
not have the function of persuading the voter to act. He furnishes the
motive power himself. The argument has the function of identifying for
him the way of thinking and acting which he is already half-aware of
wanting. (Lazersfeld et al, 1944, p. 83, 2nd edn)
Consequently, certain mechanisms of audience response to political messages
were invoked to explain the reinforcement process. Given such labels as
selective exposure, selective perception and selective recall, their linking thread
was the idea that many people used their prior beliefs, both as compasses for
charting their course through the turbulent sea of political messages, and as
shields, enabling them to rehearse counter-arguments against opposing views.
Third, it was recognized, of course, that there was a group of ‘floating voters’
whose prior political anchorages were not firm enough to conform to this
reinforcement model. Nevertheless, the findings of early research seemed to
suggest that political persuasion was virtually irrelevant to many members of this
group who, because they tended to be less interested in political affairs, were also
less likely to be reached by political messages.
Finally, a key linchpin of this edifice of interpretation concerned the role of
party loyalty in mass electoral psychology. It was assumed that most voters tuned
in to political communication through some underlying party allegiance.
Typically, this would (a) be acquired early in life; (b) persist through one’s life-
time; (c) be echoed among many members of the individual’s social circles, such
as his family, friends, workmates and so on; and (d) guide the majority of the
electorate through the maze of issues and events which appear on the political
stage.
A ‘NEW LOOK’ IN POLITICAL COMMUNICATION
RESEARCH
The reinforcement doctrine of political communication reigned supreme and
virtually unchallenged in academe for a number of years. Even sceptics (e.g.
Lang and Lang, 1966), who considered that the dominant perspective overlooked
important media roles in shaping public opinion between elections, tended to
accept the validity of its interpretation of short-term campaign processes. For
example, they tended to agree that ‘the minds of most voters’ were likely to be
‘closed even before the campaign opens’. And since electioneering politicians
would be striving mainly to ‘activate partisan loyalties’, the campaign period
was ‘inherently…less a period of political change than a period of political
entrenchment’ (pp. 456–7).
It is striking to find, therefore, that from the late 1960s onwards an increasing
number of investigators began to proclaim that the book on political