Abstract
In the run up to the 2020 US presidential elections, some activist groups promoted the practice of ‘deep canvassing political persuasion’ as an inclusive, values-based communication strategy, to turn Trump voters favourably towards left leaning or progressive agendas. Deep canvassing emphasises non-judgemental listening to voters’ stories and emotions, in order to avoid any threat that voters may feel from ‘forms of persuasion employed by traditional political campaigns’. In current conditions, some see it as an antidote to the increased persuasive power of misinformation campaigns. This paper provides a critical description of deep canvassing and investigates its growing appeal as a persuasive activist communication practice in the US, focussing on its justification and ethical orientation. In doing so, it situates the practice as ‘activist public relations’ and discusses its context in relation to democratic models. The paper will field the proposition that deep canvassing should be situated within a broader and more robust discussion of democracy, discourse and power to fully understand its ethical and social implications. This study of contemporary communication in the US contexts will shed light on democratic political cultures and interrelationships of power and language between civil society, business and government that support their distribution and interpretation.
The dissolving contours of truth
Shortly before the 2016 US presidential election, Republican Party nominee Donald J. Trump retracted a long held position that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya, and therefore not eligible to hold office. The misinformation about Obama’s identity had been circulating and gathering momentum over several years. According to Jardina and Traugott (2019: 61–62).
During the period from 2004 to 2012, through his first term, there was extensive news coverage of Obama’s religious preference, birthplace, and of the individuals questioning his Christianity and citizenship—efforts eventually known as the ‘birther movement’.
Active in promoting the coverage, Donald Trump provocatively tweeted 67 times on ‘birther’ speculation over 2015 and 2016, but in a press conference, on the cusp of his presidential ascent, he declared: ‘President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Period’. 1 The racist narrative thereby withered, and since then, has received only scant media attention.
The so called ‘birther movement’ as a politically expedient misinformation campaign shows how social and political exclusion based on cultural identity can be harnessed and used as an intervening dynamic in public debate and opinion formation. However, in contemporary conditions, this is not isolated or unexpected. For Adjei (2018: 43) there is ‘an emerging pattern in Euro-American/Canadian societies, where far-rights political candidates with racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic, and homophobic attitudes are getting elected into public offices’. A corollary for Bennett and Livingston (2018: 131) is that ‘What appear on the surface to be blatantly false and bizarre stories may appeal to deeper myths and emotions among publics who support anti-democratic policies such as limitations on the free press and restrictions on civil liberties’. The steady production of far right statements circulating in public debate supporting race baiting and/or promoting fear or hatred of sexual identities thus can be understood as a persuasive practice within the normative conditions designed to cultivate or maintain political power and control. Bearing this in mind, the ‘birther movement’ works more broadly as a means to effectively lead the ‘public’ as ‘voters’ to more fundamental and extreme far right political ideologies. Contributing to these conditions social media platforms like Facebook have been particularly prevalent in spreading misinformation from a variety of sources. Graham-Harrison (2019) for example, discusses that a ‘web of far-right Facebook accounts spreading fake news and hate speech to millions of people across Europe’.
Communicative action 2 conditions that support the rapid spread of hate speech and right wing political ideology differ substantially from those in the 20th century. Then only large businesses, and a privileged few, had right of entry to media power. As a result, industrial scale persuasive misinformation campaigns 3 were largely associated with corporations that had unique access to financial resources, a keen understanding of the critical role of media in democratic society and to occupational domains such as public relations.
Despite the central importance of persuasion and the power of large corporations to wield social influence, within public relations field. Fawkes (2007: 313) argues that there ‘has (a) tendency to marginalise the role of persuasion . . . concentrating instead on the positive role that public relations makes to society and democracy’. The mainstream public relations field’s passing interest in the ethical and social impacts of using large-scale persuasive tactics is concerning. Perloff (2010) defines persuasion as a powerful phenomenon and symbolic process through ‘which communicators try to convince other people to change their attitudes or behaviour regarding an issue through the transmission of a message, in an atmosphere of free choice’. He argues it is important have clear definitions so ‘we can disentangle coercion and persuasion’ and to view social influence as ‘a continuum, with coercion lying on one end and persuasion at the other (Perloff, 2010). Given this, critical public relations scholars have taken a different tack, focussing instead on large-scale public relations’ effects, and its implications for shaping cultural identities and social and political realities (Fawkes, 2007; L’Etang, 1996; Moloney, 2006). This suggests a level of division and tension in the public relations field that raises questions about its overall coherence and the need to develop stronger conceptual strength.
