Does Political Communications Matter?

I think that it's important to start off any discussion by looking at the background. Political communications has become a very contentious issue over the last decade. This has been mainly based on the notion that in the run up to the 1997 UK election the Labour Party ran a very professional and efficient campaign through which they were able to set the news agenda for the country and therefore effectively manage the national debate in their favour.

The assumption that politcial parties have the power to manipulate the agenda in this way has fuelled the controversy ever since. But, is this assumption based on fact? To what extent does politcial communication really affect the issues being discussed in the media and by the public? And, to what extent does it affect voting patterns? If the impact is not as great as has been assumed then how does this affect the need to take up of new communication tools which are the subject of this blog? In other words, is using blogs, social networking sites etc going to turn out to be a waste of time and energy?

The first source I've looked at is a book entitled 'On Message, Communicating the Campaign'. Written by Pippa Norris, John Curtice, David Sanders, Margaret Scammel and Holli A. Semetko, it looks at the 1997 campaign and discusses the effectiveness and impact of the campaigns of the three main political parties in the UK.

Between 1992 and 1997 there was a 10.3% swing from the Conservatives to Labour. As last as the last week of the campaign some 28% had, it seems, still not decided on how to vote. This suggests a very volatile electorate that is open to persuasion. However, Labour's performance in the polls duirng the last twelve months before the election and more strikingly in the last week of campaigning show a decline in support. The Liberal Democrats were advancing the most while Conservative support remained stable.

The situation therefore was that over the long term of five years there had been a massive swing towards Labour but that this support began to fade away as the election drew nearer. So, does this mean that the Labour Party's communications strategy, which was praised so much in the aftermath of their landslide victory, actually fail? Did the Liberal Democrats have a better strategy? Or does employing news management straregies not really work with the electorate who turn to other influencers to help them in their decisions?

The conclusions reached in the research conducted by Norris et al seem to suggest that political parties despite their efforts are unable to dictate the agenda during the 1997 campaign. The former wanted to focus on issues such as the economy and education while the media focussed on the conduct of the campaign. Interestingly, while the media made a big issue out of the possibility of European Monetary Union, the public remained focussed on more bread and butter issues. It seems that while the politicians and the public may have been thinking about similar issues it was the media that was out of touch. The public it seems remained laregly unaffected by the news agenda, as set by the media and not the politicians.

In broadcasting, governed by the rules of balance and impartiality, there seems to be little effect on voting patterns in the short term although in the longer term it seems that the more positive the stories about the party, the greater the support. This was reflected in the success of the Liberal Democrats in the last months before the 1997 election as they stuck to being positive about their own policies rather than attacking others.

The impact of newspapers, which are free to take sides, was greater than that of broadcasting over the longer term but it is still clear that a change in editorial position like the one carried out by The Sun did very little to persuade its readers to change their voting patterns in the short term.

Overall the general conclusion seems to be that the power of political parties to influence the news agenda is limited and that even if this could be done the independnece of thought of the public is strong. The media it seems does not have the power to tell people what to think about. The old broadcasting rules about impartiality may in fact be irrelevant as it is not the amount of coverage that matters but the nature of it. The authors, although writing in 1999, already see the problems that are with us today when they ask how impartiality based on equal air time can be controlled in a world of new media and multiplicity of digital televison channels?

My own personal thoughts at this moment are that controlling the news agenda has always been an illusion. But, over a longer time frame the ideas and the messages to which people are exposed and the nature in which they are delivered does influence thought - and then action. In the context of new media this will continue to apply. Political parties and media organisations will not be able to change voting intentions in a short six week election campaign but over the course of a number of years those who learn to use these media most effectively will be able to influence the way in which national issues are debated. Importantly the ability to bypass the media, whose consistent negative approach to reporting politics over recent years seems to be having an affect on voter turnout could make the use of new media an ideal tool for politicians and the public to re-connect.