Handbook of Political Communication Research - Spada UNS

POLITICAL

COMMUNICATION RESEARCH

Edited by

Lynda Lee Kaid

Handbook of

OF

POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

RESEARCH

Jennings Bryant/Dolf Zillmann, General Editors

Selected titles in Journalism (Maxwell McCombs, Advisory Editor) include:

Bunker rCritiquing Free Speech: First Amendment Theory and the Challenge of Interdisciplinarity

McCombs/Reynolds rThe Poll with a Human Face: The National Issues Convention Experiment in Political Communication

Merrill/Gade/Blevens rTwilight of Press Freedom: The Rise of People’s Journalism

Merritt/McCombs rThe Two W’s of Journalism: The Why and What of Public Affairs Reporting

Perloff rPolitical Communication: Politics, Press, and Public in America

Wanta rThe Public and the National Agenda: How People Learn About Important Issues

For a complete list of titles in LEA’s Communication Series, please contact Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, at www.erlbaum.com.

HANDBOOK OF

POLITICAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH

Edited by

Lynda Lee Kaid

University of Florida

LAWRENCE ERLBAUM ASSOCIATES, PUBLISHERS

2004 Mahwah, New Jersey London

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Handbook of political communication research / edited by Lynda Lee Kaid.

p. cm.—(LEA’s communication series) Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8058-3774-4 (case : alk. paper)—ISBN 0-8058-3775-2 (paperbound : alk. paper) 1. Communication in politics. I. Kaid, Lynda Lee. II. Series.

JA85.H36 2004

320.014—dc22 2003025837

Books published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates are printed on acid-free paper, and their bindings are chosen for strength and durability.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Keith R. Sanders and Dan Nimmo and

to the memory of Steve Chaffee

They forged a new discipline. They fought for the formal recognition of political communication as a field of study, and they helped to train a new generation of scholars who have advanced it. I benefited enormously from working with them, and I’ll never forget their influence on the field of political communication. We all owe them.

Acknowledgments ix

Foreword xi

Keith R. Sanders

Introduction and Overview of the Field xiii

Lynda Lee Kaid

PART I

Theories and Approaches to Political Communication

1

Theoretical Diversity in Political Communication 3 Everett M. Rogers

2

Political Marketing: Theory, Research, and Applications 17 Bruce I. Newman and Richard M. Perloff

3

Methodological Developments in Political

Communication Research 45

Doris A. Graber

4

Fragmentation of the Structure of Political Communication

Research: Diversification or Isolation? 69

Yang Lin

5

Design and Creation of a Controlled Vocabulary for

Political Communication 109

Kathleen J. M. Haynes

PART II

Political Messages

6

Rhetoric and Politics 135

Bruce E. Gronbeck

7

Political Advertising 155

Lynda Lee Kaid

8

Political Campaign Debates 203

Mitchell S. McKinney and Diana B. Carlin

vii

PART III

News Media Coverage of Politics, Political Issues, and Political Institutions

9

News Coverage of Political Campaigns 237

Girish J. Gulati, Marion R. Just, and Ann N. Crigler

10

Agenda-Setting Research: Issues, Attributes, and Influences 257 David Weaver, Maxwell McCombs, and Donald L. Shaw

11

Gatekeeping and Press–Government Relations: A Multigated Model

of News Construction 283

W. Lance Bennett

12

The Presidency and the Media 315

Amy McKay and David L. Paletz

PART IV

Political Communication and Public Opinion

13

The Spiral of Silence and the Social Nature of Man 339 Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann and Thomas Petersen

14

Knowledge as Understanding: The Information Processing

Approach to Political Learning 357

Mira Sotirovic and Jack M. McLeod

15

Mediating Democratic Engagement: The Impact of

Communications on Citizens’ Involvement in Political and Civic Life 395 Michael X. Delli Carpini

16

Women as Political Communication Sources and Audiences 435 Dianne G. Bystrom

PART V

International Perspectives on Political Communication

17

Political Communication Research Abroad: Europe 463 Christina Holtz-Bacha

18

Political Communication in Asia: Challenges and Opportunities 479 Lars Willnat and Annette J. Aw

PART VI

New Trends in Political Communication Channels and Messages

19

Changing the Channel: Use of the Internet for Communicating

About Politics 507

John C. Tedesco

About the Authors 533

Index 539

Many people helped to make this volume possible. I owe a special debt to the contributors of the individual chapters, who gave a great deal of themselves and their work to this demanding task. I am also grateful to Keith R. Sanders, not only for taking time to provide a Foreword for the volume, but for his encouragement and support for this project and throughout my career.

Thanks are also due to Colleen Connolly-Ahern for her assistance with editing and indexing. Linda Bathgate at Lawrence Erlbaum Associates has offered outstanding support for this volume—she’s an author’s editor, encouraging yet patient, setting high standards but providing the guidance to meet them.

Finally, the continued assistance and support of my husband, Cliff A. Jones, is a prerequisite for any project. He keeps me on track and clears the distractions and obstacles to concentration.

ix

Keith R. Sanders

Executive Director (Ret.) IIIinois Board of Higher Education

Readers of this volume who were active during the early years of the emergence of political communication as a distinctive field of study will remember such salient events as:

r The creation in 1973 of the Political Communication Division within the In- ternational Communication Association (ICA), providing a provocative forum for like-minded scholars from several disciplines;

r The founding, by the Political Communication Division of the ICA, in 1974 of Political Communication Review, the precursor toPolitical Communication, a journal that provides researchers with knowledgeable editors who can judge and publish their best work;

r The publication of the first comprehensive, partially annotated bibliography on the subject (Kaid, Sanders, & Hirsch, 1974), giving students, young and old, an opportunity to access the intellectual history of the topic without having to do what was then tedious, computer unassisted library work;

r The teaching of courses, beginning in about 1968, and the development of graduate programs that gave students a firm foundation on which to launch a career in the field, whether as a practitioner, teacher, or scholar; and, of course,

r The publication of the firstHandbook of Political Communication(Nimmo &

Sanders, 1981), one of the earliest efforts to provide some synthesis and give some structure to this “pluralistic” undertaking.

These activities, and others of like kind, were the necessary progenitors of the work appearing in the following pages. Those who were there at conception will be xi

pleased, and more than a little surprised, at how rapidly their offspring has matured from infancy to adolescence.

