C H A P T E R
1
Theoretical Diversity in
Political Communication
Everett M. Rogers
University of New Mexico
Note: The late Steven H. Chaffee originally planned to write this chapter, which is
dedicated to his memory.
In the 2000 election, almost every political candidate running for ofﬁce at every
level (presidential, state, county, city, and local) had an active Web site. This fact
indicates the current importance of Internet-related communication technologies
in political communication and suggests how this specialty ﬁeld has evolved since
its beginnings earlier in the past century in the hands of Walter Lippman, Harold
Lasswell, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, and other forefathers and founders of communication
study. Despite the growth of television in the 1950s and the Internet in the 1990s,
which altered the channels of communication carrying political messages to the
U.S. public, certain human communication processes involved in changing political
behavior have remained much the same.
A long-lasting, stable set of theoretical themes has dominated the study of political
communication, rather than any single, overarching theory. Nevertheless, the
theoretical diversity of political communication displays certain common themes,
such as a lasting concern with communication effects. Our purpose here is to synthesize
these diverse theoretical perspectives, showing how they have evolved
over the years, with an emphasis on their beginnings. Although the ﬁeld of political
communication began by studying the effects of print media and radio on individuals’
voting choice, such as in the 1940 Erie County Study (described later), the
ﬁeld has expanded to include additional aspects of communication and political
behavior.
3
4 ROGERS
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
The beginnings of communication study, mass communication, and political communication
are intertwined. All shared a common intellectual interest in the effects
of mass media communication, and the forefathers and founders of these
ﬁelds included the same set of scholars. From the early period of what was
later to be identiﬁed as communication study, scholars focused on changes in
political behavior (such as voting) as one of their main dependent variables of
study.
Walter Lippmann and Public Opinion
Some observers consider Walter Lippmann’s (1922) Public Opinion a founding document
for communication study. Lippmann was a contemporary scholar with the
political scientist Harold Lasswell in studying propaganda and public opinion. During
World War I, Lippmann served as a propaganda leaﬂet writer for the Allied
Army in France. During the era when communication study was getting under way
in the 1920s and 1930s, until the 1950s or 1960s, propaganda constituted one important
stream of communication scholarship. World War I represented a conﬂict
in which both combatants used propaganda extensively, and the public perceived
propaganda techniques as being dangerously powerful. This perception was based
mainly on anecdotal evidence and on exaggerated claims by governments, rather
than on scientiﬁc analysis. The public’s fear of powerful propaganda served to attract
the attention of early scholars like Lippmann and Lasswell. In fact, the ﬁeld
that was later to be called “mass communication” was termed “public opinion and
propaganda” (or approximately similar names) in the 1930s. For example, Lasswell
taught a course by this name at the University of Chicago (Rogers, 1994).
Lippmann (1922) also did early thinking and writing about what later was called
the agenda-setting process, with his insightful chapter on “The World Outside and
the Pictures in Our Heads.” Lippmann contrasted what agenda-setting scholars
were later to call “real-world indicators” (which index the seriousness of some social
problem) with peoples’ perceptions of the issue (later called the public agenda).
Walter Lippmann pioneered in conducting one of the ﬁrst scholarly content analyses,
of The New York Times coverage of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Lippmann
and Merz (1920) found an anti-Bolshevik bias in this news coverage, which led
Lippmann to become skeptical about how the average member of the American
public could form an intelligent opinion about important issues of the day. Walter
Lippmann was called the most gifted and inﬂuential political journalist of the 20th
century. At the same time, he was a key analyst of propaganda and public opinion,
and of agenda-setting.
Lippmann was important in identifying the role of the mass media in public
opinion formation in a democracy. He argued that the media, whose freedom was
protected by the First Amendment, were crucial in creating a free marketplace
of ideas. “The value of participatory democracy, active and widespread popular
participation informed by a free and responsible press, serves as an important
impetus to political communication research” (McLeod, Kosicki, & McLeod, 2002,
p. 215). Study of political communication was stimulated from its beginnings by
a normative concern about the need for a free press and an informed public in
society.
