Politics and the bored spectator—a provocation

by David Sless

Elections are not getting any better, and the problems with the one we have just had in Australia are no different to earlier ones. But this time, I think (and hope) that the problems are more obvious to a wider group of thoughtful people. After the 1993 Federal Election in Australia, I wrote a 'provocation' to my research colleagues. The only thing that has changed since then is that it probably doesn't seem quite so provocative, and the many faults in using focus groups are more widely recognised. But will anyone do anything?

Originally published as:
Sless D 1993 Politics and the bored spectator: a provocation
Australian Journal of Communication 20 (2) 61-67

Abstract

This paper—provoked by the last general election campaign—asks some questions about possible future communication research.

Boredom

When the 1993 general election was called I was in Europe, and not bored. I returned in mid-February to watch the campaign on television, hear about it on the radio, and read about it in the papers. I did not feel invited to participate in any way. I even found it difficult to take a professional academic interest in it. I was a reluctant, bored spectator.

There was nothing new in the parties’ rhetorics, the advertising, the polls, or the way in which the media endlessly (so it seemed) regurgitated the same old election clichés. At the office, discussion about the election was met with a big yawn. At home, we desperately hunted for alternative viewing. Nobody really wanted to talk about it.

Even though the outcome was uncertain till the very end, it was boring.

The boredom was not because the political issues of our day are boring or unimportant or that we live in a boring country. Far from it. We live, as the Chinese say, in interesting times. But the political process that accompanies general elections has made it thus by excluding the majority of citizens. And, as I shall show, communication researchers bear a great deal of responsibility for encouraging this exclusion.

From participant to spectator

The progressive exclusion of citizens from elections had its antecedents in the introduction of the mass media as the major method of conducting campaigns. As Kathleen Hall Jamieson observed in Packaging the Presidency:

...the bargain that gave politicians access to millions of voters was a Faustian one, for access to the masses from the silence of the studio sacrificed the inspiration the crowd provides a skilled orator. Gone are the ability to adapt the message to the cheers, scowls, and silences of palpable individuals.

To compensate for the inability to gauge personally the responses of an invisible audience, the politician increasingly relied on audience measures to determine who and how many had listened, and on polls to chart audience predispositions and responses. With polling came the danger that politicians would carve their own identities out of the hopes and fears of the mass audience.

In addition to intuiting audience responses by such indirect means as ratings and polls, politicians offered the electronic audience a new identity as eavesdroppers on speeches personally delivered to crowds.... But in the shadow of this new role resided the possibility that instead of being participants in elections, audience members would become mere observers. (Jamieson 1984 p 23)

Thus from the beginning of mass media campaigns, communication research methods were regarded as essential. But, as I shall argue, far from acting to ‘compensate’ for the audience’s absence, they have contributed to the audience’s alienation, and there is no strong evidence that they have provided politicians with greater capacity to predict election outcomes or successfully shape their political identity on the audiences’ hopes and fears.

As I have argued elsewhere, our greatest concern should be for the image politicians have of us, as a result of using these methods, rather than the image we have of them (Sless 1985).

Unfortunately, the reductionist nature of these research methods failed to pick up what was being lost. At the same time, the ambivalent voyeuristic audience position offered by the mass media accommodated the transition from participant to mere observer—a transition which in our time has reached its nadir in the bored spectator.

From citizen to consumer

How far have the specific research techniques used to guide politicians contributed to the creation of the bored spectator? The techniques most widely used to try and control voting behaviour derive from market research and advertising, and with these techniques come the assumptions about capitalist modes of exchange (Sless 1985).

Paralleling the transition from participant to spectator has been a transition from citizen to consumer—impoverishment of one kind of relation is paralleled by another. Politics has become yet another part of the consumer society, subsumed within capitalism and treated as yet another item of consumption. Policies are now ‘test marketed’ with focused groups and surveys, ‘packaged’, and then ‘sold’ to the electorate. As consumers we can only choose between political ‘packages’, we cannot get involved as citizens in their creation.