The divergent views about public relations and the role of persuasion have taken place in tandem with rising expectations of businesses’ social and environmental responsibilities to society, and the legitimacy to operate and make a profit. According to Carroll (2008: 13) ‘The prominent themes which continued to grow and take center stage in the 1990s included the following: corporate social performance (CSP), stakeholder theory, business ethics, sustainability, and corporate citizenship’. Perhaps adjusting to the rising appetite for more accountable cultures for business, a change public relations nomenclature occurred. The term ‘dialogical public relations’ emerged denoting practices considered ‘symmetrical’ and ‘balanced’. Taylor and Kent (2014: 387) argue that engagement is core attribute of dialogic approach to communication campaigns in public relations and thus ‘organizations must “engage in dialogue” to be ethical’. Hence for some public relations theorists the idea of ‘dialog’ is useful in bridging some of the problematic ethical terrain associated with the coercive notion of persuasion. More palatable and more normatively acceptable, a dialogic approach seemed ideal to navigate the tricky contradictions between democracy and persuasion, and at the same time remain true to the zeitgeist, and achieve a higher ethical and moral dimension for the field. According to Edgett (2002: 3) Stalwart US public relations theorists, such as David M Dozier and James E Grunig and Larissa A Grunig, favoured a ‘two way symmetrical dialogic approach over “persuasion”’. It is little surprise then that Theunissen and Noordin (2012: 5) argue that the ‘term “dialogue” has become ubiquitous in public relations writing and scholarship’, this is despite the fact that a dialog takes place between two people, or in small group relations. Bearing this disjuncture in mind, Kent (2013: 341) argues that if the idea of dialog is taken out of this context and applied to mass media or social media such as Twitter, Facebook that affords users technical interactivity and engagement, it takes on a very different meaning. Illustrating the point, Sommerfeldt and Yang (2018: 61) argue: ‘This confusion often manifests in studies where researchers simply treat the presence of any interactive features or functions on organizations’ websites and social media accounts as evidence of a dialogic approach’. The words ‘dialog’ and ‘dialogic’ not only lose precision but are subject to disconnection, dilution and colonisation by market-based processes and ideas.
Deep canvassing is a persuasive political campaign practice used by activist collectives advocating for social change that has the hallmarks of a long form dialogic or conversation. According to Dave Fleischer, a key promoter of deep canvassing, ‘a distinguishing feature of a deep canvass[ing] is you . . . [have a] two-way conversation about real experiences that shape their thinking about the issues’. He says conventional or traditional political canvassing focusses on convincing voters to shift ground with the right targeted message whereas ‘we want to figure out what’s relevant to voters . . . to help the canvasser build a good rapport with a voter’ (James-Harvill, 2017). Fleisher further elaborates the particular dialogical persuasive characteristics of deep canvassing in an interview with Fuld (2017): There’s no difference regarding who you can speak with in a deep canvass. Rather, the deep canvass is built on a different set of assumptions than a traditional canvass. In many campaigns, polling data and focus groups tell us that very few people are persuadable, so we ignore those voters and stick with talking to the voters who are already on our side. But many times this approach underestimates who’s persuadable. In a deep canvass, we go to the turf where voters have voted against our causes in the past, and we find out why. Then we try to convince them to change their minds.
The practice of deep canvassing suggests that the dialogic/persuasive dynamic has extend a path into politicized social collectives positioned as civil society and advocating for change. In doing so it may have formed a hybrid that can be conceptualised as ‘activist public relations’ that supports a view that it is possible to ‘achieve an acceptable intersection between profit making on the one side, and social, economic, and environmental responsibility on the other’ (Demetrious, 2011: 1, 2013). This study explores how dialogic deep canvassing ideas are shaped by language and construct ideologically inflected communication practices in the activist space. It asks: Are deep canvassing’s dialogic communication practices aligned with a participative and deliberative approach or a market-driven or public relations approach; and accordingly what are the shifts and ethical impacts?
