Abstract
As the first issues of the ABS Election 2020 series goes to press, the ballots cast in person, as well in the historic mail in effort, have been counted with President Donald Trump swept out of office, the 10th incumbent president to lose a re-election bid. While losing to former Vice President Joe Biden who garnered over 78 million votes, Trump’s vote total of more than 72 million is the second highest ever in American history. In comparison to 2016, when Democratic candidate, Sec. of State Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by almost 3 million but lost the all-important electoral vote, 2020 witnessed Biden winning both the popular and electoral vote – ironically by the same number, 232 – 306, that Trump won the electoral vote in 2016. Trump labeled his 2016 electoral victory as a “landslide,” yet four years later refused to concede defeat when his opponent had the identical same electoral vote total.
Bucking the traditional norm of working with the incoming President-Elect, President Trump has refused to initiate the normal change of power by barring anyone in his administration to initiate or take part in the transition process. Instead thousands of Trump supporters gathered in Washington D.C. as part of a “Stop the Steal” and other similar movements in response to the election results, which the President’s supporters deem invalid, without any substantive proof for such claims.
The January 6th attack on the Capitol was it’s first breach since the British attack in 184. While have the U.S. moves toward a change in leadership another half, including GOP party leadership, embrace a narrative without evidence yet advocated by the President. Interestingly, the “Stop the Steal” movement was not a product of the 2020 election, but a group created in 2018 by some of the President’s most fervent and disruptive supporters, including Roger Stone among others. Evidence of the January 26th rioting at the Capitol further cast a shadow over the President’s credibility and potential involvement in this historic attack. It is true that we live in at least and maybe more parallel universes, each having it’s own accepted mediated reality.
A product of such antics is an unparalleled erosion of trust and credibility in our governmental institutions and the democratic process by which we elect our leaders. Such distrust in the U.S as well internationally has corrosive effects does social media have on all layers of society. Serious questions include: what effect on messaging in our political process? Should we reexamine our reliance on polling as our primary focus on voting behavior? A major theme of this issue will examine these and other related issues and themes as they pertain to campaigns in the U.S. as well as political communication worldwide.
The first article explores the U.S. perceptions on the election process and how Republicans and Democrats differ on what they deem as “rigged.” Dakota Park Ozee and Jarvis in the on-going research project of the Democracy Fund, “What Does Rigged Mean? Partisan and Widely Shared Perceptions of Threats to Election,” focuses on the impact of communication that casts doubt on the integrity of elections. Computerized text analysis of almost 3,000 open-ended surveys collected in 2018 explored the question of what did those surveyed conclude regarding the statement that “elections are rigged?” Results show similarities and differences among Democrats and Republicans, as well as distinct differences: Republicans were twice as likely to be concerned about illegal voting than Democrats, ”while Democrats were slightly more likely to be upset about money in politics than Republicans.” Not surprisingly, Russian meddling was a major Democratic theme, as was that “threats to elections benefit people already in power whereas Republicans worry that elections are threatened by ordinary people cheating” Such insights present serious challenges in our effort to improve our faith in the electoral process.
Exploring the stories offered by the media of the Catalan move for independence in Spain, Barcelona researchers in “The Editorial Opinion of the Mainstream Media During the Catalan Elections of 2017: a Madrid-Barcelona Comparative Study,” utilized the same methodology as they applied in a prior ABS article to study editorials published prior to the 2017 Catalan parliamentary elections. As the authors elucidate, this was the first time since the Franco era that the central government in Madrid had questioned Catalan autonomy, and called snap elections. Once again interested in the regional differences of how journalist in Barcelona and Madrid crafted their editorial stories for Catalan and Spanish publics, the researchers analyzed the mediated realities for a “better understanding and providing a wider overview of the public agenda and debate at that time.”