However, even in the face of great growth and change, one truth lingers and has changed little since Dan Nimmo and I wrote, in 1981, that “instead of residing in a fixed, static, and sterile body of knowledge, scholars find themselves living in an exciting process of emergence, one of expanding possibilities, enriching diversities, and plural options” (Nimmo & Sanders, 1981, pp. 9–10). May it always be so. My compliments to the editor and contributors to this book for avoiding premature closure, while capturing much of the essence, excitement, and potential of this vital field of inquiry.

REFERENCES

Kaid, L. L., Sanders, K. R., & Hirsch, R. O. (1974).Political campaign communication: A bibliography and guide to the literature.Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press.

Nimmo, D. D., & Sanders, K. R. (Eds.). (1981)Handbook of political communication. Beverly Hills, CA:

Sage.

of the Field

Lynda Lee Kaid

University of Florida

INTRODUCTION

Although political communication can trace its roots to the earliest classical stud- ies of Aristotle and Plato, modern political communication research is very much an interdisciplinary field of study, drawing on concepts from communication, polit- ical science, journalism, sociology, psychology, history, rhetoric, and other fields.

In their seminalHandbook of Political Communication, Nimmo and Sanders (1981) traced the development of the field as an academic discipline in the latter half of the 20th century, and other scholars have described the breadth and scope of political communication (Kaid, 1996; Swanson & Nimmo, 1990). Many defini- tions ofpolitical communicationhave been advanced, but none has gained univer- sal acceptance. Perhaps the best is the simplest: Chaffee’s (1975) suggestion that political communication is the “role of communication in the political process”

(p. 15).

The interdisciplinary nature of the field, as well as its growth and importance in the broader communication field, means that the field badly needs scholarly syntheses of its major research and theoretical findings. Not since Nimmo and Sanders’ original handbook in 1981 has there been any volume that attempts to provide syntheses and overviews of the major components of the field. In 1990, Swanson and Nimmo provided a look at some new advances, but their volume made no claim to updating the major topics covered in the Nimmo and Sanders handbook. This volume provides the first opportunity in over two decades to bring together the major thrusts of research and theory in political communication.

This volume’s approach is one that stresses theoretical overviews and research synthesis. One label for such pieces would be “bibliographic essays,” meaning that xiii

the goal of each chapter is to provide the reader with an overview of the major lines of research, theory, and findings for that topic.

This handbook approaches the field of political communication with an organi- zational structure that relies on six divisions. The first part of the book contains chapters that discuss some of the theoretical background, history, structure, and diversity of the field. Part II concentrates on the messages that are predominant in the study of political communication, ranging from classical rhetorical modes to political advertising and debates. The third part focuses on the news media cover- age of politics, political issues, and political institutions and is followed by Part IV, which emphasizes public opinion and the audiences of political communication.

Part V offers international perspectives on political communication, with the inclu- sion of European and Asian approaches. The final Part VI, provides an opportunity to look at the newest channel in political communication study, the Internet, and its role in changing the face of political communication.

THEORIES AND APPROACHES

In the book’s first chapter,Everett Rogerstraces the development of political com- munication and places the evolution of the field in a broad and historical per- spective. His discussion of the roles of Walter Lippmann, Harold Lasswell, Paul Lazarsfeld, and Wilbur Schramm are important—because we too often skip over them today, and students do not always learn the roots of the field. Even Klapper gathers dust in the brains of many students today. Rogers then outlines the major theoretical perspectives that have guided the field in the past few decades, such as agenda-setting and the diffusion of news events, and brings us to a discussion of new technologies, especially the early example of the Public Electronic Network (PEN) Project in Santa Monica, California.

In Chapter 2,Bruce Newman and Richard Perloffexplain the importance of considering the political marketing perspective in the study of political communi- cation. They define it here, as Newman (1999) defines it inThe Handbook of Political Marketing, as “. . . the application of marketing principles and procedures in politi- cal campaigns by various individuals and organizations” (p. xiii). They argue that a marketing orientation is necessary both for winning office and for governing in modern times. Their analysis highlights the practical implications of marketing tools for political communication and demonstrates how much the field of political communication is intertwined with the commercial field of marketing.

Doris Grabertraces the methodological evolution of the political communica- tion discipline from its early roots in observational methods through the dominance of quantitative methodologies such as survey research. In addition to discussing the widespread use of content analysis and the need for more concern for visual anal- ysis, her investigations also indicate a surprising amount of experimental research in current political communication scholarship, with its concurrent strengths in internal validity and challenges in external validity.

Yang Linbrings together the theoretical and methodological traditions of polit- ical communication by investigating the structure of the discipline through cocita- tion analysis. By bringing the tools of bibliometric inquiry to the field of political communication, Lin provides a way of illuminating the intellectual structure of the discipline of political communication. Using cocitation analysis and multidimen- sional scaling techniques, he demonstrates that there is clear fragmentation in the

intellectual structure of the political communication discipline. He further suggests that this fragmentation is, in fact, a healthy indicator of a strong multidisciplinary field, but he cautions against the possibility that fragmentation can also lead to isolation.

One of the most critical factors in the evolution and identification of a discipline is the development of topic and subject headings that can be used to classify the discipline’s work. Without consistent and systematic subject headings, the classi- fication of literature and ability to search for it and identify it are very difficult. The most accepted and commonly used subject headings are those developed by the Library of Congress for use in cataloging books and other materials. In the past few decades, the field of political communication has evolved to the point that it now justifies, even requires, that a special vocabulary be developed to systematize the classification of research materials.Kathleen Haynesdiscusses the use and devel- opment of vocabulary for the political communication field and the importance of developing a thesaurus that can apply both to the written word and to the visual content of the field. As all fields of research move further into an era of electronic and digital searching, the need for a thesaurus for political communication will become even more imperative.

POLITICAL MESSAGES

The chapters in Part II focus on political messages.Bruce Gronbeckreminds us that the study of political communication has its roots in classical rhetoric and that modern scholars still have much to learn from these early disseminators of political messages. Chapter 7, on political advertising, provides a way of organizing and analyzing the research in an area of political communication that has evolved dramatically since the original Nimmo and Sanders handbook (Kaid, 1981). Partic- ularly important is the new work on negative advertising and on the potentially discouraging impact of negative advertising on voter turnout. The chapter also discusses the growth in the study of international and comparative approaches to the study of political advertising.

Televised debates were still a relatively rare phenomenon at the time of the 1981 handbook (Nimmo & Sanders, 1981). Today this form of political message provides voters at almost all levels of electoral competition the chance to see and hear direct confrontations between candidates. AsMitchell McKinney and Diana Carlinpoint out in Chapter 8, debates have become a true staple of the political information environment, not only in the United States but also abroad. These messages provide voters with a great deal of issue and image information that research has shown to be important for decision making, as well as helpful in stimulating interest among those with lower levels of interest and involvement in other political message types.