In approaching this research, I undertook a textual analysis of reports and instructional training and user advice in deep canvassing techniques, paying attention to discourse, what has been included and excluded, and to intertextuality. I did this by examining a specific discourses and the movement of language between the in situ texts to understand better how the texts diverged or agreed. In developing a key list, I selected representative documents over a 5 year period. 4 The analysis drew on Fairclough’s (1992) ideas that ‘Texts are sensitive barometers of social processes, movement and diversity, and textual analysis can provide a particularly good indicators of social change’ (p. 211). In particular, I used intertextual analysis to show a pre-existing encoding system consisting of key words such as ‘persuasion’, ‘management’, ‘citizen’, ‘voter’, ‘participate’, ‘engage’, ‘share’, ‘conversation’, ‘values’ and ‘democracy’ can be used to understand the specific hybridisation of activist and public relations discourse. According to Fairclough (1992: 194) ‘Intertextual analysis shows how texts selectively draw upon orders of discourse the particular configurations of conventionalized practices (genres, discourses, narratives etc.) which are available to text producers and interpreters in particular social circumstances’. In doing so I looked for what concepts of persuasion, democracy and ethics were promoted and if they broadly aligned with market-based ideas or deliberative and participatory democratic ones. These findings are viewed through the lens of democratic theory, to understand the shifts and ethical implications. This paper maps trends that have potential to define the changing contours of the communicative landscape and shed light on its shifts and distinctive discourses to emerge. The discussion shows how identifying the orientation of the democratic model is pivotal to how ethics is applied to communication practices that seek to change and influence people and society.
Collective reasoning, market society and democracy
Deep canvassing persuasively positions ‘voters’ as central in the political decision making process, and it is the significance of this contradiction that is of interest. Hence the question at the heart of this paper is whether the dialogic activist communication practices promoted in deep canvassing align with an egalitarian, participatory, or a market-driven conception democracy. In a capitalist or market-based society which centres on the aggressive competition and self-interest, civil society 5 often expressed as activism representing marginalised social collectives of groups outside the state and business, has a unique intersubjective role in building communities and fairness. This point is illustrated by Habermas (1994) who argues ‘civil society provides the social basis of autonomous public spheres that remain as distinct from the economic system as from the administration’ (p. 8) Therefore activism’s orientation towards a competing democratic modes is pivotal to understanding the political and social flows and directions in contemporary society.
It is hardly surprising that there is much academic theorisation of democracy and explanatory modelling. For the purposes of this paper, the focus narrows on two competing conceptions: the liberal market-based ‘founding model of democracy for modern industrial society’ (Macpherson, 1977: 43), and the participatory model which began in ‘New Left movements of the 1960s’ and places citizens at the centre of government decision making (Macpherson, 1977: 93). The first model has its basis in utilitarianism and the pursuit of individual wealth and ‘did fit, remarkabl[y] well, the competitive capitalist market society and the individuals that had been shaped by it’ (Macpherson, 1977: 43). However this model lacks vision and imagination – and stagnates around the growth of capital and material wealth. This suggests that a normative liberal model of democracy cannot be separated from an ideological chain of consequences that inflect leadership, policy, values and culture. Accordingly Macpherson (1977) asks: ‘what sort of state is needed’ for this type of democracy? (p. 34). Habermas (1994) also notes the thin fabric of market-based democracy and argues that in a liberal framework government it can be conceptualised in a rather limited way as public administration, with the democratic process simply a way of programming it to meet the collective needs of society. In excavating the liberal model further, Habermas argued that it is supported by two pillars: firstly the notion of state political and administrative power to service collective goals, and secondly private or individual personal interests that place pressure on its direction. Hence a characteristic of market-driven democracy is a focus on of compromises – where competing private or individual interest spending much time wrestling power and pushing against government and trying to bend its will. Fairness is built into to the rules and institutions that uphold them such as ‘one vote one value’. On the other hand, Habermas discusses another normative model which calls ‘republican’ which accords far more to the citizen based ‘participatory model’ discussed by Macpherson (1977), because it has a mediated dimension and constitutive process and ethical implications of the common good. In this model, Habermas discusses the role of political communities and their interdependence, with the notion of citizens who participate fully in the decision making process, such as the formation of laws. But like the liberal model, this ‘republican’ model, while having deliberative dynamics, is still centred on the state ‘be it the state as guardian of a market-society or the state as the self-conscious institutionalization of an ethical community’. For Habermas (1994), a third model draws from the other two models by adopting for example, the idea of rights being fixed (liberal model), and the idea of political communities with ethical dispositions (republican model), but reframes and refocusses this centrally to ‘a proceduralist view of democracy and deliberative politics which differs in relevant aspects from both the liberal and the republican paradigm’ (p. 1). He argues that ‘the proceduralist model sets off an arena for the detection, identification, and interpretation of those problems that affect society as a whole’ (Habermas, 1994: 9). This draws on the idea of communicative action Habermas (1989) expounded which coordinates and builds cooperation, consensus and agreement rather than goal oriented strategic action. Hence, instead of the state and the reinforcement of instrumentality, the proceduralist model focusses attention on the communicative action and power exercised through the public sphere as a forum for the intersubjectivity of deliberative politics and to rationally argue and resolve decision making. Habermas (1994: 8).
