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The Conventions and the Media–Who’s Watching and Does it Matter?

September 3, 2012 by

A precipitous drop since the 1950s in how much we trust our media outlets has major implications for the political sphere. The more we distrust the mainstream press’s information about policy outcomes, the more voters turn toward alternative partisan media outlets. And in the absence of a neutral, trustworthy news source, public beliefs and voting behavior are now increasingly shaped by partisan predispositions. Jonathan Ladd, author of Why Americans Hate the Media and How it Matters takes a look at the effects of conventions on public opinion. Are they opportunities to disseminate information, or simply preach to the choir? Who is really tuning in? Will there be bumps in polls? Read his post here.

Do the Conventions Matter?

Jonathan Ladd

 

Last week (in spite of a  disruption from Hurricane Isaac), Republicans  held their presidential nominating convention in Tampa Bay, FL. It will be followed one week later by the Democratic nominating convention in Denver, CO. Historically, conventions have produced “bumps” in the trial heat polls. On his blog, Tom Holbrook of the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, produces a chart showing the bounces generated by major party conventions since 1964.

 

Some of these are quite large, including a 14.1 percentage point bounce for Nixon in 1968, a 13.6 point bounce for Clinton in 1992, and a 12.9 point bounce for Goldwater in 1964. Holbrook uses a regression model to predict that this year Romney will receive a 3.6 point bounce and Obama a 1.1 point bounce.

 

What are the important considerations that we should keep in mind when thinking about the importance (or lack thereof) of the conventions for the presidential race?

 

In general, political scientists find that the biggest effect of major campaign events is to activate partisan predispositions. The campaign as a whole has this result, but the effect may be even more dominant for conventions and debates that require one to self-select to be a viewer. This activation effect is driven by that fact that those most interested in politics are also the most likely to have strong existing views (see here and here). A very large portion of those who tune in are political junkies/activists who made up their minds long ago or those who are at least partisan enough that watching these events reminds them what they like about their party and dislike about the other one.

 

Of course, this does not preclude large post-convention bounces. But the biggest bounces tend occur when a candidate has a divisive nomination fight or for some other reason has failed to previously consolidate his own coalition behind him. This partisan reinforcement (or activation) can produce a surge in the polls without converting many swing voters. Voters who are truly up for grabs have the least interest in, and knowledge about, politics. They are simply unlikely to pay attention to conventions.

 

This was all true when the parties were less polarized and there were far fewer media choices. Yet it is possible that polarization and the proliferation of media options have made conventions even more primarily about rallying the base. Ben Lauderdale pointed out on twitter yesterday that convention bumps appear to be getting smaller over time. This makes sense if the bumps seen in past decades largely resulted from the partisan activation of candidates’ own coalitions. In today’s polarized environment, almost everyone exposed to convention messages comes in with their partisanship already activated.

 

How will people watch the conventions? To get a sense, I assembled available data from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, as compiled in their annual “State of the Media” reports. All figures below are from that source.

 

Total Households (in millions) Watching Conventions on Cable or Network TV

Source: “State of the Media, 2009”

 

The first thing to mention is that it is hard to predict how many total people will tune in to the conventions this year. While the networks have shrunk the amount of prime-time coverage over the years, many people still do watch the network coverage and it is relatively easy to switch over to complete coverage on cable. The total number of households watching the conventions actually shows little clear trend over time. There was a decline after 1992, but that was reversed with a big increase in viewership four years ago. It will be interesting to see if we return to the post-1992 norm or see viewership more like 2008.

 

Percentage of Households with TVs Turned to the 3 Network Evening New Programs Based on Nielson Data

Source: “State of the Media, 2012”

 

The three major broadcast networks audience has been steadily shrinking for decades. The most popular source for television news in the U.S. remains local news broadcasts, but these contain very little national political information. For this, you need to use network or cable news or some other source. On a normal evening, even the diminished network news audience is much larger than the cable prime time audience, but that is not necessarily the case for special events like party conventions, where people are more likely to seek out cable news channels.

 

Political Convention Viewership in 2008

Source: “State of the Media, 2009”

 

In 2008, the number of people watching the conventions on cable was not that much less than the number watching on the networks. This was especially true for the Republican Convention, likely driven Republicans’ affection for Fox News and distrust of the networks. People were just about equally likely to watch the Republican Convention on cable as on a network.

 

We can see a bit more about what this means by looking at the breakdown across cable channels. The Project for Excellence in Journalism doesn’t appear to have this data available for 2008, but I could find it for the 2004 conventions.

 

Democratic Convention Viewership on Cable News (in thousands)

 

Source: “State of the Media, 2005”

 

Republican Convention Viewership on Cable News (thousands)

Source: “State of the Media, 2005”

 

While cable viewers of the Democratic Convention were roughly evenly divided between the three major cable new networks, a majority of cable viewing of the Republican Convention was done through Fox News. The biggest difference between 2004 and 2012 will likely be MSNBC being used by a higher percentage of Democratic Convention viewers and a smaller percentage of Republican Convention viewers.

