The mediatized manifesto (or the strange case of Nick Clegg)
Prepared for the Political Studies Association Annual Meeting, Cardiff, Wales, March 2013
####Please note that this is a very early draft. Comments and suggestions welcome. Please contact me if you wish to cite####
Nick Anstead Department of Media and Communications London School of Economics and Political Science
The mediatized manifesto (or the strange case of Nick Clegg)
Abstract
Election manifestos are an important object of study for political scientists. Work in this area has largely focused on two research questions: quantifying the relative positions of political parties on a left-right spectrum and assessing the success of parties in achieving their legislative agendas. What is not really discussed in the literature though is the broader question of the relationship between the party manifesto and political communication. In other words, what happens to the content of the manifesto when it enters the public sphere in press releases and news reports, and how do the priorities laid out in the formal document differ from the policy emphasis in political coverage?
Using the 2010 Liberal Democrat campaign as an example, this paper will employ the computer aided content analysis program Wordstat to analyse the Liberal Democrat manifesto, party and leader press releases, and election news coverage, to ask whether the manifesto has been mediatized, and if so what does this mean for traditional ideas of political accountability?
The mediatized manifesto (or the strange case of Nick Clegg)
Enoch Powell famously noted that “All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs” (Powell 1977). Never has that statement proved more apt than in the case of Nick Clegg, the current leader of the Liberal Democrats and Deputy Prime Minister in the coalition government. Clegg’s decline in popularity was positively Icarus-like as he fell from the heights of so- called Clegg-mania during the election campaign in Spring 2010 to being called the most hated politician in Britain by the end of the same calendar year (Oborne 2010). This impression is backed up by polling data taken over the period and beyond. During the peak of his election campaign boost on the 16th April 2010, 68 per cent of those surveyed in an Ipsos-Mori poll were satisfied with the job that Clegg was doing as Liberal Democrat leader, compared with just 15 per cent who disapproved, giving him a net approval rating of +53 per cent. By the end of the year, only 38 per cent of people asked the same question were satisfied, in comparison with 50 per cent who were disapproved. This was not the end of the matter though - the figures kept getting worse, reaching their nadir (thus far at least) in October 2012, when 23 per cent of citizens said they were satisfied with Clegg’s performance, in comparison with 68 per cent who disapproved, a net approval rating of -45 per cent, giving Clegg a good claim to being the most unpopular British politician of all time (Ipsos-Mori 2013).
These numeric are certainly impressive due to their sheer scale. They do however raise a broader question as to the cause of Clegg’s unpopularity. This question can more broadly be placed in the context of two understandings of the post- election period and the coalition government.
The first interpretation is very simple: Nick Clegg lied to the electorate, articulating a policy agenda during the election campaign that was promptly dumped when the party entered coalition government, leaving supporters feeling betrayed. Nowhere was this reading of events better illustrated than in the very public u-turn on university fees. Prior to the election the Liberal Democrats had said that “we will scrap unfair university tuition fees so everyone has the chance to get a degree, regardless of their parents' income” (Liberal Democrat Party 2010). When in government though, the Liberal Democrats enabled legislation that increased the cap on fees from £3000 to £9000. It is certainly not hard to see how this reading of events would prove very damaging for Clegg’s popularity. Aside from the formal manifesto pledge, the Liberal Democrats had placed great emphasis on their tuition fees policy during the election campaign, pouring resources into university towns such as Cambridge and Norwich. 400 of the party’s candidates had signed an NUS pledge to oppose any increase in University fees (National Union of Students 2010). The seeming effectiveness of this approach was reflected in the support the party received from students, where they were by far the most popular choice receiving 45 per cent of the vote, in comparison with 24 per cent support for Labour and 21 per cent for the Conservatives. Likewise, the ramifications of supporting the coalition’s proposal for increased fees in the 2010 parliament seem clear: by November 2010, the Liberal Democrats were only receiving 15 per cent support from students, with Labour receiving 42 per cent and the Tories 26 per cent (Wells 2010).