Given that Habermas proceduralist view of democracy and deliberative politics draws on both liberal and republican conceptions of democracy, Vitale (2006) asks: ‘To what extent are the ideas of participatory democracy and deliberative democracy an alternative?’ (p. 744). In other words, are they not just a hybrid of the two, and so what is really so different about what Habermas is putting forward? John Dewy ‘one of the earliest social theorists who advocated a democratic polity based on public communication and debate’ according to Vince Marotta, also explored the intersections between participation in democracy, public opinion and democracy. Marotta (2000) says Dewey expounded the view that ‘By listening to and debating with others, one will be exposed to different ideas and values; [and] this, according to Dewey, will make individuals more open and thus more like to change their perceived opinion’ (p. 205). But while Dewey’s contribution to democratic theory is immense, Habermas’s (1994) exploration of these themes via communicative action is dynamic and enriching. His focus on democratic models, such as the proceduralist one, where communicative spheres of action are central to the political process is a significant as it opens greater relational understanding of the relevance and power of public relations and political campaigning to collective reasoning in democratic society. Thus, we understand that activist organisations in civil society and their choice of communicative methods like deep canvassing have significance, not just for the campaign at hand, but for our social formation and ethical dispositions.
Doubt, ‘dialog’ and communicative ethics
Drawing on the earlier discussion of democratic models, the notion of ‘dialog’ can be viewed through various democratic models. Depending on the democratic frame applied, the concept of dialog changes. For example, if framed by the market-based model, dialog is merely facilitating ‘a system of constitutional norms mechanically regulating the interplay of powers and interests’ (Habermas, 1994: 8). This inflection was evident when public relations theorists promoted practitioners adopt a dialogic rather than persuasive slant to social influence. As discussed, Edgett (2002) pointed out that Dozier, Grunig and Grunig, theorised dialogic public relations as symmetrical communication. Thus the US based public relations theorists subjected the notion to a reification process in order to fit their ideology. Hence it is reasonable to speculate that most dialogical communications in public relations are likely to reflect this liberal inflection. Therefore the idea of dialog in public relations is subject to a cultural process through which it must be understood within a market-based lens. This raises important questions about the authenticity of a dialogical approach in public relations, and suggests that it may be a way of concealing the dangerous problems entwined in practice and perhaps a means of legitimising a communication industry that is beset by ethical questions, scandal and diminished standing and reputation (Edgett, 2002: 3).
The mismatch of ideas in ‘dialogic public relations’ creates an imperative to examine the ethical characteristics of how it is used in a persuasive campaign in civil society contexts. But critical too, are the conditions of the persuasive campaign’s reception. According to L’Etang (1996) a focal element in a discussion of persuasion is the idea of ‘free will’ (p. 113). She says: ‘The concept of free will is important in separating persuasion from negative connotations of manipulation, coercion “brainwashing and propaganda”’. Therefore persuasion, even if situated in civil society, can be inflected with coercion or more benign characteristics that resemble free choice (Perloff, 2010). This ideological flavour can point to the conception of society promoted, and determine if the dialogic practices emphasise democratic characteristics or ‘simply a market mechanism [where] voters are consumers’ (Macpherson, 1977).
