Political Communication

Background

Lazarsfeld and his colleagues focused on human decision making, primarily vote choice and attitude change (Sheingold, 1973). Although, as Chaffee and Hochheimer (1985) pointed out, the Lazarsfeld studies point to media as a potentially important source of political information [Page 438]for voters, their focus on attitude and behavioral change led the Columbia researchers to argue that media have only small, indirect effects on voter decision-making processes through opinion leaders. Out of this model came the broader limited-effects approach to communication research that dominated the field for several decades (Klapper, 1960).

The limited-effects purview, as used in political communication research over the past several decades, represents an “upper-middle-range” theory, a type of theory important for its organizing power (Chaffee & Berger, 1987). One of the keys to any theory of the middle range is replication and the building of empirical statements over time. Replication is central to social science research and provides greater certainty about the true nature of a relationship being studied (Rosenthal, 1991). Holbert, Benoit, Hansen, and Wen (2002) argue that replication is not well established in modern-day political communication research, and the lack of replication has weakened our understanding of fundamental political communication processes.

The introduction of graduate programs in mass communication, many housed in journalism schools, thwarted the hegemony of the Lazarsfeld paradigm (Delia, 1987). New theory was introduced that envisioned the role of the press and elections in very different terms from Lazarsfeld (e.g., McCombs & Shaw, 1972). For example, the argument underlying agenda setting is that political communication needs to shine its empirical lens earlier along the hierarchy of effects (see McGuire, 1989)—toward awareness, information processing, and salience—and away from the latter stages of attitudes and behavior. Although, as Katz (1987) argues, this “alternative institutional paradigm” was not a radical departure from the limited-effects model, this type of research opened the eyes of the discipline to the possibility of sizable media influence in the political realm (Johnston, Hagen, & Jamieson, 2000).

Political communication scholarship still wrestles with the fundamental question of whether political campaigns influence election outcomes (e.g., Holbrook, 1996). Significant roadblocks remain in place for the case that elections matter, and many of those impediments can be traced to the Lazarsfeld tradition. Political communication research is conducted primarily in two fields, communication and political science. When viewed from the perspective of the individual scholar, both communication scholars (see Katz, 1987) and political science scholars (e.g., Zaller, 1996) have made arguments against the limited-effects model. However, when viewed from the macro level of the field, the communication discipline has made greater strides away from the Lazarsfeld tradition than has political science. Support for this argument can be found in a comparison of the national data sets that define the two fields and the level of political com munication scholarship found in the two fields' top journals.

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