Domestic Perspectives on Contemporary Democracy

7. Engineering Consent: The Persistence of a Problematic Communication Regime

7 Engineering Consent The Persistence of a Problematic Communication Regime w. lance bennett In the early decades of the twentieth century, the emerging consensus among many elites, including public intellectuals such as Walter Lippmann, was that publics were so explosive and potentially threatening to national interests that governance required the new art of public relations to engineer consent. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, the evolved technologies for engineering consent have come to mediate most relations between elites and publics. Indeed, the national political communication apparatus has become thoroughly institutionalized and professionalized, with cadres of pollsters, image consultants, marketing specialists, and spin doctors attached to parties , candidates, and causes. These trends are most pronounced in the United States but are evident in other democratic systems (Blumler and Kavanagh 1999; Napolitan 2004). This chapter examines the arc of public communication processes over the last century with an eye to two broad questions about the present and future of political communication: What has this centurylong institutionalization of highly managed public communication processes wrought for democracy? and, What are the democratizing prospects for new digital information and communication technologies to enable publics to communicate more independently of efforts by elites to manage election and policy discourse? Engineering Consent: A Doctrine and Its Mixed Effects It is easy to assume that sophisticated practices of political communication actually result in the engineering of consent, or, at least, in routinely influenci -xii_1-180_Nard.indd 131 2/6/08 4:27:23 PM 132 . w. lance bennett ing public opinion. Yet, in many cases, publics appear to form strong dispositions based on external factors (e.g., experienced shifts in peace, prosperity, and social stability) that seem immune to the best efforts of elites to shape perceptions to the contrary (Nardulli 2005; Zaller 2001). Many political scientists see election and public policy processes as being largely in tune with independent public preferences (Bartels 1991; Stimson 2004). What, in this view, is the effect of managed communication? Stimson (2004) argues that elite efforts at manipulation simply “update” inattentive citizens, which explains why “information terms” in statistical models often predict election results without incorporating data on communication campaigns. Yet, in other situations, such as the highly managed Bush administration selling of the Iraq War, opinion was substantially shaped by oft-repeated but poorly substantiated claims about weapons of mass destruction and alleged links between Iraq and the terror attacks of 9/11 (Entman 2004; Bennett, Lawrence, and Livingston 2007). Many other situations fall somewhere in between these extremes, with often staggering expenses on advertising and news management working at the margins to shift public responses. For example, Johnston, Hagen, and Jamieson (2004) show that based on externalities, the election of 2000 should never have been so close. They attribute the margin of the Bush vote to strategic advertising and news management choices on both sides. Given this range of empirical results, it is not surprising that a lively academic debate has continued for decades over just how malleable publics really are. While this debate will surely continue, it is interesting that no side contests the degree to which the elite management of public discourse has become a doctrine of modern politics. Whatever its effects, communication management sets the tone for contemporary politics, resulting in many implications for democracy beyond its measurable effectiveness in shaping opinion. For example, the daily glimpses of politics and government offered up in the media are seen by media savvy audiences as contrived and often cynical efforts to fool at least some of the people some of the time. Jacobs and Shapiro (2000, xv) propose that the goal of most policy leaders is to “simulate responsiveness,” or to create the “appearance of responsiveness” to their agendas by using polling and communication technologies to find “the most effective means to move public opinion closer to their own desired policies.” They cite professional operatives, ranging from Frank Luntz (Republican architect of the Contract with America) to Dick Morris (erstwhile Clinton communication advisor), as advocating the use of polls not to reshape programs but to move public perceptions in line with desired policy outcomes (Jacobs and Shapiro 2000, xv). i-xii_1-180_Nard.indd 132 2/6/08 4:27:23 PM engineering consent · 133 Targeted audiences who are bombarded with strategic messages may end up confused, discouraged, tuned out, and, not infrequently, misinformed. Indeed, the collateral damages from the daily stream of managed political communication...