Good will, the third of the credibility triumvirate, came to the fore in the 1992 election, when the electorate, reeling from recession, sought a candidate who could empathize with its economic woes. Enter Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas, who conveyed good will in a presidential town hall debate, turning, Oprah-style, to a questioner who asked how the national debt had personally affected each of the candidate’s lives. After gently asking her to explain how the debt had affected her, he displayed empathy toward the plight of the questioner and others hurt by the national recession, thereby enhancing his connection with the audience.
Although there are no hard data demonstrating that these dimensions of credibility influenced vote decisions in 1960, 1976, and 1992, the plethora of credibility research and studies of presidential debates (Denton & Holloway, 1996) suggests they certainly played a role in voters’ presidential evaluations. Source factors could be similarly summoned to explain the roles candidate image played in more recent elections, such as Bush’s “aw shucks” likability in 2000 and Obama’s dynamism in 2008. Complicating matters, the elaboration likelihood model (Petty & Wegener, 1999) stipulates that source factors can serve as a cue, argument, or catalyst for processing, depending on the extent of elaboration likelihood.
Message Perspectives
Announcer: (quiet symphonic music, accompanied by a video of boats pulling out of the harbor in the early morning, against a clean city skyline) It’s morning again in America. Today, more men and women (video clip of a smiling businessman stepping out of a taxi on a New York street in the morning …) will go to work than ever before in our country’s history … (video clip of newspaper boy throwing papers from his bike in a suburb …) With interest rates at about half the record highs of 1980, nearly 2,000 families today will buy new homes (video of a man and his young son, with a spring in their steps, carrying a rug into their new home).… It’s morning again in America (photo of a lit White House at dusk).
1984 advertisement for President Ronald Reagan, Westen (2007, pp. 73–74)
Reagan’s advertisement is emblematic of successful campaign spots. It contains some of the major attributes of the persuasive political message: compelling narrative, evidence, and a strategic frame. A persuasive narrative contains a structure that can be easily comprehended and has clearly defined protagonists and antagonists, a coherent storyline, a moral lesson, and rich metaphors (Westen, 2007). Political narratives typically promulgate myths, “dramatic, socially constructed realities. … that people accept as permanent” (Nimmo & Combs, 1980, p. 16). Myths are the stuff of politics, whether cultivated by Barack Obama in 2008 (a multicultural outsider who can restore the voice of the people to Washington) or Tea Party conservatives in 2010 (antigovernment crusaders harking back to the spirit of 1775 who will restore the voice of the people to Washington). Narratives with mythic attributes can transport individuals to historically exalted places and, through the act of transportation, influence attitudes (Green & Brock, 2005). Stories with vivid anecdotes and compelling themes can also change attitudes (Kopfman, Smith, Ah Yun, & Hodges, 1998). Narratives are influential when they promote associations between candidates and time-honored values, as well as contain optimistic themes.
More prosaic message attributes also influence political evaluations. Evidence—factual assertions and quantitative data—can serve as an effective device in political persuasion. Presidential debates from Kennedy-Nixon to McCain-Obama have featured candidates’ use of evidence to bolster arguments or serve as peripheral cues. Plausible evidence can exert potent effects on attitudes (Reynolds & Reynolds, 2002), although there is never a guarantee the evidence cited is factually correct; indeed, it frequently can be inaccurate, but sadly compelling.
Framing, an additional ingredient of political messages that has stimulated considerable research, has especially important implications for political persuasion. Given that most political issues are complex and multilayered, they can be defined in different ways, an ambiguity that political communicators frequently exploit. A frame is the central organizing theme that communicators harness to suggest what underlies a multifaceted, controversial issue (Gamson, 1989). Contemporary politics is a contest among competing frames in which the three main actors in political communication—leaders, media, and the public—symbolically joust to determine which frame will dominate discourse and ultimately influence policy.
Framing is a time-honored political pursuit, long part of the warp and woof of American political campaigns. One of the earliest framing battles in American history occurred at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. The Federalist frame emphasized that “an independent representative model of government was necessary to guard against excessive democracy,” while the anti-Federalists centered on the “threat to liberty” and dangers posed by government consolidation (Callaghan & Schnell, 2005, p. 3). In our own day, we encounter framing debates on a multitude of issues, ranging from Obama’s health care reform (cost control for the middle-class or European-style socialism?) to the New York City mosque (insensitivity to victims of 9/11 or First Amendment-enshrined freedom of religion?). Some scholars find frames to be a useful heuristic to describe the ways that government can manipulate public opinion in a manner that furthers its ideological goals. Of course, manipulation is a value-laden term, and frames are also used by citizens groups to challenge government’s perspective on an issue (Druckman, 2001).
