Abstract
Darren Lilleker’s new book seeks to understand the important processes by which citizens interpret political communications. It combines studies of communications and psychology with ‘politics’ as the central concept. A core theme, running throughout this examination, concerns the extent to which citizens are governed in their choices by a combination of logic and emotion as opposed to logic and reason alone. Broadly, the author takes a psychological approach to exploring how audience receive messages and ‘what cognitive processes may take place as a political message is evaluated’.
The author makes the bold claim that his book is the ‘first work to position cognitive psychology at the heart of political communication’, a claim that a number of scholars, notably Dietram A. Scheufele, might question. This bold claim is partly modified by the addition of the words ‘and make it accessible to as wide an audience as possible’. Despite this caveat, such a claim could raise a certain scepticism about the book’s approach. This would be a pity. While this is by no means the first work to utilize psychological approaches to the study of political communication, the author certainly achieves his aim of making what could be a dense study accessible. He seeks a ‘stimulating read’ for his audience and deserves sincere congratulations for achieving this.
Lilleker takes the reader through nine well-focussed and discrete chapters, including an overview of political communication’s development, an examination of valence politics which contextualizes social judgement theory to assess how messages may be accepted or rejected and the processes of electoral decision making. Throughout, his analyses are leavened by reference to cognitive processes. After a wealth of well-written chapters, which draw together the relevant research from a variety of approaches and genuinely illuminate the interested scholar, the final chapter attempts to model political cognition by offering a ‘reception model for political communication’.
For me, this is a mistake in an otherwise very good book. The author apologizes for the over simplistic and generic nature of the model, anticipating criticism on both counts. He is right to anticipate that criticism, which could have easily been avoided by not attempting to construct a model which lacks both sophistication and explanatory power. The model attempts to ‘draw together a range of works within political, consumer and social psychology with reception theory’ and apply these to the various processes the brain might engage in when receiving political communications. The sheer complexity of this is beyond the model’s capability.
He believes the model offers an illustration of a series of stages ‘with many exits and offers some understanding of what might be occurring in the brain and how this might lead to further cognition and to behaviour’. He argues that his model outlines a process by which ‘conditioning’ leads to value and beliefs which enter an assembly line in which ‘peripheral processing’ and ‘central processing’ lead to ‘participatory behaviour’ – but the distinctions between the behaviour that results from, for example, accepting or rejecting a message, are not clearly delineated. The model clearly indicates that accepting or rejecting an idea leads only to ‘peripheral processing’ – and in the diagrammatic representation offered in Lilleker’s final chapter, peripheral processing appears to be the end of the line for participation. Another process, connected with relevance or dissonance, then begins, but its connection to the previous stages is unclear.
Essentially, the model leaves the reader little the wiser about the processes which affect the decision to participate or not, and offers no clues as to how these factors combine. The author excuses this by saying it is ‘impossible’ to produce some form of ‘global understanding’ of how the various factors ‘combine together’ [sic] as the power of any one source of influence ‘will be individual’. In that case, the sceptical reader might argue, why bother to attempt what is essentially a ‘global model’ in the first place?
Despite my criticisms of the model Lilleker offers, there is much to admire in this book. It is a work of considerable scholarship and draws the attention of political communication theorists – and of course political scientists generally – to the potential importance of cognitive approaches. For citizens to get engaged – or perhaps more accurately re-engaged – with politics, Lilleker argues they need to be ‘fired-up, inspired’ and drawn to hot and deep (as opposed to peripheral) cognition. This may well explain a large amount of the electoral appeal offered by Nigel Farage and UK Independence Party (UKIP) to groups which may have been previously unengaged or have become disenchanted with mainstream party politics.
Previous work by the author on political marketing has attracted the interest of the political parties, anxious to find the Philosopher’s Stone which will ensure their base messages turn to words of spun gold for the electorate’s ears. The banal slogans offered to the electorate by the three main parties in 2010 suggest they failed to learn any useful messages from ‘market-orientated’ approaches to political marketing. The author concludes by offering the book’s research to the academic and practitioner community in the hope that they will develop a better understanding of political cognition in order to comprehend how we the people think about politics.
On behalf of the academic community, thank you, but the brain chills at the thought of the political party spin doctors fully understanding the ‘complex processes of political cognition’. However, as the author acknowledges, the book is but a ‘first stage’ in this process. And despite his attempts to offer a simple model, the processes appear to be far beyond the construction of a simple route map. The challenge to ‘cut through the clutter in the modern communication environment’ and produce a message that is more persuasive than your opponents and gets ‘accepted, stored and acted upon’ by the electorate in the desired way may be (hopefully?) beyond the reach of electoral strategists. But Lilleker’s book offers a fascinating account of the psychological processes which may occur when political communications are received. I enjoyed reading it and recommend it to all students of political communication.