“Parliamentary Question Times” (Rob Salmond) – draft manuscript only
Chapter 1
SHORTCUTS TO
PARTICIPATION
Why shallowness, sloganeering, and shenanigans are good for political
participation.
1.1 Setting the Scene
In November 2003, Michael Howard became leader of the British Conservative Party. Mr.
Howard’s first high-profile event after becoming Tory leader was to take on Prime Minister
Tony Blair at Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs). As usual, the House of Commons was
crowded to the point of overflow for PMQs, both in the MPs’ leather pews and in the public
and media galleries hovering above1. Mr. Howard was greeted with excited cheers from both
levels of the chamber as he rose to challenge Mr. Blair for the first time. Theatrics
notwithstanding, the gravity of the event was evident in both combatants, as both their
voices initially trembled with nervousness and anticipation.
The first stanza of questioning lasted only a few minutes, but in that time it ran a
wide and increasingly personal gamut of topics, ranging from the “ineptitude and
incompetence” of the public sector – especially the health service – under Mr. Blair, through
the notorious Poll Tax that Mr. Howard introduced when previously in government, to Mr.
Blair’s ongoing internal cold war with his finance minister Gordon Brown, and finally to
various far-left declarations Mr. Blair had made in his youth but now seemed to have
disowned in his actions as Prime Minister. Each short, snappy intervention was punctuated
with cheers, jeers, catcalls and insults, hurled form all quarters of the chamber. It was,
according to the BBC, a “bruising, electrifying clash.” The Financial Times immediately
declared that the session had “galvanized Tory MPs” and cemented the institution’s
reputation as “the highlight of the political week.”
The Daily Mail published two stories in the hours after the clash, declaring Mr.
Howard the victor. The following day, the Daily Telegraph agreed, saying that Howard’s
strong PMQ performances “will manifestly be good for parliament” and that “PMQs are
My account of this session of PMQs draws on the following media reports: The Guardian, “Able seamen,”
November 13, 2003; BBC News, “Verdict on Howard’s PMQs Debut,” November 13, 2003; Financial Times,
“Howard sets the scene for weekly bloodfest,” November 12, 2003; Daily Mail, “Howard has his way at PMQ
clash,” November 12, 2003; Daily Telegraph, “Roll up, roll up”, November 12, 2003; and Daily Mirror, “Soundbite Blair just scrapes victory,” November 13, 2003.
1
restored to their natural place: the best show in town.” The Guardian went a step further,
declaring, “the political atmosphere has been quite transformed by today.” Even the tabloid
papers featured Howard’s first PMQs clash prominently.2 The Daily Mirror said that “Dracula
Howard,” who had been strategically “squashed [in the debating chamber] between the best
girlies the Conservatives could muster… sank his fangs into Tony Blair – and drew blood.”3
Amongst the considerable excitement in the “chatter classes” following Michael
Howard’s PMQs debut, the Financial Times asked one especially incisive question: “How
much impact this [PMQs clash] will have on the public - which tends to take in prime
minister's questions through television news soundbites – remains open to question.”
This book answers the FT’s question, not solely in the British context but examining
also similar Question Time (QT) institutions, and other similar political phenomena, across
the advanced democracies.
In brief, I argue that PMQs have multiple, profound, effects on the public,
motivating them to learn about their leaders, to participate in elections, and to pay attention
to politics between elections. These effects have important consequences both for the
administration of government and for the policies that governments seek to enact. The
argument that theoretically underpins these findings is simple but powerful. QT institutions
promoting quick-witted, genuinely spontaneous, and jargon-free debate between political
leaders help citizens to remain engaged with the political process between elections by
providing them with a regular, engaging, easy-to-comprehend political spectacle. As the
political information becomes easier and more fun for people to digest, they are more likely
to appreciate and comprehend it. It follows that QT institutions that do not promote this
kind of spectacular and non-technical exchange do not mobilize citizens as strongly.
1.2 A Roadmap
In this book, I seek to advance two broad points. The first point, which takes up the first
two thirds of the book, is that the presence of theatrical, combative QT institutions tends to
lead to increased political participation, especially among the young. This finding flies in the
face of the popular conception of PMQs’ effects in Britain, where it is often thought that the
partisan shenanigans and lack of democratic respect on display at PMQs turn people away
from politics altogether. In making this argument, I draw together multiple strands of a
developing literature in American politics on non-traditional media and information sources
and their effects. The second point of the book is to examine the flow-on effects of these
citizen-mobilizing theatrical QT institutions for important matters of public policy.
The Mirror even printed a photo of Howard with digital Dracula teeth and a black cape added to help make its
point (Daily Mirror “Sound-bite Blair just scrapes victory,” November 13, 2003). That photo, however, would
quickly get the Mirror into trouble with the Director of Parliamentary Broadcasting (Daily Mirror “Dracula: A
grave mistake,” November 14, 2003).
3 PMQs catches the Mirror’s attention at times other than leadership challenge. A search of www.mirror.co.uk in
May 2006 found that 145 articles, spread fairly evenly over the previous five years, contain a reference to
“Prime Minister’s questions.” Nor is interest in PM’s questions limited to the tabloid Mirror. During the first
five months of 2005, The Times ran 25 stories containing the phrase “Prime Minister’s questions,’” which is
more than the number of QTs Tony Blair faced during that period. Over the same period, The Guardian ran 64
stories containing reference to “Prime Minister’s questions.”
2
The book proceeds in the following fashion. For the remainder of this chapter, I
outline an argument about political participation that relies on sound-bites, innuendo, and
sloganeering. Utilizing basic survey data, previous research, and historical examples, I will
argue that politicians are best able to entice the masses into political action when they distill
their political communications down to their bare bones, and to make those bones seem fun
and exciting.
In chapter two, I present a survey of QT institutions across the advanced
democracies. Every advanced democracy other than the USA has some form of QT, but the
institutions vary markedly from place to place. Those sets of rules that encourage theatrics,
short speeches, and surprises, I will argue, are far better suited to providing palatable political
information to citizens. Institutions featuring these rules will, therefore, also be better at
mobilizing the citizenry.
Chapter three is the first of three empirical chapters, and represents the empirical
core of the book. In it, I use survey data to test whether or not a country’s choice of QT
institution affects its rate of political participation. I will find that no matter how
participation is measured, a more lively or “open” QT institutions enhances political
participation.
Chapter four conducts an additional experimental test of my argument, using
internet video clips of QT institutions re-cut in various ways to simulate different QT
institutional environments. I find [NOTE TO SELF: INSERT SUMMARY OF
FINDINGS HERE]
In Chapter five I present statistical evidence that the QT effect plays out most
strongly in younger and less educated sections of the populations, and therefore that the
presence of an open QT may – in addition to being good for political participation – also be
good for parties of the left and bad for parties of the right.
Chapter six explores the flow on effects of open QT on policymaking in
democracies. Using country level data on broad policy outcomes, I find evidence that in
open QT countries respond by shifting policy to the left. The politicians, I argue, are shifting
leftwards to pick up those voters who would not vote in the absence of an open QT. Those
voters are disproportionally young and/or poor, and a common way to attract those voters is
to propose higher taxes and higher government spending.
The concluding chapter seeks not only to summarize what I have learned about QT
during the course of this study, but it also poses some questions that I learned enough to ask
but cannot yet answer. I also speculate about the possible changes that introducing an open
QT institution might have in the US.
1.3 Theory: What Makes People Want to Participate in Politics?
There is a branch of education psychology that seeks to understand why children learn better
in some classrooms than in others. One of the key findings of this research program is that,
all else equal, children seem to learn better in environments they perceive as “fun.” In an
experiment performed on 1st grade students in two Michigan school districts, Julianne
Turner (1995) found that the “introduction of more complex, interesting and challenging
tasks” lead to greater student motivation and enjoyment, even as these new tasks – due to
their novelty and difficulty – were also delaying the gratification that comes from success.
This study is not an isolated example. In a review of the literature on student motivation,
Carole Ames (1992) reported that learning tasks that incorporated “novelty, variety, diversity
and student interest” were consistently found to lead to, among other things, a “greater
focus of effort and learning”. Fun and learning are positively linked.
Such a finding does, of course, invite question as to the direction of the causal arrow.