NEWS COVERAGE OF POLITICS

Chapter 9, on news coverage of political campaigns, reviews the vast literature on journalistic interpretations of election campaigns.Girish Gulati, Marion Just, and Ann Crigler emphasize the television medium but clearly demonstrate the dominance of the horse race and strategy frames of media coverage. In Chapter 10,David Weaver, Maxwell McCombs, and Donald Shawdetail the history and

major tenets of agenda-setting theory, demonstrating the tremendous reach of the theory, both in the United States and internationally. Agenda-setting has proven to be one of the most robust theories in political communication. Not only has the basic premise of the media’s power to communicate the salience of issues to the public been validated repeatedly over the past several decades, but agenda-setting has expanded beyond the communication of issues (first-level agenda-setting) to the ability of the media to communicate attributes about issues and candidates (second-level agenda-setting). The authors here make a case also for the under- standing of priming as related to agenda-setting but argue that framing, while it may be viewed as embodying second-level agenda-setting concepts, is different from agenda-setting in its focus on media presentation and its lesser emphasis on the salience communicated to audiences.

The selection of the information that makes up the news to which citizens are exposed is also the focus ofLance Bennett’sanalysis in Chapter 11. Bennett argues that the absence of substance in news content has a great deal to do with the struc- tural and organizational constraints that constantly bear on the news decisions of media, journalists, and even politicians maintaining the gatekeeping function. He offers a four-pronged, multigated model that drives the modern news cycle: appli- cation in different historical and political contexts, the reporter’s news judgment values, bureaucratic or organizational news gathering routines, economics, and in- formation and communication. In Chapter 12,Amy McKayandDavid Paletzreview the literature on the president and the media, providing detailed analyses of the books and articles that address this relationship.

POLITICAL COMMUNICATION AND PUBLIC OPINION

The next group of chapters focuses on the role of publics and public opinion in studying political communication. In Chapter 13Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann and Thomas Petersendiscuss one of the most enduring theories of public opinion, the Spiral of Silence. Before explaining the complexities of this theory and reviewing the research that underpins it, the authors provide a very useful history of the public opinion concept and its relationship to views of the social nature of man. In Chapter 14,Mira SotirovicandJack McLeoddiscuss political learning and argue that political knowledge is much more than the acquisition of factual information about government and political affairs. They suggest that political learning is also about understanding and making sense of civic affairs. In addition to a review of the relative importance of various types of media (including entertainment media) in the construction of political meaning, they provide new data and interpretations of the role of various media in relation to age and education as indicators of political knowledge in the 2000 elections.

Few issues have captured the attention of political scholars and observers of democratic life like the documented decline in civic engagement during the last few decades of the 20th century. In Chapter 15,Michael X. Delli Carpinireviews mixed research on the role of the media on the various forms of civic engagement. Among his conclusions is the clear finding that evidence suggests a positive role for the information carried by public affairs media, while acknowledging that some types of exposure (such as political advertising) may yield more negative outcomes. Further,

entertainment programming may offer more hope of constructive stimulation of civic engagement than does the news. In addition, the Internet has not yet attained the positive effects predicted for it, although there is still hope that its combination of information in varied form may yet produce positive results. Delli Carpini argues that we must “expand our theories and research to a much wider range of genres,”

taking more note of entertainment formats.

In the final chapter in the public opinion section,Dianne Bystromanalyzes the role of women both as political sources and as audiences for political messages.

Noting the increased frequency with which women have taken their place in posi- tions of political leadership at both the national and the state level, she concludes that “though some gender differences still exist, both women and men candidates and elected officials seem to be balancing ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ issues and images in their political speeches, televised political advertising, and Web sites.”

Her summary of research also indicates that women are still subjected to some stereotypical coverage by the media, although the degree of this problem is lessen- ing. It also appears that the much-discussed gender gap in voting and knowledge levels no longer places women in inferior roles compared to men. Today women vote in higher percentages and proportions than do men, and their knowledge and interest levels are becoming more similar.

POLITICAL COMMUNICATION FROM AN INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

In the last few decades, the study of political communication has expanded greatly, and this growth has been evident around the world, as well as in the United States.

Several authors of the first 16 chapters in the handbook discuss relevant interna- tional findings in the specific topic areas being addressed. However, the chapters in this section provide a more comprehensive understanding of the evolution of political communication in the two areas of the world where the greatest amount of scholarship can be found, Europe and Asia. In Chapter 17Christina Holtz-Bacha traces the major lines of political communication research in Europe, indicating a rich and developing heritage that continues to evolve but stops short of the con- solidated efforts that national associations and more established research groups have achieved in the United States. In the 21st century, European contributions to political communication scholarship are significant, and major streams of theory such as uses and gratifications and the Spiral of Silence can be traced to their roots in work done in Britain and Germany.

Also, a growing part of the landscape in political communication is the con- tribution of Asian scholars, outlined in Chapter 18 byLars Willnat and Annette Aw, who note that political communication became a noticeable aspect of Asian communication study only in the 1980s. Further, the awareness of Asian political communication scholarship has been hampered by the small number of studies published in English and by the limited number of Asian countries that have gen- erated relevant research (China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan). Of course, tight political controls in many Asian countries have served as constraints on the allowable research, and real and perceived cultural differences have caused many to question the applicability of mainstream mass communication theories to Asia.

However, Willnat and Aw argue that such constraints need not hamper political

communication scholars from advancing comparative research. They argue for more research that applies major communication theories to Asian countries, while acknowledging the very real political, social, cultural, and media system differ- ences.

NEW TRENDS

The last chapter in this volume addresses one of the most exciting new develop- ments in political communication, the Internet. As a new channel of communica- tion, the Internet has brought wide-spread changes to almost every aspect of the political communication arena. John Tedescodiscusses the implications of this new medium and points out that the hope that the Internet would generate a new and intensive level of civic engagement for the general populous has not yet been realized. Nonetheless, the new medium presents many opportunities for political communication, and the future may offer exciting changes.

REFERENCES

Chaffee, S. H. (Ed.) (1975).Political communication. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications.

