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Understanding the Mechanisms Underlying Political Participation...and Why It Matters
Dietrum Scheufele
In a CBS/MTV poll leading up to the 2004 presidential election in the U.S., 76% of young voters between 18 and 29 years of age reported that the upcoming election was “the most important” or “one of the most important” of their lifetime. On Election Day, however, less than 50% of all young voters turned out. In other words, even though more than three quarters of young voters believed that this was one of the most important elections in their lifetime, less than half of them considered it important enough to turn out and actually vote. What explains these disturbingly high levels of apathy among voters? And are there leverage points to reverse some of these trends?
Pathways to Political Participation: Predispositions, Socio-demographics, or Communication?
Researchers in political communication have invested a lot of energy in the last few decades to try and answer some of these questions. And we have learned a lot. Personal predispositions matter for who participates, and so do socio-structural determinants, including family background, social networks, and economic resources. Communication variables are equally critical, of course. Media shape our issue agendas and, in turn, the standards we use to evaluate candidates. They help frame the policy choices that are presented in public discourse. And they ideally inform the electorate, and help build feelings of trust and political efficacy among citizens by making politics transparent.
Unfortunately, however, our field has also run into a few dead ends. Some of those were simply a function of paradigm shifts over time. We went from magic bullet and hypodermic needle models of media effects in psychology, for instance, to two-step flow and reinforcement models in sociology. After that, however, communication and politics began to drift further apart. The American Voter left little room for communication effects. And the return to powerful mass media proclaimed by Noelle-Neumann, Gerbner and other communication scholars, arrived in the 1970s largely unnoticed by political scientists and researchers from other disciplines.
The overlaps in focus and membership between the political communication sections of ICA and APSA have helped tremendously in overcoming some of these schisms and countering the institutional obstacles to interdisciplinary research. Interdisciplinarity also is critical in this area of research. The problem of apathy, especially among younger voters, is multifaceted, and so are the solutions.
Political Participation: Why Communication Still Matters
One of the variables that is now at the center of most research on voter apathy and political participation, however, is communication. Communication is also what campaign professionals and policymakers are naturally most interested in. In other words, communication variables matter from a theory building perspective, but they also have direct relevance for solving the pressing issues related to turnout among voters. In this essay, I will highlight two areas that I think political communication scholars should pay particular attention to as we go into the 2008 election.
Is the Internet overrated? With major candidates for the 2008 presidential race falling all over each other to declare their candidacy on Youtube.com or their own web sites, pundits and scholars continue to speculate about the role that the Internet will play in future campaigns. Back in 2002, my colleague Matthew Nisbet at American University and I wrote an article titled “Democracy online: New opportunities and dead ends” where we tested some of the assumptions regarding the transformational role that some cyber optimists believed the Internet could play in modern democracies. What we found back then was sobering. Traditional media, especially newspapers, continued to play a crucial role in informing the electorate, increasing their sense of efficacy, and motivating them to participate in politics. The Internet played a very limited role. Similar to what researchers had seen with the introduction of television in Germany in the 1950s and 60s, the Internet increased feelings of efficacy and interest for some citizens, but produced no significant changes in political information or participation.
More recent research, however, suggests that as online literacy increases among the electorate, certain groups of citizens will begin to use the Internet as a valuable informational resource. Online sources and media put political information at people’s fingertips, and party platforms, candidate issue stances, and voting records are easily accessible in seconds. But interestingly, the Internet may not produce simple learning effects, similar to newspapers, for example. Rather, recent research seems to suggest that hyperlinked information from the Internet can help citizens to connect political facts and to develop a more integrated, abstract understanding of politics. Chip Eveland at Ohio State and his colleagues’ (2004) work on Knowledge Structure Density (KSD) provided some early insights into these processes. Kajsa Dalrymple at Wisconsin and I also have a forthcoming piece in the Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics that explores the impacts of online and traditional media on factual and integrated knowledge during the 2004 presidential campaign, suggesting that online media provided an important tool for interested citizens to connect pieces of information and develop a more integrated understanding of political facts and candidates during the last presidential campaign.
Talk matters. While instant messaging, social networking sites, and online tools for campaign fundraising may be important tools for modern campaigns, most research suggests that interpersonal channels still play a crucial role as part of networks of recruitment for political participation. Two aspects about political talk are especially interesting.