For those citizens who take politics seriously and do not regard themselves as mere consumers of pre-tested political packages, there is no place in today’s well-researched election campaigns.

Instead of prolonged debate, lobbying, and consultation, sometimes spanning years and weighed against general political principles, opinion polls can canvass a whole shoppingbagful of issues in mini social encounters, which are brief, slight, and usually not very important to the interviewee (Sless, 1985. p 130).

And as Rogers and Penman have noted:

...the increasing use of market researchers and opinion sampling, rather than give politicians a real understanding of the electorate, act to keep citizens out of the political discursive space (Rogers and Penman, 1989, p 17).

From spectator to bored spectator

One of the most profound reasons for the bored spectator is the fact that many election campaign messages are not addressed to the majority of the electorate. The reasons for this go back to early research findings on elections (See Katz 1971 for a useful summary) which showed that most people, about 80%, make up their mind which way they are going to vote before a campaign starts, and do not change their minds during the campaign.

From the point of view of a campaign manager with limited resources, there is, therefore, no point in addressing a campaign to this stable group. Rather, the group to address is the undecided or swinging voter. Rather than provide a general forum for the majority to seriously debate a party’s political platform, campaign managers have increasingly focused on techniques they believe will help them persuade a group of undecided voters to make up their mind. Ironically, as Katz observed, the typical undecided voter, unlike the majority, does not care about politics. Campaigns addressed to them are necessarily focused on whatever issue may stimulate their limited political interest sufficiently to make a decision. No wonder the majority are bored.

When a campaign starts, those who care about politics know they have not been involved in the formation of policy, and the minority, whose opinion has been sought through superficial research, know that they have been involved superficially.

Little in the campaign addresses the serious issues that concern anyone. Even the undecided voters’ sense of the unimportance of politics can be readily reinforced by the superficiality that is directed at them.

This is why election campaigns are boring. They bore the undecided voters because they are not interested in politics anyway, and they bore the rest of us because we are.

Spectator research

As researchers we should also be bored by our own continual recycling of the same issues. Communication research on elections has essentially been a commentary on the status quo—researchers have become spectators of spectators.

Whether from an oppositional, negotiated, or preferred reading position, communication research is an attempt to articulate an understanding of a phenomenon which is already massively over-determined and over-researched. How many more academic papers are going to be written and read about why the polls got it wrong or right, how the media supported the dominant ideology, how the subject is inscribed in the electoral text, how the media manipulated the campaign, or how the politicians manipulated the media?

Does this type of research add anything fundamentally to our understanding of election campaigns? I think not. Like election campaigns themselves, research merely provides the reinforcement of whatever view we already hold. And perhaps spectator research has merely reinforced the trend that turns us into bored spectators.

Research junkies

Yet all political parties draw on communication research into rhetoric and effective speaking. They all use communication research methods of quantitative and qualitative research. They debate endlessly with their advertising agencies and campaign managers on the best methods of ‘getting their messages across’ and ‘packaging’ the policies, using theories of the communication and marketing processes. Even the media, nowadays more familiar with mass communication research, intersperse their familiar clichés with talk about agenda setting, undecided voters, and non-sampling errors.

As Jamieson shows, there is now a well-established structural dependence between the political system and research (Jamieson 1984). Even if politicians were sceptical of polls, once the political system incorporated the pollster there was no turning back. If politicians won an election using opinion surveys to plan their campaign, they were likely to use them again. If they lost, they argued that their polls were not as good as their rival’s, in which case the pollster had to improve or make way for someone who was as good as their rival’s. Either way they need the pollster to tell them where they went wrong so they could avoid the same mistakes next time.

Politicians need polls like junkies need a fix. And like all forms of drug dependence, the only one who really wins is the pusher, or should we say pollster in this case.

The dependence is predicated on the belief that research is necessary to develop policies with predictable electoral outcomes. This in turn is based on the belief that the methods used in such research can lead to predictable outcomes.