 

Does this tell us anything more about the effects of the conventions on public opinion? To the extent that Republicans are likely to watch their party’s convention on Fox, the network’s style will likely enhance the partisan activation effect. And to the extent that Democrats watch their convention on MSNBC, it will likely have a similar effect. To reiterate, this is the main effect that conventions have always had, only now more so.

Jonathan M. Ladd is assistant professor of government and public policy at Georgetown University. He received his PhD in politics from Princeton University.

Filed Under: American History, Election 101, Election 101 - Campaigns, Election 101 - Media, Twitter

Check your References — the Press and Politics

April 1, 2012 by

As part of Election 101, we are posting exclusive content from The Concise Princeton Encyclopedia of American Political History on subjects related to Election 2012.

Charles L. Ponce De Leon looks at the surprising history of the press and politics in this lengthy article noting that earlier news outlets avoided domestic politics so as not to offend their patrons. When and how did things changed? How have we arrived at the wary antipathy between politics and press we have today? Here’s a short excerpt:


The press has played a major role in American politics from the founding of the republic. Once subordinate to politicians and the major parties, it has become increasingly independent, compelling politicians and elected officials to develop new strategies to ensure favorable publicity and public support.

Newspapers in the colonial era were few in number and very different from what they would later become. Operated by individual entrepreneurs who produced a variety of printed materials, newspapers included little political news. Instead, their few columns were devoted to foreign news and innocuous correspondence that would not offend colonial officials or the wealthy patrons on whom printers relied for much of their business.

This began to change during the Revolutionary era, when printers were drawn into the escalating conflict with Great Britain.

Fast forward to the 21st century:

But it is an open question whether the welter of often fiercely partisan and ideologically driven sources of political news in America serves— or will ever serve— the larger cause of public enlightenment. Can a mode of discourse that is designed at least in part to entertain, in a popular culture marketplace that is fragmented into increasingly specialized niche markets, ever contribute to inclusive, constructive debate? Or will it reach its logical conclusion and become another species of show biz?

 

Read the complete article here: http://blog.press.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/2Media-gossip.pdf

 

The preceding is an excerpt from The Concise Princeton Encyclopedia of American Political History, edited by Michael Kazin, Rebecca Edwards, and Adam Rothman. To learn more about this book, please visit http://press.princeton.edu. Copyright © 2011 by Princeton University Press. No part of this text may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher.
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Rasmus Kleis Nielsen discusses the election’s Ground Wars

March 20, 2012 by

Sociology and cognitive sciences editor Eric Schwartz spoke with Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, author of Ground Wars: Personalized Communication in Political Campaigns, about “ground wars” in American politics — knocking on doors, phone banks — and their efficiency in getting candidates’ messages out. If you want to learn more about the resurgence of this rather old-fashioned style of campaigning, check out Nielsen’s book in which he examines how American political operatives use “personalized political communication” to engage with the electorate, and weighs the implications of ground war tactics for how we understand political campaigns and what it means to participate in them.

ps – Eric risked life and limb during the production of this video. At about the 18 minute mark you will hear the Press’s fire alarm in the background. Thankfully it was just a drill and even more importantly it doesn’t overwhelm the discussion!

 

Filed Under: Election 101, Election 101 - Media, Election 2012, Political Science, Twitter

Robert Kurzban Talks “The Hypocrite in Everyone Else” on the NYT’s Campaign Stops blog

March 14, 2012 by

Hypocrisy and politicians seem to go hand in hand. But are most of us ourselves guilty of the kinds of inconsistencies both in our positions and our moral principles that we condemn so readily in politicians? Robert Kurzban, author of Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind had a wonderful piece yesterday on NYT.com’s popular Campaign Stops blog on the widespread existence of hypocrisy in human nature, which inconsistencies “merit further reflection” and to what extent we all tend to invoke moral principles only when convenient. An associate professor of psychology at The University of Pennsylvania, Kurzban draws from an array of great examples, from the gay marriage debates, to healthcare, to the cornerstone of all hypocritical outrage: marital infidelity.

Read the New York Times piece here.

What do you think? Are we holding our leaders to higher standards than ourselves? What’s more, is the lack of inconsistency a higher standard, or simply an impossible one?

 

Filed Under: Election 101, Election 101 - Media, Psychology, Twitter

Who Do You Trust Less?

March 6, 2012 by

The guys in the debate or the ones holding the microphone? Election season is on, and sometimes it seems that the only ones more subject to suspicion than the candidates themselves are the media following their every move from primaries to polls. Recently I spoke to Jonathan Ladd, author of Why Americans Hate the Media and How it Matters to get his take on this phenomenon, and how he thinks it impacts our engagement with politics. Check out the interview here:

 

How did you get interested in the phenomenon of  distrust in the media?

