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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
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