Are fun and learning linked because the fun environment causes increased learning, or
because successful learning (with the rewards that brings) is more likely to induce a feeling of
enjoyment among children? Researchers have been very active researching this effect and
determining the direction of the causal arrow. Indeed, Turner’s 1995 study quoted above
makes specific note of a finding that supports the “fun causes learning” hypothesis but not
the “learning causes fun” hypothesis – namely that more novel and challenging tasks seemed
to induce greater student enjoyment even as they made it more difficult for students to
successfully complete the lesson. Through a series of experiments, quasi-experiments and
observational studies, various educational psychologists have come to the conclusion that
exogenously induced increases in the enjoyment of classroom activity really do tend to
enhance the successful completion of learning tasks (Ames 1992, Marshall 1987, Marshall
and Weinstein 1984, Nichols 1989, Malone and Lepper 1987, Rosenholtz and Simpson 1984,
Turner 1995). They have collectively demonstrated that – whatever the impact of knowledge
on enjoyment – enjoyment appears to have an independent effect on educational success.
That is, despite evidence that successful learning causes enjoyment of learning, there is also
evidence that an enjoyable learning experience has an independent causal effect of learning
outcomes. Fun causes learning.
The pattern this research has described is intuitive, familiar, and present in many
clichéd sayings about human motivation, whether in adults or children, and whether people
are at school, at work, or at play. In the workplace, for example, “a happy worker is a
productive worker” is a common claim made by proponents of recent workplace reforms
revolving around parental leave, flexible work hours, “work-life balance,” and new-age
workplaces complete with video game consoles, ping-pong tables, and on-demand
masseuses. This thesis is consistent with empirical evidence in a study showing that increased
levels of affective well-being and of intrinsic job satisfaction were causally prior to increases
in job performance among Australian managers (Hosie, Sevastos, and Cooper 2007).
1.3.1
Having fun with politics
Could this same process of fun-induced learning be at work when people come to engage
with politics? The correlation implied by this process of fun leading to learning is certainly
evident in many studies of the democratic citizenry. For example, a simple regression
predicting either recall of US congressional candidates or turnout in US elections shows that
affective interest in politics (the closest we come to a question asking whether respondents
find politics fun) is a significant predictive factor. A simple regression such as this cannot,
however, tell us whether the interest is causing the political learning and participation or vice
versa.
[Table 1.1 about here]
One statistical way around that issue is to replace the political interest variable with
an instrument – a variable that can reasonably stand in for a respondent’s political interest, that
was clearly not caused by the respondent’s political knowledge or participation, and that
cannot reasonably have any other causal association with candidate recall or turnout. In a
number of the US National election Studies, researchers gathered data on the political
interest of respondents’ parents when the respondent was growing up, and that can help us
generate a reasonable instrument for political interest here.4 It is hard to argue that the
political knowledge of the daughter in the 1970s caused the mother to become interested in
politics in the 1940s. The instrument, therefore, is that part of political interest determined
by parental political interest. A simple regression of this instrument on voter turnout still
shows a positive and significant relationship, indicating that interest in politics has an
independent effect on political participation, regardless of any effect flowing the other way.5
The results of these three simple regressions are shown in Table 1.1. (Note that while I only
present bivariate regressions in this introductory chapter, the regression results in Table 1.1
are robust to including other explanatory variables such as education, gender, and age in the
model.)
Such a research finding is, of course, nothing new in political science. The idea that
political interest and political learning cause political participation dates back at least to The
American Voter (Campbell et al 1960). And since that seminal work there have been hoards of
studies confirming their various findings, both in the American context (Wolfinger and
Rosenstone 1980, Leighly and Nagler 1992), and across multiple countries (Verba, Nie, and
Kim 1978, Franklin 1996). Brady, Verba, and Schlozman (1995) deconstructed The American
Voter’s socioeconomic status variable into three constituent parts: time; money; and civic
skills, showing that each of these resources has a powerful independent effect on multiple
forms of political activism, including voting. Rosenstone and Hansen (1993) expanded the
analysis to show that, in addition to their increased likelihood of voting, society’s upper
echelons (who tended also to take the strongest affective interest in politics) are also more
likely than are other citizens to be mobilized by political leaders into other forms of
participation such as writing to their leaders, signing petitions, and making campaign
contributions. Delli Carpini and Keeter (1996) showed that citizens who have more
knowledge about politics (society’s upper echelons again) are more likely not only to
participate in politics, but also to participate effectively in a way that furthers their particular
interests.
If the finding that political interest can lead to all sorts of other forms of political
participation (including learning) is so well known, why is it worth mentioning here? The
answer is that knowing the causal power of political interest underscores the importance of
understanding where political interest comes from. And research in another relevant field
has suggested that one place that “interest” comes from is “fun.”
For the educational psychologists seeking to improve child learning, the step that
followed from realizing that fun environments induce kids to learn better was to seek to
understand what makes a learning environment fun for a child. If fun causes learning, we
ought to know what causes fun.
While reasonable, this instrument is probably not perfect, because it is possible that a respondent may view
her parents’ earlier level of political interest through the lens of her own level of political interest today.
Nonetheless, to the extent that people are telling the truth about their parents, the instrument is a good start.
5 The National Election studies did not start asking respondents about congressional candidate recall until after
they had stopped asking about parental political interest, and for that reason I cannot use the instrument in a
regression predicting candidate recall.
4
Many political scientists, politicians and pundits seek to increase participation in
democracies, especially democracies with low and falling turnout such as the United States.
For those people, the step that follows from understanding that interested citizens are
participatory citizens should be to understand what makes politics interesting from the
citizenry’s point of view. That is, political science needs to do a better job of understanding
what people like and find interesting about politics.
1.3.2
People Say They Don’t Like “Politics”
In a superficial sense, understanding what people like about politics is easy – people do not
like politics at all. They do not like politicians. They do not like pollsters. They do not like
what politics has become today, and look nostalgically back to an earlier political time (which
at that time they usually did not like). As time goes on and on, people like politics less and
less. Evidence for this proposition comes from far and wide, from mass surveys both within
political science and outside.
The World Values Survey has tracked global attitudes since the early 1980s. At that
time, despite the undoubtedly important role that politics plays in shaping the lives of almost
every person on the planet, only 54% of survey respondents said that they were either “very
interested” or “somewhat interested” in politics – the rest were either “not very interested”
(31% of the sample) or “not at all interested” (15% of the sample). By the early 2000s, when
the World Values Survey collected its fourth wave of questionnaires, the percentage
expressing interest in politics had dropped to 45%, while the percentage expressing no
interest at all in politics had risen to 23%. (European Values Survey Group and World
Values Survey Association 2004).
[Figure 1.1 about here]
Two other large-scale scientific surveys confirm this finding. The longstanding
American National Election Studies (ANES) show a consistent downward trend in political
interest among Americans, as shown in Figure 1.1.6 The figure shows that the cliff-hanger
2000 Presidential election garnered less public interest than the predictable and uneventful
1962 midterms, and that the only post-Nixon Presidential election to generate as much
interest as any pre-Nixon Presidential election was the novelty-filled 1992 contest, which
featured the non-traditional candidacy of Ross Perot, a gregarious Texas outsider intent on
destroying “politics as usual”. Once Mr Perot predictably lost and politics went back to
being “as usual”, people’s interest again dropped away. This finding has also received
support in cross-national studies of political trust (Bowler and Karp 2004).
The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES), which contains multiple
ANES-like surveys run in multiple countries around the same time, has also found evidence
of low public interest in politics. Out of approximately 60,000 surveys across 35 nations in
the late 1990s and early 2000s, a full 57% of respondents could not name a single political
party or block of parties that they felt close to. Fewer than 10% were willing to say they felt
close to more than one party. If we restrict the CSES sample to long-standing democracies
only, where parties have had many decades to appeal to voters, the proportion of people
willing to say they feel close to any political party or block limps barely over the half way
line, up to 50.8%
6
The downward trend evident in the Figure is significant (p<0.001) in a simple regression of interest on time.
Other less scholarly polls, asking often more colorful questions, have retrieved the
same basic pattern of public attitudes. In 2006, for example, European polling house GfK
found that in the US, every country in Western Europe, and all eight countries surveyed in
Eastern Europe, politicians were the least trusted of nine professions. The margin of the
politicians’ “victory” was substantial in every case. In Western Europe, Italian and Greek
politicians fared the worst, with under 10% of the population rating politicians as “very
trustworthy” or “quite trustworthy” (GfK 2006). And in Britain, a 2007 Reader’s Digest
survey found that only 7% of Britons trust politicians to tell them the truth – a figure that
had dropped from 15% in 2002. The 2008 figure for used car salespeople was 8%, and all
other professions scored substantially higher (This is London 2007).
Other studies do show, however, that most citizens, even uninterested ones if the
surveys are to be believed, can be enticed into the polling booth if the conditions are right.
Close elections have significantly higher turnout (Franklin 1996, Cox and Munger 1999, Blais
2000), perhaps because a horse race is more compelling when the result is uncertain.