Framing is a broad, but fuzzy, concept that operates on multiple levels. It is less a theory than an elastic concept with rich, cross-cutting applications. This has been a foundational strength, but a source of frustration to researchers who understandably want to classify a concept for use in empirical study. In political persuasion, where frames operate on a narrower level than in the whole of political communication, we have more certainty. There is abundant evidence that frames influence political attributions, perceived issue importance, tolerance, and a variety of political cognitions (e.g., Callaghan & Schnell, 2005; Iyengar, 1991; Nelson, Clawson, & Oxley, 1997). Why do frames work? What happens inside the head of voters when they process divergent frames? Scholars have gathered data to advance three mediating mechanisms (Slothuus, 2008). The first is accessibility, the view that frames make certain attributes more accessible, while pushing others to the background. A second view emphasizes belief importance, whereby frames make some considerations seem more relevant than others, leading them to be accorded more weight in a citizen’s decision-making calculus. A third account is belief change; rather than altering perceived importance, frames provide new arguments on behalf of a particular viewpoint.
Although pinpointing processes has some practical utility to message strategists, its primary import has been to differentiate competing theories of political psychology. Researchers who argue in favor of accessibility view framing as analogous to priming, contending that political opinions are superficial, tilting with the political wind, capable of being manipulated by consultants who can cleverly call attention to “top-of-the-head” considerations. Those who advance the belief importance interpretation view framing as more mindful, requiring the deployment of more thoughtful or at least targeted messages that address importance considerations (Nelson et al., 1997). These scholars are also at pains to differentiate framing from persuasion, which they argue involves changes in belief content or evaluations of the attitude object. Frames, they argue, are not the same as arguments, an underpinning of the third approach, which emphasizes that framing is a subset of persuasion because it works by delivering new information or changing the cognitive content of an individual’s political beliefs. Framing, belief importance advocates note, works by altering information that is already part of memory.
The latter debate—is framing persuasion?—is redolent of the academic battles of the 1970s, in which researchers argued that agenda-setting and other cognitive effects were theoretically new media influences that did not fall under the traditional persuasion rubric (Becker, McCombs, & M
cLeod, 1975). Scholars were at pains to differentiate these cognitive effects from attitudinal influences, both because the former seemed to showcase stronger media influences (ones not emphasized by bête noire Klapper) and because they allowed the nascent field of political communication to claim a turf that differentiated it from the time-honored terrain of social psychology. There are subtle differences between framing and persuasion. Frames differ from arguments in certain respects and when frames appear in news stories that are not intended to change viewers’ attitudes on the topic, they blur the line between communication and persuasion. In addition, unlike persuasion, which focuses on attitude change, framing affects interpretations (Tewksbury & Scheufele, 2009). However, it strains credulity to argue that framing is not an element of—or at least overlaps with—persuasion. Political candidates seek to frame issues in ways that will get them elected. The political environment is awash in battles among elites, media, and activist groups, each trying to convince the public to frame an issue in a particular way. Interpretations, the object of message frames, can potently influence attitudes.
A more substantive issue is the nature of framing effects. Scholars have speculated that the public may be highly susceptible to framing effects; political leaders, the argument goes, may be able to alter frames in subtle ways that allow them to manipulate public opinion to their advantage. The resilience of attitudes (and closed-mindedness of partisans) suggests that elites have a more difficult job exploiting frames to their advantage than is commonly assumed. Moreover, a casual review of the difficulty that recent presidents have had framing issues in ways that are palatable to the public—one recalls Clinton’s and Obama’s health care reform campaigns and Bush’s post-2003 effort to rally the public around the Iraq War—illustrate the problems with this hypodermic needle model-style argument. Yet to say frames have few effects is to discount an abundant empirical literature. Elite frames can mold public opinion, particularly, theory suggests, when the frame is relevant or applicable to an existing political schema, when it resonates with existing values, or when it connects two ideas that were previously not linked in the public mind (Nesbit, 2010; Price & Tewksbury, 1997). When we take this to the macrolevel, we find that causal arrows can operate in multiple directions. Elite frames definitely influence the public, but public—and perceived public—frames cajole leaders into taking particular positions. Frames advocated by activist groups also influence elites and citizens, and the media’s ways of framing the frames add another layer of influence.
Channel Factors
The hidden ground of American politics is now a simultaneous information environment that extends to the entire planet. … This charismatic image has replaced the goals and the parties and the policies.
McLuhan (1976/2010)
McLuhan’s comment encapsulates the notion that the modality in which political communication occurs—the mass media and now the Internet—is the essential feature of contemporary politics. It also underscores the widespread perception that images and appearances have supplanted political substance. For persuasion researchers, the question turns on whether a particular channel or modality—the term has never been adequately defined—has distinctive persuasive effects. Channel effects have intrigued scholars ever since it was widely reported that radio listeners believed that the verbally combative Nixon won the first presidential debate, while those who viewed the encounter on television perceived that the telegenic JFK emerged victorious. It is arguably the most famous of all communication research results and has been discussed endlessly over the years. Although scholars place credence in the finding (Kraus, 1996), it is not entirely clear what it means. Does television favor the low intensity “cool” candidate, as McLuhan (1964) argued? Or, stated in more contemporary terms, does television, a visual medium, confer persuasive advantage on a candidate whose pleasant visual appearance seems to match the formal features of the medium? Did the 1960 results instead reflect a rejection of Nixon’s idiosyncratic mannerisms, or was it an interaction effect reflecting approval of a candidate whose nonverbal communication matched his verbal arguments? More complexly, does this effect generalize to other candidates and other elections?
