ABSTRACT
We said in Chapter 1 that a campaign consists of the activities of an individual (or group) in a particular context directed at manipulating the behavior of a wider number of people to his (their) advantage. So defined, campaigns involve a series of communications in specific settings between campaigners and their constituents. In American elections campaigners rely heavily on professionally developed skills to gather relevant information about the electorate in order to devise strategies and contrive the setting to the advantage of client-candidates. Instead of direct, spontaneous, personal contact between candidates and voters, we find professional management firms, pollsters, and communications specialists mediating between political leaders and followers. Our tasks in this final chapter are to estimate and explain the effects of the professionally mediated campaigns on voter behavior and to speculate about the consequences of modem campaign technology for democratic elections. Since the bulk of research explaining campaign effects (both experimental and survey research) has focused on the efforts of persuasive communications to change personal attitudes, we will report the results of that research. We will also examine a line of inquiry which suggests that campaigns do not change voters’ attitudes (and are not intended to), but do influence voters’ behavior by shaping human perceptions. Finally, we will discuss the impact of the management-pollster-television complex on democratic elections.