Kaid, L. L. (1981). Political advertising. In D. Nimmo & K. R. Sanders (Eds.),Handbook of political com- munication(pp. 249–271). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

Kaid, L. L. (1996). Political communication. In M. Salwen & D. W. Stacks (Eds.),An integrated approach to communication theory and research(pp. 443–457). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Newman, B. (Ed.). (1999).The handbook of political marketing. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Nimmo, D., & Sanders, K. R. (Eds.), (1981).Handbook of political communication. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

Swanson, D. L., & Nimmo, D. (Eds.). (1990).New directions in political communication: A source book.

Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

I

THEORIES AND APPROACHES TO

POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

1

Theoretical Diversity in Political Communication

Everett M. Rogers

University of New Mexico

Note:The late Steven H. Chaffee originally planned to write this chapter, which is dedicated to his memory.

In the 2000 election, almost every political candidate running for office at every level (presidential, state, county, city, and local) had an active Web site. This fact indicates the current importance of Internet-related communication technologies in political communication and suggests how this specialty field has evolved since its beginnings earlier in the past century in the hands of Walter Lippman, Harold Lasswell, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, and other forefathers and founders of communication study. Despite the growth of television in the 1950s and the Internet in the 1990s, which altered the channels of communication carrying political messages to the U.S. public, certain human communication processes involved in changing political behavior have remained much the same.

A long-lasting, stable set of theoretical themes has dominated the study of polit- ical communication, rather than any single, overarching theory. Nevertheless, the theoretical diversity of political communication displays certain common themes, such as a lasting concern with communication effects. Our purpose here is to syn- thesize these diverse theoretical perspectives, showing how they have evolved over the years, with an emphasis on their beginnings. Although the field of political communication began by studying the effects of print media and radio on individ- uals’ voting choice, such as in the 1940 Erie County Study (described later), the field has expanded to include additional aspects of communication and political behavior.

3

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

The beginnings of communication study, mass communication, and political com- munication are intertwined. All shared a common intellectual interest in the ef- fects of mass media communication, and the forefathers and founders of these fields included the same set of scholars. From the early period of what was later to be identified as communication study, scholars focused on changes in political behavior (such as voting) as one of their main dependent variables of study.

Walter Lippmann and Public Opinion

Some observers consider Walter Lippmann’s (1922)Public Opiniona founding doc- ument for communication study. Lippmann was a contemporary scholar with the political scientist Harold Lasswell in studying propaganda and public opinion. Dur- ing World War I, Lippmann served as a propaganda leaflet writer for the Allied Army in France. During the era when communication study was getting under way in the 1920s and 1930s, until the 1950s or 1960s, propaganda constituted one im- portant stream of communication scholarship. World War I represented a conflict in which both combatants used propaganda extensively, and the public perceived propaganda techniques as being dangerously powerful. This perception was based mainly on anecdotal evidence and on exaggerated claims by governments, rather than on scientific analysis. The public’s fear of powerful propaganda served to at- tract the attention of early scholars like Lippmann and Lasswell. In fact, the field that was later to be called “mass communication” was termed “public opinion and propaganda” (or approximately similar names) in the 1930s. For example, Lasswell taught a course by this name at the University of Chicago (Rogers, 1994).

Lippmann (1922) also did early thinking and writing about what later was called the agenda-setting process, with his insightful chapter on “The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads.” Lippmann contrasted what agenda-setting scholars were later to call “real-world indicators” (which index the seriousness of some so- cial problem) with peoples’ perceptions of the issue (later called the public agenda).

Walter Lippmann pioneered in conducting one of the first scholarly content anal- yses, ofThe New York Timescoverage of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Lippmann and Merz (1920) found an anti-Bolshevik bias in this news coverage, which led Lippmann to become skeptical about how the average member of the American public could form an intelligent opinion about important issues of the day. Walter Lippmann was called the most gifted and influential political journalist of the 20th century. At the same time, he was a key analyst of propaganda and public opinion, and of agenda-setting.

Lippmann was important in identifying the role of the mass media in public opinion formation in a democracy. He argued that the media, whose freedom was protected by the First Amendment, were crucial in creating a free marketplace of ideas. “The value of participatory democracy, active and widespread popular participation informed by a free and responsible press, serves as an important impetus to political communication research” (McLeod, Kosicki, & McLeod, 2002, p. 215). Study of political communication was stimulated from its beginnings by a normative concern about the need for a free press and an informed public in society.

Harold Lasswell and Propaganda Analysis

The study of media effects as part of an ongoing research program began with the scholarly work of Harold Lasswell, a political scientist at the University of Chicago who specialized in the investigation of propaganda. Lasswell’s Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Chicago, later published as a book (Lasswell, 1927), content analyzed the effects of propaganda messages by the Germans versus the French, British, and Americans in World War I. Lasswell formalized the methodology of content analysis of media messages. He is known for his five-question model of communication:Whosayswhattowhomviawhich channelswithwhat effects? This conceptualization was to influence early communication study toward the inves- tigation of media effects, a preoccupation that has continued, to at least some degree, to the present day. Although Lasswell earned his doctorate in political sci- ence, his scholarly interests ranged widely, and in the latter part of his career, after he left the University of Chicago, he specialized to an increasingly greater de- gree in communication research. During World War II, Lasswell, with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, led a research team at the U.S. Library of Congress charged with content analyzing Allied and Axis propaganda messages in the media.

In 1944, the owner of Time–Life Corporation, Henry Luce, provided funding for a 3-year study of the mass media in the United States by the Commission on Freedom of the Press. The 13-member Commission, chaired by Robert Hutchins, President of the University of Chicago, included Lasswell as an influential member. The Commis- sion was concerned about the growing concentration of U.S. media ownership and the decreasing degree of newspaper competition. The Commission report stressed the value of First Amendment freedoms for the media as being essential for an informed public in a functioning democracy.

Paul F. Lazarsfeld and the Erie County Study

Another key forefather of communication study was Paul F. Lazarsfeld, an ´emigr´e scholar from Austria, who spent much of his scholarly career at Columbia Uni- versity. Trained in mathematics, Lazarsfeld became an important toolmaker for social science research on mass communication effects. He led the Radio Research Project, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1937, which explored the effects of radio on American audiences. Lazarsfeld transformed the Radio Research Project into the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University, arguably the most noted university-based research institute of its day, and one specializing in communication research. With his sociological colleague Robert K. Merton, Lazars- feld developed the research method of focus group interviews (Rogers, 1994), a data-gathering technique initially utilized to study U.S. government radio spots urging the American public to plant Victory Gardens, collect scrap iron and used rubber, and buy war bonds. These federal government campaigns, essentially a form of domestic propaganda, were designed and evaluated by a set of communi- cation scholars drawn from various social sciences, including Lasswell, Lazarsfeld, Wilbur Schramm, and others.

