What considerations do individuals have when thinking
about politics or participating in politics?
Discuss in relation to the politics of race in the United States of
America.
© Barry Gilheany
This
essay examines the various influences that are brought to bear on the citizen
when engaging in the political process either through voting, reflecting on or
expressing an opinion. It looks at how
citizens acquire information and at the effects of elite discourse on public
opinion. It analyses the
Receive-Accept-Sample or RAS Model constructed by a leading academic authority
on public opinion to explain how citizens process political information. It then applies these theories to the
changing dynamics of racial politics in the USA using the concept of racial
formation as an explanatory tool.
To
begin with, it needs to be stated that every opinion constitutes a merger of information and predisposition: information to form a mental image of the
particular issue, and predisposition to influence a conclusion about it
(Zaller,6). Citizens in large societies
depend for their information about the wider world in which they live on unseen
and, invariably, unknown “others”. These
others belong to political elites.
Political elites include elected politicians, higher level government
officials, opinion formers such as journalists, academic experts and policy
analysts and some activists. When elites
promulgate clear ideas of what needs to be done on a given issue, the public
tends to view this issue within this prism, with the most politically attentive
members of the public most likely to follow the elite position. When elites divide, members of the public
tend to adhere to the elites sharing their general ideological or partisan
predisposition, with the most politically aware members of the public
reflecting most closely the ideological divisions among the elite (Zaller,6-8).
Elite
discourse thus transmits political information in particular ways to depict
reality sufficiently vividly so that the lay person can grasp it. The
information is selective and located in stereotypical frames of reference. Even topics that lie within the lived experience
of some citizens, such as poverty, homosexuality and racial inequality are
subject to widely different interpretations, depending on the framing of facts
concerning them (Zaller,13). The
receptiveness of the citizenry to elite discourse hinges on their levels of political awareness.
In
Zaller’s terms, political awareness refers to the extent to which an individual
pays attention to politics and
understands what he or she has encountered.
However two caveats need to be issued about political awareness: (1)
people vary greatly in their general attentiveness to politics, regardless of
particular issues; and (2) average overall levels of information are quite
low. For example he has found that the
people most strongly committed to women’s right to abortion were more likely to
find out about the landmark US Supreme Court decision in Webster v. Reproductive Services in 1989. Yet he also established that their
informational advantage was fairly modest (Zaller,18).
Political
awareness represents intellectual or cognitive engagement with public affairs
as opposed to emotional engagement or no engagement at all. The key to political awareness is, therefore,
the absorption of political communications.
However the receptivity of citizens to persuasive influences will vary
with the interests, values and experiences that they can bring to bear; in
other words political predispositions – the
stable, individual-level traits that modulate the acceptance or rejection of
the political communications they receive.
Predispositions are thus the crucial intervening variable between the
messages one receives from the mass media and one’s statements of political
preferences (Zaller, 23). For example,
the well-established ignorance of many Americans of foreign affairs explains
why individuals need to fall back on core values to inform policy preferences
on issues such as the U.S. policy of aid to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua in
the 1980s.
Shifts
in elite discourse and consequent political awareness has had a profound debate
on debates around race in the USA. At
the turn of the century, the USA was a deeply racist society – not only in the
Jim Crowe caste structure of the
southern states and in the widespread discrimination practice but also of the
political ideas informed by biological and psychological theories of the
inferiority of blacks to whites. Elite
attitudes on race began to change from 1930 as in that year, President Hoover’s
nomination of John Parker of North Carolina to the Supreme Court was rejected largely because of a racist
speech he had made ten years previously.
Despite the apparent lack of impact on race on political discussion in
the 1930s and the almost negligible improvements in the material conditions of
blacks in the antebellum era in the
US, Gunnar Myrdal in his magisterial study of race relations in 1944 felt able
to predict that a period of racial progress lay just ahead. He based this optimism on purely intellectual
developments; scientists were now eschewing their earlier theories of racial
inferiority and psychologists were now examining the stigmatising effects on
blacks of racial prejudice and the origins of this prejudice in types of
psychiatric disorder and educational deficiencies (Zaller,9-10).
As
a result, the stereotypes used to explain racial differences were replaced
after 1930 by the failure of individual effort or, in the liberal variant, of
the effects discrimination against blacks.
This new elite discourse on race led to a massive shift towards greater
public support for the principle of racial equality (for example only 45% of
whites in a 1944 survey said that blacks should have as good a chance as white
people to get any kind of job; a figure which rose to 97% in 1972). Furthermore, the people most heavily exposed
to the new elite discourse on race, have been the most likely to support those
ideas that constitute the modern elite consensus on race (Zaller,11).
