Campaign Reform: Insights and Evidence

6. Is Reform Really Necessary? A Closer Look at News Media Coverage, Candidate Events, and Presidential Votes

Chapter 6 Is Reform Really Necessary? A Closer Look at News Media Coverage, Candidate Events, and Presidential Votes Daron R. Shaw Introduction Despite the centrality of presidential election campaigns to the American political process, they are not held in high esteem by political scientists. There are two major reasons for this perception. First, presidential campaigns are thought to be too negative, boring, and nonsubstantive. In particular , candidates, their surrogates, and their advertising are typically believed to be uninteresting and prone to attacking the opposition rather than advancing a positive agenda or clarifying a set ofcontrasts. Similarly, the news media are thought to contribute to the inadequacy ofcampaigns. Their coverage is regarded as excessively negative and preoccupied with strategy and candidate standing rather than issues (Jamieson 1996; Lichter and Noyes 1993; Patterson 1980, 1993). As a consequence, one of the main effects ofpresidential campaigns is to raise public cynicism and mistrust of government without offering a suitable criteria for choosing candidates (Hetherington 1998, 1999). Empirical research verifying the negative, boring, and nonsubstantive quality ofpresidential campaigns has been spotty. Negativity does seem to be pervasive among television ads, according to Ansolabehere and Iyengar (1995), Jamieson (1996), and a handful of other content analytical studies. Jamieson correctly observes, however, that political scientists tend to refer to both comparison and attack ads as "negative." In this sense we may be overestimating the deleterious effects of media by conflating a legitimate form of advertising (comparisons) with a less legitimate form (attacks). That campaigns are uninteresting is asserted based on observations of the behavior they are assumed to affect: low turnout, high percentages of Americans claiming to be independent, relatively small audiences for national conventions and debates, and other such aggregate statistics. 145 146 Campaign Reform Direct evidence of disinterest has been more elusive. Survey data from the National Election Study show oscillations over time in the percentage of Americans saying they are interested or very interested in the presidential election and the percentage saying that they care about the election. These percentages usually exceed 65 percent, however, and there is no discernible trend. As for the charge that campaigns are nonsubstantive, content analyses of television ads, candidate speeches, and news media coverage show past campaigns to have had considerable substance.) Furthermore, although nonsubstantive campaigning and campaign coverage has also been found, little effort has been made to link this to subsequent behavior or opinionation. A second reason for our profession's antipathy is that campaigns are thought to be of secondary importance in explaining election outcomes. Systematic explanations of presidential election outcomes are more often sought in the variations of the macroeconomy, the stability of partisanship , and the power of money and media (Brown and Chappell 1996; Campbell 1992; Campbell and Wink 1990; Fair 1978; Gelman and King 1993; Lewis-Beck and Rice 1992; Rosenstone 1983). Furthermore, those empirical studies that do examine the direct effects of campaigns on presidential election outcomes yield inconsistent results. The dominant, "minimal effects" perspective has garnered continued support from a majority of these studies (Bartels 1992, 1993; Finkel 1993; Markus 1988), although some of the most recent analyses challenge this perspective (Campbell, Cherry, and Wink 1992; Geer 1988; Holbrook 1994, 1996; Shelley and Hwang 1991). The position of the discipline thus seems to be a twist on the Shakespeare quotation: campaigns do not contain enough sound and fury and therefore signify nothing. But these recent challenges should not be overlooked. Most notably, Holbrook (1994, 1996) finds evidence of presidential campaigning's influence in the 1988, 1992, and 1996 elections that has sparked renewed debate over the minimal-effects claims of the election forecasting literature . These and other challenges not only call into question our understanding of election dynamics but specifically raise the possibility that campaigns serve an important role in the democratic process and are not necessarily in need of reforms designed to increase and rechannel their impact. In addition to the direct evidence ofcampaign effects uncovered in the studies mentioned previously, those suspicious of the assumption of campaign irrelevance and the need for reform would find empirical support from studies of the news media's coverage of politics and election campaigns . Numerous analyses have shown that the news media can influence political opinions and behaviors through the favorability of their coverage Is Reform Really Necessary? 147 toward issue positions and candidates (Just et al. 1996; Lichter and Noyes 1993), the subject matter they choose to cover...