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Title
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Simple political communication : nature, causes, and consequences
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Author
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Abstract
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| In recent years, it has become customary for academic researchers and members of the general public to argue that political and media discourses are “dumbing-down.” These observers claim that due to various social, political, and technological developments, discussion of issues in the public debates of politicians and in the media coverage of politics is nowadays shallower, less diverse, and more one-sided than it ever was in the past. A simplified and narrow public debate, these critics warn, prevents society from reaching optimal solutions to the problems it is facing because complex problems require complex solutions. While general arguments about a simplified political communication are prevalent, no systematic empirical exploration of this issue has been conducted to date, and several important questions regarding it remain unanswered. This dissertation focuses on three such questions. First, what does simple news coverage of politics entail exactly—what are its precise “ingredients” and what is the best way to conceptualize and measure it? Second, what makes certain politicians more likely than others to adopt simple communication strategies? And, perhaps most importantly, what are the implications of exposure to simple communication for citizens’ political perceptions and preferences? By answering these questions, this dissertation seeks to provide a first systematic account of the nature, causes, and consequences of simple political communication. The dissertation proceeds in five chapters: an introduction, three empirical chapters, and a conclusion. In Chapter 1, the dissertation’s introduction, I present the topic under investigation, clarify important theoretical and conceptual issues, and posit my three research questions. The introduction discusses the rationale for examining simple political communication in general, and at this point in time in particular, and introduces the two major concepts the empirical studies build on (and extend): news diversity and integrative complexity. Chapter 2, which is the first empirical chapter of the dissertation, explores simple political communication in the context of the mass media’s coverage of politics. Since the media are where most citizens get most of their political information, they are expected to provide citizens with a diverse, accurate, and comprehensive account of current events. Yet, a recurrent claim in the political communication literature is that the media often do not live up to this standard of diversity in content. Building on and extending existing research on news diversity, this chapter proposes a new conceptual and methodological framework for examining news diversity. The main argument in this chapter is that previous research on this topic has been limited both conceptually, by an analysis of too broad political categories, and empirically, by a reliance on human coders that has led researchers to analyze small samples of texts and extract too little information from each text. Using a novel computational text classification approach, the chapter presents a framework for inductively identifying a large set of very specific and theoretically- relevant political issues that appear in the news on a regular basis and analyzing news diversity using those categories. After describing the new approach in detail, the chapter demonstrates its efficiency in testing theoretical hypotheses by showing that elite newspapers are more diverse than popular newspapers and that news diversity has deteriorated over the past two decades. Chapter 3 examines the causes of simple political communication in the discussions and debates of politicians. This study’s point of departure is the expectation that politicians in a democracy should exchange well-reasoned, multidimensional points of view in their public deliberations. After a theoretical introduction, the chapter presents evidence that some politicians can be considered “simple speakers” while others are consistently more complex in their communications. Then, the rest of the chapter explores the sources for this variation. Based on surveys conducted among 111 incumbent Members of Parliament and ministers in Belgium, Canada, and Israel as well as an analysis of a large sample of their parliamentary speeches, the chapter shows that the tendency to use simple rhetoric as a communicative strategy is driven by motivation for media coverage at two levels: the individual level and the political system level. The study finds that at both levels, the higher the dependency of politicians on the mass media as a means of communication, the simpler the rhetoric they present. These results contribute to the literature by demonstrating that the news media have a substantial (negative) impact on the quality of elite deliberation, and by emphasizing the important role political systems play in moderating mass media effects on politicians’ communication behavior. Chapter 4 takes the previous studies a step forward and examines the effects of simple political communication on citizens. The rationale for this study is the assumption shared by scholars and practitioners that politicians simplify their public communication because “simplicity works.” The chapter shows that this is an unsubstantiated claim because the way citizens respond to simple and complex messages has, in fact, not been examined before in a systematic manner. This chapter fills in this gap in the literature by conducting two original experiments that test the informative and persuasive effects of simple rhetoric. The experiments show that in contrast to the conventional wisdom advising politicians to “keep it simple” if they want to influence citizens, simple rhetoric is, in most cases, an ineffective communication strategy. The concluding chapter summarizes the main findings of the three preceding chapters and discusses the contribution of the dissertation as a whole to research in political communication, journalism, and public opinion. The chapter highlights two dynamics in particular. The first is the finding that the media appear to have substantial leverage in dictating the way politicians communicate and that this effect carries negative implications for democracy. The second is an apparent contradiction between the way politicians choose to address citizens and the types of messages that are actually effective in swaying public opinion. |
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Language
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English
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Publication
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Antwerp
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University of Antwerp, Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Political Science
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2019
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Volume/pages
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126 p.
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Note
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Walgrave, Stefaan [Supervisor]
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Sheafer, Tamir [Supervisor]
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Full text (open access)
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