Those of us who imagine bands as friends who find their sound in garages or basements and polish it working local clubs were a bit dismayed by the MTV series Making the Band. The premise seemed glaringly inauthentic: choose a group of telegenic musicians and call them a band? Yet some of the series' groups had brief successes. Bandwagons can happen, however inauthentic their roots.
More below the fold....
Making the Bandwagon
Last Saturday we explored whether Democratic senators "follow the money" spent by lobbyists. The data suggested campaign contributions to Democratic senators were a weak predictor of senators' actions on health care reform, and showed the four Senate Democratic hold-outs - Sens. Mary Landreau (LA), Blanche Lincoln (AR), Ben Nelson (NE), and Bill Nelson (FL) - represented states where polls showed the majority of their constituents did not support a public option.
I saw that as "good news, bad news." The good news was that public opinion matters, at least among Democratic senators and on high-profile legislation where there has been extensive public debate. The bad news was that the vast majority of lobbying money is spent to influence public opinion, that is, to reach Fred, our archetypal median voter. It works often enough that Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) has introduced two bills aimed at curbing corporate efforts to drive public opinion - the Business Should Mind Its Own Business Act, and the Corporate Propaganda Sunshine Act - in his package of corporate ethics bills.
This week we'll explore how lobbyists try to manipulate Fred with polls, talking point repetition, astroturf protests, and advertising. The first creates the illusion of a majority, the second purports to say what that majority believe and why, the third puts a mass face on that majority, and the fourth invites Fred to join that majority. We'll explore the first two today, the second two tomorrow, and conclude Saturday by seeing how we progressives can push back against these efforts. And we'd better push back, because public relations firms know a troubling fact about Fred....
Fred is prone to bandwagon.
The bandwagon effect is a social science term for our tendency to believe or do things because many other people believe or do those same things. It seems to be rooted in our impulse, as members of a social species, to belong to social groups with greater influence. The political media call it "momentum." A 1993 International Political Science Review study showed the bandwagon effect could swing 5-7 points. More specifically, a 1994 Journal of Politics study showed the effect was especially strong among independents, who often vote for candidates they perceive as most likely to win.
Although some conflate this with the herd effect, they are slightly different. The herd effect addresses group activity without planned direction, and is nearer the viral epidemic metaphor described by science writer Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point. If the herd effect are the bands that find their sound in the basement and polish it in local clubs before getting a lucky break, the bandwagon effect is the MTV series. Bandwagoning does involve planned direction - public relations firms are paid millions of dollars to use tested manipulation strategies - although it's intended to seem like mere herd behavior. If you don't notice the strategies, a bandwagon movement can seem as authentic as Chicago, when it's really O-Town.
Political polling: Is that a majority?
Pollsters like to say they simply track public opinion, and some try to. Others try to steer public opinion, through a combination of sample bias, question phrasing, question sequencing, and other techniques. In the past few months, for example, Scott Rasmussen's polls have been targeted by progressives almost as often as they've been cited by conservatives. Both Nate Silver and Alan Abramowitz discuss whether Rasmussen's polls are biased, and offer evidence to suggest they may be. However, Silver argues:
But such house effects can emerge from legitimate differences of opinion about how to model the electorate. And ultimately, these differences of opinion will be tested -- based on what happens next November. If Rasmussen's opinion turns out to be wildly inaccurate, that will impeach their credibility, and believe me, we will point that out. Likewise, if they turn out to be right when most other pollsters are wrong, we will point that out too. [Emphasis added.]
This ignores the bandwagon effect, although Silver also writes:
If you're running a news organization and you tend to cite Rasmussen's polls disproportionately, it probably means that you are biased -- it does not necessarily mean that Rasmussen is biased.
We know which news organizations Silver means. But is Silver's proposed division of responsibility valid? If Rasmussen knows that poll results that favor conservatives will get wide play in the conservative media and generate more hits and subscriptions at his own site, and given that Rasmussen's political commentary page is hugely skewed toward conservative voices, and given the problematic questions Silver and Abramowitz cite, it seems naïve to assume Rasmussen has no horse in the race. To test self-fulfilling prophecies by whether they happen is to miss something important about why they were made.
Talking point repetition: What the majority believes?
Talking points are catchy capsule ideas designed to be repeated as often as possible by as many voices as possible. The theory is that you hear lots of people saying the same thing over the course of a given day or week, you will interpret each as expressing his/her own opinion. In fact you're not hearing several different people's opinions, but a single opinion - usually manufactured by a marketer or in a think tank - repeated through several different mouthpieces. As webranding noted yesterday, this "elevator speech" is important in building brand identification for a business, or a political idea.
Many talking points include the phrase "most Americans believe" and, when the think tanker can find convenient data, "as polls show." If skewed polling can create the illusion of a majority opinion, talking points can create the illusion of a commonly-shared reason for that opinion. They're making a bandwagon which they'll then invite Fred to jump on.
Tomorrow we'll discuss how industry-funded astroturf protests help prime Fred to believe that bandwagon is a real band, and how advertising asks him to become a fan.
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Happy Thursday!