1. THEORETICAL DIVERSITY IN POLITICAL COMMUNICATION 5
Harold Lasswell and Propaganda Analysis
The study of media effects as part of an ongoing research program began with the
scholarly work of Harold Lasswell, a political scientist at the University of Chicago
who specialized in the investigation of propaganda. Lasswell’s Ph.D. dissertation
at the University of Chicago, later published as a book (Lasswell, 1927), content
analyzed the effects of propaganda messages by the Germans versus the French,
British, and Americans in World War I. Lasswell formalized the methodology of
content analysis of media messages. He is known for his ﬁve-question model of
communication: Who says what to whom via which channels with what effects? This
conceptualization was to inﬂuence early communication study toward the investigation
of media effects, a preoccupation that has continued, to at least some
degree, to the present day. Although Lasswell earned his doctorate in political science,
his scholarly interests ranged widely, and in the latter part of his career,
after he left the University of Chicago, he specialized to an increasingly greater degree
in communication research. During World War II, Lasswell, with funding from
the Rockefeller Foundation, led a research team at the U.S. Library of Congress
charged with content analyzing Allied and Axis propaganda messages in the
media.
In 1944, the owner of Time–Life Corporation, Henry Luce, provided funding for a
3-year study of the mass media in the United States by the Commission on Freedom
of the Press. The 13-member Commission, chaired by Robert Hutchins, President of
the University of Chicago, included Lasswell as an inﬂuential member. The Commission
was concerned about the growing concentration of U.S. media ownership and
the decreasing degree of newspaper competition. The Commission report stressed
the value of First Amendment freedoms for the media as being essential for an
informed public in a functioning democracy.
Paul F. Lazarsfeld and the Erie County Study
Another key forefather of communication study was Paul F. Lazarsfeld, an ´emigr´e
scholar from Austria, who spent much of his scholarly career at Columbia University.
Trained in mathematics, Lazarsfeld became an important toolmaker for
social science research on mass communication effects. He led the Radio Research
Project, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1937, which explored the effects of
radio on American audiences. Lazarsfeld transformed the Radio Research Project
into the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University, arguably the
most noted university-based research institute of its day, and one specializing in
communication research. With his sociological colleague Robert K. Merton, Lazarsfeld
developed the research method of focus group interviews (Rogers, 1994), a
data-gathering technique initially utilized to study U.S. government radio spots
urging the American public to plant Victory Gardens, collect scrap iron and used
rubber, and buy war bonds. These federal government campaigns, essentially a
form of domestic propaganda, were designed and evaluated by a set of communication
scholars drawn from various social sciences, including Lasswell, Lazarsfeld,
Wilbur Schramm, and others.
Lazarsfeld led the ﬁrst quantitative studies of voting behavior, with his
most well-known inquiry being the 1940 Erie County Study, which in certain
respects represented the most important pioneering investigation of political
6 ROGERS
communication. Lazarsfeld and his colleagues conducted 600 personal interviews
each month for 6 months until the November 1940 presidential election. This
study was carried out in Erie County, Ohio, selected by the Columbia University
researchers as a representative American county. At the time, the prevailing conception
was one of powerful media effects, a perception based loosely on historical
events like the role of the Hearst newspapers in leading the United States into the
Spanish American War, the panic resulting from Orson Welles’ “Invasion from Mars”
radio broadcast in 1937, and Hitler’s use of propaganda as World War II began in
Europe.
So Lazarsfeld intended that the Erie County Study investigate the importance of
the direct effects of the media in determining how people voted in a presidential
election. The main dependent variable of study was voting behavior, a reﬂection
of Lazarsfeld’s background in conducting market research (in fact, Lazarsfeld was
one of the founders of market research in America). As Chaffee and Hockheimer
(1985, p. 274) stated, “The vote was taken to be the ultimate criterion variable,
as if it were the most important political act a person can perform. This focus on
voting has been followed by many researchers since the 1940s. . . .” No one would
deny that voting is a crucial aspect of political behavior, but contributions of time
and money to a political campaign, personal statements to others in support of
a candidate, display of campaign buttons and posters, and other political actions
are also important (Chaffee & Hockheimer, 1985). The main independent variables
of study in the Erie County project, in addition to exposure to newspapers and
news magazines and radio (the main media of the day in 1940), were individuals’
socioeconomic status and political party identiﬁcation.
To Lazarsfeld’s surprise, only 54 of his 600 respondents in the Erie County panel
of voters shifted from one presidential candidate to another, and only a few of
these switchers were directly inﬂuenced to do so by the media (Converse, 1987).
