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PART III
Contexts, Settings, and Applications
CHAPTER 16
Political Persuasion
Richard M. Perloff
Politics has always been about persuasion, for better and sometimes for worse. The storied Founding Fathers, who publicly lamented the formation of campaigns and political parties, engaged in vitriolic persuasive attacks against members of opposing groups, with Jefferson and Hamilton leading the persuasive charge. Persuasion played an increasing role in 19th century presidential election campaigns from Jackson to McKinley. It was harnessed by Lincoln, in eloquent egalitarian speeches that still arouse emotions today, but also by prejudiced political figures who argued in favor of slavery or against immigrants’ rights. But it was not until the 20th century that American politics and persuasion became synonymous in the public mind, with the advent of broadcast media, political consulting, and the nattering gaggle of speechwriters, pollsters, fund-raisers, political journalists, and other exemplars of the institutionalization of politics.
Contemporary political persuasion is played out on a media terrain. In the 21st century, as Iyengar (2004) observes, “American politics is almost exclusively a mediated experience. The role of the citizen has evolved from occasional foot soldier and activist to spectator” (p. 254). Citizens are necessarily objects of mediated persuasive appeals. Leaders recognize that they must harness the news and persuasive media to sway public opinion, resulting in a continuous and complex interplay of influence among elites, voters, and an increasingly polymorphous media.
Political persuasion at once repels and intrigues the public. Commentators on Fox News rail against the “powerful liberal media,” fanning passions among conservative viewers. Liberals, who frequently gravitate to the more politically congenial National Public Radio (Iyengar & Hahn, 2009), invoke the value-laded term “propaganda” with impunity as they recall the Bush administration’s campaign to convince the American public that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Yet the onset of the quadrennial presidential election campaign, with the ritualistic appearance of candidates in snowy Iowa and New Hampshire, titillates even jaded political aficionados, many of whom will predictably lament the onslaught of negative advertisements, viewed as “the electronic equivalent of the plague” (West, 2010, p. 70). Living in a media democracy, citizens have developed a multitude of lay theories about the impact of political persuasion, as well as normative evaluations of its role in American political life. Some of these theories are thoughtful, others are intuitively reasonable if simplistic, while still others are downright kooky. Citizens have every right to articulate their notions of political persuasion effects, and our democracy is richer for their sharing these perspectives in conversations. It is the job of social scientists to artic
ulate comprehensive models of political persuasion, test them empirically, and engage in the difficult but important task of integrating the facts of persuasion with the ideals of democracy in an effort to reach a reasoned assessment of the state of political persuasive communication today. This chapter is designed to systematically examine these issues.
The scholarly study of political persuasion in America dates back to the 1920s when Lippmann (1922) theorized about media effects on “pictures in our heads” and Lasswell (1927) described the nature of World War I propaganda during a time when writers worried that democratic society was “run by an unseen engineer” (p. 222). Scholars categorized propaganda effects, most famously in the “ABCs of propaganda analysis,” a listing of seven propagandistic devices, including name-calling, transfer, and testimonial (Jowett & O’Donnell, 2006). The techniques, while overly general from a social scientific perspective, remain relevant today, with name-calling studied under the rubric of negative advertising, transfer under accessibility of associations, and testimonial within the source credibility heading. The nascent study of propaganda took an abrupt turn with the 1944 publication of Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet’s study of communication effects in Erie County, Ohio, which uncovered little evidence of strong media effects, but considerably more support for interpersonal influence, a somewhat surprising turn of events that contrasted sharply with the gloom and doom of the early propaganda studies.
The term “propaganda” fell out of favor at the end of the World War II, its benighted orientation out of step with the cheerful zeitgeist of the 1950s. Suddenly, persuasion was a favored term. The study of persuasion gained academic respectability with Hovland, Janis, and Kelley’s (1953) experimental studies of communication and attitudes. Yet as the 1950s came to a close, the academic community seemed to foreclose the possibility of strong political persuasive influences with the publication of Klapper’s (1960) proclamation of limited effects, ironically published just before the celebrated Kennedy-Nixon debates affected the outcome of the 1960 election. It became increasingly impossible to deny media effects in the wake of the endless stream of vivid television images of racial brutality, Vietnam casualties, and political assassinations, as well as political advertisements, famously exemplified by “Daisy” in 1964 and 1968, as McGinnis (1969) described in his classic account of the selling of the recently remodeled Richard Nixon.
Emboldened by their intuition that television had strong influences and motivated to develop a new disciplinary approach to political communication, mass communication researchers sought to empirically overturn the limited effects legacy of Klapper, which Bartels called “one of the most noticeable embarrassments of modern social science” (quoted in Callaghan & Schnell, 2005, p. 2). With increasing evidence of media impact on political cognitions (Becker, McCombs, & McLeod, 1975) and growing recognition that political communication operated on macrolevels that had been hitherto ignored (Chaffee, 1975), the interdisciplinary field of political communication was born. Political persuasion is a subset of this field and a vital area of study.
The academic study of political persuasion is a multifaceted arena that operates on different levels of analysis, involves complex questions of causation, and presents distinctive methodological challenges. In addition, political persuasion calls on storied historical narratives, blurs the lines between persuasion and communication, and raises knotty normative concerns. Each of these deserves brief consideration.
First, political persuasion occurs on different levels. It operates on the microlevel, as when a television commercial alters a voter’s attitude, the dyadic level, showcased by communication network effects on political deliberation (Huckfeldt, Johnson, & Sprague, 2004), and the macrolevel, exemplified by presidential speech effects on public opinion or multiple influences of primaries on the institutionalization of political consulting. Political persuasion can also occur on micro- and macrolevels simultaneously, as when Internet-relayed protests about the 2009 corrupt Iranian election helped mobilize citizens and transformed the Iranian electoral context.
