First I want to say that I think I understand, but nevertheless I am still struck by the overwhelming focus of attention being paid to the role of political communication in the sphere of electoral politics. It’s almost as though some mad scientist, or perhaps a wizard behind a screen had developed a mass illusion, or a strategic misdirection, that led you all to believe that all the really important action was taking place during those months in the fall before the polls opened.

If Danna will forgive me, I want to try on my Jackie Mom’s Mabley persona [Mabley was a Richard Pryor contemporary that most of you young, and apparently white folks might not be familiar with]. In any event she would come on, and like Bill Cosby have a special message for the parents in the room. She’s say “You know, y’all always telling the kids, that when they’re going downtown to the movies, to make sure that they watch the lights before they cross the streets. Well damn the lights, it’s the cars that’s killing these chillen…

So, while you’re expending so much time, energy and intelligence paying attention to the mobilization of voters, at least some of you ought to be paying attention to what’s going on in our legislatures, in our agencies, and in our courts, because that’s where the threats to our sustainable futures are being put into place.

To the extent that the production of influence over the institutions of governance is not determined entirely by the exchange of money, favors, and promises of more, but may actually be influenced by the provision of information, argument, and evidence, then we really ought to be paying more attention to the accessible paths through which this information gets to its targets.

I ask you all to consider the powerful arguments made by Amitai Etzioni back in 1988 in The Moral Dimension, where he introduced his version of socioeconomics. He suggested that corporations, because they were managed by rational actors, [again, perhaps only because they had not been fully elevated to the status of artificial persons by our Supreme Court], would invest heavily in efforts to produce influence over the legislative process because it was a more efficient and effective way to establish and maintain market power and profits than by investing in research and development.

Etzioni was referring to all laws, rules and regulations that would provide these firms with short-, and occasionally long-term competitive advantage by reducing the costs they would face if they had to pay taxes, or were subject to a host of liabilities for products and services that might cause harm to clients and consumers, or might damage the environment through pollution of the air and water around their ancient factories.

Among the most important examples he set forth were the benefits that might be derived by those firms if they could bar, or at least retard the competitive entry of other firms that might have an unfair advantage because they had developed, or acquired some new technology that would allow them the reduce costs of production or distribution in a more socially productive way.

Of course, not even Etzioni fully understood how the fundamental nature of the US economy was already being transformed. There were plenty of signs that the manufacturing of material goods was being replaced by the production of informational goods and services. But still, we really had no way of imagining that the rise of the finance, insurance and real estate sectors of the economy would be so dramatic, and so important in terms of the kinds of systemic risk that their expansion would invite, and we would experience at a particularly historic moment in the history of the United States.

I want to suggest that it is really important for us to begin to gather the kinds of data that would allow us to map and assess the nature of the influence, and the means by which it was produced that helped to shape the environment within which the current state of affairs was seeded, cultivated, nurtured, and then allowed to blossom into the kind of multidimensional catastrophe that continues to unfold and spread around the globe.

What I am talking about here is a long term institutional process analysis that would allow us to go back, perhaps as far as the 1960’s to identify the legislative, regulatory and judicial decisions that established the conditions for the rise of the FIRE sector at the core of our economy.

Although I think we should include them all, I am particularly interested in the rise of the insurance industry and its truly amazing capture and transformation of the meaning of the traditional moral and ethical core of our understanding of “fairness” within our discourse about the management of risk. This notion of “actuarial fairness,” is one that is based on theoretically argued and statistically based projections of what the long term costs of insuring an individual would be, on the basis of the assignment of that individual to a algorithmically determined category or group.

I am also interested in the dramatic rise in legislative and judicial protections for what we refer to as “intellectual property.” I ask you to just consider how the rise in the cost of health care delivery has come to be associated with the treatment of genetic information as the property of investors in the development of diagnostic and treatment protocols derived from human, animal, or plant biology.

Such a project might mean an expansion and redesign of part of the really quite important work done by Frank  Baumgartner and his colleagues in order to take advantage of some of the arguments and insights provided by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, in their discussion of their notion of “winner take all politics.” What they refer to, and I quote, are the “politics as organized combat” that emphasize the role of organized interests in shaping large-scale public policies that mediate distributional outcomes.” Their primary focus is on economic inequality, but the framework they have developed can surely apply to other outcomes of the policy process.