Many of the voters had made up their minds before the electoral campaign began.
Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet (1944) concluded that the media had minimal
effects in the 1940 presidential election campaign. However, other scholars (e.g.,
Chaffee & Hockheimer, 1985) have questioned this conclusion, and so the matter
seems to be dependent in part on interpretation and on the types of data that are
considered (Rogers, 1994). In any event, Lazarsfeld and others postulated a twostep
ﬂow of communication in which opinion leaders with a relatively high degree
of media exposure then passed along political information to their followers via
interpersonal communication channels. This two-step ﬂow model highlighted the
complementary role that media and interpersonal communication often play in
inﬂuencing an individual’s political decisions, a lead that has been pursued in later
investigations up to the present (Rogers, 2002a).
In the several years following the Erie County study, communication scholars
may have overemphasized the minimal effects of the mass media. A younger colleague
of Lazarsfeld’s at the Bureau of Applied Research at Columbia University,
sociologist Joseph Klapper (1960), concluded in his book The Effects of Mass Communication
that the media seldom have direct effects. At the time, given the assumptions
and methodologies of mass communication research, this conclusion
seemed rather obvious. Later developments, however, led to questioning of this
minimal effects conclusion.
Along with a follow-up to the Erie County Study, of the 1948 presidential election
in a New York community (Berelson, Lazarsfeld, & McPhee, 1954), Lazarsfeld’s investigations
were the ﬁrst large-scale election research to give major attention to
1. THEORETICAL DIVERSITY IN POLITICAL COMMUNICATION 7
the role of the mass media and virtually the last for many years thereafter (Chaffee &
Hockheimer, 1985). The University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research began
a series of studies of presidential election voting, carrying on Lazarsfeld’s tradition
of survey research on voting behavior. These national surveys, however, paid relatively
little attention to the role of the mass media in voting decisions, concentrating
instead on political party identiﬁcation and socioeconomic variables in inﬂuencing
voting (the importance of political parties in determining citizens’ voting behavior
has faded in recent years, replaced by the media, especially television). Because
these Michigan studies were national sample surveys, the role of personal communication
networks in voting decisions was difﬁcult or impossible to explore (Sheingold,
1973). The primary focus on the individual as the unit of response and the unit
of analysis led to a deemphasis on network and other social inﬂuences on voting
decisions and to lesser attention to larger systems (such as media institutions) in
political communication research.
World War II and the Beginnings
of Communication Study
World War II Washington, DC, was the gathering place for leading American social
scientists who were to become the forefathers and founders of communication
study. One important preceding event, however, was the year-long Rockefeller Foundation
Communication Seminar, organized by Foundation ofﬁcial John Marshall and
held monthly at the Rockefeller Foundation’s ofﬁces in New York City. Marshall’s
letter of invitation to the Seminar’s participants was one of the ﬁrst uses of the term
mass communication (previously, such terms as public opinion or propaganda were
used to refer to such study) (Rogers, 1994). The 12 regular participants in the Rockefeller
Foundation Communication Seminar included Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Harold
Lasswell, with the latter being the dominant intellectual force in the discussions.
Lasswell’s ﬁve-question model of communication was developed at the Seminar.
The primary concern of the Rockefeller Foundation Communication Seminar was
to have been deﬁning the newly emerging ﬁeld of communication but centered
increasingly on the approaching World War II, which began in September 1939
(as did the ﬁrst of the Seminar’s monthly meetings). The Seminar was important
in bringing together leading scholars with an interest in communication research
and in forming a consensus about the priority questions that should be pursued.
At the conclusion of the year-long series of Seminar sessions in New York, the participants
held meetings with high government ofﬁcials in Washington to brief them
on the Seminar’s conclusions, including the role that the newly emerging ﬁeld of
communication could play in the ensuing world conﬂict.
World War II brought together a talented set of social scientists in Washington,
DC, where they worked as consultants or employees of various wartime government
agencies. Included were Lazarsfeld, Lasswell, sociologist Sam Stouffer, social
psychologists Carl Hovland and Kurt Lewin, and Wilbur Schramm, who had been
director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. These scholars
shared a common interest in human communication study and in its application
to wartime problems facing the United States. Their interaction in Washington led
to the formation of a paradigm for mass communication study. These scholars
were relatively more free of disciplinary barriers in wartime Washington than when
they were on their university campuses, and this freedom encouraged them to
8 ROGERS
think about an interdisciplinary approach to communication research. Some of the
participants in these interdisciplinary discussions began to plan how to continue
communication research after the War and how to train a cadre of individuals with
doctoral degrees in communication.