Elections with especially high-stakes also have higher turnout (Blais 2000). But these parttime circumstantial crutches cannot hide the lack of regard that citizens have for their
political leaders
Many members of the democratic elite (politicians, pundits, and professors) have
decried this lack of public interest in the day-to-day aspects of democracy, and the
consequent negative effects on political participation and therefore democracy (Lijphart
1997). Various parts of modern society have been blamed for this sorry state of affairs. The
education system has been blamed, either for having too little focus on civics (APSA
Taskforce on Civics Education in the 21st Century 1998), or for having too much focus on
civics (Hibbing and Theiss-Morse 1996). The political media have been blamed for playing
up on the game-show aspects of political competition (Patterson 1994, MORE). Youth
culture got blamed (see Bennet 1997 for discussion). Politicians who lie or are immoral
(Jeffery 2005), or accuse other politicians of lying or immorality (Ansolabehere and Iyengar
1995) have been blamed, too.
In Britain, the Prime Minister’s weekly Question Time in the House of Commons
has also been blamed (BBC 2002, Hansard Society 2002, Thomas 2005). Especially injurious
to the public, it is argued, is the increasing tendency of MPs from both sides of the House to
bait and tease each other during PMQs. “Prime Minister’s Questions are often cited as… the
Commons at its most adversarial and characterized by ‘yah-boo’ politics, as the PM and the
Leader of the Opposition confront each other and their supporters bay at each other” (Rush
2005, pp 238-9). This ‘yah-boo’ form of politics has been identified as a partial cause of the
recent decline in British voter turnout along with falling levels of trust in politicians and in
the political process:
“There is a danger, a danger that may already have been realized, that the popular disrepute
into which Prime Minister’s Question Time has fallen will overwhelm any popular
recognition of the value of PM's Question Time.” (Philip Norton, quoted in House of
Commons Select Committee on Procedure 1995, p 3)
“Viewers are literally switching off media stories of Westminster village gossip. The danger is
that they will also switch off from democracy” (Robin Cook, quoted in Hansard Society
2002, p 74)
“Many felt that on TV, politicians are always taking a dig at the opposition or disagreeing
unconstructively, and that this over time is devaluing politics. Politicians are further belittling
it by not stating what they stand for, believe in or feel. This makes politics less engaging to
many, and even redundant to some.” (BBC 2002, p 20)
These varied aspects of society partly attract blame because some see them as contributing to
a cheapening of democracy. Politics was once the purview of eloquent statesmen, lionized by
their followers and respected by their opponents, who comported themselves with dignity
and principle, and who participated in the nation’s two pre-eminent forums for all public
debate – legislatures and election campaigns. Nowadays politics has to compete for attention
with Jerry Springer and Judge Judy (Baum and Kernall 1999, Prior 2007), and the public face of
politics has consequently become more driven by Springer-esque scandal-mongering and Bill
O’Reilly-like sloganeering, and less by learned discussions of policy alternatives (CITES
Rush 2005). This, it is claimed, is why people do not like politics.
In this book I will show that large elements of this diagnosis are mistaken, and that
simplistic and emotive yelling about politics is, in fact, what many citizens prefer to see in
their political leaders. Plenty of those same citizens will disown that position as loudly as
they can, of course. But their approving actions will speak louder than their words of denial,
however vociferously they are spoken.
1.3.3
Making Politics Easy, Making Politics Fun
Simply put, politics is complicated. We can conceive of at least four broad aspects of this
complexity. First, debate about what policies the government should implement is certainly
multi-faceted, and many argue multi-dimensional, too (Hix 1999, Budge et al 2001, but see
also Poole and Rosenthal 1987). Second, in addition to the dimensions of policy
disagreement among the political elite, there is a constant debate along a “valence”
dimension, fought using politicians’ various gaffes, zingers, photo opportunities,
embarrassments, pandering, personal habits, family issues, and other miscellany (Stokes
1963, Enelow and Hinich 1982, Groseclose 2001). Third, the way that citizens decide to
judge the victor in this complex competition varies widely from person to person– some
base their vote on economic policy, others base it on perceived empathy, still others base it
on hair styles. And fourth, the competitors in this game are all acting strategically, targeting a
particular subset of voters who can shift the odds of winning in their favor at the lowest
possible policy or monetary cost. To many, it may appear that no other form of human
endeavor has as many facets of competition and forums for competition as does politics.
This complexity makes politics almost impossible to get one’s head around.
Gaining a complete understanding of political competition is not at all easy, requiring
the policy knowledge of an economist and a social worker and a doctor and many other
things besides, the cultural awareness of a gossip columnist, and the technical knowledge and
strategic savvy of a Las Vegas oddsmaker. Very few, if any, people have a complete
understanding of this form of human competition. That is why universities and political
parties and media outlets pay large sums of money to smart people who can only make some
vague sense of one or two aspects of the game. And even then those experts are wrong a
goodly proportion of the time.
Almost everybody in modern society does not understand particle physics. Political
competition is what particle physics would be if particles had egos, could define their own
physical laws, and were attracted to other particles for unknown reasons entirely personal to
themselves.
Given this complexity, what is the average citizen to do? Most people aren’t paid to
sit around and think about politics – instead they are paid to do something entirely different,
from teaching children to raising crops to manufacturing widgets to designing websites. For
some people, their job will involve interacting with the political process, but for most their
professional links with the political process are distant at best. And when most citizens get
home from their jobs, they are not only tired from their efforts but also have families to
feed, dogs to walk, lawns to mow, bills to pay, cars to fix, and “THIRTY ONE MILLION
UNITED STATE’S DOLLARS” to collect from their recently deceased Nigerian cousin.
This doesn’t leave much time for thinking about all the political questions of the day. And if
people with decades of training, who spend all day every day thinking about politics, disagree
with each other and make large numbers of incorrect predictions, citizens cannot really be
blamed for throwing their hands in the air. What are they to do in the face of all this
complexity?
One option is to hide from politics altogether, and that is what increasing numbers
of citizens in democracies are doing, in terms of both their affect and their actions. Interest
in politics is down across the advanced democracies, trust in leaders is down, and turnout in
elections is down. This reaction, however, flies in the face of the great and the good’s
exhortations that it is everyone’s sacred duty to vote in elections and care about politics. The
elite creates a distinct stigma to exercising the Exit option, and yet the masses are
increasingly heading for the exits.
There is another option available to harried citizens trying to get a quick, simple
handle on politics, and this second option does not fly in the face of their civics classes.
Citizens can seek shortcuts to acquiring political information. This way the citizens
participate in their democracy, thus avoiding withering looks from the worthy, while limiting
the time they spend thinking about politics, thus avoiding complaints from children,
colleagues, or consorts. This process of seeking informational shortcuts lies at the core of
my argument in this book.
Just as a statistic is simply a number that summarizes some other numbers, an
informational shortcut is a piece of information that summarizes some other information.
The phrase “tax-and-spend liberal” for example, is a shortcut for a vast array of policy
positions in many different areas. It connotes particular policy directions on social welfare,
healthcare, education, regulatory regimes, and housing in addition to taxation. “Fiscal
conservative” is a two-word phrase connoting the precise opposite. “Hawk” and “dove” are
even more efficient, connoting broad policy directions in the wildly complicated strategic
environment of international relations all in the space of four letters. And policy directions are
often all the shortcut-seeking citizen is looking for. Many people haven’t the time or
inclination to wrap their heads around concepts like a “$1 trillion deficit” (what does that
look like?) or 16% of something called “GDP.” Compared to considering these abstract
concepts, thinking about “more than today” or “less than today” is much more tractable. If
citizens can find out that a candidate is a Dovish Fiscal Conservative, then they are far closer
to making a decision about that politician that they were before. And all it took was three key
words, and mere seconds of their time.
Informational shortcuts need not be about policy – they work in other dimensions,
too. For example, US Senator George McGovern famously discovered that simply ordering
a Kosher hot dog with a glass of milk and scheduling a foreign policy speech for Friday
night at the synagogue spoke more to the Jewish community about his knowledge of
Judaism than the policy speech itself, or ten more like it. Gerald Ford infamously made a
similar discovery about unshucked tamales and Mexican-Americans four years later (Popkin
1991).
Political science has already considered two important questions about information
shortcuts: first are they real, and second do they work?
Are informational shortcuts real?
The answer to this first question is a resounding “yes,” which is important for this
project. If informational shortcuts were not real or commonly used, it would be difficult to
claim they are widely beneficial. Samuel Popkin’s The Reasoning Voter is the foundational
reference here. Popkin found that the process of seeking informational shortcuts, which he
calls Low Information Rationality, “best describes the kind of practical reasoning about
government and politics in which people actually engage” (Popkin 1991, 212). Indeed the
media has encouraged this kind of reasoning by broadcasting progressively smaller and
smaller snippets of Presidential speeches – the average length of a Presidential soundbite on
TV dropped from 45 seconds in 1968 to a mere nine seconds in 1988. With only nine
seconds at a time to make his case, the President, too, is forced to rely on very simple
statements connoting vastly more complex positions.