Lazarsfeld led the first quantitative studies of voting behavior, with his most well-known inquiry being the 1940 Erie County Study, which in certain respects represented the most important pioneering investigation of political

communication. Lazarsfeld and his colleagues conducted 600 personal interviews each month for 6 months until the November 1940 presidential election. This study was carried out in Erie County, Ohio, selected by the Columbia University researchers as a representative American county. At the time, the prevailing con- ception was one of powerful media effects, a perception based loosely on historical events like the role of the Hearst newspapers in leading the United States into the Spanish American War, the panic resulting from Orson Welles’ “Invasion from Mars”

radio broadcast in 1937, and Hitler’s use of propaganda as World War II began in Europe.

So Lazarsfeld intended that the Erie County Study investigate the importance of the direct effects of the media in determining how people voted in a presidential election. The main dependent variable of study was voting behavior, a reflection of Lazarsfeld’s background in conducting market research (in fact, Lazarsfeld was one of the founders of market research in America). As Chaffee and Hockheimer (1985, p. 274) stated, “The vote was taken to be the ultimate criterion variable, as if it were the most important political act a person can perform. This focus on voting has been followed by many researchers since the 1940s. . . .” No one would deny that voting is a crucial aspect of political behavior, but contributions of time and money to a political campaign, personal statements to others in support of a candidate, display of campaign buttons and posters, and other political actions are also important (Chaffee & Hockheimer, 1985). The main independent variables of study in the Erie County project, in addition to exposure to newspapers and news magazines and radio (the main media of the day in 1940), were individuals’

socioeconomic status and political party identification.

To Lazarsfeld’s surprise, only 54 of his 600 respondents in the Erie County panel of voters shifted from one presidential candidate to another, and only a few of these switchers were directly influenced to do so by the media (Converse, 1987).

Many of the voters had made up their minds before the electoral campaign began.

Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet (1944) concluded that the media had minimal effects in the 1940 presidential election campaign. However, other scholars (e.g., Chaffee & Hockheimer, 1985) have questioned this conclusion, and so the matter seems to be dependent in part on interpretation and on the types of data that are considered (Rogers, 1994). In any event, Lazarsfeld and others postulated a two- step flow of communication in which opinion leaders with a relatively high degree of media exposure then passed along political information to their followers via interpersonal communication channels. This two-step flow model highlighted the complementary role that media and interpersonal communication often play in influencing an individual’s political decisions, a lead that has been pursued in later investigations up to the present (Rogers, 2002a).

In the several years following the Erie County study, communication scholars may have overemphasized the minimal effects of the mass media. A younger col- league of Lazarsfeld’s at the Bureau of Applied Research at Columbia University, sociologist Joseph Klapper (1960), concluded in his bookThe Effects of Mass Com- munication that the media seldom have direct effects. At the time, given the as- sumptions and methodologies of mass communication research, this conclusion seemed rather obvious. Later developments, however, led to questioning of this minimal effects conclusion.

Along with a follow-up to the Erie County Study, of the 1948 presidential election in a New York community (Berelson, Lazarsfeld, & McPhee, 1954), Lazarsfeld’s in- vestigations were the first large-scale election research to give major attention to

the role of the mass media and virtually the last for many years thereafter (Chaffee &

Hockheimer, 1985). The University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research began a series of studies of presidential election voting, carrying on Lazarsfeld’s tradition of survey research on voting behavior. These national surveys, however, paid rela- tively little attention to the role of the mass media in voting decisions, concentrating instead on political party identification and socioeconomic variables in influencing voting (the importance of political parties in determining citizens’ voting behavior has faded in recent years, replaced by the media, especially television). Because these Michigan studies were national sample surveys, the role of personal commu- nication networks in voting decisions was difficult or impossible to explore (Shein- gold, 1973). The primary focus on the individual as the unit of response and the unit of analysis led to a deemphasis on network and other social influences on voting decisions and to lesser attention to larger systems (such as media institutions) in political communication research.

World War II and the Beginnings of Communication Study

World War II Washington, DC, was the gathering place for leading American so- cial scientists who were to become the forefathers and founders of communication study. One important preceding event, however, was the year-long Rockefeller Foun- dation Communication Seminar, organized by Foundation official John Marshall and held monthly at the Rockefeller Foundation’s offices in New York City. Marshall’s letter of invitation to the Seminar’s participants was one of the first uses of the term mass communication(previously, such terms as public opinion or propaganda were used to refer to such study) (Rogers, 1994). The 12 regular participants in the Rock- efeller Foundation Communication Seminar included Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Harold Lasswell, with the latter being the dominant intellectual force in the discussions.

Lasswell’s five-question model of communication was developed at the Seminar.

The primary concern of the Rockefeller Foundation Communication Seminar was to have been defining the newly emerging field of communication but centered increasingly on the approaching World War II, which began in September 1939 (as did the first of the Seminar’s monthly meetings). The Seminar was important in bringing together leading scholars with an interest in communication research and in forming a consensus about the priority questions that should be pursued.

At the conclusion of the year-long series of Seminar sessions in New York, the par- ticipants held meetings with high government officials in Washington to brief them on the Seminar’s conclusions, including the role that the newly emerging field of communication could play in the ensuing world conflict.

World War II brought together a talented set of social scientists in Washington, DC, where they worked as consultants or employees of various wartime govern- ment agencies. Included were Lazarsfeld, Lasswell, sociologist Sam Stouffer, social psychologists Carl Hovland and Kurt Lewin, and Wilbur Schramm, who had been director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. These scholars shared a common interest in human communication study and in its application to wartime problems facing the United States. Their interaction in Washington led to the formation of a paradigm for mass communication study. These scholars were relatively more free of disciplinary barriers in wartime Washington than when they were on their university campuses, and this freedom encouraged them to

think about an interdisciplinary approach to communication research. Some of the participants in these interdisciplinary discussions began to plan how to continue communication research after the War and how to train a cadre of individuals with doctoral degrees in communication.

In 1943, Wilbur Schramm returned to the University of Iowa as Director of the School of Journalism, where he sought to implement his vision of the new schol- arly field of communication. He established a Ph.D. program in communication and started a mass communication research center at the university, thus launching a postwar strategy of founding university-based communication research institutes that awarded Ph.D. degrees in communication. After several unfruitful years at Iowa, Wilbur Schramm moved to the University of Illinois, where his efforts to establish communication research and to award doctorates in the new field were more suc- cessful. By the mid-1950s, when Schramm moved to Stanford University, the field of communication was becoming well established. By 1960, more than a dozen U.S. universities, including Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan State, had institu- tionalized mass communication research institutes or centers and were awarding doctorates in communication.

