Communication and Public Opinion: Plus Ca Change?

Abstract

Three central themes that have persisted throughout the history of research on communication and public opinion are examined in light of past, present, and future research. These themes include (1) ongoing concerns surrounding the political diversity of the communica- tion environment; (2) selective exposure to political communication; and (3) the interrelationship between mass and interpersonal political commu- nication. We explore the importance of these themes with an emphasis on how technological changes have made them, if anything, more relevant today than they were when first identified as central concerns of the discipline. To say that communication technology has changed dramatically since the last Public Opinion Quarterly anniversary issue in 1987 is to state the obvious. But technological change alone does not necessarily dictate changes in the locus of scholarly concern. In this article, we suggest that many of the same themes that Elihu Katz identified on the 50th anniversary ofPublicOpinionQuarterly— which were themselves drawn from the earliest studies of communication and public opinion in the 1940s and 1950s—are as relevant today as ever. In this article, we review three major themes that connect studies of communication and public opinion from the past to those in the present and likely future. First, scholarly activity reflects an ongoing interest in the political diversity of the communication environment. To what extent does the information environ- ment approximate the democratic ideal of a marketplace of ideas? In this case, the research question is largely a descriptive one, asking to what extent the state of the communication environment is as one would like it to be. Beyond diversity, two additional themes follow directly from the earliest empirical