Political Discourse and the Electorate

excerpted from the book

The Democratic Facade

by Daniel Hellinger and Dennis R. Judd Brooks

Cole Publishing Company, 1991, paper

 

Political Discourse and the Electorate

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... the two-party system is a crucial means for ensuring that elections will be run within a narrowly defined public discourse. It isn't so much that the voters get what they deserve; elites go to considerable lengths to guarantee that they can get nothing else.

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The Poverty of Political Discourse

The two major parties conduct their political arguments within an extraordinarily narrow range, and the extent of their differences is reflected in the views of party loyalists. Political scientist Benjamin Page examined the magnitude of difference between Democratic and Republican partisans in 1967 and 1968, utilizing 119 questions asked by several polling organizations during that period. Altogether, the questions were combined into two clusters of issues; twenty-seven issues dealt with foreign policy, and thirty-six concerned domestic affairs. On 59 percent (that is, sixteen) of the foreign policy issues, the spread between the percentage of Democrats and Republicans expressing an opinion one way or the other was no more than 5 percent, which is statistically insignificant. This was also the case for 42 percent of domestic issues. In effect, the Democrats and Republicans largely agreed on nearly half (49 percent) of the issues put to them in polls. Despite the rising controversy over the war in Vietnam, which would force Lyndon Johnson from the presidency in 1968, there was not a single foreign policy issue on which Democratic and Republican identifiers diverged by more than twenty percentage points (e.g., a 60% to 40% split). The greatest differences in political opinions between Democrats and Republicans involved a few select domestic issues, especially federal assistance for medical care, employment, and education. Democratic respondents were slightly more likely (by a 21% to 18% margin) to support the rights of various kinds of employees to organize unions and to strike.

By comparing speeches by presidential candidates Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon in the 1968 election, Page tried to determine how closely candidates' issue differences fit with the positions expressed by Democratic and Republican activists. He found that on 87 percent of the issues the candidates mirrored the difference between supporters, when these existed. Humphrey and Nixon, however, meticulously avoided strong positions on the most controversial issue of the day- Vietnam-and both attempted to project a centrist image on the occasion of their main image-making opportunity, their nomination acceptance speeches. By the most generous estimate, only about 10 percent of Nixon's acceptance speech and 8 percent of Humphrey's dealt with Vietnam. Both candidates strived for ambiguity and vacuity. Nixon, for example, promised to make a "complete reappraisal of America's policies in every section of the world" and to make it a high priority "to bring an honorable end to the war in Vietnam." Page concluded, "The voter could not hope to find much information here-or in the TV spots or stump speeches which echoed the acceptance speech: whether he would 'end the war' by massive escalation, by unilateral withdrawal, or by negotiation." Humphrey's statements were equally insipid. In the most specific references Page could find, Humphrey mentioned the "necessity for peace in Vietnam," and promised that he would "do everything within my power to aid the negotiations and to bring a prompt end to this war," adding on another occasion that the "policies of today need not be limited by the policies of yesterday."

In contrast to such meaningless and contrived platitudes, George Wallace, running as a third-party candidate, made thinly veiled racist appeals for votes complaining that the federal government was forcing people "to sell or lease your home or property to someone that they think you ought to lease it to" and "saying you folks don't know where to send your children to schools." These remarks were obviously aimed at fair housing policies and integrated schooling for blacks and whites. Wallace's demagoguery sharpened the controversy over civil rights and framed the issues for voters. Four years later, a poll found that voters found it relatively easy to define their own positions on civil rights. On the other hand, the Vietnam War remained a very difficult issue for voters to define in 1972.

It is important to ask why Eugene McCarthy's 1968 and George McGovern's 1972 campaigns failed to sharpen the Vietnam conflict for the electorate in the same way that Wallace's campaign helped to define the civil rights issue. McCarthy and McGovern both campaigned as peace candidates and were sharply critical of the war. Wallace was willing to attack directly the liberal consensus on civil rights, and thus the policy alternatives were clear. McGovern, although he consistently opposed the war throughout his campaign, was unwilling to attack the kneejerk anticommunism that both parties long had embraced as the linchpin for their foreign policy positions. As a consequence, the policy alternatives were ambiguous: As in all previous post-war elections, in 1972 the candidates "mostly repeated the prevailing wisdom that national security must be sought through mutual armament; that 'freedom' must be defended abroad against socialism." McGovern felt that Vietnam was not the appropriate place to defend American interests, but he defined these interests in a rather conventional way.