Deep canvassing ‘102 times more effective than typical voter persuasion methods’ 6
In 2016, David Fleischer a Los Angeles based LGBT activist described ‘deep canvassing’ as a reciprocal persuasive community campaigning approach to promote marriage equality in the state arising out of the disappointment and frustrations ‘shortly after the Prop 8 constitutional amendment
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and struck down same-sex marriage in California’ (Chen, 2016). Following this, ‘He and LGBT Center volunteers began talking to as many people as they could, trying to understand why they lost Prop 8’ (Chen, 2016). Fleisher and his colleagues produced in a detailed report in which deep canvassing was represented as distinct from brief one-way communication exchanges used in conventional methods: By contrast, our voter persuasion and prejudice reduction conversations were much longer (twelve minutes on average); two way message delivery (where both canvasser and voter enter into a reciprocal relationship and both do a lot of talking); and where back and forth is the hallmark of the conversation, with the canvasser asking questions that are open ended instead of leading (e.g. tell me more about why you feel that way) (Barrett et al., 2015)
The idea of deep canvassing was promoted to activists as a dialogic tool for excavating meaning, rather than focussing on persuasion and was applied in other settings. The practice gathered academic bona fides when Broockman and Kalla (2016) published evaluative research to show how door-to-door canvassing could work to overcome transgender prejudice. Indeed the research was noted in Barrett et al. (2015) which flagged a section titled ‘Summary of Initial Quantitative Results from the Broockman and Kalla Study’. Discussing deep canvassing in a TedxMidAtalantic, in Fleischer (2016) prefaced his presentation by saying: ‘In a world where it is seemingly easy to increase prejudice – maybe you’ve wondered is the reverse possible, what would it take to make human beings less prejudiced?’ The wider uptake of deep canvassing was evident when animal rights campaigner Stijn Bruers (2017) wrote enthusiastically about its potential for campaigning: ‘Deep canvassing is a new, evidence-based effective persuasion strategy’. Over the next few years, the idea of deep canvassing circulated more broadly. Conley (2020), staff writer for Common Dreams NewsCenter wrote that research showed ‘respectful, non-judgmental conversations are able to move voters where many other tactics have failed, producing meaningful increases in Biden’s vote margin’. Deep canvassing as a new and effective political campaigning technique was promoted activists causes in the run up to the 2020 US presidential election to ‘both persuade infrequent voters about what is at stake in this electoral cycle and engage conflicted voters in powerful conversations to persuade them to vote for Vice President Biden in the presidential election’ (People’s Action, 2020a: 1).
‘How to talk someone out of bigotry’ 8
In researching the question of what type of dialogic activist communication practices deep canvassing promote and whether they align with an egalitarian, participatory or a market-driven conception democracy, I was interested in how three broad concepts were framed in the textual evidence: persuasion, democracy and ethics. Specifically I sought to identify how language and ideas were encoded, social resources and experiences and interpreted and the political and dialogic themes to emerge.
Concepts of persuasion
The positioning of deep canvassing as a persuasive communication to change political views and opinions varied in and between the textual samples. The framing of deep canvassing as a form of ‘persuasion’ is most explicit and prominent in Barrett et al. (2015). Evidence, is in the title, in the first paragraph and in sub-headings or first sentences. Thereon, the words ‘deep canvassing’ are disarticulated from the word ‘persuasion’ and is frequently used as shorthand. Barrett et al. (2015) also pays attention to the theorisation of deep canvassing discussing as a ‘persuasion model’ or a set of procedures that enable its replication. The implied reader for Barrett et al. (2015) is other activists and learners of the method, although the authors make it clear that a caveat placed on the replication of method is ‘a non-partisan voter education rather than lobbying for or against a particular law’ (p. 76). Five years later People’s Action (2020: 3) points to deep canvassing as ‘one of the most proven and durable forms of persuasion and is far more effective than other forms of persuasion employed by traditional political campaigns’.
To support the claims, People’s Action (2020) gave weight to political campaigning research around this (Kalla and Broockman, 2018). Other documents also had direct references and terms such as ‘persuasion’, ‘persuade’ and ‘persuasive’, for example, Fischer (2020): Deep canvassing is a growing tactic for voter persuasion that uses longer, two-way conversations . . . In a 2 hour shift, a volunteer can expect to have about 5 conversations. If your campaign wants to target 1,000 persuadable voters, you will need to schedule 200 shifts, and with 3 dedicated shifts a day, could take up to 70 days
In the samples the word ‘talk’ was sometimes used synonymously with ‘persuade’, for example, ‘How to talk someone out of bigotry’ (Resnick, 2020). The interchangeability and slippage between ‘talk’ and ‘persuade’ is also evident in Fuld (2017) who wrote: ‘In many campaigns, polling data and focus groups tell us that very few people are persuadable, so we ignore those voters and stick with talking to the voters who are already on our side’. Nonetheless the problematical implications of coercion, either directly as ‘persuasion’ or indirectly as ‘talk’ hovered over the discussion throughout the samples. People’s Action (2020: 3), for example, makes this comment for readers: ‘The practice of sharing narratives also is perceived as less manipulative and more engaging than facts and creates an emotional connection that moves beyond surface-level talking points’. However one sample diverged and adopted an altogether different tone and language that linked to an educational and participative framework. Organizer (2017), defined deep canvassing as different to ‘traditional outreach’ and used terms ‘sharing’ and ‘candid or engaged conversations’ and promoted the idea of ‘active listening’ and in this it emerged with a clear alternative interpretative position of the communication practice.
