Theory and/as Normative Assumptions in Political Communication Research[1]
Thomas J Billard, Northwestern University
https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-98561-6, PDF
The eminent communication theorist and media sociologist Sandra Ball-Rokeach always began her graduate theory seminars by asking students to write down their answers to three questions:
- What is the nature of human nature?
- What is the proper social order?
- Is “equality” possible?
Students didn’t submit their answers for grading and they didn’t discuss them in class; that wasn’t the point of the exercise. As she explained, the answers to these questions reveal, in a general sense, the unstated worldviews that shape how we understand the social as we endeavor to produce social science. They also reveal, in a more focused sense, the normative commitments our work makes. We should ask these questions not only of ourselves, but also of the theories we read and cite, because what we perceive as disagreements over theories are often actually disagreements over normative foundations.
Historically, Ball-Rokeach argued, communication research has been informed by very clear answers to these questions—answers that reflect a Christian view of humans as inherently prone to vice and vulnerable to influence, and in need of moral guidance from more enlightened minds. This is, in many ways, the normative basis of much media effects research, perhaps most visible in historic debates over media violence and pornography (e.g., Ball-Rokeach, 2001; Gross, 1996), but resurgent in domains such as misinformation studies (e.g., Anderson, 2021). Unfortunately, most scholars do not ask themselves these questions, nor do they ask these questions of others, making us blind to the assumptions that are shaping our theorizing.
When reading research published within the field of political communication, I often find myself thinking about these three questions. I first attempt to provide my own assessment of what the implicit answers to these questions are within the text. Similar to Ball-Rokeach’s characterization of the media effects literature, I would characterize the political communication literature as tending toward a paternalistic view of “the public” that views them as irrational and apathetic and identitarian, and in need of education and enticement from those who are more rational and engaged. In the paternalistic view of many political communication scholars, the public are like children who want the ice cream of (often disinforming) entertainment media, but who must be spoon-fed the broccoli of (ostensibly informing) news media. I then attempt to discern how the author(s) would answer these questions if asked of them. If metatheoretical reflections on the purpose and value of scholarship published in the field are any indication (Lake, 2011; Phelan and Maeseele, 2023), it seems many authors would reply that the answers to those questions are irrelevant, because they approach their research as “neutral” observers who bracket their personal opinions.
The problem is, of course, that it is not possible to ignore the answers to these questions. Even when scholars present their work in the common language of an artificial scientific neutrality, the “neutrality” of their work is what leads us to the answers to Ball-Rokeach’s three questions. That is, “neutrality” assumes certain norms and it places unflinching faith in those norms as objectively given reality (Harding, 1992; Horowitz, 1962). So, while many political communication scholars maintain that they are neutral observers of political processes, they actually, in fact, seek to uphold or maintain certain normative ideals about what politics is and how it ought to function (Blumler, 2015; Peters, 2001; Phelan and Maeseele, 2023). And as the system that seeks to direct human nature, to structure the social order, and to define “equality,” politics is inherently a normative project.
Take for example the study of “polarization” in political communication. Particularly in studies of the United States, political communication research maintains a detached “neutrality” that frets over a supposed bidirectional flee from an ideological “middle ground” that is assumed (in an almost Aristotelian sense) to be inherently superior to “left” or “right” perspectives (e.g., Bail, 2021). Per this line of argument, American democracy is under threat from a refusal, if not an inability, for citizens of different ideological orientations to deliberate, reach consensus (somewhere in “the middle,” which is presumed not to be a political position in its own right, but to be “neutral”), and go about daily life content that “democracy” has happened. Of course, this line of argument ignores the unfortunate reality that there is not, in fact, “polarization” occurring in contemporary democracies, but rather radicalization (e.g., Knüpfer et al., 2024; Kreiss & McGregor, 2024).
