"The most exciting and visible part of politics is the political campaign. Politicians and their team of strategists, pollsters, and surrogates wage battle for the votes of the public. Slogans are trumpeted. Gaffes are made. Tactics are deployed. And it probably does not matter all that much."Andrew Gelman and Gary King in their 1993 British Journal of Political Science article, "Why are American Presidential Election Polls so Variable when Voters are so Predictable?", were among the first empiricists to provide statistical evidence in support of the 'political campaigns don't matter' argument, as have many other quantitaitve election studies since. So then, why do we, as a nation, spend billions of dollars each national election cycle on campaigns? If they don't matter, wouldn't this compel politicians to concentrate on the things that do matter - the economy, national security, etc. - and to minimize their expenses on elections?
One possible answer is that, similar to the U.S.-Soviet arms race in the 20th-century, there is no politician willing to unilaterally disarm in order to prove that 'elections don't matter.' The other (and probably better) answer is that campaigns do matter, particuarly if we view them as more than just a means through which voters learn about candidates on their way to making a rational vote decision. Just as there is significant empirical evidence that underlying economic conditions largely determine electoral outcomes at the aggregate level, there is also significant experimental evidence at the individual-level that political communications "change" what voters know, how they think, and how they behave. Reading the work of Stanford's Shanto Iyengar provides a good primer on the evidence in support of the 'campaigns do matter' argument (News That Matters [University of Chicago Press, 1987], Is Anyone Responsible? [University of Chicago Press, 1991], Explorations in Political Psychology [Duke University Press, 1995], Going Negative [Free Press, 1995]. The graphic below is a rough approximation of the research findings from the last 30 years of political communication research.
All else equal, political campaigns can change voter attitudes and behavior. The campaign practitioners rule-of-thumb is that persuasion occurs when the right message is sent to the right person and is repeated often enough to be remembered. A truism, perhaps, but this rule reminds the communications professional that sending a message is a wasted effort if the receiver considers the information irrelevant or cannot understand, use or accept it. In this media age, a communication mistake like that is a very expensive mistake.
Effective political communications campaigns need to consider the information levels of the recipients of political communication. Disseminating complex information to individuals who do not have the background to interpret the information is a not an effective communications strategy. [Sidebar: This is why Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich's often logical, yet overly academic, explanations of economic or foreign policy leaves many voters unmoved.] Unfortunately, many political arguments are inherently complex. Which is why campaign strategists usually consider a couple of strategies to minimize this problem. One approach commonly used in campaigns is to take a long-term view and try to increase the ability of the target audience to understand the complex information (i.e., political communication as a form of civic education). Arguably, the Ross Perot presidential campaign in 1992 effectively utilized this strategy. The other more commonly used approach is to take a shorter-term outlook and present the target audience with simple messages (i.e., political communication as the rhetorical version of a McDonald's McRib). Guess which one dominates political discourse in this country?
The problem campaigns face is that both strategies are risky and can alienate key voters, namely, undecided voters (often incorrectly assumed to be "independent" voters). Furthermore, political communications research has shown that there is a large and receptive group of potential voters just above the bottom of the political awareness scale that does learn from being exposed to simple messages. Learning by this group, however, requires loud and consistent messages from political campaigns and some political scientists, such as Larry Bartels and Benjamin Page, have argued that this type of political learning encourages intellectural short-cuts and does not translate into genuinely enlightened political choices. Political scientist James Kuklinski further argues that political communications, particularly television advertisements, are more about "priming" and "framing" issues than about providing genuine information to voters.
Nonetheless, there is substantial evidence that political campaigns do matter, particuarly given the potential impact of bringing "low information" citizens into the voting booth. However, from the perspective of normative democratic theory, the problem is not whether campaigns matter but whether campaigns are providing sufficient information so voters can make informed decisions in the voting booth. That is a much more difficult question to answer.