Concepts of democracy
Overall the framing of democracy in the textual samples was fused around the advocating and passage of law and the state as an administrator to achieve equality. Prevalent in Barrett et al. (2015) were references to the legal and state processes in respect of the passage of ‘non-discrimination law’ but this was largely absent in other sources. Resnick (2020) discusses ‘voters’, ‘rights’ and ‘ballots’. While Fischer (2020) discussed the conduct of ‘electoral campaigns’ particularly in light of the Covid 19 pandemic where canvassers had ‘been forced to limit their in-person field operations and get more creative’. The clearest and direct reference to ‘democracy’ was in the People’s Action (2020) report specifically aimed at defeating Donald Trump in the US presidential election. In this reference democracy is understood as needing to be ‘restored’, implying that it is currently something that is lost to many, neglected or broken: Deep canvassing is deeply connected to our broader vision of “building a bigger we” – a multiracial movement that has the power to restore our democracy and build a government and economy that puts people and planet first. (People’s Action, 2020: 1).
Samples rarely used the word ‘citizen’, the word ‘voter’ was vastly preferred. While the term ‘consumer’ was absent, all bar one of the texts, have a distinct managerial tone and tenor, with an emphasis on time and efficiency and indicators of success and that reflect market dominance, for example, ‘These deep conversations, I suspect, may be more cost-effective in the long run because the impacts are durable’, (Resnick, 2020). And again, ‘deep canvassing is a long-term investment, but the impact is cumulative’ (Fuld, 2017). In the main however, managerial terms like ‘goals’, ‘targets’, ‘control’ and ‘management’, ‘cost-effective’, ‘low cost’ and ‘long-term investment’ were used hegemoncially without reflexivity. Nonetheless, it is acknowledged that in most of the samples a distinctive hybrid position was evident, where a deliberative and participative processes as part of a democratic style were acknowledged in concept or else merged with values, and implicit. Often this was signified by the importance placed of non-judgemental ‘conversations’ as bridge to understanding fairness and equality.
Concepts of ethics
None of the textual sources explicitly used the word ‘ethics’ despite the deep canvassing’s purpose to challenge world views and change opinions about social and political issues. However the language of ethics was evident and expressed in terms like ‘values’ and ‘virtues’. Barrett et al. (2015) contained the most references to persuasion, so the absence of an explicit reference to ethics stood out. However the report does make references to ‘values’ which in training material are defined as ‘the core beliefs that motivate people to act – sense of justice, belief in equality, concern for other people and desire for fairness’ (Barrett et al., 2015, Supplemental Appendix 36). Moreover, this sample contained One of the strongest ethical references, in concept. This was a directive to potential users of the technique that: ‘We are not an authority on their religion, so DON’T get sucked into a vague or impersonal conversation about religion’ (Barrett et al., 2015: 6). ‘Virtue’ was also signalled in People’s Action (2020: 10) which stated that: ‘There is a new possibility on the horizon of ending the vicious cycle of racial scapegoating and division and replacing it with a more virtuous cycle where empathy and solidarity become the most valuable currency in our public lives’. On several occasions Fischer (2020) makes a reference to ‘common values’ but does not spell out what these are: ‘Enter deep canvassing: an emerging method of using longer, more interactive conversations to engage with voters by making values-based connections’. Organizer (2017), which framed deep canvassing more neutrally as an educational rather than as persuasive practice, used terms like ‘honesty’ and ‘empathy’ and had a higher emphasis on ethical values than the others, and promoted active listening, empathy, honesty, candidness. It contained an acknowledgement of the tricky ethical terrain in changing people’s opinions was evident in the following: ‘Allow the audience to come to their own conclusions: Make sure your team understands that their role is to lead contacts through a process of gaining understanding, and not to simply tell them what the proper thing to think is’. (Organizer, 2017)
Ethical references within a contemporary US context of cultural intolerance and bigotry were evident in Resnick (2020). The allusions often manifest as values to uphold, such as nondiscrimination, and in the language used which was inflected with religious discourse, for example, ‘Giving grace. Listening to a political opponent’s concerns. Finding common humanity. In 2020, these seem like radical propositions. But when it comes to changing minds, they work’.
Deep canvassing: Activist public relations?
