Following the Campaign: Politicization, Confirmation, and Polarization

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What is the purpose of election campaigns? Do they have an impact on voting behavior and, more specifically, do they affect the processes of electoral decision making? For more than sixty years a whole branch of political science research has been attempting to answer these questions but has yet to come up with any definitive answers.1 One school of thought, which represents a continuation of the Columbia School (Lazarsfeld et al., 1944; Lazarsfeld 1948) and Michigan School (Campbell et al., 1 960) t raditions, r egards c ampaigns as having only a marginal impact on the outcome of elections. For them, voting behavior is primarily linked to party identification of voters, which operates as a kind of filter of the information that candidates attempt to communicate. They believe that campaigns can do no more than reinforce voters’ preexisting opinions. A second school of thought, which was established in the 1970s, focused on the often negative influence of the media on election campaigns (Schwartzenberg, 1977; Bourdieu, 1996; C apella a nd J amieson, 1997). According to t his tradition, the media structure the definition of the key election issues (agenda setting), shape the perception of political debates (framing), or influence the criteria used by voters to evaluate candidates (priming effect) (Iyengar, 1994). For the last twenty years or so, research has increasingly sought to analyze the way voters process the information they receive during election campaigns, stressing, for example, the importance of the heuristics that enable political judgments to be made using a minimum amount of information ( Sniderman, H agen, Tetlock, a nd B rady, 1 991; Kuklinski, 2001a). The way voters articulate both information sources in the media and interpersonal communication has also been subjected to fresh analysis. Although the most recent work in this field has tended to stress the importance of the conjunctural, it does not dismiss the conclusions of earlier research. The literature on the functions and effects of election campaigns highlights their lack of uniformity: their influence varies significantly f rom one voter to t he n ext (Zaller, 1992a). Voters do n ot a ll relate to election campaigns in the same way, and the manner and intensity of their exposure to election debates can also vary considerably. Moreover, the processes used by voters to come to their final decision are not all the same. As Richard Lau and David Redlawsk (2006) have noted, some voters actively gather information about the various candidates in order to make comparisons (“rational” vote), whereas others concentrate on candidates’ positions on the issues that matter most to them (issue voting). Some voters follow election campaigns in a selective way and only retain information that provides confirmation of the views they already hold. Others make up their minds without taking much of an interest in the campaign, at best paying attention to incidents or stories that arise during the media campaign coverage.