My main area of study in graduate school was U.S. public opinion, and especially its interaction with the news media. Then I read some conference papers by two political scientists named Tim Cook and Paul Gronke, which documented the extent that trust in the news media had declined since the early 1970s. I suspected that this lower level of media trust would have consequences for how people learned political facts and were persuaded by media coverage. I looked around a little and found that there wasn’t much existing research on this topic. A few political scientists, including James Druckman of Northwestern and Skip Lupia of Michigan, had done studies of the effect of attitudes toward a specific media source on persuasion from that source. But no one had studied the consequences the broader phenomenon of lower trust in the media as a social institution. That is what I set out to do when I started this project.

Is widespread distrust of the media a new issue in American history?

No. We only have modern opinion polling from the 1930s onward (and even polls in the 1930s and 1940s have methodological flaws), but the available evidence suggests that it was the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s that were the historical anomalies. There is not any other period in American history where a news media establishment existed that was widely respected by the public. For instance, in 1938 a Roper poll found that only 40% of the public believed that newspapers produced fair news.

Earlier than that, we don’t have polls but all available evidence suggests that journalists were held in low esteem. Journalism in the 1800s was largely considered a blue collar profession. It was not uncommon for people to work their way up from operating the printer to eventually writing for the newspaper. Writers for the famous “yellow journalism” newspapers owned by Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst were certainly not widely respected.  And earlier than that, in the late 1700s and early 1800s, most newspapers were closely affiliated with a political party or faction. No newspapers were widely trusted as sources of accurate unbiased news.

What do people mean when they say that they distrust the media? What types of sources are they thinking about?

This is an important question. Given the diversity of modern news outlets, I wondered whether people still had meaningful opinions about the news media as a collective institution. I found that they did. In fact, opinions about the institutional media in general are unusually strongly held political opinions. As evidence of this, I found that the percentage of people who say “don’t know” or refuse to answer at all, when asked about the news media as an institution is unusually small—often less than half of one percent. In addition, when I gave people the chance to provide their opinions on this topic in an open-ended format, they had a lot to say. Essentially no one said they didn’t have any opinion on this topic and very few expressed any confusion about what the institutional media were. Based on these open-ended responses, most people considered the institutional media to be the major television networks and large newspapers.

It actually makes sense that opinions about the institutional media would be so strongly held in the current environment. In the 1950s and 1960s, people had a much smaller and less diverse selection of news sources to choose from. Most of the sources available in that era reported in a style that we would associate with the institutional media. But now, we live in a world where people must constantly chose whether to get information from sources employing the more conventional style or those that employ more partisan or sensational styles. In making that choice people draw on their views of whether the media establishment can be trusted. And because this is such a consequential decision, politicians, political activists, and opinion journalists at partisan outlets constantly try to influence people’s attitudes toward the institutional media.

Do people learn about politics differently when they distrust the media?

Yes. I find that one’s level of trust in the institutional news media has important consequences for how one learns politically-relevant information. In contrast to those who trust the institutional media, those who distrust the media are more likely to augment their use of conventional news outlets with partisan sources that reinforce their existing political views. They are also more likely to resist new information that is attributed to the institutional news media. As a result of all this, those who distrust the media are resistant to new information about the political world. Rather than accept new information, they are more likely to either rely on their past beliefs about the world or use their partisanship to form their beliefs.

Let me illustrate with two examples. The first is the reaction to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. After those attacks, on average, the American public became much more concerned about the threat of war. However, those who distrusted the media increased their level of worry about war less than everyone else did. They were more distrustful of all the media messages about terrorism and war and as a result were less affected. The second example is partisan beliefs about various national conditions. There is a tendency for Democrats to think that the country’s economy, inflation, deficit, national security, are all relatively better than Republicans think they are when a Democrat is president and relatively worse than Republicans think they are when a Republican is president. In other words, partisans have biased perceptions of national conditions that reflect their presidential loyalty. But this phenomenon is more extreme among those who distrust the institutional news media because they distrust many of the informative messages they encounter and must rely more on their partisan instincts and news from partisan news outlets, which they tend to consume at higher rates.

What are the consequences of this for the broader political system?

As I mentioned, those who distrust the news media are less likely to accept new information about the world around them. They are more likely to have inaccurate beliefs about national conditions that usually correspond with their partisan predispositions. I find that this increases the correlation between party identification and voting. This helps to increase the proportion of the public that will vote for their own party regardless of the state of the economy or whether the U.S. is bogged down in a costly foreign war.

Rewarding and punishing the president’s party based on the state of the country is one of the primary ways that political scientists think that the public controls national elected officeholders. There is still a lot of their retrospective voting that occurs. But, by contributing to more polarized voting patterns and reducing accountability at the ballot box, media distrust should be an ongoing concern of political scientists and others who care about the health of American democracy.

Jonathan M. Ladd is assistant professor of government and public policy at Georgetown University. He received his PhD in politics from Princeton University.

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