Why Does Political Communication Start With Volume 10? ... and Other Mysteries of the Scholarly Infrastructure

Jarol B. Manheim

It is at times like this that I feel old.

In April, Jill Edy, who was a student in the first course I taught after coming to George Washington University in 1987 and whose exceptional work as editor of this newsletter we should pause to appreciate, pointed out to me a tradition of which I had been unaware – that the outgoing Chair of the APSA Section shares with readers in the autumn issue her or his thoughts on current research, issues confronting the field, or some such. This in turn prompted me to look back at the offerings of some of my predecessors in this position and of our counterparts in the ICA Division, whose contributions are published in the spring issues. What I found were a number of erudite pieces that tended to focus on particular research interests or other professional concerns of the authors. All have been fundamentally scholarly efforts offering excellent insights.

Naturally I decided to offer something completely different – a brief and doubtless idiosyncratic look backward and forward, not at the scholarship in our sphere of interest (at least not directly), but rather, at the infrastructure of Political Communication as a field of study.

Central to that infrastructure are the Section/Division organizations themselves, the journal, Political Communication, that we jointly publish, and this newsletter. We could not live without them. It is, I think, important that we take note from time to time, especially in a growing field that so many have entered quite recently, that we once did.

The ICA Political Communication Division has a longer history than the APSA section, having developed in the mid-1970s just as the study of political communication itself was emerging from the hibernation imposed by the failure of early voting studies to find the silver bullet of persuasion. With exceptions, media and politics, as it was often termed then, tended to be a topic of one or two weeks’ duration in courses on elections, public opinion, political behavior, persuasion or the like, and the opportunities to publish related research were few. When I offered my own first full course in the field in 1971, I was able to find only three or four topical books suitable for assignment to students. The establishment of the ICA division was a major step toward changing that.

But I am writing here as the APSA section chair, so I’ll let the ICA folks relate their own history if they are so inclined. On the APSA side, despite early interest and efforts (including a noteworthy one by David Paletz), the impediments placed on section development by the parent association slowed development, and it was not until 1990 that enough petition signatures were obtained to establish the section. I don’t want to leave anyone out (and apologize to those whom I inadvertently have), but my memory is that Ann Crigler, Marion Just, Russ Neuman and Doris Graber contributed the most to that success. As Ann tells the story, her spearheading of the petition drive that ultimately proved successful started over a dinner discussion with Jean Pool, who urged her to push it forward during Lucian Pye’s APSA presidency. Pye agreed to help, and provided valuable assistance moving the petition through the association. The founding group was able to gather the requisite 100 signatures, and the section became a reality. The founders also made what has become, in my view, a crucial decision to assure future development when they chose to name the new section not Media and Politics, but the more inclusive Political Communication.

At about that same time, Dan Nimmo and Bob Savage, acting from the ICA side, approached me about exploring the possibility of establishing a journal in cooperation with the APSA section. ICA already sponsored a journal, Political Communication Review, which had been established in 1976 and was ably edited by Lynda Lee Kaid and Keith Sanders at the University of Oklahoma, but PCR operated on a shoestring and was able to publish only a small annual issue. Dan and Bob had something grander in mind, but felt that the division itself could not sustain two publications. Lynda and Keith graciously agreed that, as part of any negotiations on a larger publication, PCR would participate in the changes.

Interestingly in light of the extraordinary cooperation we have all experienced over the last decade plus, the ICA division leadership of the time recognized that no journal proposal would succeed without the support and participation of the newly formed APSA section, but was quite concerned that the two organizations might not be able to work together toward a successful venture. And despite the overlap in membership, there was some measure of distrust coming the other way as well.

It turned out to be remarkably easy. Working with Bob Savage and David Weaver on the ICA side, I was named chair of the division’s publication committee. Then, under the leadership of Doris Graber, the APSA section, too, created a publications committee. Doris asked me to chair it. As one can imagine, this greatly simplified the negotiations between the two political communication organizations. Acting jointly, then, the two committees solicited interest from publishers and advanced a proposal that included alternating editorships, a joint editorial board and a publisher. We also recommended the joint publication of a newsletter with the editorship to be alternated on a reverse pattern to the journal.

From the beginning, this all had to make economic sense, and, given that libraries were even in those pre-Web days cutting back on journal purchases and scholarly publishers were suffering financially as a result, identifying a publisher for Political Communication proved to be a bit of a challenge. And that’s where the answer to the trivia question in the title is found. Through one of the numerous industry mergers of the time, Taylor & Francis, the publisher the committee ultimately recommended, had acquired a journal related to our field, Political Communication and Persuasion, edited by Yonah Alexander. But T&F was considering terminating the journal, which was then publishing its ninth volume. Their proposal was that PCP be renamed Political Communication and come under the joint sponsorship of the ICA and APSA groups. But, they argued, the “renamed” (as opposed to the “new”) journal needed to begin with Volume 10 because that would permit them to continue fulfilling essential and existing library subscriptions rather than trying to sell new ones into an adverse market. In candor, we all wanted a “new” journal and this was almost a deal breaker, but set against that was a royalty arrangement that would, over time, greatly improve the finances of both organizations, which in those days tended to run in the high three figures. The committee recommended the deal, and at their respective membership meetings in 1991, both the ICA and APSA groups accepted the recommendation. Because neither the section nor the division could enter into contracts on their own, however, there followed yet another round of reviews by APSA and ICA, which, with a bit of diplomacy on all sides, approved of the venture. Then the real work began.

I will assume for reasons of verbal economy that everyone reading this is familiar with the enormous contributions of our journal and newsletter editors and our program chairs over the dozen years since. Well beyond their own scholarly efforts, collectively, and as our agents, they have helped to shape and change our field, and helped it to mature. It is easy being a section chair, at least these days – you chair a meeting, do a few administrative and political odds and ends, and write a piece for the newsletter. But editors and program chairs do the real work of field building, and no matter how often we thank them, one more time is not too many.

The extent of their success was brought home to me recently when I had the privilege of attending a conference sponsored by the Communication Department at the University of Washington. The conference brought together political scientists and communication scholars for a discussion of communication and citizenship, and as Ann Crigler pointed out, the remarkable thing about it, especially given the topic, was how little it had to do with campaigns and elections – our common point of origin. Rather, the topics ranged from the definition and measurement of citizen competence through citizen activism and corporate power structures to the analysis of communication networks. The presentations and discussion were theory-rich and data-rich, but most of all they were innovative and interesting. It was clear from the conference, as a microcosm, that as a scholarly community our interests are evolving and expanding and we are developing new methodological tools to explore aspects of political communication that few imagined even a dozen years ago. That, more than anything else, is the sign of a vibrant enterprise.

It was also clear from the UW conference, as it is from the continued success of our journal, from its diverse content, from the degree of overlapping membership between the ICA and APSA groups, and from the growing pattern of collaboration across disciplines and continents, that the early disciplinary jealousies on both sides were misplaced. Political scientists and communication scholars will continue to have differences of substantive interests, theories and perspectives, and methods. But perhaps more than in most areas in either discipline, we continue to interact with one another and to turn those differences to advantage as we go forward.

Good for us.