Page 252 - Culture Society and the Media

242 POLITICAL EFFECTS
communication effects should not be closed after all. The literature began to
resound with ever more frequent references to a ‘new look in political
communication research’ (Blumler and McLeod, 1974), to ‘new strategies for
reconsidering media effects’ (Clarke and Kline, 1974) and even to ‘a return to
the concept of powerful mass media’ (Noelle-Neumann, 1974). This new mood
reflected three ground-swells of change, each undermining an essential prop of
the reinforcement doctrine. These changes inhered in trends in the political
environment, in the media environment and in the academic community itself.

Changes in the political environment

The reinforcement doctrine of political communication was part and parcel of an
overall view that placed far more emphasis on the underlying stability of the
world of politics than on its flux. As Lazarsfeld (1948) put it (p. xx, 2nd edn):
The subjects in our study tended to vote as they always had, in fact as their
families always had.’
Nowadays, however, party loyalty, once the linchpin of electoral psychology,
seems to have lost much of its power to fix voters in their usual places. Political
scientists in one democratic country after another have documented evidence in
recent years of accelerating rates of electoral volatility. In the US, for example,
there has been a steady downward trend in ‘Presidential elections since 1952
(only slightly reversed in 1976) in the capacity of self-disclosed ‘party
identification’ to predict how people will actually vote. There has also been a
concomitant rise in the number of those identifying themselves as
‘Independents’. Similar trends have been reported from Germany, Denmark,
Sweden, Norway, Belgium and Holland. For Britain, Butler and Stokes (1974)
have assembled an impressive array of evidence indicating ‘far greater volatility
of party support’ in the 1960s than in earlier post-war years. Continuing their
work into the 1970s, Crewe (1973 and 1976) has documented further falls, both
in shares of the eligible electorate obtained by the Conservatives and Labour at
successive elections, and steep declines (ranging from 46 per cent in 1964 to 23
per cent in 1974) in the percentages of voters professing to be ‘very strongly’
identified with some political party.
Moreover, a number of signs suggest that the combination of weak
partisanship and higher volatility rates is no passing phenomenon. For one thing,
the power of social class to predict the ultimate destination of voters’ ballots is
on the wane. That means that people are less likely to encounter a consistent and
consistently reinforcing pattern of party loyalties in the work and social circles in
which they move. For another, family socialization processes may no longer be
capable of transmitting life-long partisan affiliations from parents to children as
effectively as had been supposed in the past. It is striking to note in this
connection not only that the number of Independent identifications among new
entrants to the US electorate went up steadily from 1952 to 1972, but also the
lack of evidence that as the newly eligible mature politically they are abandoning