In 1943, Wilbur Schramm returned to the University of Iowa as Director of the
School of Journalism, where he sought to implement his vision of the new scholarly
ﬁeld of communication. He established a Ph.D. program in communication and
started a mass communication research center at the university, thus launching a
postwar strategy of founding university-based communication research institutes
that awarded Ph.D. degrees in communication. After several unfruitful years at Iowa,
Wilbur Schramm moved to the University of Illinois, where his efforts to establish
communication research and to award doctorates in the new ﬁeld were more successful.
By the mid-1950s, when Schramm moved to Stanford University, the ﬁeld
of communication was becoming well established. By 1960, more than a dozen
U.S. universities, including Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan State, had institutionalized
mass communication research institutes or centers and were awarding
doctorates in communication.
This new ﬁeld stressed a social science approach to communication study, building
on the communication research and theory that had been conducted in previous
decades in social psychology, sociology, and political science (by Lasswell, Lazarsfeld,
Lewin, Hovland, and others). Importantly, a prerequisite to doctoral study in
these early communication Ph.D. programs was experience as a mass media professional
(usually as a newspaper journalist). This requirement meant that the new
corps of doctorates in communication looked at the world they studied somewhat
differently than had the prior generation of communication researchers, who kept
their academic base in a department of sociology, psychology, or political science.
The new Ph.D.’s had a central scholarly interest in mass communication effects,
like their social science predecessors, but they also had an understanding of the
realities of media institutions. This orientation led them to look at the indirect effects
of the media (such as through the agenda-setting process), as well as the
direct effects, and not to expect such strong effects of media exposure on individuals’
behavior (given that the media played mainly an informational, rather than a
persuasive, role).
Wilbur Schramm emerged as the dominant leader of the founding of communication
as a ﬁeld of scholarly study in the postwar era. Communication scholars
with doctorates from Schramm’s program at Stanford University fanned out to universities
across the United States, where they often rose to leadership positions.
Examples are Paul J. Deutschmann at Michigan State University, Wayne Danielson
at the University of North Carolina and later at The University of Texas, and
Steven H. Chaffee at the University of Wisconsin (all became deans or directors
of schools of journalism). Several of these scholars made important conceptual
contributions, such as Danielson and Deutschmann to the study of news event
diffusion and Maxwell McCombs, another Stanford product at the University of
North Carolina, in collaboration with Donald L. Shaw, a Ph.D. from the University
of Wisconsin, in investigating the agenda-setting process (Rogers, 1994).
The institutionalization of communication study at U.S. research universities
around 1960 was a turning point in political communication research, in that the
new cadre of communication doctorates pursued research on the indirect, as well
as the direct, effects of mass media communication. After about 1960, communication
study had a greater degree of constancy and continuity, which facilitated
1. THEORETICAL DIVERSITY IN POLITICAL COMMUNICATION 9
the pursuit of important theoretical questions and paradigms through organized
research programs.
RESEARCH ON MEDIA EFFECTS
About the same time that communication study was becoming institutionalized at
a growing number of U.S. research universities, television was spreading rapidly in
the United States. By 1960, most American households contained a television set,
and television soon became the main source of political news. Currently, 56% of the
American public responds in surveys that television is their main source of political
news, with 24% responding newspapers and 14% saying radio (Graber, 2001).
The public wants to obtain its news quickly and easily and generally believes that
television does an adequate job of providing news, although many media experts
claim that television overpersonalizes the news.
We previously traced how a powerful media effects model was eventually replaced
by a limited effects model, with the Lazarsfeld et al. Erie County Study as
a turning point (Chaffee & Hockheimer, 1985). Television, of course, was not yet
available in the 1940 presidential election. During the decade of the 1950s, when
television diffused rapidly among U.S. households, this new medium became the
dominant channel used in political communication campaigns and began to occupy
an important role in their study by communication scholars. Electoral campaigns
soon spent the majority of their budget on television, especially on candidates’
television spots, and these campaigns began to escalate in total cost. The previously
important role of political parties in inﬂuencing electoral outcomes faded in
the new age of television politics.