This research sought to understand if dialogic communicative practices of deep canvassing aligned with a democratic approach inflected with deliberative and participative, or a market-driven ideas; and what the shifts and ethical implications of this may be for society. The findings suggest that deep canvassing assimilates with a market-driven democratic approach to politics can thus be identified as activist public relations (Demetrious 2011). In this sense its overall function is reduced to a transactional ‘will-formation of self-interested citizens is laden with comparatively weak normative expectations’ (Habermas, 1994: 7). In other words, once a passage of legislation becomes law ‘This state-centered understanding of politics can forego the unrealistic assumption of a citizenry capable of collective action’ (Habermas, 1994: 7). This echoes the idea of the state as a public administrator and the associated clatter of competing interests to pushing and pursing compromise. Overwhelmingly deep canvassing is judged by its message success and impact by a shift in attitudes of the subjects (Barrett et al., 2015; Fischer, 2020; Fuld, 2017; People’s Action, 2020; Resnick, 2020). This focus on changing voter opinion leads to specific market-based orientation of society and citizens. Hence deep canvassing infused with instrumentality and arguably lacking autonomy, in turn could weaken or undermine the concept of civil society. Habermas (1994: 3) explains how this occurs: Success is measured by the citizens’ approval, quantified as votes, of persons and programs. In their choices at the polls, voters give expression to their preferences. Their voting decisions have the same structure as the acts of choice made by participants in a market
The market-based orientation of deep canvassing was particularly apparent with the additional step in Barrett et al. (2015) to develop the idea into a model that could be replicated put forward as ‘FAB’: FAB stands for Friend, Activist, Banker; it reminds us to invest in building a personal connection with every potential Volunteer and to deliver a strong sense of urgency, both about the problem we’re facing and the value of the action we’re taking to address the problem. After this foundation, the recruiter then makes a direct, specific ask
Strong claims were made in the samples that deep canvassing is something different and new, for example, ‘Deep canvassing is close to being the opposite of conventional modern campaigning (which is a sad commentary on the lack of curiosity about persuasion that informs modern campaigning)’ (Barrett et al., 2015: 72). While another source pointed out the relational differences between deep canvassing and ‘conventional’ approaches, by highlighting aspects of message control: In a conventional canvass, campaigns try to control the message by sending volunteers out with a script to recite exactly as written. . . With a deep canvass, we want to figure out what’s relevant to voters. There’s still a script, but it’s designed to help the canvasser build a good rapport with a voter (Fuld, 2017).
Yet another framed the different approach in deep canvassing through its credentials and its emphasis on values: The new research shows that if you want to change someone’s mind, you need to have patience with them, ask them to reflect on their life, and listen. It’s not about calling people out or labeling them fill-in-the-blank-phobic. Which makes it feel like a big departure from a lot of the current political dialogue. (Resnick, 2020)
Despite the claims of a break in communication tradition, deep canvassing is anchored to a persuasive, rather deliberative process has the hallmarks of conventional public relations claiming a dialogic disposition which has come from a market-based view of democracy, albeit one that is inflected with notions of corporate social responsibility and a desire to be differentiated from misinformation (Edgett, 2002). Thus the interpretations in Fuld (2017) and Barrett et al. (2015) could more accurately be characterised as variation rather than differentiation from traditional coercive persuasion campaigns.
Nonetheless, while deep canvassing is communication practice with a dominant market-based inflection it also has a high level of intersubjectivity and as such arguably, does have deliberative component. Therefore if deep canvassing constitutes a different dialogic approach that bridges a path between participatory civil society and capitalist market-based approaches, the question remains: is this hybridisation conceptually flawed or does it open up new ways to think about communicative action? Deep canvassing involves a constitutive processes, and a focus on building cohesion and communicative bonds in community, and in this reflects elements of a republican model (Habermas, 1994). Moreover deep canvassing understood in the real world contemporary US political context, is a practice situated in and cultural context riven with ‘norm breaking’, as seen the birther example, (Lieberman et al., 2019: 5) and partisan divides that are reflected in ‘Trump’s nativist and race-laden populism’. This norm breaking populism not only degrades public culture but threatens confidence in ‘the capacity of its institutions to withstand that threat’ (Lieberman et al., 2019). In applying L’Etang’s idea of ‘free will’ as a barometer to measure whether persuasion in deep canvassing leans more towards manipulation and coercion that deliberation, the context of the subject’s free will in light of the misinformation culture and the importance of the political moment, that is electing a authoritarian populist political administration in US, must be taken into consideration.