Specifically, there has been an unchecked ascendence of far-right ideologies that are not only profoundly anti-democratic, but anti-social. Assaults—both physical and via policy, both by the state and by radicalized citizens—on racial and ethnic minorities (Nacos et al., 2024), religious minorities (Riedl et al., 2024), and sexual and gender minorities (Billard, 2024) threaten the basic rights and human dignity of countless citizens. When these targeted citizens experience mistrust and dislike for compatriots who support the laws and policies that oppress them, this is taken as evidence of “affective polarization,” and their social distance from far-right citizens is normatively equated with the prejudice and hatred toward them among those on the right. These kinds of analytic and evaluative asymmetries, driven by a fetish for scientific neutrality and a “normative” disavowal of norms, fail to rebuke truly anti-democratic politics. Instead they uphold a version of social reality in which racist and cisheteropatriarchal hierarchies are normalized and in which equality is a prize to be won through persuasion and not a right due to all people.
Beyond the fetish for neutrality that plagues political communication research, the field’s un(der)examined normative assumptions about democracy play a major role in shaping its theories. Specifically, deliberative democracy serves as a normative assumption in political communication research, which accordingly assumes that democracy is practiced in very specific ways. Building on normative assumptions about the proper roles of citizens and the press in the operation of mass democracy, political communication scholars assume that citizens should engage in “critical-rational” debate based on information sourced from reputable professional news outlets (e.g., Habermas, 2006; Schudson, 2014). Participation in political discourse then leads to civic engagement in the form of voting and communication with elected representatives, who enact the will of their electors, and—voila!—democracy (e.g., Gil de Zúñiga et al., 2012). This vision of the democratic process and the communicative practices that enable it are built on particular US-centric political values, such as “free speech,” (which is far from a universal democratic value), a Tocquevillian model of civic participation, and a particular scholarly canon based on European Enlightenment ideals (e.g., Badr, 2023; George, 2022; Neyazi, 2023; Phelan & Maeseele, 2023; Waisbord, 2023).
These foundations, in turn, shape what the field cares about. They shape the field’s recurrent panic over “low” levels of news media consumption, since the field’s normative perspective upholds news media as the primary avenue to an informed public. They shape the field’s concerns over declining levels of civic engagement, which is necessarily understood as participation in institutional politics via voting, public communication (e.g., protests and writing letters to the editors of newspapers), and personal appeals to elected representatives. They even shape our narrow focus on the role of (mis)informational media as the primary forms of communication that drive public opinion and political action, rather than considering the role of arts and entertainment media as primary drivers of citizens’ political socialization (cf. Delli Carpini, 2013).
The unlikely combination of a Habermasian prioritization of deliberative democracy and a Lippmannian pessimism about the public and investment in the role of elites produces a particular vision of democracy as a system of governance that, in and of itself, is ideal if only the press and the public would play their proper parts. However, were the field of political communication built upon different normative foundations, we might envision democracy differently. We might, for example, reject Lippmann’s (1922) diagnosis of the problem with publics and instead accept Dewey’s (1927) understanding of democracy as not merely a system of government, but as a process of communal life. Similarly, we might abandon what James Carey (1989) called a “transmission” model of communication that focuses on information and persuasion for a “ritual” model that focuses on cultivating intersubjectivity and cultural (re)production. From that perspective, we might concern ourselves less with communication as a means of informing the public, and more with communication as a means of arriving at shared understanding. We might concern ourselves less with voting and appealing to elected officials to enact our will, and more with participating in collective life within our local communities. We might even concern ourselves less with the press and other informational media that ostensibly drive public opinion, and more with the artistic productions and creative expressions that shape our understandings of one another and of society. In short, were political communication research built on different normative foundations, we might care less about the participation of citizens in the exercise of power by states and care more about how people experience collective life and produce social cohesion.
My point here is not simply that we could imagine political communication otherwise if we so wanted. I intend to push further to say that our present normative assumptions reify oppressive systems and we therefore ought to seek out new normative foundations. Our field and the journals that shepherd it have been critiqued for their narrow range of scholarly interests, their upholding of Euro-American ideals, and their disavowal of issues of power and inequality (e.g., Chakravartty & Jackson, 2020; Coles & Lane, 2023; Freelon, 2023; George, 2022; Ma, 2024). These are fundamentally issues of norms. It is often assumed that research challenging hegemonic understandings of political communication are “biased” and therefore unscientific. For example, former President of the American Political Science Association David A. Lake (2011) has argued that the “isms” of feminism, anti-racism, and other intellectual challenges to hegemony are “evil” because they lead us into dogma instead of theory. While his screed is unusually direct in its loathing for challenges to the status quo, he is far from alone in his thinking. Typically, it shows up in subtler ways, such as in theorizing communication processes in ways that assume, if not actively normalize hegemonic standards.