This growing importance of television in politics brought with it new concerns.
For example, political communication scholars found that “the amount of learning
from television is slight. Large numbers of citizens see news as boring and politics
as disconnected from their lives” (McLeod et al., 2002, p. 250). As the costs of television
spots rose, forcing up electoral campaign budgets, only wealthy individuals
(or those who could attract substantial contributions) could win public ofﬁce.
Research on mass media effects often dealt with the dependent variable of political
behavior change, such as voting choice. “Political communication research
has traditionally played a central role on the effects of mass media” (McLeod et al.,
2002, p. 218). Mass communication research and political communication research
became almost synonymous in their priority concerns with media effects. It is no
accident that in the main communication research organization, the International
Communication Association, the Political Communication Division split off from
the Mass Communication Division in 1973.
Findings from mass communication and political communication studies often
supported a minimal effects model, although these results may have been due in
part to the research designs and research methods that were utilized. For example,
Rogers (2002a) reviewed four recent investigations to ﬁnd relatively strong
media effects when data were gathered (1) about an important news event (such
as Magic Johnson’s 1991 disclosure of his HIV infection), (2) by tracing its effects
on the overt behavior of individuals exposed to media messages about the event,
(3) whose contents are analyzed, and (4) whose effects are evaluated by means
of data gathered rather immediately after the event occurred. Coincidentally,
this research approach is similar to that followed by Paul F. Lazarsfeld and his
10 ROGERS
colleagues at Columbia University’s Bureau of Applied Social Research 60 years
ago (although not in the Erie County Study), such as the investigation of the panic
effects of “The Invasion from Mars” (Cantril, Gaudet, & Herzog, 1940) and the highly
successful Kate Smith War Bond radio marathon (Merton, Fiske, & Curtis, 1946).
Importantly, both these earlier and later studies of direct effects considered the
intermedia processes of mass media effects occurring through, and in combination
with, interpersonal communication stimulated by media messages (Chaffee,
1986).
The rise of communication study after 1960 and the pervasiveness of television
led political communication scholars to investigate indirect media effects such as
in the agenda-setting process.
Agenda-Setting
A well-known dictum by political scientist Bernard Cohen (1963, p. 13) was that “The
press may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is
stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about.” Cohen’s statement
was based on Walter Lippmann’s (1920) earlier idea of “the world outside” and
“the pictures in our heads.” Cohen’s dictum suggested that the media have indirect
effects along with, in certain cases, direct effects.
Maxwell McCombs, one of the new generation of communication scholars earning
his doctorate at Stanford University, read Cohen’s book in a seminar taught by
Wilbur Schramm and, later, while a young faculty member at the University of North
Carolina, collaborated with a colleague, Donald Shaw, in the ﬁrst empirical study of
agenda-setting. These new Ph.D.’s in communication knew from their experience
as professional newspaper journalists that news seldom had strong direct effects
on audience individuals. However, the amount of news coverage accorded an issue
by the media might indeed lead audience individuals to rate such an issue as more
important (Rogers, 1994).
The ensuing Chapel Hill study (McCombs & Shaw, 1972) of how 100 undecided
voters in Chapel Hill, NC, made up their minds in the 1968 presidential election
was the ﬁrst empirical investigation of the agenda-setting process and is the most
widely cited publication in this ﬁeld of research (Dearing & Rogers, 1996). McCombs
and Shaw content analyzed the media coverage of the election in order to
identify the ﬁve main issues and the amount of news coverage given each (this
has since been called the media agenda), which they compared with a personal
interview survey of the 100 undecided voters, who were asked which issues they
felt were most important (this is the public agenda). McCombs and Shaw (1972)
found a high degree of agreement between the rank order of the four or ﬁve issues
on the media agenda and the rank order of those on the public agenda. The
implication of this ﬁnding was that the media indeed tell the public “what to talk
about.”
