JLMast 02.Aug.16 Appendix AJCS-258-OAR1
Title – Action in Culture: Act I of the Presidential Primary Campaign in the U.S., April to
December, 2015
Jason L Mast1
Appendix
Presidential elections are the subject of a tremendous amount of scholarly research. In effort to
indicate how my study fits into the universe of election studies, I offer a broad and partial
schematic of this literature. In this appendix, I describe four particularly influential orientations
to the subject of presidential elections, and specify how culture is represented and positioned
epistemologically in each.
The following approaches argue that economic conditions, peace and war, media
influences, presidential rhetoric and communication, and demographics figure centrally in
shaping politics and election outcomes. I agree that these factors are important and influential.
Where my approach differs, however, is that I insist that these categories are culturally
constructed.
My method is interpretive. I foreground the symbolic environment in which political
actors perform specific meanings about these categories, and I specify the interpretive resources
citizen audiences draw upon to make sense of these performances. Critical to my approach is
insisting that when candidates name, diagnose, and prescribe plans for improving the conditions
and forces that shape these factors, they do so by embedding these categories in narratives laden
1
Institute of Advanced Study, University of Warwick, Millburn House, Coventry, CV4 7HS, UK
Email: j.l.mast@warwick.ac.uk
with moral meanings and ethical sentiments. Voting, I argue, is an action at which many
powerful meaning formations --about citizenship, personal interests, national and personal
identity, for instance-- intersect.
Bread and peace
Researchers seeking to build predictive models are explicit: they aim to specify quantifiable
variables that determine election outcomes, and the fewer the variables, the better the model.
Douglas Hibbs (2012), for instance, designed a “bread and peace model” in effort to “pin
down quantitatively the persistent influence of objectively measured political-economic
fundamentals on aggregate votes for president” (637). He analyzed every postwar US
presidential election from 1952 to 2008, and concluded that two factors, bread and peace,
determined every one of these elections’ outcomes. Bread, the more determinative of the two
variables, represents the “weighted-average growth of per capita real disposable personal income
over the [presidential] term.” The second, less influential factor, peace, represents “cumulative
US military fatalities due to unprovoked, hostile deployments of American armed forces in
foreign wars” that occurred during the incumbent party’s four year mandate period. “No other
outside variable systematically affects postwar aggregate votes for president,” Hibbs asserted
(365).
On culture, Hibbs was explicit: it played no role in electoral outcomes. In developing his
model he dispensed with “voter sentiments, preferences, and opinions” because, in his words,
“[a]ttitudinal variables are endogenous: they are affected causally by objective fundamentals and
consequently supply no insight into the root causes of voting behavior” (637).
Bread and peace explained the outcomes of fifteen consecutive presidential elections.
Hibbs’s article was published in October 2012, prior to that year’s presidential election, in which
incumbent Barrack Obama sought reelection against a challenge from Republican candidate,
Mitt Romney. Hibbs concluded that the bread and peace model “forecast a fairly big loss by
President Obama” (639) that year, an election that Obama proceeded to win in November.
Higgs’s approach may appear extreme, yet many of his epistemological assumptions run
deep in election studies, even if in diluted form.
Peace, prosperity and political moderation
A second cluster in the universe of election scholarship is comprised of researchers who
acknowledge that broadcast media and new media technologies have reshaped how politics is
practiced by elites and experienced by citizens. They recognize that many of their colleagues are
increasingly attending to communicative spaces and political actors’ appeals to the public. Yet
scholars in this cluster argue that findings from studies of “this new political style” of
“‘constructing’ a public discourse” (Zaller 1998: 187) are “somewhat weaker” (186) than
findings from studies that privilege variables of “political substance – in the sense of peace,
prosperity, and moderation” (187).
Studies that approach politics as the “attempt to govern on the basis of words and images
that diffuse through the mass media” are fine, Zaller suggests, but ultimately they are missing
what really shapes political processes: “The public stays focused on a bottom line consisting of
peace, prosperity, and moderation,” and these fundamentals “very heavily influence the
dynamics of presidential support, probably matters of presidential popularity and certainly in
general elections” (186).
In this cluster, the substance variables are understood to be resistant to interpretive
interference, or to forces that may obfuscate their true importance or distort their real meanings:
“However poorly informed, psychologically driven, and ‘mass mediated’ public opinion may be,
it is capable of recognizing and focusing on its own conception of what matters” (186). While
“peace, prosperity, and political moderation” shares many of the naturalist assumptions in the
“bread and peace” approach, its concerns with the origins and effects of public opinion indicate it
is less epistemologically rigid than the modelling cluster.