This new field stressed a social science approach to communication study, build- ing on the communication research and theory that had been conducted in previous decades in social psychology, sociology, and political science (by Lasswell, Lazars- feld, Lewin, Hovland, and others). Importantly, a prerequisite to doctoral study in these early communication Ph.D. programs was experience as a mass media pro- fessional (usually as a newspaper journalist). This requirement meant that the new corps of doctorates in communication looked at the world they studied somewhat differently than had the prior generation of communication researchers, who kept their academic base in a department of sociology, psychology, or political science.

The new Ph.D.’s had a central scholarly interest in mass communication effects, like their social science predecessors, but they also had an understanding of the realities of media institutions. This orientation led them to look at the indirect ef- fects of the media (such as through the agenda-setting process), as well as the direct effects, and not to expect such strong effects of media exposure on individ- uals’ behavior (given that the media played mainly an informational, rather than a persuasive, role).

Wilbur Schramm emerged as the dominant leader of the founding of communi- cation as a field of scholarly study in the postwar era. Communication scholars with doctorates from Schramm’s program at Stanford University fanned out to uni- versities across the United States, where they often rose to leadership positions.

Examples are Paul J. Deutschmann at Michigan State University, Wayne Daniel- son at the University of North Carolina and later at The University of Texas, and Steven H. Chaffee at the University of Wisconsin (all became deans or directors of schools of journalism). Several of these scholars made important conceptual contributions, such as Danielson and Deutschmann to the study of news event diffusion and Maxwell McCombs, another Stanford product at the University of North Carolina, in collaboration with Donald L. Shaw, a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, in investigating the agenda-setting process (Rogers, 1994).

The institutionalization of communication study at U.S. research universities around 1960 was a turning point in political communication research, in that the new cadre of communication doctorates pursued research on the indirect, as well as the direct, effects of mass media communication. After about 1960, communi- cation study had a greater degree of constancy and continuity, which facilitated

the pursuit of important theoretical questions and paradigms through organized research programs.

RESEARCH ON MEDIA EFFECTS

About the same time that communication study was becoming institutionalized at a growing number of U.S. research universities, television was spreading rapidly in the United States. By 1960, most American households contained a television set, and television soon became the main source of political news. Currently, 56% of the American public responds in surveys that television is their main source of polit- ical news, with 24% responding newspapers and 14% saying radio (Graber, 2001).

The public wants to obtain its news quickly and easily and generally believes that television does an adequate job of providing news, although many media experts claim that television overpersonalizes the news.

We previously traced how a powerful media effects model was eventually re- placed by a limited effects model, with the Lazarsfeld et al. Erie County Study as a turning point (Chaffee & Hockheimer, 1985). Television, of course, was not yet available in the 1940 presidential election. During the decade of the 1950s, when television diffused rapidly among U.S. households, this new medium became the dominant channel used in political communication campaigns and began to occupy an important role in their study by communication scholars. Electoral campaigns soon spent the majority of their budget on television, especially on candidates’

television spots, and these campaigns began to escalate in total cost. The previ- ously important role of political parties in influencing electoral outcomes faded in the new age of television politics.

This growing importance of television in politics brought with it new concerns.

For example, political communication scholars found that “the amount of learning from television is slight. Large numbers of citizens see news as boring and politics as disconnected from their lives” (McLeod et al., 2002, p. 250). As the costs of tele- vision spots rose, forcing up electoral campaign budgets, only wealthy individuals (or those who could attract substantial contributions) could win public office.

Research on mass media effects often dealt with the dependent variable of po- litical behavior change, such as voting choice. “Political communication research has traditionally played a central role on the effects of mass media” (McLeod et al., 2002, p. 218). Mass communication research and political communication research became almost synonymous in their priority concerns with media effects. It is no accident that in the main communication research organization, the International Communication Association, the Political Communication Division split off from the Mass Communication Division in 1973.

Findings from mass communication and political communication studies often supported a minimal effects model, although these results may have been due in part to the research designs and research methods that were utilized. For exam- ple, Rogers (2002a) reviewed four recent investigations to find relatively strong media effects when data were gathered (1) about an important news event (such as Magic Johnson’s 1991 disclosure of his HIV infection), (2) by tracing its effects on the overt behavior of individuals exposed to media messages about the event, (3) whose contents are analyzed, and (4) whose effects are evaluated by means of data gathered rather immediately after the event occurred. Coincidentally, this research approach is similar to that followed by Paul F. Lazarsfeld and his

colleagues at Columbia University’s Bureau of Applied Social Research 60 years ago (although not in the Erie County Study), such as the investigation of the panic effects of “The Invasion from Mars” (Cantril, Gaudet, & Herzog, 1940) and the highly successful Kate Smith War Bond radio marathon (Merton, Fiske, & Curtis, 1946).

Importantly, both these earlier and later studies of direct effects considered the intermedia processes of mass media effects occurring through, and in combina- tion with, interpersonal communication stimulated by media messages (Chaffee, 1986).

The rise of communication study after 1960 and the pervasiveness of television led political communication scholars to investigateindirectmedia effects such as in the agenda-setting process.

Agenda-Setting

A well-known dictum by political scientist Bernard Cohen (1963, p. 13) was that “The press may not be successful much of the time in telling peoplewhat to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readerswhat to think about.” Cohen’s statement was based on Walter Lippmann’s (1920) earlier idea of “the world outside” and

“the pictures in our heads.” Cohen’s dictum suggested that the media have indirect effects along with, in certain cases, direct effects.

Maxwell McCombs, one of the new generation of communication scholars earn- ing his doctorate at Stanford University, read Cohen’s book in a seminar taught by Wilbur Schramm and, later, while a young faculty member at the University of North Carolina, collaborated with a colleague, Donald Shaw, in the first empirical study of agenda-setting. These new Ph.D.’s in communication knew from their experience as professional newspaper journalists that news seldom had strong direct effects on audience individuals. However, theamountof news coverage accorded an issue by the media might indeed lead audience individuals to rate such an issue as more important (Rogers, 1994).