The Chapel Hill research set off a tremendous number of studies of the agendasetting
process. This proliferation of agenda-setting studies amounted to 357 publications
at the time of a 1996 synthesis (Dearing & Rogers, 1996), and the number
continues to grow. Many of the early studies of agenda-setting more or less followed
the model and methods pioneered by McCombs and Shaw, but in more recent
years single-issue longitudinal research on agenda-setting also has been conducted
1. THEORETICAL DIVERSITY IN POLITICAL COMMUNICATION 11
(Dearing & Rogers, 1996). Here the essential question is how an issue like AIDS or the
environment rises on the national agenda over time. In contrast, the early agendasetting
research concentrated on the set of issues (usually four or ﬁve) that were
on the national agenda at any one time. In both types of agenda-setting studies, the
media agenda is measured by a content analysis, the public agenda by survey data,
and the policy agenda by the laws, regulations, and appropriations regarding the
issue of study.
The general model of the agenda-setting process that has emerged from research
is a usual temporal sequence of
Media agenda → Public agenda → Policy agenda.
Communication scholars study mainly media agenda-setting and public agendasetting,
whereas political scientists and sociologists study mainly policy agendasetting.
The initial multiple-issue research focused on the relationship of the media
agenda and the public agenda (a focus similar to that of the Chapel Hill Study),
whereas more recent longitudinal, single-issue research illuminated factors important
in setting the media agenda. A common ﬁnding is that a focusing event or a
tragic individual (such as the death of Hollywood actor Rock Hudson and the discrimination
against Kokomo, Indiana, schoolboy Ryan White) often initially calls
an issue to media attention. If an issue appears on the front page of The New York
Times or if the U.S. president gives a speech about the issue, it is immediately
boosted upon the national media agenda. The seriousness of a social problem,
measured by what scholars call real-world indicators (like the number of deaths
due to AIDS), has been found to be unrelated to an issue’s position on the national
media agenda, given that the issue is at least perceived as an important problem
(Dearing & Rogers, 1996).
One of the important advances in understanding the agenda-setting process
is framing, that is, how an issue is given meaning by media people, politicians,
or others. Framing began to be studied as an important inﬂuence in the agendasetting
process a decade or so after the Chapel Hill Study, in a series of ingenious
experiments by Shanto Iyengar (1991), a political scientist and communication
scholar.
Agenda-setting research may overrepresent the power of the mass media to
set the national agenda through an over-time process. Certain news events shoot
immediately to the top of the agenda, such as the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and
represent an exception to the more gradual agenda-setting process investigated
by communication scholars (McLeod et al., 2002). Nevertheless, agenda-setting
research advanced the understanding of the indirect effects of the mass media, this
in an era of minimal effects. Further, agenda-setting study represented a refocusing
of political communication research away from a primary emphasis on individual
political behavior (as in the voting studies) by relating media news coverage of an
issue to individual aggregated perceptions of issue salience and to the response
by political institutions (the policy agenda). Further, agenda-setting investigations
cast light on how people organize and give meaning to the political world around
them, as the public gives meaning to various news issues. Finally, agenda-setting
research generally recognized that one mechanism of media inﬂuence was through
stimulating interpersonal communication, which in turn often triggered behavior
change (Dearing & Rogers, 1996).
12 ROGERS
Diffusion of News Events
Another type of communication research that was launched in the 1960s by the new
cadre of experienced newspaper journalists who earned Ph.D.’s in Communication
at Stanford University was the study of news event diffusion. Paul J. Deutschmann
and Wayne Danielson (1960) established the paradigm for news diffusion research
with a pioneering study. These scholars gathered data from a sample of the public
soon after the occurrence of a major news event, asking about the channels through
which initial awareness–knowledge of the news event was obtained, channels for
obtaining further information, and the time of an individual’s ﬁrst knowing about
the news event. A common ﬁnding in the news event diffusion studies was that
the media, especially the broadcast media, were particularly important in spreading
major news events. When plotted over time, the number of individuals knowing
about a news event increased slowly at ﬁrst, then rapidly as interpersonal communication
channels were activated, and, ﬁnally, tailed off to form an S-shaped diffusion
curve as the remaining individuals learned about the event. This S-shaped curve
was similar to that found for the diffusion of technological innovations over time,
and news event diffusion studies were initially inﬂuenced by the earlier diffusion
research (Rogers, 2003).