Second, in political persuasion the arrows of causal influence flow in different directions. Normatively, political persuasion should start with both the electorate, where citizens persuade political leaders to implement policies that reflect the public will, and elites, as when politicians convince the public to support critical foreign policy initiatives. The media are an important and complex link between public and elites. Empirically, media political content can produce changes in public attitudes, public opinion can drive media coverage, both may be a product of elite governmental influence, or each may operate under specific contingent conditions. One of the great challenges of political persuasion research is to sort out cause and effect. Needless to say, it is not easy.
Third, the study of political persuasion presents unique methodological problems. In surveys of media effects, researchers measure exposure by self-report. However, respondents may misremember the source, reporting that they learned a fact from a debate when they actually acquired it from news coverage of the debate. In addition, recall may not be a valid measure of exposure to a particular message. Voters can fail to recall seeing a political ad, but actually have had exposure to it, or assume they saw the ad when they in fact did not (Valentino, Hutchings, & Williams, 2004). What’s more, media exposure is increasingly confounded with pre-existing attitudes, with those exposed to a particular media outlet more likely to harbor attitudes congenial with the outlet than those not exposed (Bennett & Iyengar, 2008). Thus, regular views of Fox News differ from nonviewers in both exposure and strength of conservative Republican attitudes.
Fourth, political persuasion calls on rich historical narratives, more so than other persuasion arenas. The Founding Fathers, Lincoln, the World War II generation, Ronald Reagan, and time-honored family values are invoked to convince Americans to cast votes or partake in political causes. At the same time, historical perspectives are contested, contentious, and fraught with multiple meanings.
A fifth complexity involves the degree to which political message content falls under a traditional persuasion rubric, which emphasizes a communicator’s intent to persuade (O’Keefe, 2002). If we examine the sender’s motives, we find that political journalism is sometimes less concerned with persuasion than with informing or entertaining mass audiences. Yet if we focus on audience effects, we discover abundant evidence that news sets agendas, primes attitudes, and influences political evaluations. News, therefore, falls along the border of communication and persuasion. Even this distinction is muddied by increasing tendencies of news programs to promote particular points of view. Fox and MSNBC are prominent examples of news organizations whose talk shows promulgate political perspectives. Some of their programming, as well as those of ideological blogs, can be regarded as persuasion, although it is useful to differentiate political persuasion from propaganda and manipulation, which have different definitional features (Perloff, 2010).
Finally, political persuasion raises difficult value-laden questions. Political leaders have exploited persuasion to attain horrific ends, as is painfully evident from reviewing its uses by despots from Adolf Hitler to Saddam Hussein to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Yet charismatic persuaders have long harnessed the symbols of political communication for laudable purposes. Through the poetry of his words and moral clarity of his message, Martin Luther King Jr. mobilized masses of people to challenge a racially prejudiced status quo. On a less grandiose level, politicians rely on persuasion to make their case to voters, frequently bending rhetoric to suit audience predispositions. Thus, political communication raises a host of complex value-tinged questions, and these underlie social scientific questions of effects. Do campaigns enhance the art of argumentation or rely on shibboleth and poll-tested synecdoche to influence voters? Do campaigns encourage or discourage open-minded consideration of alternative points of view? Does political persuasion manipulate voters or deliver what they want? These questions are hardly new. Appeals to
sophistry and logos date back to ancient Greece. Discussions of the morality of persuasion recall Plato’s metaphor of the cave. Scurrilous political attacks were commonplace in 18th-century America. Normative assumptions about values, such as deliberation and freedom of speech, play a distinctive role in the study of processes and effects of this persuasion genre.
Theoretical Perspectives on Political Persuasion Effects
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Source Approaches
We have to be very clear on this point: that the response is to the image, not to the man … It’s not what’s there that counts, it’s what’s projected—and carrying it one step further, it’s not what he projects but rather what the voter receives. It’s not the man we he have to change, but rather the received impression.
Raymond K. Price, speechwriter for Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, quoted in McGinnis (1969, p. 37)
Credibility—or for consultants like Price, the manufacturing of credibility—plays a critical role in contemporary political persuasion. Persuasion research has identified three components of credibility: expertise, trustworthiness, and good will (McCroskey & Teven, 1999). Each is salient in different political contexts, as is illustrated by these three anecdotal examples.
Richard Nixon employed expertise in the 1972 election, with his consultants reasoning that the gruff, chronically distrustful Nixon was not a likable figure. As his adviser Roger Ailes famously quipped, voters regarded Nixon as “a bore, a pain in the ass … who was forty-two years old the day he was born. They figure other kids got footballs for Christmas. Nixon got a briefcase and he loved it” (McGinnis, 1969, p. 103). Consequently the campaign ads emphasized not that “you like Nixon,” but “you need Nixon” (Diamond & Bates, 1992, p. 180). Messages focused on his experience, competence, and accomplishments, such as traveling to China. He trounced the morally admirable, but politically hapless, George McGovern. Four years later, the nation reeling from Watergate, Jimmy Carter promised that he would never lie to the American people. Trustworthiness became his mantra. Appearing with his evangelical smile, the born again Christian and political incarnate of The Waltons character John-Boy (Nimmo & Combs, 1980), strode to the White House with an earnest, faith-based manner that contrasted with Gerald Ford, whose pardoning of Nixon cast doubts on his trustworthiness in the eyes of many voters. Carter edged Ford in a close election, only to lose in 1980 to Ronald Reagan, whose communication skills helped convey likability and charm to the majority of the electorate.
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