Communication and Rhetoric
The “somewhat weaker” studies to which Zaller refers are outgrowths of Richard Neustadt’s
(1990 [1976]) influential study of the modern presidency and the politics of leadership. Neustadt
represented mid-twentieth century state power as concentrated in Washington’s corridors, where
it was sequestered from press scrutiny and public purview. It was in these insulated spaces that
state power was negotiated, bargained over, and ultimately translated into an agenda. Neustadt
was foremost interested in presidential power, and in the constraints on it and the strategies for
projecting it. He argued that multi-branch government and party politics established conditions
in which executive power operated not through simple commands but through bargaining with
Washington and congressional elites. Persuasion was the key to successful bargaining (or “deal
making” in the parlance of the 2016 election), he observed, and direct appeals to the public could
increase an incumbent’s prestige and thereby his power to persuade political elites.
Conditions changed dramatically in subsequent decades, however: television and mass
media penetrated the political and domestic spheres, the executive branch expanded its
communications and press relations administrative arms, party hierarchies eroded, and presidents
engaged directly with citizens through public addresses with greater frequency and in regard to a
proliferating variety of subjects. Scholars continued to pursue Neustadt’s questions, however,
their depictions of the sources and means of executive power increasingly cast speaking to the
public, and public opinion itself, in more robust roles.
One of the post-Neustadt responses argues that defusing forces transformed an orderly,
institutionalized Washington into a fragmented arena, one comprised not of party loyalists but
individualized political actors and diverse interests (Kernell 2007 [1986]). These conditions
radically altered the calculus of bargaining, and made political rhetoric and the method of “going
public” strategically advantageous. This response retains Neustadt’s emphasis on bargaining,
though it conceives of it as a much more complex site of transaction, and as occurring within a
much more complex political field. It interprets instances of political rhetoric and “going public”
through an economistic logic: motives for going public, the strategies and means for pursing it,
and the content and style of practicing it, are all reduced to calculations of costs and benefits, and
estimates of the likelihood of outcomes. Presidents speaking to publics in this approach is
rhetoric practiced and interpreted by rational actors with instrumental motives and individual
interests.
A second post-Neustadt response attributes the increasing centrality of public rhetoric to
meaning and interpretation, and thereby represents an important step toward bringing the cultural
into political analysis. The rise of the “rhetorical presidency” (Ceasar et al 1981; Tulis 1987) is
rooted in twentieth century presidents’ shifting interpretations of the executive role and the
doctrines that had dictated its parameters. The rise was facilitated by media technology, and lent
fuel and normalized by increasingly aggressive and flamboyant approaches to campaigning for
office. Meaning is important in this approach, but it is limited to presidents’ and critics’
interpretations of the role and duties of the office. Meaning in the analysis stops at that point, at
instances in which presidents interpret their role differently. From that moment on, meaning is
translated into practice, as rhetoric and speechmaking. Audiences are conceived of as so
thoroughly habituated to the practice of public rhetoric that they are inured to it, or as highly
rational actors who weigh the costs and benefits of the proposals contained in the rhetoric vis-àvis
their own interests. Rhetoric analysis ends up returning us to metrics of effectiveness,
strategy, and the force of mere expectations, and not to interpretive structures and symbolic
environments.
David Ryfe (2005) interpreted Kernell’s and Tulis’s innovations in presidential studies as
representative of a potential that had been only partially realized. More so, the rhetoric-oriented
work inspired be these developments remains hamstrung by epistemological assumptions that
“mischaracterize how symbols work” (10) and by a “conception of communication that casts the
public as consumer of presidential information: citizens receive, cognitively process, and decide
wither [sic] or not to ‘buy’ information conveyed by the presidents” (6), or in the case of
elections, presidential candidates.
To fully realize its potential, Ryfe sets out to place presidents in culture. Building upon
Habermas’s work on the institutional conditions that facilitated the rise of a robust public sphere,
and Geertz’s advocacy for thick description, Ryfe covers the rise of the rhetorical presidency and
the strategy of going public but in a much more culturally nuanced and ultimately illuminating
way. He details how presidents thought of their own roles, and those of the press and the public,
through the dominant discourses and metaphors of their day. Without writing the word, Ryfe
creates a representation of presidents in culture which is essentially a semiotic one. Yet leaning
on Searle and Wittgenstein to represent the institutionalization and continuance of the practice of
going public, Ryfe’s explanation veers toward presenting culture as the mere repetition of
practice, or towards a formulation of culture which is essentially an ethnomethodological one.