The Deutschmann and Danielson (1960) study of news event diffusion led almost
immediately to a spate of similar investigations, most of which focused on
news events that were more or less political in nature: assassination of a president
or a head of state, resignation of a high-ranking ofﬁcial, or a major disaster. More
than 60 news event diffusion studies have been published to date. DeFleur (1987)
concluded that the ﬁeld of news event diffusion research was dying because the
interesting questions had been answered. However, in the past decade or so, new
types of news event diffusion investigations have been completed that explore new
research questions (Rogers, 2000). For example, the Mayer, Gudykunst, Perrill, and
Merrill (1990) study of diffusion of news of the Challenger disaster, which occurred
on January 26, 1986, showed the importance of the time of day and day of the week
of a news event’s occurrence on which media or interpersonal channels were most
frequently used by members of the public. For instance, stay-at-home housewives
ﬁrst learned of the news event, which occurred in midmorning on a weekday, particularly
from broadcast media, whereas individuals at work were more likely to
learn from interpersonal channels.
Rogers and Siedel (2002) investigated diffusion of the September 11 (2001) terrorist
attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. They found that the news
of this spectacular event led to various actions by many members of the public,
such as donating blood, sending ﬁnancial contributions, and ﬂying American ﬂags
on vehicles, at homes, and at workplaces. News of the terrorist attacks affected
audience members emotionally to a much greater degree than the news events
studied in past research. Prior to the Rogers and Siedel (2002) study, most news
event diffusion research emphasized the dependent variables of time of knowing
and the relative importance of various communication channels. Recent research
demonstrates the value of looking at other dependent variables and at additional
independent variables in news event diffusion.
In contrast to the news event diffusion studies, which investigate mainly major
news event, most political news spreads relatively slowly and with modest impact
on public knowledge. So the news event diffusion studies emphasize highly
1. THEORETICAL DIVERSITY IN POLITICAL COMMUNICATION 13
unusual news events. Most members of the public remain relatively uninformed
about most current news. This lack of knowledge is especially characteristic of the
less-educated, lower-socioeconomic segments of the American public (Tichenor,
Donohue, & Olien, 1970; Viswanath & Finnegan, 1996).
The pervasive problem of an inactive and inadequately informed public led
political communication scholars in recent years to conduct research on “civic
journalism,” as a means of increasing citizen participation in American democratic
society. An example of such research on civic journalism is a study by McDevitt and
Chaffee (2002) that evaluated the impacts of KidsVoting USA, a program intended to
stimulate family political communication for civic involvement. Current interest in
civic journalism is an expression of the values of political communication scholars
on an active, informed citizenry, values that go back to the days of Walter Lippmann.
NEW COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES
One early and well-studied application of the new interactive communication technologies
was the Public Electronic Network (PEN) Project in Santa Monica, CA. PEN
was designed to encourage communication exchange, especially about political
issues, among the residents of Santa Monica, a seaside community in Los Angeles.
A 6-year investigation of PEN was conducted by communication scholars at
the University of Southern California (Collins-Jarvis, 1993; Guthrie & Dutton, 1992;
Rogers, Collins-Jarvis, & Schmitz, 1994; Schmitz, Rogers, Phillips, & Paschal, 1995).
PEN was noteworthy because at the time it was established, in 1989, it was the
ﬁrst municipal electronic network available at no cost to residents of a city. Some
5,300 Santa Monica residents (of a total population of 90,000) registered to use PEN,
and approximately 60,000 accesses to PEN occurred each year. A core of approximately
1,500 users remained active on PEN, with a turnover among the remaining
users each year. Some 200 electronic messages were exchanged monthly between
residents and city ofﬁcials.
PEN was launched in an era of optimism about the potential of the new interactive
communication technologies for increasing political participation. The Internet
existed in 1989 but had diffused to only a small percentage of the U.S. public. Santa
Monica had a tradition of intense political activity. The city government was able to
obtain the donation of networking equipment from a U.S. computer company. This
equipment included 20 public terminals that were placed in city libraries, senior
citizens’ centers, and other public buildings. Some 20% of all PEN log-ons occurred
from these public terminals, with the remainder from individuals using computers
at home or at work. The public terminals, initially expected to be a minor part of
the PEN system’s design, turned out to be very important as a means for homeless
people to gain access to the electronic communication system.
