What is the Full Extent of Electorate Shaping?

All three of the articles for this week focused on the power of elites to shape the segment of the population that shows up on Election Day. Each reading, however, focused solely on the short-term effect of voting rather than on other, more longitudinal effects of campaign communications. The Mendelberg article does pay lip service to the longitudinal effects when it claims that "racial campaigns can affect far more than voters' behavior at the ballot box" (p.134), but never determines what these theoretical side-effects are or how far they can extend. Can the elite discourse during an election not only decide who gets involved today, but also serve to mold the people who will decide whether to be involved in future elections? If yes, how far into the process of shaping tomorrow's electorate to the tastes of yesterday's elites are we?

As shown by the Claibourn and Martin piece, discussions of tax policies showed broad mobilization effects. They attributed this result to two widespread misconceptions: (1) people thought they were richer, and therefore in a higher tax bracket, than they actually were; and (2) they were convinced that they would one day be rich and needed to look out for today's rich in order for there to be favorable policies in place for when they become rich themselves. The latter of these misconceptions is characteristic of a naive optimism that permeates the American public. The former, however, is based solely on a lack of knowledge of even the most basic information about a citizen's own interactions with the government. Rather than trying to correct this widespread factual error, the Bush campaign in 2000 decided to use it to its benefit to drum up support for the then-Governor and his proposed tax policy. This conduct sends one strong message from the political elites to the general public: "we don't care if you're grossly misinformed as long as you vote for us." If given repeatedly throughout many election cycles (which it almost undoubtedly is), this message could become internalized in the voting public to the point where they don't even consider it important to be informed.

In addition to the long-term dumbing down of the electorate, methods used by campaigns to shape their electorate could possibly work all too well. In areas of limited competition (which includes the vast majority of the United States, based on congressional incumbency rates), the same candidates run on the same platforms cycle after cycle. Barring significant outside influences, most of these areas end up having the same campaigns about the same issues every cycle. This continual limiting of the scope of discourse along the same lines could ostensibly instill a form of learned helplessness in the populations that are not significantly targeted by the campaigns which could be passed down from generation to generation through parents informally showing their children that the political world is not for people like them. This could, over time, create significant populations that won't become involved in political discourse, no matter how high their personal stakes may be raised. Unfortunately, this last statement sounds all too familiar.