Popkin’s analysis is consistent with earlier, broader, theorizing about the role of
information in political competition. Downs (1957) recognized that in an uncertain world,
only limited amounts of information are needed before rational actors come to political
decisions, and that different people seek different quantities of information, each one
perfectly rational. He even addressed the ways in which people seek to reduce the cost of
political information, including “Employing others’ explicit value judgments to reduce
evaluative costs.” That process is central to mediated information shortcuts.
Popkin’s analysis is also consistent with later theorizing about the role that simple,
sweeping retrospective evaluations play in determining vote choice in elections. When the
economy grows well, voters reward the government of the day; when the economy heads
down the gurgler, so too does the incumbent’s electoral support (Fiorina 1981). This is a
quintessential informational shortcut – never mind why the economy performed the way it
did, never mind the candidates’ respective qualifications to run an economy, never mind
even their economic policies, this simple rule has a marked effect on election outcomes.
Popkin’s argument also found support in modern empirical work, which has found
that modern voters really do vote on the basis of the retrospective evaluations Fiorina
theorized about (e.g. Lewis-Beck 1988). Further, Wolfers (2002) also found that voters are
willing to judge Governors for economic outcomes that are clearly outside the Governors’
sphere of influence. The voters of New Jersey even punished the government for shark
attacks in 1916, even though those attacks were demonstrably not the government’s fault
(Achen and Bartels 2002).
Do informational shortcuts work?
Findings on the second research question about information shortcuts – are they a
normatively Good Idea? – are more mixed. The major debate in the literature is over
whether people informed only through shortcuts are capable of discharging the
responsibilities of democratic citizens. The debate bas noth normative and positive aspects.
On the normative side, Patterson (1994) has led the charge for the public to all be highly
informed about politics. How can citizens judge whose policy platform is best for them
when they do not know what the policy platforms are? But the charge has not been all in
one direction, with Zaller (2003) and others arguing that citizen oversight of their elected
leaders can just as effectively follow a “burglar alarm” model, where citizens are alerted to
the most important of issues. If citizens are constantly bombarded with large volumes of dry
political material, Zaller asks, how will they know which of it to care about? On the empirical
side, Lupia (1994) showed that citizens with very little information tend to make the same
democratic decisions as their very well informed compatriots, which calls into question the
value of that extra information for most people. But his finding has been challenged by
many others, including a dramatic claim by Oscarsson (2007) that that two recent Swedish
results would have been overturned if all the citizens had voted the same way as a wellinformed version of themselves.
I mention this debate in passing to acknowledge its existence and relevance to a great
many political science questions. It is not, however, especially relevant to the argument in
this book. In comparing the low level of citizen information with very high levels, scholars in
these debates are comparing the real world present with a highly hypothetical alternative.
Given the strength and persistence of the current trend – in which people around the world
progressively turn away from politics and learn less and less about it – it is hard to envisage a
scenario in which that trend is suddenly reversed and all the people become the highly
informed political analysts that Patterson desires. Swedish citizens are really not about to be
replaced by well-informed versions of themselves. The much more likely future is the one
that has Lijphart (1997) and many others worried – on in which the present trend continues
and democracy loses the legitimacy that comes with majority (or even large plurality)
participation.
This project’s aim is to compare a public informed through shortcuts with a public
that is chooses whether to participate in politics in the absence of those shortcuts. Scholars
such as Patterson are possibly right: maybe a public informed through shortcuts is not as
good at making democratic decisions as a universally fully informed public. But that really is
not a practical choice in democracies today.
One aspect of the literature on whether information shortcuts work that is relevant,
however, is the literature addressing questions about whether people actually gain some
political information from non-traditional media formats and sources. If people do not gain
information from such sources, then it becomes difficult to argue that a public informed
through these means is better equipped to make democratic decisions than an entirely
uninformed public. This is a new and growing literature, but already the evidence points
strongly towards the view that non-traditional sources and formats for political information
really do inform people.
In the context of learning news from non-traditional news sources, Matthew Baum
(2002, 2003, 2005) proposed a model where citizens pay “incidental attention” to political
issues while watching “soft news” talk shows like Oprah Winfrey because the political
information has been hidden in a low-cost entertainment oriented television format. He
finds empirical support for this model in patterns of citizen interest and learning about
foreign policy issues (2003, 2003) and in exploring the impact of presidential candidate
appearances on soft news shows on voter behavior in elections (2005).
Another set of scholars have explored the impact of late night political comedy
shows such as Saturday Night Live, The Daily Show with John Stewart, and The Colbert Report on
patterns of political learning and participation among their disproportionately young
audience (Pew Center 2000, 2004). The creators of these shows claim that they play no role
in the democratic process. Jon Stewart argues that: “[writers and comedians] need [viewers]
to know something before they even make a joke about it” (Bettag 2000). Jay Leno agrees,
saying: “we [writers and comedians] reinforce what people already believe” (Schaap 2000).
Their denials, however, are about their inability to persuade viewers to either care about
politics at all or to change their partisan viewpoint. The more interesting and more nuanced
question, however, is about whether late night comedy can persuade viewers to care more
about politics or to deepen or activate their pre-existing partisan preferences.
Young (2004) did not find overwhelming evidence of a late-night comedy effect, but
did find that as exposure to late night comedy went up, particularly among low knowledge
citizens, audiences tended to view candidates as less and less inspiring. Baungartner and
Morris (2006) came to similar conclusions. It may be here that late-night skewering of
candidates cued increased “negative partisanship” (that is, partisan attachments based on fear
and anger directed at opponents, rather than hope and excitement about a favored
candidate). A year later, Young (2005), now using experimental methods, did find that
political jokes can both successfully prime issues and traits and can also increase political
awareness among low-interest citizens.
Cao (2005) found that exposure to late night comedy shows increased knowledge
among citizens, and especially among young citizens. Parkin (2005) makes similar
conclusions, even finding that candidate appearances on late-night comedy shows actually
cause young viewers to increase their understanding of a candidate’s policy positions in
addition to her/his image.
This strand of research sources does seem to suggest that people can indeed learn
about important, serious issues even if the information is not presented to them in important
serious tones. It is not all upside, however, as the same treatment that increases knowledge
also appears to decrease trust in politicians, as I will briefly explore in chapter three.
To summarize, others in the field have established that informational shortcuts are
widely used by citizens assessing their political choices. And while there is not definitive
evidence that this is the normatively best way for democracies to function, there is also no
scholarly consensus that shortcut-taking is a practice we should be discouraging. I now wish
to extend our understanding of informational shortcuts further by asking:
1. Can political competition be structured so as to provide greater or fewer avenues for
informational shortcuts; and if so
2. What is the impact of the supply of informational shortcuts on political
participation?
1.3.4
Shortcuts to Participation
In this section, I argue that the nature of political competition can help determine the
availability of informational shortcuts to citizens. Before exploring how political competition
might generate shortcuts, we need to understand what an effective informational shortcut
looks like.
Effective shortcuts are pieces of information that are both short summaries of larger
volumes of information, and also are presented in a manner which citizens are likely to
observe and absorb. Shortcuts need not be verbal – the sight of hundreds of MPs refusing en
masse to clap a speech from their leader says more about party unity that almost anything
else, as Ian Duncan Smith and the British Conservative Party found in 20037. This is an
especially explicit display of a non-verbal cue (in this case it was a non-audible cue as well),
but more subtle displays of body language can also be effective – most humans are
subconsciously adept at picking up cues from body language. Indeed, one early estimate
suggested that the majority of social meaning from any conversation was taken from outside
of the spoken words (Birdwhistell 1970). Shortcuts also need not be overtly political. It was
Antony Downs (1957) who initially surmised that people could become “accidentally”
informed about politics by seeking entertainment, and Baum (2002, 2003, 2005) showed
specifically that people could successfully learn about political issues even when they are not
presented in a political form. People can learn about foreign policy by hearing about soldiers’
family lives.
So what makes an effective informational shortcut? Here I suggest three rules of thumb:
1. Informational shortcuts should be short. A long informational shortcut is like a short tall
person – unmemorable.