The first aspect is discussion networks. A lot of my recent research—most of it collaborations with graduate students and colleagues at Wisconsin, Cornell, and Ohio State (e.g., Scheufele et al., 2004, 2006)—suggests that discussion networks among citizens play a crucial role as networks of recruitment, but also as catalysts for additional information seeking. And the more diverse these networks are, the better. True deliberative democracy is based on the notion that an exchange among non-likeminded individual citizens produces the best outcomes for the collective. Our research suggests that this is indeed the case. Citizens with more heterogeneous discussion networks are more likely to participate in various political activities. But they also turn more to political information in news media, are more knowledgeable and feel more efficacious, and, in turn, are more participatory.
The second important aspect related to the recruitment potential of talk comes from my recent research on the differential gains model (Scheufele, 2002). This research shows that talk does not only have a linear link with political participation. Rather, political talk moderates the relationship between traditional news media use and political participation. Why is that? One explanation is based on the idea that citizens need to talk things over with other people. In other words, discussing what they have seen on TV or read in the newspaper with other people helps citizens make sense of politics and participate meaningfully. The other explanation for this phenomenon is based on the assumption that people who talk about politics with others on a regular basis also anticipate needing certain kinds of information in these conversations, and therefore process information from mass media more carefully.
So What About Young Voters?
What does this mean for political participation during the 2008 campaign? What are the contributions we as researchers can make to understanding and increasing turnout? One approach is to stop examining the Internet in a mostly descriptive fashion as a new phenomenon in politics. Yes, the Internet is a powerful fundraising tool, as Howard Dean and others demonstrated, and a very unpredictable communication tool, as the recent Hillary Clinton/Apple viral ad showed. Instead, communication scholars should begin to see the Internet as a catalyst for democratic citizenship, as a supplement and enhancement of traditional news outlets.
Linking the two areas I outlined earlier—political talk and the Internet—provides a good example. In the work I did with Bruce Hardy (Hardy & Scheufele, 2004) at the University of Pennsylvania and Matthew Nisbet (Nisbet & Scheufele, 2005) at American University, we showed that online conversations can serve as an important tool for citizens to make sense of information they have gotten from traditional offline media. Online conversations or additional information seeking online, in other words, can replace the important role that interpersonal conversations have played traditionally during political campaigns. If social networking sites like Myspace.com or Facebook.com successfully connect users to one another and allow them to debate politics and provide political background information on the issues discussed, they may do more for youth turnout than “Rock the Vote” or other efforts by traditional media were ever able to. At this point, of course, this is largely speculation. We need research in order to be able to make more precise predictions, and in order to put some of these ideas into action.
Dietram Scheufele is Pofessor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Life Sciences Communication, and Professor in the School of Journalism & Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin.
REFERENCES
Dalrymple, K., & Scheufele, D. A. (forthcoming). Finally informing the electorate? How the Internet got people thinking about presidential politics in 2004. The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics.
Eveland, W. P., Cortese, J., Park, H., & Dunwoody, S. (2004). How Web site organization influences free recall, factual knowledge, and knowledge structure density. Human Communication Research, 30(2), 208-233.
Hardy, B. W., & Scheufele, D. A. (2005). Examining differential gains from Internet use: Comparing the moderating role of talk and online interactions. Journal of Communication, 55(1), 71-84.
Nisbet, M. C., & Scheufele, D. A. (2004). Political talk as a catalyst for online citizenship. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 81(4), 877-896.
Scheufele, D. A. (2002). Examining differential gains from mass media and their implications for participatory behavior. Communication Research, 29(1), 46-65.
Scheufele, D. A., Hardy, B. W., Brossard, D., Waismel-Manor, I. S., & Nisbet, E. (2006). Democracy based on difference: Examining the links between structural heterogeneity, heterogeneity of discussion networks, and democratic citizenship. Journal of Communication, 56(4), 728-753.
Scheufele, D. A., & Nisbet, M. (2002). Democracy online: New opportunities and dead ends. Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, 7(3), 53-73.
Scheufele, D. A., Nisbet, M. C., Brossard, D., & Nisbet, E. C. (2004). Social structure and citizenship: Examining the impacts of social setting, network heterogeneity, and informational variables on political participation. Political Communication, 21(3), 315-338.
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