The challenge is one of bringing back to the table a focus on the coordination function of communication: that is, the use of communication to shape, support, oppose, and direct behavior at a system wide level. The coordination of a conservative, neoliberal political movement to reshape, and reposition the role of markets, relative to the role of the state, or the reassessment of the importance of regulatory oversight, and government initiative in the guiding the movement of local, national, and international frameworks for understanding the role of government in society are all part of this research agenda. It is the role of what I once referred to as information subsidies in the shaping of the normal, the standard, that which becomes a “taken for granted” aspect of modern political culture.

Of course, there is my continuing concern about the use of segmentation and targeting, now even  more meaningful in the context of new media, to deliver specialized PR in support of, or, more realistically, in opposition to policies that would constrain the further rise of finance [rather than industrial] capital.

I am inviting the field of political communication to pursue the production of influence in all the institutional arenas in which public policies are developed and brought to bear on the social systems that influence the quality of life.

While it’s not all there, I believe there is more than enough in the public record to allow us to piece together an accurate and meaningful impression of how we managed to drift into our current state of disarray.

Patricia Moy
(Moy on behalf of Feldman, Holbert, Iyengar, Scheufele, Stroud, and Vavreck):
This unanswered-questions panel was structured around the five overarching (missing) theories identified at lunch. (Each has implications for methods, but we focused primarily on theoretical concerns.)

Message learning theory; How can we better understand the decay or persistence of message effects? Relative to the discrete texts that typically constitute our units of interest, how can we better understand the effects of nonverbal and emotional cues that are not so easily analyzed?

How can we identify new channels in the evolving media landscape, understand how they contribute to the political environment, and identify their potential effects?

How do we define message quality? What are the effects of message attributes and appeals and specific arguments?

Accessibility theory; There is no consensus on the definitions of agenda-setting, priming, and framing and how they operate vis-à-vis each other. Is one attainable?

How can a better understanding of the psychology of accessibility theory and related constructs (e.g., memory, reaction time) shed light on media processes and effects? To what extent do reciprocal influences exist between agenda-setting and market concerns? Similarly, what is the role of real-world cues? How broadly should aggregate MIP responses? To what extent is there integrity between what respondents actually identify as their most salient concern and how the researcher has defined the concern?

Active audience theory; What drives audience members to particular messages, information, or channels? We need a more contemporary typology of needs.
Can we extend the menu of contingent conditions that would either mitigate or magnify A/S effects? How do framing and persuasion differ in terms of process and intent? How can we measure and study these phenomena outside the laboratory? To what extent can we study “externally valid” frames?

Regarding misinformation, when do audience members accept this information and when do they reject this and start to correct that misinformation? Can we generate an updated typology of interactivity, one that incorporates audience participation in the diffusion of information (e.g., the retransmission of rumors)? Similarly, how and under what circumstances do audience members generate their own content? How has our notion of issue publics changed?

Social context theory; How does group identity, in all its incarnations, influence media content preferences? With the new media environment, how do published polls and perceptions of public opinion shape our opinions and behaviors? What are social contextual influences on media content? For example, how are neighborhood media or non-English media influencing audience members? How are media effects moderated by our media consumption context – e.g., whether we watch alone or with others?

Spatial theory; How can we better understand spatial vs. affective polarization? To what extent are citizens polarized by issues or by dislike of the other side, or both? With the return of the partisan press, we need to better understand the dynamics and endogeneity issues related to media consumption and polarization.


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In reviewing the parameters of the handbook, we thought it would be useful to rename “Theories about Media Content and Effects” to “Media Content” and to simplify “Psychological Theories and Media Effects” to merely “Media Effects,” and move chapters 17, 18, 21, and 47 into the latter.

Our discussion also identified a few conceptual areas that would warrant commissioning of chapters:

1. Media as agents of political socialization
2. News in a digital age
3. The evolution of journalism (e.g., decline of investigative journalism, changes in models of journalism)

To build on our lunchtime panel, we envision the structure of each section to include:

1. a prologue, a meta-theoretical piece that would help situate the individual chapters in that section;
2. the individual chapters; and
3. an epilogue that would address these larger questions that go beyond the purview of any given one chapter and would incorporate some of these unanswered questions.