2. Informational shortcuts should be familiar to citizens. That familiarity makes the
shortcut easier for the citizen to understand and digest – thus lowering the cognitive cost
of gaining information. There are multiple avenues for achieving this familiarity. For
some shortcuts, familiarity comes from constant repetition and explanation – telling a
first-time computer user to “Command-Tab to Firefox” isn’t a shortcut at all, but it is
for a person familiar with computers. For other shortcuts, familiarity comes from linking
a non-familiar political concept with a familiar non-political concept – the use of
sporting metaphors is a good example of this process. For still others, familiarity is bred
through using a familiar delivery technique – if a political campaign ad looks jus like the
trailers for scary movies, people familiar with scary movies will find the political ad easy
to follow. As Popkin and Baum and others have shown us, that initial attraction and
attention is often all that is needed.
3. Informational shortcuts should also be catchy – both the shortcut and its association
with more detailed information should stick in the memory long after the shortcut has
disappeared from the screen or the page.
The tabloid Daily Mirror discerned that Conservative leader Ian Duncan Smith was in real trouble in late 2003
when Conservative MPs delivered him a “damning silent verdict,” refusing to cheer him during PMQs on
October 15. In response, “Labour MPs openly mocked Mr Duncan Smith by cheering and encouraging him.
MP Peter Bradley put in a motion calling on him to stay – signed by only Labour MPs” (Daily Mirror “IDS
Snubbed by Tories,” October 15, 2003).
7
A shortcut that has all three of these characteristics is likely to be successful, by which I
mean sit for a long time in a citizen’s heads representing larger volumes of more complex
information. A shortcut with any two of the characteristics has a fighting chance, and one or
none of the characteristics likely indicates failure.
Of course, informational shortcuts need not be effective in a partisan sense even if
they are effective in an informational sense. Dan Quayle, for example, created an
informational shortcut for his stances on multiple moral issues when he came out against the
behavior of fictional TV character Murphy Brown, who had borne a child alone and
dismissed the absence of a father from the child’s life as a “lifestyle choice.” Quayle’s “antiMurphy Brown” stance was, in informational terms, very effective: it was short and familiar
and catchy. But it was only familiar and catchy to viewers of the Murphy Brown show. For
those who did not view the show – including most of Quayle’s Republican party base, the
phrase “anti-Murphy Brown” would have served to confuse rather than clarify. “Who is
Murphy Brown and what party is he in?” they may have asked.
It is certainly true that some individuals are better at producing and delivering
informational shortcuts to citizens than are others. Compare the effectiveness of Ronald
Reagan’s “it’s morning in America” or Bill Clinton’s “it’s the economy, stupid!” to Barry
Goldwater’s “In your heart, you know he’s right” or Woodrow Wilson’s “14 points.” Some
politicians are just better at zingers than others. But can some political systems be structured
in such a way as to promote zingers, sloganeering, and other informational shortcuts more so
than other political systems?
The structure of political competition can provide varying amounts of informational
shortcuts by providing differing incentives for political communication to be short, familiar,
or catchy. There are multiple such mechanisms:
Grafting political divisions onto existing cleavage structures makes political appeals more
familiar. For example, when an ethnic party develops it can create slogans with
ethnic appeal like “Fairness and Compassion – the Bhuddist way.”
Grafting political messages into events ostensibly designed for entertainment increases familiarity
(and probably “catchiness” as well) by placing the political message in a well-known,
attractive context.
Quoting politicians in very short soundbites, or severely limiting the time allotted to their speeches,
forces them to condense their core messages into a few carefully crafted sentences.
This, from the citizen’s point of view, makes political communications shorter and
easier to digest.
Presenting political communications in a similar manner to entertainment increases catchiness
by hiding the “uninteresting” politics in an attractive context. (This last mechanism is
culturally specific. Making a piece of political news look like a short disaster movie is
only effective in cultures where people are familiar with, and like, disaster movies.)
We know that informational shortcuts, almost by definition, make marginal information less
costly to acquire. A short phrase is easier to remember than a long one, let alone a full policy
proposal or manifesto. This in turn implies that for any given level of cost that a person is
willing to bear acquiring political information, assuming they hold their overall budget fixed,
they will acquire more of it when the marginal cost is lower. And we already know that as
political information levels rise, so too does political participation. As discussed earlier, we
also know from educational psychology that people learn more when information is
presented to them in a “fun” or “interesting” manner. If follows that if political information
could be presented in a more “fun” or “interesting” (or “familiar” or “catchy”) manner, then
political learning would increase, thereby spurring voter turnout.
These arguments lead to the empirical claim that as communications from politicians
and elites to citizens contain more and more informational shortcuts, general political
information levels will rise and so too will rates of political participation. I call this a
“Shortcuts to Participation” argument. (I hope that this concise, perhaps even catchy phrase
will serve to help you, the reader, to recall the details of the argument at low cognitive cost
to you.)
So my answer to the question “why should we care about informational shortcuts?”
is this: The more citizens have access to informational shortcuts about politics, the more
they participate in the political process. Increasing political participation is widely regarded as
a normatively Good Thing. Therefore providing citizens with more access to informational
shortcuts is, in the absence of other countervailing effects, also a normatively Good Thing.
I started this section suggesting that political science should strive to better
understand what people like about politics, and my argument is that people like politics
when it is easy and enjoyable to follow. Much of the rest of this book, therefore, is about
political style. Writing on a related topic in 1986, historian Michael McGerr noted:
“[I, McGerr] focus on the trappings – partisan headlines, parades, and advertisements – that scholars
usually consider useful for adding a dash of color to history. Political style deserves more serious
attention.” (McGerr 1986, 9-10)
I couldn’t agree more. If catchy political style adds color to history, just imagine what it adds
when it is current. And in adding color to history, political style forms an important part of
that history, serving (I argue) as an important cause of the political events of the time. And if
it does all that, then political scientists should sit up, hold our noses if we must, and take
note.
Note: Readers should not take the Shortcuts to Participation argument to mean that
every pro-participation right-leaning politician everywhere in the world should immediately
take to calling everyone left of them a “tax-and-spend liberal” at every opportunity, nor that
every leftist should brand all to the right of them “slash-and-burn supply siders.” Turnout
jumps do not automatically follow any spate of partisan name-calling. Informational
shortcuts are only effective if the population you are talking to knows what they mean. That
takes time. And they’re most effective when they’re familiar and culturally appropriate in
terms of context and tone, whereas “tax-and-spend liberal” and “slash-and-burn supplysider” have distinctly American cultural connotations.
1.4 Initial Evaluation of the “Shortcuts to Participation” Argument
In this section, I present a series of four brief vignettes from different parts of American
history, which illustrate the viability of the Shortcuts to Participation argument, and its
resilience to changing context. I choose American history because most extant work on the
role of information in political decision-making examines the American case. The first looks
broadly at the period of US political history starting with the Civil War and stretching
through the late 18th century to the rise of the Progressive Movement in the early 20th
century. The second examines more closely Tammany Hall, a particular political machine
from that time and place more, more closely. The third explores recent developments in
American political advertising. And the fourth looks at the rise of new, non-traditional
sources of political news.
I will move to apply this argument to QT institutions after surveying them in
Chapter 2.
1.4.1
The Rise and Fall of the Liberty Pole.
It is well known that America today has one of the lowest rates of voter turnout of any
advanced democracy. Civic apathy, it seems, is a cancer on American civic life, engulfing
ever more of its citizens in every passing generation. The US has not, however, always been
the runt of the participatory litter. In the tumultuous times surrounding the Civil War,
political participation was infectious in America. Despite poor literacy, poverty, and lack of
leisure time, millions of Americans filled the streets of the growing cities of the east coast,
feverishly cheering on their champions in elections at all levels, from the US Presidency all
the way down to the city level. Why this period? Why so much participation? And what
finally killed this mass mobilization? The key to answering those questions lies in
understanding that politics looks best when it looks simplest – sold in the very basic story
arc of the boxing match or the excited sloganeering of the entertainment spectacular.
The famed Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 have come to occupy a special place in
American democratic folklore. They are seen as a symbol of America’s great conversation
over the issue of race, and of the great civic-minded tradition of Illinois’ leaders and people.