The ensuing Chapel Hill study (McCombs & Shaw, 1972) of how 100 undecided voters in Chapel Hill, NC, made up their minds in the 1968 presidential election was the first empirical investigation of the agenda-setting process and is the most widely cited publication in this field of research (Dearing & Rogers, 1996). Mc- Combs and Shaw content analyzed the media coverage of the election in order to identify the five main issues and the amount of news coverage given each (this has since been called the media agenda), which they compared with a personal interview survey of the 100 undecided voters, who were asked which issues they felt were most important (this is the public agenda). McCombs and Shaw (1972) found a high degree of agreement between the rank order of the four or five is- sues on the media agenda and the rank order of those on the public agenda. The implication of this finding was that the media indeed tell the public “what to talk about.”

The Chapel Hill research set off a tremendous number of studies of the agenda- setting process. This proliferation of agenda-setting studies amounted to 357 pub- lications at the time of a 1996 synthesis (Dearing & Rogers, 1996), and the number continues to grow. Many of the early studies of agenda-setting more or less fol- lowed the model and methods pioneered by McCombs and Shaw, but in more recent years single-issue longitudinal research on agenda-setting also has been conducted

(Dearing & Rogers, 1996). Here the essential question is how an issue like AIDS or the environment rises on the national agenda over time. In contrast, the early agenda- setting research concentrated on the set of issues (usually four or five) that were on the national agenda at any one time. In both types of agenda-setting studies, the media agenda is measured by a content analysis, the public agenda by survey data, and the policy agenda by the laws, regulations, and appropriations regarding the issue of study.

The general model of the agenda-setting process that has emerged from research is a usual temporal sequence of

Media agenda→Public agenda→Policy agenda.

Communication scholars study mainly media agenda-setting and public agenda- setting, whereas political scientists and sociologists study mainly policy agenda- setting. The initial multiple-issue research focused on the relationship of the media agenda and the public agenda (a focus similar to that of the Chapel Hill Study), whereas more recent longitudinal, single-issue research illuminated factors impor- tant in setting the media agenda. A common finding is that a focusing event or a tragic individual (such as the death of Hollywood actor Rock Hudson and the dis- crimination against Kokomo, Indiana, schoolboy Ryan White) often initially calls an issue to media attention. If an issue appears on the front page ofThe New York Timesor if the U.S. president gives a speech about the issue, it is immediately boosted upon the national media agenda. The seriousness of a social problem, measured by what scholars call real-world indicators (like the number of deaths due to AIDS), has been found to be unrelated to an issue’s position on the national media agenda, given that the issue is at least perceived as an important problem (Dearing & Rogers, 1996).

One of the important advances in understanding the agenda-setting process is framing, that is, how an issue is given meaning by media people, politicians, or others. Framing began to be studied as an important influence in the agenda- setting process a decade or so after the Chapel Hill Study, in a series of ingenious experiments by Shanto Iyengar (1991), a political scientist and communication scholar.

Agenda-setting research may overrepresent the power of the mass media to set the national agenda through an over-time process. Certain news events shoot immediately to the top of the agenda, such as the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and represent an exception to the more gradual agenda-setting process investigated by communication scholars (McLeod et al., 2002). Nevertheless, agenda-setting research advanced the understanding of the indirect effects of the mass media, this in an era of minimal effects. Further, agenda-setting study represented a refocusing of political communication research away from a primary emphasis on individual political behavior (as in the voting studies) by relating media news coverage of an issue to individual aggregated perceptions of issue salience and to the response by political institutions (the policy agenda). Further, agenda-setting investigations cast light on how people organize and give meaning to the political world around them, as the public gives meaning to various news issues. Finally, agenda-setting research generally recognized that one mechanism of media influence was through stimulating interpersonal communication, which in turn often triggered behavior change (Dearing & Rogers, 1996).

Diffusion of News Events

Another type of communication research that was launched in the 1960s by the new cadre of experienced newspaper journalists who earned Ph.D.’s in Communication at Stanford University was the study of news event diffusion. Paul J. Deutschmann and Wayne Danielson (1960) established the paradigm for news diffusion research with a pioneering study. These scholars gathered data from a sample of the public soon after the occurrence of a major news event, asking about the channels through which initial awareness–knowledge of the news event was obtained, channels for obtaining further information, and the time of an individual’s first knowing about the news event. A common finding in the news event diffusion studies was that the media, especially the broadcast media, were particularly important in spread- ing major news events. When plotted over time, the number of individuals knowing about a news event increased slowly at first, then rapidly as interpersonal communi- cation channels were activated, and, finally, tailed off to form an S-shaped diffusion curve as the remaining individuals learned about the event. This S-shaped curve was similar to that found for the diffusion of technological innovations over time, and news event diffusion studies were initially influenced by the earlier diffusion research (Rogers, 2003).

The Deutschmann and Danielson (1960) study of news event diffusion led al- most immediately to a spate of similar investigations, most of which focused on news events that were more or less political in nature: assassination of a president or a head of state, resignation of a high-ranking official, or a major disaster. More than 60 news event diffusion studies have been published to date. DeFleur (1987) concluded that the field of news event diffusion research was dying because the interesting questions had been answered. However, in the past decade or so, new types of news event diffusion investigations have been completed that explore new research questions (Rogers, 2000). For example, the Mayer, Gudykunst, Perrill, and Merrill (1990) study of diffusion of news of theChallengerdisaster, which occurred on January 26, 1986, showed the importance of the time of day and day of the week of a news event’s occurrence on which media or interpersonal channels were most frequently used by members of the public. For instance, stay-at-home housewives first learned of the news event, which occurred in midmorning on a weekday, par- ticularly from broadcast media, whereas individuals at work were more likely to learn from interpersonal channels.

Rogers and Siedel (2002) investigated diffusion of the September 11 (2001) terror- ist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. They found that the news of this spectacular event led to various actions by many members of the public, such as donating blood, sending financial contributions, and flying American flags on vehicles, at homes, and at workplaces. News of the terrorist attacks affected audience members emotionally to a much greater degree than the news events studied in past research. Prior to the Rogers and Siedel (2002) study, most news event diffusion research emphasized the dependent variables of time of knowing and the relative importance of various communication channels. Recent research demonstrates the value of looking at other dependent variables and at additional independent variables in news event diffusion.

In contrast to the news event diffusion studies, which investigate mainly major news event, most political news spreads relatively slowly and with modest im- pact on public knowledge. So the news event diffusion studies emphasize highly

unusual news events. Most members of the public remain relatively uninformed about most current news. This lack of knowledge is especially characteristic of the less-educated, lower-socioeconomic segments of the American public (Tichenor, Donohue, & Olien, 1970; Viswanath & Finnegan, 1996).

