The State of the Field Report, 2005

by Shanto Iyengar

I would like to take this opportunity first to bring readers abreast with the latest news of section governance and, second, to offer some general thoughts on what I see as he current renaissance in political communication research.

I am happy to report that the Political Communication Section remains in sound health. Membership is steady, and our APSA panels continue to attract an abundance of applicants, so much so that we are among the more selective of the organized sections.

There is one organizational change to report. This past year, we decided to participate in the joint reception hosted by the Political Psychology and Elections-Public Opinion sections. Many of our members also belong to one or both of these sections and a joint reception will simplify the schedule, permit us to network more effectively with our colleagues in these sections, and experience some cost savings (the cost of the reception will be divided evenly among the three participating sections).

We have continued to work cooperatively with our counterpart section at ICA on a variety of matters. Most notably, the two sections will co-sponsor an award in memory of the late David Swanson. As most readers of this newsletter must know, David was in the forefront of efforts to establish and sustain PCS, including serving a term as editor of Political Communication. But as his colleagues have pointed out (Paletz et al., 2005), David’s true legacy was on a global scale; he pioneered efforts to establish cross-national collaborative relationships among scholars interested in communications-related questions. David was one of the few genuine exponents of inter-disciplinary and multi-method research; so long as the phenomenon of interest had anything to do with political communication, he was equally enthused whether you came at it from a psychological-experimental, macro-economic, or rhetorical-qualitative perspective. I was given a close-up look at David’s strong bonds to the broader community of scholars making up our section when my Stanford colleague (and pioneering researcher) Steve Chaffee passed away quite suddenly. David took it upon himself to solicit contributions for a special section of the journal to be devoted exclusively to papers celebrating Chaffee’s significant impact on the field. As a fitting recognition to David’s multiple contributions to the institutionalization of our field, the APSA and ICA sections will inaugurate, in 2006, the biennial “David Swanson Memorial Award for Professional Service to the Field of Political Communication.”

So much for what your officers have done over the past year. Let me turn now to taking stock of the intellectual state of our field. There can be no doubt that we are witnessing a renaissance of political communication research. Scholarly excitement can be traced to at least three distinct sources. First, the spectacular diffusion of information technology has added a whole new dimension of media users and potential effects on individuals and institutions. From time displacement to the mobilization of activists to democratization of authoritarian societies, researchers are busy documenting the implications of IT. Second, we live in a “24/7” era of political communication. From candidates who resort to negative advertising campaigns to elected officials who leak news or plant stooge reporters at press conferences, the use -- even manipulation -- of the mass media to promote partisan political objectives has become a standard practice viewed as essential to survival. Third, and from my perspective most importantly, improvements in experimental design coupled with the ability to attract a mach broader pool of experimental participants have made possible an unprecedented level of methodological precision.

Twenty-five years ago, when Don Kinder and I were planning a series of laboratory experiments on agenda-setting, we realized that unless we could recruit “real people” as subjects, the findings, null or otherwise, would never see the light of day in mainstream political science journals. Our task was made all the more daunting by the fact that the design required participants to come to a particular (and not especially savory) spot on a New Haven campus for six consecutive evenings. Today, we could have more easily finessed the issue of sampling bias by assembling participants in groups online to watch the manipulated newscasts. Moreover, we could have gone so far as to have selected participants using standard probability sampling techniques. Several market and political research firms maintain national research panels dedicated to social science research; the Knowledge Networks Panel (which is reached through a WebTV Modality) has approximately 40,000 panelists recruited by RDD, and the Polimetrix Panel is even larger, numbering 1.5 million panelists drawn from all 50 states.

The obvious advantage of using the Internet as the experimental “site” includes the ability to reach diverse populations without geographic limitations. The rapid development of multimedia-friendly browsers makes it possible to bring video presentations to the computer screen. The technology is so accessible that subjects can easily self-administer experimental manipulations. Compared with conventional shopping mall studies, therefore, the costs are minimal. Moreover, with the ever-increasing use of the Internet, not only are samples more diverse, but also the setting in which participants encounter the manipulation (surfing the Web on their own) can be less artificial.