Television has undoubtedly changed the persuasive discourse of election campaigns, but how it has done so and facts supporting this hypothesis have been hard to come by. Jamieson (2003) has argued that by taking political rhetoric from the town center and moving it to the living room, television has personalized political speech, increasing its intimacy and conversational style. Others contend, based on the vividness effect (Taylor & Thompson, 1982), that by placing a premium on vivid, cognitively accessible information, televised political messages should be more impactful than the same messages delivered via other media. There have been few studies addressing these issues, although Chaiken and Eagly’s (1976) finding that an easy message is most compelling when videotaped and a difficult message most persuasive when written is a notable exception. It helps explain the rhetorical success of Ronald Reagan, whose compellingly simple rhetoric seemed to match the conventions of television, while also shedding light on the shortcomings of Jimmy Carter, whose complex messages seemed peculiarly unsuited to the television medium (Hart, 1984).
It is possible that there are persuasive benefits associated with contemporary channel features, such as high-definition television, with its credibility-inducing effects (Bracken, 2006), as well as texting and social networking sites, used heavily by Obama in 2008 (Kenski, Hardy, & Jamieson, 2010). In any event, whatever persuasive effects particular channels exert are strongly influenced by the nature of the message, as well as contextual features, such as number of individuals physically (or in the case of Facebook, virtually) present. It remains an empirical question as to whether use of Internet channels invigorates or retards civic debate, although there is some meta-analytic evidence suggesting that Internet use has a small positive effect on engagement (Boulianne, 2009).
Receivers
Voting is a matter of the heart, what you feel about someone, rather than a matter of the mind. (The mind) takes what the heart feels, and interprets it.
Political consultant Robert Goodman, quoted in Diamond & Bates (1992, p. 311)
Dual-process theories of persuasion, such as the elaboration likelihood model (Petty & Wegener, 1999), offer a useful framework for viewing the complex psychology of the political receiver. The ELM stipulates that there are two routes by which people process information—central and peripheral. Motivation and ability determine the degree to which individuals trek down the central and peripheral paths. Persuasive message strategies can be derived from the processes by which individuals elaborate on communications.
When voters lack motivation or ability to centrally process political messages, they rely on peripheral cues or heuristics, superficial strategies that make them vulnerable to disingenuous appeals. A telling anecdotal example of this occurred in a low-involving Illinois primary election some years back, in which voters preferred candidates with smooth-sounding names (Fairchild and Hart) to those with less euphonious names (Sangmeister and Pucinksi), only to be learn to their apparent dismay that Fairchild and Hart were followers of extremist politician Lyndon LaRouche (O’Sullivan, Chen, Mohapatra, Sigelman, & Lewis, 1988). Presumably, their reliance on a simple cue—euphony of candidate names—led voters down the primrose peripheral path of persuasion, an outcome at odds with normative democratic theory.
There is some empirical evidence consistent with ELM predictions. Candidate physical appearance—similarity and attractiveness—seem to exert particularly strong effects under low-involving conditions (Bailenson, Iyengar, Yee, & Collins, 2008; Rosenberg & McCafferty, 1987). Mere exposure also promotes electoral success in elections that may reasonably be regarded as low involvement. Candidates who spent more money in these races were more likely to get elected than opponents with less financial largesse (Grush, McKeough, & Ahlering, 1978). Repeated political exposure, working through a series of low-leve
l cognitive processes, seems to have produced liking, thereby influencing voting behavior. In a similar fashion, weak political frames are more likely to influence opinions when individuals lack knowledge or ability, although even those low in elaboration likelihood prefer strong to weak frames, a finding that offers some solace to proponents of contemporary democracy (Chong & Druckman, 2007).
Citizens low in political ability or knowledge also may be susceptible to indirect persuasion effects via the impact of presumed influence (Gunther & Storey, 2003). According to this view, exposure to mass media leads individuals to assume that others are strongly influenced by persuasive media messages. By a process analogous to social proof (Cialdini, 2001), individuals presume that such influence is commonplace and normative; this in turn pushes receivers to accept the message. During presidential primaries, low involvement/low ability receivers may presume that media stories that favor the front-runner potently influence public opinion, leading them to leap on the bandwagon and support the leading candidate. Notice that “bandwagon,” a classic propaganda effect articulated by 1930s scholars, is still invoked some 80 years later, but is explained in more sophisticated and careful ways.
The SAGE Handbook of Persuasion Page 53