The pervasive problem of an inactive and inadequately informed public led political communication scholars in recent years to conduct research on “civic journalism,” as a means of increasing citizen participation in American democratic society. An example of such research on civic journalism is a study by McDevitt and Chaffee (2002) that evaluated the impacts of KidsVoting USA, a program intended to stimulate family political communication for civic involvement. Current interest in civic journalism is an expression of the values of political communication scholars on an active, informed citizenry, values that go back to the days of Walter Lippmann.

NEW COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES

One early and well-studied application of the new interactive communication tech- nologies was the Public Electronic Network (PEN) Project in Santa Monica, CA. PEN was designed to encourage communication exchange, especially about political issues, among the residents of Santa Monica, a seaside community in Los Ange- les. A 6-year investigation of PEN was conducted by communication scholars at the University of Southern California (Collins-Jarvis, 1993; Guthrie & Dutton, 1992;

Rogers, Collins-Jarvis, & Schmitz, 1994; Schmitz, Rogers, Phillips, & Paschal, 1995).

PEN was noteworthy because at the time it was established, in 1989, it was the first municipal electronic network available at no cost to residents of a city. Some 5,300 Santa Monica residents (of a total population of 90,000) registered to use PEN, and approximately 60,000 accesses to PEN occurred each year. A core of approxi- mately 1,500 users remained active on PEN, with a turnover among the remaining users each year. Some 200 electronic messages were exchanged monthly between residents and city officials.

PEN was launched in an era of optimism about the potential of the new interac- tive communication technologies for increasing political participation. The Internet existed in 1989 but had diffused to only a small percentage of the U.S. public. Santa Monica had a tradition of intense political activity. The city government was able to obtain the donation of networking equipment from a U.S. computer company. This equipment included 20 public terminals that were placed in city libraries, senior citizens’ centers, and other public buildings. Some 20% of all PEN log-ons occurred from these public terminals, with the remainder from individuals using computers at home or at work. The public terminals, initially expected to be a minor part of the PEN system’s design, turned out to be very important as a means for homeless people to gain access to the electronic communication system.

“Ted,” a homeless man in Santa Monica, entered the following message on the PEN system: “I . . . spent many hours in the Library; it is my home more or less. Then I discovered PEN and things have never been the same. PEN is my main compan- ion; although it can’t keep me warm at night, it does keep my brain alive.” At the time Santa Monica had a homeless population variously estimated as from 2,000 to 10,000. They were regarded by most homed people in the city as the priority social problem of Santa Monica, and early discussion on the PEN system by the homed concerned complaints about the homeless. Then the homeless, using the public

terminals, began to participate in PEN. They responded to earlier criticism about their perceived laziness by stating that they wanted jobs but could not apply be- cause of their appearance. Soon, about 30 homed and homeless individuals formed the PEN Action Group in order to identify possible solutions. They obtained the use of a centrally located vacant building for SHWASHLOCK (SHowers, WASHers, &

LOCKers), in which the homeless could clean themselves, store their belongings, learn computer skills, and access job information. As a result of SHWASHLOCK, a number of homeless people in Santa Monica obtained jobs.

Importantly, PEN offered a space in which unlike individuals could interact in order to work out solutions to a social problem of mutual concern. “Don,” one of the leaders in the PEN Action Group, stated, “No one on PEN knew that I was homeless until I told them. PEN is also special because after I told them, I was still treated like a human being. To me, the most remarkable thing about the PEN community is that a City Council member and a pauper can coexist, albeit not always in perfect harmony, but on an equal basis.” Thus PEN demonstrated that electronic communication systems had the potential of connecting heterophilous members of society (note, however, that this ability of PEN to bridge social distance would not have been possible without the public terminals).

A further lesson learned from the PEN Project was that at least certain social problems that occurred on this system could eventually be solved by the system itself. For instance, in the first months of PEN’s operation, female users of the system were attacked verbally by certain males. Derogatory messages were sent to PEN users with female first names (individuals must use their real names, rather than computer names, on PEN), along with messages containing male sexual aggressive- ness (such as pornographic stories in which the female’s name was incorporated).

Many female PEN participants discontinued use of the system in the face of these personal attacks. However, 30 of the remaining female participants formed PEN- FEMME in order to organize to resist these verbal attacks. Their first decision was not to respond to the male sexual aggression. PENFEMME was closed to male par- ticipants and focused on such issues as domestic violence, sexual equality, child care, and the reentry of mothers into the workforce (Collins-Jarvis, 1993). The per- petrators of the antifemale aggression were eventually identified as several young boys. Soon, 30% of PEN participants were female. This example shows how inter- active technologies can be used to organize for social change, a process through which the disempowered can gain control of their situation.

Content analyses showed that most of the messages exchanged on PEN con- cerned local political issues. In a community that was already very politically active, it is not surprising that a new means of interactive communication was used for political discussion. The Internet, currently utilized by about 70% of adult Amer- icans, plays an increasingly important role in electoral politics (as mentioned at the beginning of this paper) and in many other types of political communication behavior.

One problem limiting the Internet’s impacts is the digital divide, the process through which the Internet advantages certain individuals who have access to computers and the Internet and relatively disadvantages other individuals who lack such access. At present, approximately 544 million people use the Internet worldwide, about 8% of the world’s total population. In many countries, and in poorer economic areas of the United States, telecenters and cyber cafes (Rogers, 2002b) provide community access to computers and the Internet, thus bridging the digital divide.

CONCLUSIONS

A theme of the present essay is that the beginnings of communication study at the hands of Walter Lippmann, Harold Lasswell, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, and others has had a lasting influence on the field of political communication. Scholars of political communication placed a primary focus on mass media communication, although a growing recognition of the interrelatedness of the media with interpersonal commu- nication has occurred. Media messages often stimulate interpersonal communica- tion about a topic, with the interpersonal communication then leading to behavior change in an intermedia process (Rogers, 2002a).

From its initial research (like the Erie County Study), the field of political commu- nication focused on such individual-level dependent variables as voting choices.

In contrast, much concern about political communication, such as an inactive and uninformed public, is at the societal level. “Most political action and power relation- ships operate at the societal or other systemic levels, whereas the bulk of empirical theory and research concentrate on the behavior of the individual citizen” (McLeod et al., 2002, p. 232).

Connecting individual-level research with societal problems remains a concern for political communication scholars, who share a normative belief in the desire for a more properly functioning democracy.

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