Apart from the rather simple fact that elections have winners and losers—making any prediction at least as likely to be right as wrong—what is generally known about the validity of interviews and focused groups as reliable predictors of successful policies? (I am not here concerned with whether polls of voting intentions predict the actual voting behaviour on election day. That is a minor issue in this context.)

Imagine the following scenario. A political party wants to find out whether a new form of taxation will be publicly acceptable and win it the election. Focused groups are run in which the new tax is described to each group. The people in the groups tell the researcher that certain elements of the taxation package are unacceptable to them, but certain other elements are thought very good. On the basis of this the researcher tells the party to change its taxation policy if it wants to win the election. The party makes the change on the assumption that the researcher has an adequate theory of attitude and behaviour change to make a prediction about voting behaviour based on opinions expressed in a focused group.

Where is the adequate theory of attitude and behaviour change that allows a researcher to make such a prediction? There is nothing in the research literature that suggests such prediction is possible. There are, of course, many theories about behaviour and attitude change, some of them superficially plausible. But there are no contemporary research tools that allow one to claim that a particular change in policy will have a predictable electoral outcome (Sless, 1992). (There are good reasons why such prediction may be impossible in principle as well as in practice. But such a methodological and theoretical exposition lies outside the scope of this paper.)

Cold turkey and cost benefits

Do political parties actually get value for money out of their research? Is the addiction to research really satisfying a need? What would happen to the political parties if they went cold turkey?

At a rough guess the average cost of each research study is probably equivalent to the annual salary of a party worker. If the research in communication makes any prediction it is that people talking to each other are a much more potent force for social and political change than anything else. So how many organisers could a party employ if it didn’t do research? If it used those party workers to keep in touch with the electorate, canvass opinion, encourage debate and stimulate interest in politics throughout the community, the effect on a party’s understanding of the citizens it wanted to represent would be considerable, as would be the effect on the community. If the party had direct contact with the community, expensive mass media campaigns might be far less relevant. Moreover, with greater community involvement, party funds and membership might not continue on their current downward spiral.

At the very least, there are some interesting cost benefit studies to be done by party organisers.

Interesting research

This type of question, which looks at alternative structures and modes of communication, seem to me interesting and a long way from the endless recycling of the past. But this is not the only question that communication research can productively, and perhaps provocatively, ask. If we start from the premise that our forms of political life are a function of the types of communication we use, and that new forms of communication lead to new kinds of political formations, then communication researchers have a great deal to contribute to the development of politics in our society.

‘New’ in this instance does not mean new techniques such as direct mail, simulated political debates, or sending the union out to persuade workers. These are merely new tricks to help prop up the old increasingly uninteresting process.

Instead of complaining about the inscription of the subject in the political discourse, or the narrowing of the discursive space for the electorate, perhaps we should be asking whether there are other conceivable modes of discourse and discursive spaces that we can create, which will change existing structures.

In almost every area of science, scientists not only study the world but seek to transform it. Why should communication research be any different? There are enormous and difficult moral questions about human intervention in the natural world. But surely in the social world which we ourselves create we not only have the right but the responsibility to intervene.

In this post-Marxist period revolutionary change is unacceptable and Marxism is all but dead. But as Marx said:

The philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways; the point is to change it.
(Marx, Thesis on Feuerbach, 1845)

Surely Marx’s thought can still provoke us into something more than being bored spectators.

References

Katz, Elihu (1971).
Platforms and Windows: Broadcasting’s Role In Election Campaigns. Journalism Quarterly, 48. pp 304-14

Marx, Karl (1845).
Thesis on Feuerbach

Rogers, David and Penman, Robyn (1989).
Communication in the Political Arena: Whither Citizenship? Occasional Paper No. 12, Canberra: Communication Research Institute of Australia.

Sless, David (1985).
Whose Image? Communication and Government: issues policies and trends, edited by Ted Smith, Graeme Osborne and Robyn Penman, Canberra: Canberra C.A.E. pp 120-136

Sless, David (1992).
Attitude Problem, Communication News, Vol 5(2) Sept/Oct. pp 5-6.

Jamieson, Kathleen Hall (1984).
Packaging the Presidency. New York: OUP.