Davis and Wilson (2008, p ix) introduce the debates this way:
“The Lincoln-Douglas debates have been models for interactive political discourse in this country for
nearly half a century, since the Kennedy-Nixon campaign of 1960. For a century longer than that they
have been known as constituting one of the great events in American political history. They now exist
as veritable icons of our democratic political culture, venerated and emulated especially at election
times…”
Similar assessments of the debates’ normative value and positive influence can be found in
dedicated volumes by Jaffa (1959) and Guelzo (2008) among others. The lofty folklore
surrounding the debates should not, however, mask what actually drew so many people,
both elite and masses, out to the events.8
Schudson (1998, pp 133-143) describes the debates as “a high point of nineteenth
century American political discourse and political participation” (p 135), before noting that
some of the central features of the debates were less about reasoned debate of policy issues
than they were about politics-as-entertainment and politics-as-sport. Schudson asks “… what
were the [10,000 to 20,000] people there for? To cheer their champions to victory…
Douglas’s opening speech in Ottawa was interrupted over and over by cries of “Hit him
again” and “Put it at him” and “That’s it,” and “He can’t dodge you” and other enthusiastic
expostulations. This was the best show in town.” (p 136) Lincoln and Douglas, in between
making their arguments (without any form of amplification so that only a tiny minority of
The blame for some of this misunderstanding of the debates lies partly with Lincoln himself, who deleted the
cheering and other audience interruptions (of which there were many) from his scrapbook of the debates, on
which many texts are based. (Angle 1981, pp xlv-xlvi)
8
the vast audience could actually hear anything at all that they had to say), also “made ad
hominem attacks, raised conspiracy theories… and tried to maneuver their opponent into
politically embarrassing admissions. Much of the debate time was occupied with Lincoln and
Douglas ‘haranguing each other on purely diversionary points’ (Holzer 1993, p 5).” (p 137.
Secondary citation added).
Most of the attendees at the debates didn’t actually hear the debaters or learn
anything about politics, but they participated because they were having a good time. And the
reason they were having a good time is that the complicated politics of the day were being
presented to them in the familiar frame of the prize-fight. This frame made the events easier
for the attendees to understand.
This frame was not unique to the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Considering stump
speeches in that period generally, Sparks (1918, pp6-7) noted:
“A good "stump speaker" could always attract a crowd, and a wit combat between two speakers
representing opposite parties was a real holiday of sport. It is true that the jokes and counter-strokes
were often feeble attempts, and sometimes not very far removed from vulgarity; but the stronger the
blows the better they were liked, and the more personal, the more enjoyable they were.”
Politics during the most of the 19th century revolved around many other political spectacles,
including torchlight parades and partisan competitions in erecting 100 foot high “liberty
poles.” Little has been written about this aspect of American political history, although an
exception is Michael McGerr’s excellent 1986 history The Decline of Popular Politics, on which
the following account is heavily reliant.
The political spectacles of the 19th century attracted huge hordes of voters, many
newly-enfranchised. Through the darkened city streets they marched, illuminated by
kerosene, fueled by alcohol, and lead by patriotic brass bands playing The Star Spangled
Banner for all to hear. Flags were unfurled, saluted, and ostentatiously honored. Sometimes
multiple speeches were made simultaneously to the same crowd, because the crowd often
grew so big that the people in the middle, let alone the back, had no idea what was going on
at the front. And the speeches themselves were typically not dense policy tracts, as noted by
Sparks. They proclaimed patriotism and denounced opponents, both in sweeping, general
terms.
To take one example of a spectacular political event from the period, Ryan (1997, p
94) recounts a mock naval battle in the streets of New York where a horde of people
backing the fake naval vessel Constitution tangled with a riotous mob whose champion was
the Veto. Political arguments about the veto and the constitution underlay the event, but the
event itself was little more than dueling carnivals with similar themes. In this case as in so
many others of the period, the political elites had used a familiar and catchy frame and a
hugely stripped down message to spread their complicated arguments throughout the often
barely-literate citizenry. Understanding the constitutional nuance of arguments for and
against the Presidential veto of Congressional action is difficult. Noticing that people like
you are lined up behind a boat that says ‘Veto’ on the front is easy.
In the country areas, pole-raising ceremonies were common, as rival partisan groups
strived to raise their flag higher than each other. Some of these poles reached 150ft high.
Again, this was much more politics-as-entertainment than politics-as-reasoned-debate, and
once parties’ liberty poles started to become subject to nocturnal sabotage raids by partisan
antagonists, the line between partisan politics and adolescent pranks became blurry indeed.
The media played their part, too, nakedly taking sides in political campaigns and
joining in the sloganeering and hijinks:
“Always ready to expose the opposing party’s “lies” and “roorbacks,” the editor set an example of
militant, combative partisanship for his readers. “ANOTHER DEMOCRATIC SHAM” ran a typical
heading in the Republican New York Tribune in 1880. Democratic papers took the same tack. In 1876,
the New York World could head a news story about a Republican leader “HOW BLAINE KEEPS UP
HIS LYING STATEMENTS.” . . . In much of the press, partisan opinion seemed almost to overwhelm
the news. The mid-nineteenth century paper, Berman Brockway has insisted, “was not a newspaper at
all. It contained little news of a general character, and almost no local intelligence. It was simply the
organ of a party.”. . . Papers habitually reported victories for their party as “Good News” and
“GLORIOUS NEWS.” “BOYS, WE’VE GOT ’EM,” the New York Tribune exulted over a report of
state elections in 1860.” (McGerr 1986, 18-20)
In short, public politics in the 19th century was not about detailed policy comparisons.
Instead it was about the most simplistic of messages, delivered to the public in bite-sized
form, garnished with a vast array of familiar, populist distractions. And all of these
distractions, from the giant pole appearing in the town square to the boisterous parades in
the streets to the declaratory banner headlines on every corner, served to inform all the nonpartisans – in a low-cost and attention-grabbing way – about the basic elements of the
upcoming election.
[Figure 1.2 about here]
What was the result of the spectacular politics of the 19th century, where public
involvement had little to do with policymaking and much to do with simple-minded
exuberances? The result was the highest rate of electoral turnout in American history
(Schudson 1998, 145). Figure 1.2 charts voter turnout in the US since 1828, using historical
data constructed by Nardulli, Dalager, and Greco (1996). It clearly shows the spectacular era
coinciding with the highest turnout rates in the nation’s history. The figure also shows what
happened next – the Progressives came.
Starting in the mid-1870s, the leaders of the Progressive movement sought a
different method for doing the nation’s political business, one that relied more on
intellectual appeal and less on sensory appeal. Among the movements’ many other political
innovations, early Progressives pioneered the first putative targeted political mailing scheme
through their Literary Bureaus. This method for reaching and persuading voters took an
increasingly prominent role in Progressive (mainly Democratic) election campaigns in the
final years of the 19th century. Influential figures like Samuel J. Tilden considered the
trappings of the earlier spectacular campaigns to be largely a waste of resources, guaranteed
to entertain the public, but not to garner their votes. Complaining about the “waste” of
millions of dollars on uniforms for marching companies, brass bands, and the like, the New
Haven Democratic Union said that “…the money would be much better spent in circulating
judiciously prepared documents that would enlighten the voters by appealing to their
intelligence.”
The Progressive Democrats’ techniques had the effect of making politics more
complicated for their supporters. Now they had manifestos to grapple with, and none of the
informational shortcuts in old the spectacular displays of Democratic partisanship to help
them. Republican candidates stuck more closely to the traditional spectacular campaigns
(McGerr 1986, 75) until 1892, when Republican elites were also won over by the appeals of
the Progressive reformers. The result in 1892? Widespread apathy, as men without the
education to understand the finer points of tariff law were forced to read policy literature
rather than attend torchlight parades. Election turnout fell into decline, a decline that lasted
throughout the Progressive era (see figure 1.2).
Is there a causal relationship behind this correlation? The paucity of 19th century data
makes it hard to settle that question scientifically. McGerr does, however, make a causal
argument, claiming that the torchlight parades and liberty poles were catalysts for a culture
of popular, participatory politics. In replacing the parades with pamphlets, the Progressives
supplanted an effective catalyst with an effective sedative.
Discussion of this era does, of course, raise some important normative questions.
We may seek political participation as a normative good, but we do not generally seek it at all
costs. Some may argue that the votes of the entirely uninformed aren’t of any benefit to
democracy, because democratic governance relies on informed consent. The shortcuts to
participation argument I made earlier, coupled with the assorted insights of Popkin and
others, suggests that 19th century citizens did gleam some basic political information and
understanding through the hurrah-filled speeches and the mock naval battles, thus making
their participation and consent at least partly informed.
1.4.2
Jobs and Fun Patrols at Tammany Hall
The rationality-based calculus of voting, as originally conceived by Downs (1957) and Riker
and Ordeshook (1968) involves a very poor bargain. In return for the voters’ efforts to
inform themselves about candidates, register to vote, travel to the booth, and stand in line,
the voter receives next to nothing. If their party wins they may receive something substantial,
but the probability of their vote being crucial to that eventuality is so small that the expected
value of voting is almost always negative.
Patronage systems are different. In patronage systems, voters are promised personal
rewards such as public sector jobs or contracts or money in return for their vote, whether
their vote was instrumental or not. The key to receiving the reward lies in securing votes for
the victorious party, not just in the party’s victory. By these means the calculus for political
mobilization is tilted far more heavily in favor of the decision to participate in patronage
societies than in other forms of democracy. In these cases, participating in politics is not
about the citizen contributing to a larger policy debate about the future of the territory;
instead, it is a job interview, whether the citizen wants to be a butcher, a baker, or a
candlestick maker to the government.
