Framing Elections

Gerald M. Kosicki

When an election is over and a particular candidate has won, a struggle begins to define the nature of the mandate that the new elected official will have to pursue various policies. To some extent, this process might be viewed as merely a continuation of the campaign, but it is distinct from the campaign. Various players take part in activities relevant to this process, which is best understood as framing the meaning of elections.

The meaning of an electoral victory needs interpretation. Candidates typically attempt to argue that their preferred policy outcomes are the reasons the voters chose them. Opponents will argue for other interpretations. Sometimes voters straightforwardly choose one candidate’s platform over that of another. Sometimes voters choose a candidate despite their platform. Sometimes voters choose Candidate X not out of any conviction that she would do a good job but simply because she is not Candidate Y. Alternatively, Candidate M could win the election despite his stand on a given issue, although it is one that he tried to push hard in the campaign. Other permutations of these choices are possible.

In each case, the winning and losing campaigns will try to offer their preferred explanation of the cause of their victory or loss. For winning candidates this is particularly important because of the need to begin articulating policies that will be pursued once power changes hands and the campaign turns into a government. Losing candidates might want to explain their losses in certain ways for particular reasons. Perhaps the losing candidate intends to run again in a couple of years. Perhaps the purpose is to make things more difficult for the winning candidate to achieve her policy goals.

When citizens vote, they are communicating something about their public policy preferences -- but what? Beyond the fact that someone is elected, the meaning of the vote beyond that one simple fact is ambiguous. Why did people vote as they did? What were their preferred policy outcomes? Interpretation of the meaning of an election begins immediately once votes are cast. Journalists and political commentators begin discussing the election right away and this first impression may be long-lasting.

Various strategies for trying to figure out what people meant by their vote have been used by journalists and political analysts over the years. The most widely used is probably demographic analysis of voting precincts and the vote. But such analyses are subject to ecological fallacy, that is, the danger of making assertions about individual units of analysis based on aggregated data. Just because Candidate A did better than Candidate C in precincts with citizens residing there with better than average educations does not mean that the better educated citizens voted for Candidate A. It may well have been the less well-educated citizens in those well-educated areas that elected Candidate A. The potential problem occurs whenever we examine an aggregated level of analysis to make conclusions about individual units.

Exit polls are the main ways that the meanings of elections can be interpreted in an unbiased and non-partisan manner. The goal is to explain the behaviors and intentions of voters and the data are coming from a random sample of those individual voters. Without exit polls, winners would be unbound in terms of their so-called mandate to undertake their favorite programs, whether or not those programs are why people elected them. Exit polls give an independent source of additional information that journalists, scholars and citizens can use to help understand what voters really meant when they voted a certain way on Election Day. These data are important and must be gathered systematically and well.

Exit polls have been developed in the United States by the news media. In my view, they are one of the key media contributions to the development of survey research. After all, exit polls are a phenomenal task - lining up the services of a couple of thousand workers to stand at polling places all day long on Election Day, collecting ballots and transmitting the results to a central office. In its basic form, this is similar to what large survey organizations do all the time, except that this poll has only one day to get all the data gathered. Months of planning go into making sure all goes smoothly, and the logistics of such efforts on a national scale are tremendous.

Unfortunately, to the extent that most people are cognizant of exit polls at all, they may be seen mainly as tools the news media use to speed up election night news coverage. Television networks use the exit polls to project winners as soon after polls close as is possible. Since it has been the custom in the United States for many years for the main TV networks to use one source of raw exit polling numbers in the interest in saving money, networks tend to compete on analysis. That is they often employ various statistics and elections experts to help move the process from data to meaning along as quickly as possible.

It may be that people, if they think at all about exit polls, may see them as being about speed. But scholars know that exit polls are about long-term interpretation and analysis in the service of democracy. Indeed, they may be irreplaceable resources to help us understand our elections. Creating these contemporaneous data is important work.

Looking ahead, the exit polls for our national elections will be in the capable hands of veteran exit pollster Warren J. Mitofsky of Mitofsky International and his partner Joe Lenski of Edison Media Research. Mitofsky is the inventor of the exit poll, having created this in 1967 while working for CBS News. Mitofsky was for many years the executive director of the CBS election and survey unit, and began the CBS/New York Times Poll in the middle 1970s and directed it for 15 years. He began Voter Research & Surveys in 1990 and directed it until 1993. Voter Research & Surveys was followed on the scene by Voter News Service (VNS). The demise of VNS earlier this year brings Mitofsky back onto center stage in the business of providing data to carry on the important work of providing data to facilitate the interpretation of the meaning of the elections in the world’s oldest democracy. Godspeed.

Gerald M. Kosicki is the director of the Center for Survey Research at The Ohio State University.

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