In an era characterized by a less trust in traditional governmental structure and it ability to provide services expected among publics, there is growing interest on civic engagement at the grass roots level as an alternative in shaping the political landscape. Exploring a dominant theme of this issue – the dystopian media landscape and its impact on civic engagement and political communication, Profs. Mihailidis and Foster, in their article, “The Cost of Disbelief: Fracturing News Ecosystems in an age of Rampant Media Cynicism” persuasively elucidate the current problematic situation and craft a possible pathway forward toward a more engaged and active civil society. Articulately describing at times a dysfunctional media ecology, the authors argue that “politicians are taking advantage of these platform architectures to position people against one another. . . The result is a fracturing of belief, where truths splinter and trust erodes.” Citing the lack of a local anchor of trustworthy sources given the “hijacking of local news” the authors explore the great political divide with tips on how we can right the ship of state.
Catalan researchers Ginesta and San Eugenio in their article, “Re-thinking Place Branding from a Political Perspective: Urban Governance, Public Diplomacy, and Sustainable Policy-Making” focus on “place branding as new transdisciplinary academic discipline,” in which a geographical entity positions itself to be successful within the rapidly changing global marketplace. Through storytelling and political communication prowess, place branding engages citizens as crucial agents in “the successful conceptualization and implementation of place brands,” that function on the local, regional, national and global levels. It is within this synergistic collaborative effort that the authors “present a theoretical evolution of place branding in order to find the most common links with the political order, as well as to design a conceptual framework” all within the political communication mosaic. Building upon their research into past Catalan governments, they argue that a major characteristic of such place branding is embracement of “public diplomacy programs outside the usual state-centric domain.”
Within the historical context of the protests in Africa that have focused on political and well as social issues, Mateos and Bajo, in their article, “Protest, Internet Activism, and Socio Political Change in Sub Saharan Africa,” focus on the impact when participants and advocates combine such tactics with online action. New modes of communication results in movements with similarities to others around the world. Examining the “third wave of African protests” provides choices and autonomy among all agents at all levels of society. The result of such grass roots engagement, the authors argue, is a brighter future for advocates of democracy. With the socio-political impact in the short and medium-term still uncertain, the third wave of African protests is giving birth to a new political and democratic culture in the three countries they examined - Senegal, Burkina Faso and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as well as the region as a whole.
Currently, many pollsters are facing a credibility gap. Pollsters in the United States and around the globe were wrong in many races in the 2020 election in the U.S. as well as in 2016 forecast for a Hillary Clinton presidency. Since 2016, pollsters have reexamined methodologies, samples and other polling variables with the goal to ensure that their predicative capabilities would not suffer another credibility issue in the next election. Rey Juan Carlos University (Madrid) researchers Prado – Roman, Gomez-Martinez and Cruz offer a new Google search method of predicting winners in such presidential contests. Focusing on four elections in the United States and five elections in Canada since 204, the first-time Google analysis provided insightful data. Their conclusion: “The results show that this method has predicted the real winner in all the elections held since 2004 and highlights that it is necessary to monitor the next elections for the presidency of the United States in November 2020 and to have more accurate information on the future results.”
Social media has transformed almost every part of politics. University of Arkansas political communication researcher Ryan Neville-Shepard’s “Generic Fragmentation in Modern Campaign Rhetoric: A Study of the 2020 U.S. Presidential Announcements,” explores the “generic fragmentation” of campaign speeches as a product of the digital era. Campaigns prior to today were best known for political rhetoric that often was epitomized by eloquence in the form of formal and informal speeches crafted to influence the hearts and minds of voters. In contrast – today’s speeches are characterized by “discourse that is scattered over a variety of channels, while taking a form that is truncated, fragmented, and unlikely to satisfy generic conventions when analyzed individually. Prof. Nevell-Shepard persuasively outlines the challenges of today’s civic rhetoric, characterized by the “long announcement,” spread out over a longer period of time and often in scattered fragments, thus, challenging the ways such messages can be evaluated by political communication critics.”
A special thanks to Allison Valton and Ariana Cruz, Special Assistants on this ABS project. My hope is that this issue will afford readers a better understanding of the ever-changing political landscape and provide insights on how we can work together to enhance our global commonalities with respect and tolerance to divergent points of view as we deliberate on our pathway forward.