For example, take the literature on “incivility” in political communication. While ostensibly a neutral concept aimed at fostering respectful and productive discourse based on Habermasian principles of critical-rational discourse (Bormann et al., 2021), incivility is often defined through racialized, classed, and gendered norms that privilege dominant cultural behaviors. These norms dismiss forms of political expression rooted in anger, outrage, or confrontation, which are seen as inappropriate, disruptive, or even anti-democratic. Dictionaries used to detect incivility automatically equate negativity with incivility, even when those negative expressions are negative about oppression, and they equate swearing with cruelty, as though telling someone to “fuck off” is more damaging to civic life than using less vulgar terminology to advocate excluding trans people from public life (Rossini, 2019). In short, our field’s conceptions of “incivility” prioritize politeness over humanity. By normatively upholding “civility” as a standard of political discourse, the field normalizes hegemonic standards while delegitimizing forms of political communication that challenge systemic oppression, ultimately upholding the very inequalities it often claims to study.
This then raises a fundamental question about the purpose of theory in political communication. From the positivist perspective dominant within the field, political communication seeks to uncover objective truths about the mechanisms and effects of political communication, viewing theory as a means to explain, predict, and potentially control political behavior through the study of media and communication processes. As Max Horkheimer (1937) famously critiqued, however, positivism fails to recognize that social facts are not objective representations of the world “out there,” but are constructed by analysts whose visions of reality are socially and historically situated. By producing theories that represent how things presently appear to the analyst as how things categorically are, positivism inherently produces representations of social reality that are politically conservative, maintaining, rather than challenging, dominant norms and practices.
From an alternative, pragmatist perspective, we might view theory as more functional. In contrast to positivism’s assumption of an objectively given reality, pragmatism maintains that reality exists merely in the form of “patterns and structures” and theory, rather than describing reality, seeks to summarize those patterns and structures to make them more legible (Swedberg, 2014). That is, pragmatism sees society as unordered and not governed by universal laws, and views scientific theories as practical tools for explaining and predicting phenomena, emphasizing their usefulness over their capital-T Truth. The dominance of positivist approaches to theory within the field of political communication entails an invisibilization of our normative assumptions under the rubric of “objectivity.” Accordingly, our theories are so shot through with normative assumptions that it’s hard to see where they cease to be models for explaining the dynamics of social phenomena and where they begin to be means of measuring reality against our normative ideals of how politics “should” be. And when our normative ideals are rooted (as they are) in the hegemonic assumptions of a white cisheteropatriarchal status quo, our theories become means of measuring the maintenance of oppressive systems.
In short, our field has very clear answers to the questions what is the nature of human nature; what is the proper social order; and is “equality” possible? Those answers are, respectively, humans are intellectually lazy and prone to passivity; that power should be exercised by the informed and the engaged; and that equality is attainable if the majority wants it to be. Personally, I don’t agree with those answers, but dominant approaches to political communication allow little space for theoretical perspectives that don’t align with them. It is imperative, I feel, that this changes.
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TJ Billard is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication and, by courtesy, the Department of Sociology at Northwestern University. They are also the founder and Executive Director of the Center for Applied Transgender Studies—the leading academic organization dedicated to scholarship on the social, cultural, and political conditions of transgender life—and Editor-in-Chief of the Center’s flagship journal, the Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies. Dr Billard is the author of Voices for Transgender Equality: Making Change in the Networked Public Sphere (Oxford University Press, 2024) and editor (with Silvio Waisbord) of Public Scholarship in Communication Studies (University of Illinois Press, 2024). They currently serve as the Vice Chair of Political Communication Section of the American Political Science Association.
[1] Copyright © 2024 (Thomas J Billard). Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd). Available at https://politicalcommunication.org.