Demographics
Demography plays an increasingly central role in election studies as well as in political
commentary and strategizing. It is a powerful signifier. It promises to represent in a pure way
(read statistical) social groups’ attitudes and interests and to predict their future actions. Culture
plays contradictory roles in this cluster. It is alternately dismissed as being immaterial and
irrelevant, or elevated to the status of being perniciously determinative. Whereas some
demographers argue that cultural factors are rendered insubstantial by social forces that clarify
real interests, others use its findings to blame culture for obscuring or concealing real interests.
While culture’s effects are interpreted in these opposing ways, representatives of both
orientations share a few assumptions. Building their arguments upon a materialism that often
remains implicit, they routinely conceptualize culture as representing a force that stands outside
of and exists external to the social actor (cf Alexander 1988). They also conceive of the rational
dimensions of social action in exaggerated and excessive terms; their social actors are either
singularly rational or tragically irrational.
Sociologists Jeff Manza and Clem Brooks (1998), for instance, seek to identify the
factors that gave rise to and sustain the gender gap in US presidential elections, and they claim
that their findings explain American women’s increasing propensity to vote Democratic relative
to the men’s vote. They conclude that “a single causal process” (1249), namely increased
women’s participation in the labor force, has caused “a cumulative net shift among women
toward support for Democratic presidential candidates” (1259).
Cultural factors are rarely mentioned. When they appear, they play either an anecdotal
role, or, in the form of attitudes, they are dismissed for failing to meet the standards of statistical
significance. The one attitudinal variable that does register significance, support for social
services spending, is in fact a product of the causal variable, that of labor force participation, the
authors explain (1255-56). While they rely on phrases such as “the Democratic Party has stood
for” (1240), or “the Republican Party has… been viewed by many voters as,” they fail to discuss
any means by which these meanings and interpretive frameworks may have formed. They
dismiss political campaigns and press commentary as thin solutes disappearing in the universal
solvent that is real interests:
“The increasing importance of work on gender-based political divisions has not been
systematically understood by previous scholarly or journalistic analysts. Even when
political commentators have referred to work related factors among women, they have
failed to grasp their political significance. For instance, a Time cover story (October 14,
1996), appearing during the final weeks of the 1996 campaign, suggested that ‘Bob Dole
and Bill Clinton will do anything to win the hearts and votes of working moms, but many
of them are too busy to notice.’ To the contrary, it appears that working women have
noticed and are choosing accordingly” (1262).
Labor force experience explains ideas, attitudes, and voting actions, the authors contend, while
communicative and performance strategies are transparent epiphenomena, easily dismissed.
The alternative version of culture is seen in pieces like social critic Thomas Frank’s best
seller, What’s the Matter With Kansas (2004), as well as in many of the scholarly responses it
generated (e.g. Bartels 2006; c.f. Willett 2008). Seeking to explain why the white working class
consistently votes against its real, material interests, Frank builds an equation akin to:
Machiavelli plus false consciousness equals manufactured consent. Culture is conceived as
values. As an arena of values, it is organized along class lines, with lower and middle class
whites embracing values strictly opposed to those found on the nation’s coasts and that are held
by media, limousine liberal, and technocratic elites.
As a demographic, the white working class played an important role in shaping Hillary
Clinton’s electoral strategy. Courting the demographic helped lift candidate Bill Clinton into
office in the 1990s. Candidate Obama, on the contrary, pursued support from young voters, nonwhites,
and women. The strategy was so successful that it gave rise to the most powerful
demographic symbol operating in the political universe currently, that of the “Obama coalition.”
The question that animates much discussion amongst the current election’s commentators and
handwringing amongst its strategists is if the coalition is transferable (Haberman and Martin
2015; Galston 2015). The Clinton campaign will soon find out.
In my analysis of the first act of the 2016 presidential election, I start from the premise
that people’s understandings and experiences of the economy, peace and violence, and identity
are assemblages of cultural narratives, discourses, and symbolic codes. My approach is intended
to demonstrate that these factors, which appear to present themselves naturally to voters, like
photographs, are in fact highly constructed. My argument is that through investigating cultural
structures and performances of meaning, we can begin to understand how people make personal
choices about what they believe are the right and wrong ways for the nation to move forward,
about who they believe has the proper character for representing and leading the country, and
about which policies they believe will be good and which will be bad for protecting and
advancing their own personal interests. Building on the works of Geertz, Barthes, and Alexander,
my argument is that through investigating durable meaning structures we can begin to
understand how in periods of economic expansion and domestic and international peace, for
instance, narratives of financial, personal, familial and social threat and vulnerability may still
find purchase. My point is that between indicators and understandings circulate meanings, and
that performances are particularly potent events during which these meanings are condensed,
communicated, and interpreted.
References
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Frank, T. (2004) What’s the Matter With Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America.
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