This real world context highlights the limitations in democratic theory and in adopting an either/or approach liberal market-based or participative deliberative approach which often does not reflect the less than ideal social and circumstances in which communicative action is taking place. As discussed most of the textual sources identify the tough ideological conditions that confronted the United States in the last 5 years and in the in situ documents – therefore concept of persuasion – emerges as an occasionally problematic concept that is contextualised in relation to the increasing alarm about the future of progressive causes within the rise of far right. For example, ‘Reducing prejudice “to divert someone away from prejudice and toward greater acceptance of others in order to build support for progressive causes”’ (Resnick, 2020). This political moment as a form of justification is exhibited in some of the framing statements below: After disappointing outcomes on Election Day for Democrats across the country, plenty of folks are wondering how we move forward and run better campaigns in the future (Fuld, 2017)
While the applying the lenses of liberal and participatory democracy is useful in interpreting the chains of assumptions that underlie communication practices, Macpherson (1977: 100) says it is not necessarily an ‘either or’ situation, but a ‘vicious circle’ because: We cannot achieve more democratic participation without a prior change in social inequality and in consciousness, but we cannot achieve the changes in social inequality and consciousness without a prior increase in democratic participation.
Hence apathy or discrimination cannot be addressed, unless there is movement in getting people to vote and become part of a political community. But how do you achieve the former without the latter and the latter without the former? To some extent this provides a justification for deep canvassing and the blurring of the boundaries between dialogic market-based approaches to participatory democracy that take into account contemporary contexts and ‘conditions for lasing opinion change and reductions in prejudice’ (Resnick, 2020). But caution is needed in justifying hybrid communication practices within the neoliberal and authoritarian populist context. Holborow (2007: 56) argues that: ‘It is easy to see why these ideas about the weight of language in the global economy have some appeal: not only has communication between people changed beyond all recognition over the last two decades, but also those at the head of governments and corporations constantly promote the idea that we are living in a post-industrial “information” age where spin, branding, and communication override everything else’. Therefore while deep canvassing might be useful as a circuit breaker in contemporary norm breaking and populist contexts, lack of ethical reflection in the long term could have corrosive consequences for society. Nevertheless the textual evidence primarily discusses people as ‘voters’ not ‘citizens’, a lens that can diminish social equality. According to Florida (2013: 11): ‘To reduce the role of citizens . . . to that of voters, who limit themselves to a periodical evaluation of governors’ performance, entails a dramatic impoverishment of democracy’.
A key theoretical questions that this study raises is the conception of society to which deep canvassing is tethered to, and whether this is a market-based, participatory or deliberative one. Without a discussion of ethics the deep canvassing, no matter how well intended, promoters of deep canvassing could fall into the trap of ‘assumptions that what is socially warranted is also ethically acceptable’ (Pieczka, 1996: 149). This functionalist belief so strong in what is being promoted, has underpinned communication programmes of action in public relations and led to disastrous result (Demetrious 2013). Therefore as Pieczka (1996: 153) says there is a need for methodological introspection. As some aspects of deep canvassing are ethically problematic, a stronger focus democratic models will reveal tensions and point to some of the potential pitfalls. Hence deep canvassing would benefit from ethical justification based on a wider set of parameters than passing references to values and virtues that is currently demonstrated.
Conclusion
This study of real world communicative action and democratic models (Habermas, 1994; Macpherson, 1977) provides important insight into the rise of activist public relations practices in civil society. Consideration of deep canvassing not only reveals what concepts of democracy are at play in its social construction, but also what assumptions about the role of citizen and of society are embedded in organisational communication practices. A shift in activist communications to market-based conception of democracy, will also shift an understanding of the public, from citizens to that of voters and consumers, and over time, potentially lay a path to a thin social fabric and potentially more social and cultural polarisation. There are two significant meanings embedded in deep canvassing practices: that of civil society and that of market-based society, and there are tensions between them and in this sense they will compete. Which one will become hegemonically accepted and absorbed invisibly into communication practices? Opening up research agendas to reflect back on these persuasive efforts of activists benefits practices like deep canvassing as it builds a more robust conception and clarifies the alignment with deliberative and participatory democratic models, or market-based. While contemporary conditions are relevant in understanding the rise of deep canvassing, communicative action of any kind can determine what sort of political society we have. In the case of activist public relations it especially important as civil society has been a critical element in providing a contrasting position from market-based capitalism. For as Macpherson (1977) says ‘The workability of any political system depends largely on how all the other institutions, social and economic, have shaped, and might shape, the people with whom and by whom the political system must operate’ (p. 4).