Most
significantly of all, the public became more responsive to partisan elite
signals on race. Throughout the 1950s
and early 1960s, there was little division between elite Democrats and elite
Republicans on the subjects and Republican representatives in Congress tended
to be more liberal than their Democratic counterparts. From late 1963, the Democrats overcame the
opposition of their racially conservative wing to become the party of racial
liberalism as exemplified by President Johnson’s four successful civil rights
bills. By contrast, Senator Barry
Goldwater, the Republican presidential nominee in 1964 became the most
prominent opponent of this legislation and henceforth, congressional voting on
racial issues began to parallel Democratic-Republican party lines (Zaller,12).
Thus
an analysis of public opinion requires an understanding of two phenomena: how
citizens learn about matters for the most part beyond their immediate
experience and how the information acquired is then converted into
opinions. To enable such an
understanding, Zaller constructs the RAS model.
The model consists of four assertions, or axioms, about how individuals
respond to political information they may encounter (Zaller,42).
A1
or the Reception Axiom states that
the greater a person’s level of cognitive engagement with an issue, the more
likely they are to receive political messages concerning that issue. It also asserts that political awareness is
operationally measured by a person’s summary score across a series of neutral,
factual tests of public affairs knowledge.
A2
or the Resistance Axiom states that
people tend to resist arguments that are inconsistent with their political dispositions
but only to the extent that they possess the contextual information necessary
to perceive a relationship and their predispositions. While this reasoning seems to posit a strong
case for an association between political awareness and resistance to
persuasion, the more simple and direct the link between a predisposition and an
issue e.g. race or taxing social security benefits, the less important
awareness is likely to be in regulating response to political communications on
that issue.
A3
or the Accessibility Axiom holds that
the more recently a consideration has been called to mind or thought about, the
less time it takes to retrieve that consideration from memory for use. This axiom appropriates one of the
best-established empirical realities in cognitive psychology.
A4
or the Responsive Axiom holds that
individuals answer survey questions by averaging across the considerations that
are immediately relevant or meaningful to them.
People thus answer the question on the basis at whatever considerations
are accessible “at the top of the head” (Zaller,42-49).
The
dominant element in the RAS model is that concerning the time taken to retrieve
consideration from memory for use.
Arguably what gives the model its strength is its ability to forecast
that different cohorts of the public will change their attitudes in different
amounts and even different directions, depending on their political values, and
the particular changes in information flow that occur (Zaller,52).
To
help in an understanding of the RAS model to US racial politics, it is
necessary to consider Omi and Winant’s concept of racial formation. Arguing that race is never a mere matter of
skin colour, they challenge the binary differences in definition as an essence ( a fixed category) and mere illusion, a purely ideological construct
which an ideal non-racist social order would abolish (Omi & Winant, 54)
They define race as a concept which
signifies and symbolises social conflicts and interest by referring to
different types of human bodies. There
is no biological basis for distinguishing among groups along the lines of race.
Racial formation
is the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created,
inhabited, transformed and destroyed. It
is a process of historically situated projects in which human bodies and social
structures are represented and organised.
Racial formation is linked to the evolution of hegemony, the way in which society is organised and ruled. Race is thus a matter of both social
structure and cultural representation from a racial formation perspective (Omi
& Winant, 56-76).
Thus
racial formation enables an understanding of how race becomes intertwined with
class and gender; how daily experiences are formed and how a “common sense” and
a hegemonic consensus is created on race which is then framed for public
consumption through elite discourses.
It
is the concept of hegemony developed by the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci
that links racial formation to the body of public opinion work by Zaller
discussed in this essay. Hegemony
constitutes the conditions necessary for the establishment and consolidation of
rule. Rule cannot be obtained in modern
societies without the element of consent which extends to the incorporation by
the dominant group of the key interests of subordinated groups. In order to consolidate their hegemony the
elite groups must generate popular practices and ideas – a “common sense”- and
propagate them through mass media channels, education, folk wisdom, religion
etc. which are then consented to by the rest of society. (Omi & Winant,67). The 20th and early 21st
centuries have witnessed successive sea-changes in the “common sense” around
the politics of race in the USA and the incorporation of racial groups formally
legally excluded from many realms of society through the hegemonic process that
Gramsci describes. These processes have
gained public acceptance though the production of elite discourse and the
susceptibility of key demographic groups to it.
This
essay has shown that the key role that opinion makers or elites play in the
establishment of the consensus which informs the political decision making and
participation levels of citizens in the USA.
It has also shown that methodologies for the study of public opinion
must be controlled for predispositional factors. It has applied public opinion models to the
changing terms of debates and discursive formations around race in the USA.
Bibliography
Omi,
Michael & Winant, Howard Racial Formation in the United States. From the
1960s to the 1990s. Second Edition New York: Routledge, 1994
Zaller,
John The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992
©
Barry Gilheany
No comments:
Post a Comment