One of the earliest organizations to offer patronage to large numbers of citizens in a
democracy was Tammany Hall, the New York fraternal organization that developed into the
heart of the US Democratic party in New York City for nearly a century. In return for
working for the Tammany ticket on election day, delivering both ones’ own vote and the
votes of one’s friends, Tammany provided jobs. Many thousands of jobs, all through New
York’s city government. And Tammany did not mind particularly whether a person was
suited to doing a job, only whether the person was suitably committed to the Tammany
cause. This is how Tammany ran New York during the late 19th century. But around 1900,
the first vestiges of the Progressive Movement tried to pass civil service laws introducing
exams and minimum standards for public employees. George W Plunkitt, a Tammany ward
boss, was incensed:
“This civic service law is the biggest fraud of the age. It is the curse of the nation. There can
be no real patriotism while it lasts. How are you goin’ to interest our young men in their
country if you have no offices to give them if they work for their party? Just look at things I
this city to-day. There are ten thousand good offices, but we can’t get at more than a few
hundred of them. How are we goin’ to provide for the thousands of men who worked for
the Tammany ticket? It can’t be done. These men were full of patriotism a short time ago.
They expected to be servin’ their city, but when we tell them that we can’t place them, do
you think their patriotism is goin’ to last? Not much. They say: ‘What’s the use of workin’
for your country anyhow? There’s nothin’ in the game.’ And what can they do? I don’t
know, but I’ll tell you what they do know. I know more than one young man in past years
who worked for the ticket and was just overflowin’ with patriotism, but when he was
knocked out by the civil service humbug he got to hate his country and became an
anarchist.” (Riordon 1994, 54)
Plunkitt sensed that the whole Tammany Hall operation (which was the real subject of the
‘patriotism’ he so cherished) depended on the promise of meaningful reward for the act of
voting. Without it, he correctly feared, participation in city politics would fall. (Nardulli,
Dalager, and Greco (1996) found that participation in the US’s main urban areas – including
New York – dropped to even lower levels than the country as a whole during the
Progressive era.)
Tammany had always, however, needed more votes than it had jobs to distribute. To
raise these votes, its lieutenants sought to please their constituents in other ways, including
more limited material gains (Plunkitt (Riordan 1994, 64) boasts of the votes to be gained in
the aftermath of a fire, if a politician is willing to engage in a little philanthropy) and even
purely psychological satisfaction:
“There’s only one way to hold a district; you must study human nature and act accordin’…
For instance, here’s how I gather in the young men. I hear of a young feller that’s proud of
his voice, thinks he can sing fine. I ask him to come around to Washington Hall and join our
Glee Club. He comes and sings, and he’s a follower of Plunkitt for life. Another young feller
gains a reputation as a baseball player in a vacant lot. I bring him into our baseball club. That
fixes him. You’ll find him workin’ for my ticket at the polls next election day… I rope them
all in by givin’ them opportunities to show themselves off. I don’t trouble them with political
arguments. I just study human nature and act acordin’.” (Riordan 1994, 62)
These anecdotes suggest that the successful politicians of Tammany Hall knew that to
mobilize often poor and illiterate voters in New York, they needed to concentrate on very
direct, targeted ways of improving voters’ (and only voters’) lives. Rather than ask voters to
contribute to the greater good or to understand complicated and abstract policies, politicians
instead promised and delivered voters immediate, tangible gains. This is a very different
process of mobilization than the “citizen duty” appeals favored in the subsequent
Progressive Era, and by some later students of political participation; instead, this was
political participation as a direct route to non-political gratification for the voter.
Tammany’s tactics did not, strictly speaking, constitute “shortcuts to participation.”
They went one step further than shortcuts – instead of using simple, catchy language to
summarize complicated information, they just ignored the complicated information
altogether. What this episode does further illustrate, however, is the participatory value of
disguising a political argument as something else – something more familiar and exciting to
the experience of citizens. In the Reconstruction era, politics was disguised as a parade.
Tammany Hall disguised politics as a job advertisement. And, as we will see, in the modern
world politics is often disguised as a cross between a pulp gotcha novel and a standup
comedy routine.
1.4.3
The Oprah Winfrey / Chris Matthews / Jon Stewart Effect
Jon Stewart, the sardonic host of Comedy Central’s consciously fake news show The Daily
Show with Jon Stewart, would probably not like being lumped in with Chris Matthews, the
bombastic host of MSNBC’s political talk show Hardball with Chris Matthews. And neither of
them would likely believe themselves in the same category as daytime TV billionaire Oprah
Winfrey. But the TV exploits of all three of these people, along with others such as Jay Leno,
Conan O’Brien, Bill O’Reilly and Stephen Colbert, all belong in the same category, because
all of their shows use comedy and melodrama as informational shortcuts, extending the
reach of politics into the modern American electorate.
The informational shortcuts in these shows can come in multiple forms. The late
night comedy shows feature humorous one-liners about politics and policy. The ultracombative political talkshows feature emotionally charged discourse broken into very short
chunks (nobody gets to talk uninterrupted for very long on those shows). And the daytime
society talk shows present items with political relevance in the same tone as their other
items, which viewers tune in to for entertainment. But all these shortcuts have the same
effect – to make it easier for viewers to learn about politics. In recent years, scholars of
American politics have started to examine the effects of these shows, and they have come to
a consistent conclusion – they are all good for political engagement.
While the creators of the late-night comedy shows profess to have no informative
role in the democratic process, the research I discussed earlier in this chapter strongly
suggests that these shows really do help people activate their wek partisan leanings and turn
them into political action (Young 2005, Cao 2005, Parkin 2005).
Exploring political talk shows, Mutz and Reeves (2005) demonstrate experimentally
that citizens prefer watching a non-traditional, uncivil Hardball-style political interview show
to a more civil and traditional format. The looked for this increased arousal both through
questionnaires and through physiological testing – strapping people to heart rate monitors
and sweat collectors then playing them fake talkshow clips. With tone the only difference
between the treatments, subjects responded to the combative show format with higher heart
rates and increased sweating, and reported increased interest. This represents evidence that
people like politics when it is loud and when it is obnoxious.
Matthew Baum’s (2002, 2003, 2005) studies of shows like Oprah Winfrey or The
Tonight Show, discussed earlier in the chapter, also speak to this effect. As he and all the other
work reviewed here shows, formats containing large doses of comedy, melodrama, or realitybased soap opera can sneak political information into viewers’ heads while they laugh, yell,
or cry along to the show’s tune.
The comparison group in all the observational studies cited above is the rest of the
population, who are likely to still recive some news over the television – most often from the
main broadcast networks. Those outlets are no longer broadcasting to the Full News
Standard recommended by Patterson (1994), but while they have adopted a stripped-down
content format, they have not incorporated as may informational shortcuts into the tone of
their broadcasts. They are presenting lightweight news seriously, while the non-traditional
shows are presenting lightweight news with some levity. The evidence I cite above,
consistent with the Shortcuts to Participation argument, suggests that the less staid and
serious tones of non-traditional news shows are better and engaging and informing the
public than the traditional tone.
1.4.4
Counterpoint? The Participatory Impact of Calling Your Opponent a Stupid Moron
Once upon a time, decorum ruled in televised political advertising. Candidates’ ads soberly
documented their lifelong journey towards elective office, and laid out what they wanted to
accomplish if elected. These ads studiously ignored the candidates’ opponent, in the same
way that most Coke ads still make no mention of Pepsi. But these norms did not last. More
recently, political ads have started to draw viewers’ attention to the darker side of their
opponent’s record, proposals, or personality. Cheerful music was replaced with foreboding
tones. Colorful images of children on swing sets were replaced with black and white images
of opponents in committee rooms. The tone of American political advertising darkened, and
their appeals depended more and more on emotion like fear and anger than hope or
excitement.
Civil society, and through them the public at large, howled in complaint. Academics
and commentators queued up to “decry the superficiality and lack of informational content”
in many modern political ads (Ansolabehere and Iyengar 1995, 7). Similar critiques pointed
to the “deceptive,” “manipulative,” and “dirty” aspects of negative political advertising.