The Political Communication Laboratory at Stanford University has been carrying on a variety of online experiments over the past five years. These experiments feature text, audio, and visual manipulations. One of the Lab’s most popular online experiments is “whack a politician,” (http://pcl.stanford.edu/exp/whack/polm) modeled on the well-known whack-a-mole arcade game. Ostensibly, the game provides subjects the opportunity to “bash” well-known political figures. Before playing the game, subjects complete a consent form and brief pretest questionnaire. After playing the game, they self-administer the posttest. Since the game imposes severe time and attention constraints (subjects see five different moving faces, each hittable for a period of between two and three seconds), the whacking task provides an unobtrusive measure of group identity. That is, subjects are expected to target “out-group” figures for more extensive whacking. In one study, the targets were five well-known American politicians (President Bush, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Newt Gingrich, Jesse Jackson, and John McCain). Two conditions were created so as to make party-based whacking more or less difficult. In the “static” condition, the five targets consistently appeared in the same location; in the “dynamic” condition, their location on the screen was randomized. Naturally, we expected stronger effects of subjects’ party affiliation on their whacking behavior in the former.

Nearly 800 subjects participated in the first study. The results demonstrated very strong effects of party affiliation. Republican subjects selected Democratic targets and vice versa. Although the proclivity of partisans to pick on out-party targets was weakened in the dynamic condition, partisan whacking continued (at a significant level) despite the additional level of difficulty. Thus, these results demonstrate the power of party affiliation as a political cue.

So far, over 1,200 people have played whack-a-pol. They comprise a reasonably representative sample of Internet users at least with respect to race, education, and party affiliation. In keeping with the digital divide, however, our participants were disproportionately male and under the age of 28.

In addition to the ability to draw on representative participant pools, experimental researchers can take advantage of designs that permit voluntary exposure to the experimental stimulus, thereby mirroring the inherent selectivity of real-world media audiences. Here the experimental researcher enjoys the best of both worlds -- manipulational control coupled with voluntary compliance. Voluntary compliance naturally compromises randomization; participants can be assigned at random to experimental condition, but those who decide to participate are systematically different from those who do not. This selection bias creates the presence of multiple confounded variables. Fortunately, there have been significant advances in the statistical estimation of treatment effects in non-randomized experimental settings (for recent reviews see Imbens (2003), Angrist and Krueger (2000), and Imai (2005). In general, the approach is to control for factors that predispose assignees to accept treatment, thus permitting some disentangling of treatment effects from self-selection. In this manner, researchers can recover an unbiased estimate of the treatment effect by matched comparisons of treated and controls (matching on the factors known to predict acceptance of treatment); averaging over these matched comparisons produces an unbiased estimate of the causal effect of treatment.

Taken together, the cumulative effects of the revolution in IT, the increased prominence of media strategies to all aspects of the political process, and the development of more rigorous and generalizable experimental designs have stimulated research in all aspects of political communication. I would even go so far as to predict an increasing centrality of the study of political communication to our understanding of the course of contemporary politics.

References:

Angrist, J. D. and A. B. Krueger. 2000. ‘‘Empirical Strategies in Labor Economics,’’ in
Handbook of Labor Economics, Vol. 3, eds. O. Ashenfelter and D. Card. New York:
Elsevier Science.

Imai, K. 2005. Do Get-Out-the-Vote Calls Reduce Turnout? The Importance of Statistical Methods for Field Experiments, American Political Science Review, 99: 283-300.

Imbens, G. W. 2003. ‘‘Semi-parametric Estimation of Average Treatment Effects under
Exogeneity: A Review.’’ Unpublished Paper, Department of Economics, University of California, Berkeley.

Paletz, D. L., Graber, D., Herbst, S., Mancini, P., and S. Althaus. 2005. In Memory of David Swanson, Political Communication, 22: 1-6.

Shanto Iyengar is Professor of Communication and Political Science at Stanford University.