The 1988 Democratic platform and the nature of the campaign suggest that despite substantial public support for "liberal" positions on specific issues (as distinct from liberalism as an ideology), most Democrats shunned the label. Dukakis was determined to avoid being branded a liberal, successfully using his majority of delegates at the convention to keep the platform deliberately vague, preferring to make the election turn on "competence" rather than on ideology or issues. The Democratic National Convention was carefully crafted to mute debate over issues and political commentators repeatedly stressed the value of having Jesse Jackson criticize Dukakis from the left in the latter stages of the primary so that voters would perceive Dukakis as a centrist. What actually happened, however, is that George Bush put Dukakis on the defensive, and Dukakis began to articulate a vaguely populist campaign with only two weeks to go, too late to turn the tide. Voters who made their minds up in the last two weeks selected Dukakis by a 55 percent to 43 percent margin but only one voter in seven decided so late in the campaign.

The Republican platforms of 1980, 1984, and 1988 presented clearly conservative positions on the issues. The shift to the right in American politics ... was not preceded by shifts in public opinion on most of the items composing the conservative agenda. Conservatism has become the leading "brand name" ideology largely because liberalism has left the field of battle. In 1976 Jimmy Carter presented himself as a southern moderate, and in 1980 he offered what amounted to an apology for his first term and a promise to do better in his second. In 1984 Walter Mondale offered concrete promises to various interest groups, but voters contradicted the Michigan study findings by refusing to vote merely on the basis of membership in an interest group. Dukakis so successfully avoided saying anything concrete, especially about taxes, at the Democratic convention that George Bush's campaign researchers found that the epithet "stealth candidate" was one of the most popular phrases that Bush used to describe Dukakis.

Although the Republican platforms of the 1980s were quite issue oriented, candidates Reagan and Bush were cautious. What Ronald Reagan's campaigns succeeded in doing was to create an encompassing, coherent image based on "a powerful myth that a return to a single, carefree, omnipotent America could be reached through the magic of slashing big govemment." Bush did not successfully convey such an image but instead was able to cast Dukakis as a threat to traditional American values: Liberalism was painted as "a general softness, especially on crime and defense, alien values; threats to the family; rampant permissiveness; anti-Americanism; and radicalism."

The "L" word became a scarlet letter because Dukakis offered no rejoinders that could frame the issues effectively. In media campaigns, when issues are replaced by "sound bites" and fleeting TV images, the absence of equally dramatic sound bites and images carrying a different or opposing message leaves a vacuum that only exceptionally informed or ideological voters can fill on their own. The day after the election, Michael Dukakis seemed to appreciate this when he said, "I think one of the lessons of this campaign is you have to respond, you have to respond quickly." But respond with what? Dukakis was only the latest in a line of Democratic candidates so eager to find the "center" of political opinion that they dared not stake out solid ground of their own. Perhaps Dukakis carried this tendency the furthest, projecting J an image of no convictions at all; he "whined about being labeled, confirming a sense that there must be something wrong with the politics that dare not speak its name."

It is clear that in 1988 a majority of Americans favored "liberal" programs for more aggressive environmental policies, education programs, child care, gun control, access to abortion, deep cuts in nuclear weapons, and a rapprochement with the Soviet Union. Yet the Bush campaign was able to use the Pledge of Allegiance, attacks on the ACLU, and Willie Horton's crimes to label Dukakis as a liberal. The images conveyed in these attacks on Dukakis were constructed of sacred cultural symbols of family, religion, and patriotism along with profane symbols of crime and radicalism. The issues making up the liberal agenda could have been framed around the same images and symbols, as Jesse Jackson showed in the primaries. By fleeing from the fight, Dukakis "left huge sectors of the population frustrated, alienated and feeling as if they [had] no stake in the election. Worse, his flight...abdicated the middle ground of political discourse." Voters were denied even the familiar choice between the lesser of two evils.

Of course, a political discourse that involves "two sides," identified as current American brands of liberal and conservative thought, is itself remarkably truncated and artificial, especially when compared to the panoply of ideologies represented in a competitive multiparty system. Liberals share so many assumptions with conservatives that the two cannot be accurately called oppositional ideologies. Accordingly a study of the origins of ideological identification in the American public concluded that the liberal and conservative labels "have largely symbolic, nonissue-oriented meaning to the mass public," and that voters' self-identification as liberal or conservative is derived largely from evaluations of the labels that they take from their environment-that is, politicians' rhetoric and the media.

Nonetheless, one must acknowledge that losing one of the "sides" in American political discourse exerts a significant effect on American politics. The ideological identification one assumes does affect one's position on an issue or a candidate Obviously there is a complex interaction among voters, candidates, and political parties. Voters are generally blamed for being no more clear about issues than politicians seem to be.

A political process designed to obscure issues cannot produce or even tolerate an informed public. The most effective technique for a challenger is not to offer policy alternatives, but to highlight and make more salient (but not necessarily to define) those broad values that are deeply held by the national electorate.

 

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The quality of political discourse engaged in by candidates and other elites inevitably trickles down to the electorate. Social scientists who are surprised and dismayed to find a low level of issue awareness among American voters are, one may surmise, assuming that the electorate ought to be able to reach well-defined issue preferences even in a political system in which candidates and parties meticulously avoid debating issues.


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