Larry Bartels (2000) noted that the public, too, has become entirely dissatisfied with the
campaign messages they are subjected to, and many subsequent opinion polls bolstered his
claim. Kathleen Hall Jamieson (1992), concerned about the way sensationalist attack ads
derail discussions of serious policy alternatives, argued instead for a “fair, accurate,
contextual, comparative, engaged campaign discourse by candidates.” Nobody would claim
that the campaigns around the time of her writing, replete with primary ads like “Gays on
Parade” and general election ads like “Willie Horton” and “Tank Ride” (see full discussion in
Ansolabehere and Iyengar (1995) and Jamieson (1992)), represented the kind of campaign
she wanted to see. Thomas Patterson (1994) worried that all this negativity and mudslinging
was linked to the sometimes bewildering cynicism in the political media. Senator Tom
Daschle even called negative campaigning “the crack cocaine of politics.” One particular
concern was that the prevalence of negative campaigning would get to be too much for the
citizens, who would resile from their democratic duty in disgust at their leaders’ petty antics.
Perhaps the most prominent early study on this topic was Steve Ansolabehere and
Shanto Iyengar’s 1995 book Going Negative. The authors ran multiple tests of the critics’ ideas
about negative advertising, and found that:
 In amongst all the “superficiality” that critics decry in negative ads, there is
actually enough information for citizens to learn about their candidates’
positions, and that this information “simplifies the task of voting” and has a
meaningful effect on voters’ deliberations;
 Negative advertisements do not, as critics claim, “manipulate” public opinion –
rather they activate pre-existing latent attitudes;
 Negative advertising does, however, tend to turn people away from the voting
booth, suppressing turnout in elections. That this suppression is non-random
across the community and may work to the strategic advantage of some
candidates is deeply troubling for Ansolabehere and Iyengar.
Alsolabehere and Iyengar’s first finding is consistent with the Shortcuts to Participation
argument, but the last finding is not. It seems that a simple, easily digested information
shortcut did all the things I expected it do to except bring people to the polls. The people
care more about the election’s outcome, they know more about the candidate’s positions,
and yet Ansolabehere and Iyengar suggest they stay home as a result. The majority of their
analyses were experiments, which can sometimes have issues with external validity. More
importantly, subsequent studies suggest that Alsolabehere and Iyengar’s finding on turnout is
incorrect.
Finkel and Geer (1998), Lau et. al. (1999) Vavreck (2001), Brooks (2002, 2004),
Clinton and Lapinski (2004), and Geer (2006) all fail to find any negative relationship
between advertising negativity and electoral turnout. Some of these later studies even find a
positive relationship between negativity and participatory attitudes, and between negativity
and turnout. This sustained attack on the earlier findings across multiple datasets, and
multiple methods (including some critical re-evaluation of Ansolabehere and Iyengar’s
original experiments), suggests that the scholarly evidence now points to the conclusion that
negative campaigning does not in fact demobilize the electorate, and it may even act as a
mobilizing force. If that second (as yet speculative) finding is further confirmed in later
work, then negative advertising would sit squarely with torchlight parades, Tammany Hall,
and The Colbert Report as examples of informational shortcuts spurring political participation
in America.
1.4.5
Objection? The New Media Environment
Some readers may object to any argument hinging on tricking people into caring or learning
about politics, because it is now relatively easy for anyone who doesn’t actually care about
politics to avoid it altogether. Markus Prior’s excellent (2005) book Post-Broadcast Democracy
details the increasing ease with which people can avoid political content in their media
choices in America, and the polarizing effect this has between not only Democrats and
Republicans, but also the participatory political-haves and the non-participatory politicalhave nots. Prior is undoubtedly right about this process, and it is equally certain that the
same process is underway in most other advanced democracies. But the increase in
consumer media choice actually makes the way political information is presented more
important, not less.
Before the explosion of cable TV, it didn’t really matter how ham-fistedly a candidate
or office-holder presented their political information. If they were an important person, the
networks would cover it. And the networks reached a large majority of the electorate Prior
(2005, 1, 35) estimates that in this “low choice” media environment, 60-80% of people
watched the news. Night after night. Week after week. In this environment, poorly presented
political information could be drummed into unwilling citizens through sheer weight of
repetition.
In an era of wide media choice, on the other hand, quality presentation is everything.
This is for two reasons. First, the percentage of people watching the network news on an
average night has plummeted to around 20%, and those viewers are less likely to be regular,
five-nights-a-week viewers than before. So for political information to “stick,” it increasingly
has to stick first time. Second, that 20% of people watching the network news (and the
further small percentage of highly motivated news watchers who view cable news)
increasingly act as the conduit of political information to the other 80% of the population
who avoided watching the news. The majority can avoid newscasts very easily, but it is less
easy to avoid their social network – their parents, sons, daughters, siblings, coworkers, fellow
parishioners, team-mates, and so on. I suggest that people in that social network are more
likely to pass on this political information is they found it memorable themselves, and the
information is easier to pass on if it comes “pre-bundled” with catch-phrases, colorful
examples, and punch-lines. If anything, this new media environment in which a marginal
voter is less likely to be exposed to political messages makes the crafting of those messages
even more important. If you only get one shot at a target, you had better be sure you aren’t
firing a blank.
1.5 Summary
In this chapter I have briefly introduced the purpose of this study of Question Times in the
advanced democracies, and I have proposed an argument linking the study of information
shortcuts with the study of political participation. My argument, which I term the Shortcuts
to Participation argument, is that:
1. Most people are not innately predisposed to liking political debate. Debates over
policies are convoluted and complicated, and most people cannot afford to invest
the time and energy to get fully informed about them - they have too much else on
their plates;
2. People are therefore more likely to take an interest in politics when it is presented to
them in simple, easy to understand terms, and in a form that doesn’t look too much
like hard work;
3. Political elites can present politics in such a way by making extensive use of
informational shortcuts. I presented theoretical and empirical studies of these
shortcuts in the context of American politics, all of which show that people do make
use of informational shortcuts, and that these shortcuts help people learn about
politics.
4. Recalling the many studies showing that people participate more in politics when
then know about it, and the many other studies showing that people learn more
when they are interested, the prediction we can draw from this argument is that
people are more likely to participate in politics when political debate is presented to
them using informational shortcuts.
My purpose in making this argument was not to posit any starkly original thinking, but rather
to present a broad-brush synthesis of findings in various corners of the political behavior
field. I hope to have presented this synthesis in such a way as to make an argument that is
applicable to many different political contexts, including the comparative study of political
institutions. None of the individual constituent claims in my argument, however, are in any
sense new. The first statement is a staple of long-standing work on democratic
disengagement. The second a restatement of a core educational psychology research
program in a new context. The third is a key finding in the literature on media politics and
election campaigning in the US. And the fourth is based on one of the central findings in
work on electoral mobilization.
Apart from achieving this task of synthesis, I think the Shortcuts to Participation
argument can help achieve two further goals.
First, while the constituent parts of the argument are well established, there has been
little work establishing the joint implications of the four findings when considered together.
That is, scholars of informational shortcuts have not generally considered their crossnational impacts on political mobilization before. Therefore in considering these premises
together, I am proposing a new and untested stylized fact.
Second, this argument shows promise in streamlining our understanding of the
mobilizing role of certain political information. There has been a tremendous amount of
work, some reviewed in this chapter, about how some previously-frowned upon political
practices may actually spur mass political engagement. Such practices include attack
advertising, spectacular displays of partisanship, simplistic political discourse, and new “soft”
vehicles for political news. In each individual case, researchers have found that these
practices, often to the chagrin of the political establishment, spur citizen participation in
politics. The research has, however, remained mainly compartmentalized. What the
researchers did not often consider was that each of these practices formed a part of a larger
class of shortcut-laden political information, and that we can broadly understand the effects
of each individual practice by considering them all together. That is, there is some chance
that this broader, more sweeping argument about political information satisfies both the
demands for Lakatosian theoretical improvement and of Occum’s Razor.
In the next chapter, I introduce the institution of question time and I suggest how
the Shortcuts to Participation argument might be applied to cross-national studies of
legislatures.
Table 1.1: Political Interest, Knowledge, and Turnout in the US.
Dependent Variable
Estimation Procedure
Constant
p-value
Political Interest
p-value
(1)
(2)
(3)
Turnout
Candidate recall
Turnout
Logit
Ordered logit
Logit
-1.132***
-2.350***
(0.000)
(0.000)
0.9444***
0.790***
(0.000)
(0.000)
Interest Instrument
1.592***
p-value
N
(0.000)
39,610
22,601
Cut1 (s.e.)
2.397 (0.047)
Cut2 (s.e.)
3.825 (0.051)
7,486
Figure 1.1: Political Interest in the US, 1960-2002
Self-reported political interest (1-3 scale)
2.4
2.2
2
1.8
1960
1970
1980
1990
Year
2000
2010
Figure 1.2: Voter Turnout in US Presidential Elections 1828-2004
(%)
90
Spectacular era
80
70
60
50
40
Progressive era
30
20
10
0
1828
1848
1868
1888
1908
1928
1948
1968
1988
2008