A New Era of Minimal Effects? The Changing Foundations of Political Communication

Abstract

The great thinkers who influenced the contemporary field of political communication were preoccupied with understanding the political, social, psychological, and economic transformations in modern industrial society. But societies have changed so dramatically since the time of these landmark contributions that one must question the continuing relevance of paradigms drawn from them. To cite but a few examples, people have become increasingly detached from overarching institutions such as public schools, political parties, and civic groups, which at one time provided a shared context for receiving and interpreting messages. What are the implications of this detachment on how people respond to media messages? Information channels have proliferated and simultaneously become more individualized. Is it still relevant to conceive of ‘‘mass media’’ or has that concept been made obsolete by audience fragmentation and isolation from the public sphere? Does this new environment foreshadow a return to a time of minimal effects? If we are looking at a new minimal effects era, how can we distinguish it from the last such period? Retracing some of the intellectual origins of the field may help us identify the fundamental changes in society and communication technologies that are affecting the composition of audiences, the delivery of information, and the experience of politics itself. In particular, we are concerned with the growing disjuncture between the prevailing research strategies and the sociotechnological context of political communication, which may give rise to unproductive battles over findings (Donsbach, 2006). To the extent that research paradigms fail to reflect prevailing social and technological patterns, the validity of results will be in serious question. Consider just one case in point: the famous earlier era of ‘‘minimal effects’’ that emerged from studies done in the 1940s and early 1950s (Klapper, 1960). The underlying context for this scholarship consisted of a premass communication media system and relatively dense memberships in a group-based society networked through political parties, churches, unions, and service organizations (Putnam, 2000). At this time, scholars concluded that media messages were filtered through social reference processes as described in the two-step flow model proposed by Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955; Bennett & Manheim, 2006). Although the classic study by Lang