“Ted,” a homeless man in Santa Monica, entered the following message on the
PEN system: “I . . . spent many hours in the Library; it is my home more or less. Then
I discovered PEN and things have never been the same. PEN is my main companion;
although it can’t keep me warm at night, it does keep my brain alive.” At the
time Santa Monica had a homeless population variously estimated as from 2,000 to
10,000. They were regarded by most homed people in the city as the priority social
problem of Santa Monica, and early discussion on the PEN system by the homed
concerned complaints about the homeless. Then the homeless, using the public
14 ROGERS
terminals, began to participate in PEN. They responded to earlier criticism about
their perceived laziness by stating that they wanted jobs but could not apply because
of their appearance. Soon, about 30 homed and homeless individuals formed
the PEN Action Group in order to identify possible solutions. They obtained the
use of a centrally located vacant building for SHWASHLOCK (SHowers, WASHers, &
LOCKers), in which the homeless could clean themselves, store their belongings,
learn computer skills, and access job information. As a result of SHWASHLOCK, a
number of homeless people in Santa Monica obtained jobs.
Importantly, PEN offered a space in which unlike individuals could interact in
order to work out solutions to a social problem of mutual concern. “Don,” one
of the leaders in the PEN Action Group, stated, “No one on PEN knew that I was
homeless until I told them. PEN is also special because after I told them, I was
still treated like a human being. To me, the most remarkable thing about the PEN
community is that a City Council member and a pauper can coexist, albeit not
always in perfect harmony, but on an equal basis.” Thus PEN demonstrated that
electronic communication systems had the potential of connecting heterophilous
members of society (note, however, that this ability of PEN to bridge social distance
would not have been possible without the public terminals).
A further lesson learned from the PEN Project was that at least certain social
problems that occurred on this system could eventually be solved by the system
itself. For instance, in the ﬁrst months of PEN’s operation, female users of the system
were attacked verbally by certain males. Derogatory messages were sent to PEN
users with female ﬁrst names (individuals must use their real names, rather than
computer names, on PEN), along with messages containing male sexual aggressiveness
(such as pornographic stories in which the female’s name was incorporated).
Many female PEN participants discontinued use of the system in the face of these
personal attacks. However, 30 of the remaining female participants formed PENFEMME
in order to organize to resist these verbal attacks. Their ﬁrst decision was
not to respond to the male sexual aggression. PENFEMME was closed to male participants
and focused on such issues as domestic violence, sexual equality, child
care, and the reentry of mothers into the workforce (Collins-Jarvis, 1993). The perpetrators
of the antifemale aggression were eventually identiﬁed as several young
boys. Soon, 30% of PEN participants were female. This example shows how interactive
technologies can be used to organize for social change, a process through
which the disempowered can gain control of their situation.
Content analyses showed that most of the messages exchanged on PEN concerned
local political issues. In a community that was already very politically active,
it is not surprising that a new means of interactive communication was used for
political discussion. The Internet, currently utilized by about 70% of adult Americans,
plays an increasingly important role in electoral politics (as mentioned at
the beginning of this paper) and in many other types of political communication
behavior.
One problem limiting the Internet’s impacts is the digital divide, the process
through which the Internet advantages certain individuals who have access to
computers and the Internet and relatively disadvantages other individuals who
lack such access. At present, approximately 544 million people use the Internet
worldwide, about 8% of the world’s total population. In many countries, and in
poorer economic areas of the United States, telecenters and cyber cafes (Rogers,
2002b) provide community access to computers and the Internet, thus bridging the
digital divide.
1. THEORETICAL DIVERSITY IN POLITICAL COMMUNICATION 15
CONCLUSIONS
A theme of the present essay is that the beginnings of communication study at
the hands of Walter Lippmann, Harold Lasswell, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, and others has
had a lasting inﬂuence on the ﬁeld of political communication. Scholars of political
communication placed a primary focus on mass media communication, although a
growing recognition of the interrelatedness of the media with interpersonal communication
has occurred. Media messages often stimulate interpersonal communication
about a topic, with the interpersonal communication then leading to behavior
change in an intermedia process (Rogers, 2002a).
From its initial research (like the Erie County Study), the ﬁeld of political communication
focused on such individual-level dependent variables as voting choices.
In contrast, much concern about political communication, such as an inactive and
uninformed public, is at the societal level. “Most political action and power relationships
operate at the societal or other systemic levels, whereas the bulk of empirical
theory and research concentrate on the behavior of the individual citizen” (McLeod
et al., 2002, p. 232).
Connecting individual-level research with societal problems remains a concern
for political communication scholars, who share a normative belief in the desire
for a more properly functioning democracy.
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