The Liberal Democrats did offer a defence against this reading of events, however. This was based on two arguments. First, that the hand the electorate had dealt the parties by voting for a hung parliament where no party wielded an overall majority prohibited the programmatic implementation of the manifesto. This argument was reflected in Nick Clegg’s claim following the election that a Liberal Democrat majority would have led to the implementation of the tuition fees pledge, but as a junior coalition partner, the party was too weak to realise it. The second claim related to the hierarchy of priorities embedded in the party’s election manifesto. This claim was articulated by former party official and media surrogate Olly Grender on the Today programme as early as the morning after the General Election, when she claimed:
“He [Nick Clegg] was very clear about the package of four issues as he went into the election. Now that wasn’t made up on the hoof, that was four issues that everyone in the party knew and completely understood would be the basis for any kind of discussions, and they are on the front cover of the manifesto” (Grender 2010).
The four pledges on the front of the parties manifesto were: fair taxes that put money back in your pocket; a fair chance for every child; a fair future creating jobs by making Britain greener; and a fair deal by cleaning up politics. Not only are these major commitments relatively ambiguous in nature (although they do relate to more specific policies included in the broader manifesto text), but it is notable that the signature policy of capping tuition fees is not included in anyway.
The idea of the manifesto and the role it plays in contemporary electoral politics is at the heart of the difference between these two accounts, and debating that issue with reference to the Liberal Democrats will allow us to consider which version of events is most convincing. Manifestos occupy an important role in British politics as they, in theory at least, fulfil a number of important institutional functions (Kavanagh 1981). However, these roles seem to have been outpaced by developments in contemporary electoral communication practices. This is the gap that this paper will seek to address. In particular it will ask what happens to the formal document of the manifesto, and it is transformed when it enters into the political communication space and, as an extension of this, what this means for political accountability?
The Study of Party Manifestos
Manifestos are much studied objects in political science. The magnum opus of this type of research is the Comparative Manifesto Project, which has been responsible for coding more than 3500 manifestos written by 905 parties in 55 countries (Volkens, Lacewell et al. 2013). These data have normally been deployed to address one of two research questions. The first of area of study relates to the nature of the political spectrum, with the aim of positioning parties on it, or comparing platforms in different countries or times (see, for example(Laver and Garry 2000; Adams and Somer-Topcu 2009; Dinas and Gemenis 2009)). This approach is theoretically grounded in classic spatial approaches to political competition, where it is assumed that parties can be arranged along a political left-right political axis, reflecting their policy prescriptions (Downs 1957).
The second research question addressed through manifesto studies deals with the “success” of parties in government, and in particular focuses on their ability to achieve the policy platform that they laid out when seeking office. Studies of this kind, employing some methodological variation, have aimed to measure the relationship between what is said in the manifesto and what parties actually do when they are in office (Royed 1996; Laver and Garry 2000).
This second area of study points in the direction of this research - if it is acknowledged that manifestos are not guarantees of policy outcomes, then it raises the important question of how both the manifesto itself, and the parties and politicians running on them, communicate their hierarchy of policy preferences. Of course, this is not a new idea - British political scientist S.E.Finer noted that the development of longer programmatic manifestos had led to what he termed “manifesto moonshine” (Finer 1975), on the ground that parties knowingly made promises that they were incapable of fulfilling. However, the question still stands: with limited political capital, what are politicians actually going to seek to achieve in their legislative programme? This issue is especially fraught, as Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats, have discovered in the eventuality of a coalition government, when policy objectives necessarily have to be prioritized as part of the negotiation process.
In this context, the party’s defence of their decision to dump the tuition fees pledge - namely, that policy actually had very limited significance in their party manifesto - raises a possible disjunction between the manifesto itself and the way politicians communicated their policies, as well as the way they were reported in the media. Certainly, in these spheres, there was a consensus that the anti-tuition fees pledge was one of the central planks of the party’s identity.
One way to understand this process is to consider the question of whether the manifesto has been mediatized. Mediatization is the idea that institutions are increasingly coming to reflect the norms and practices espoused by the media and the communication practices that they engender (Strömback 2008; Hepp, Hjarvard et al. 2010). In this case, the traditional institutional definition of the manifesto has been subverted by alternative mechanisms for communicating policy with the public.
If indeed the manifesto can be thought of as mediatized, we should perhaps not be surprised. It would be a mistake to think of the manifesto as an ever present element of the British political system. Rather, the history of the evolution of the manifesto has gone hand-in-hand with the changing nature of political parties and their relationship with wider society. Prior to the mid-twentieth century, party manifestos tended to be short documents, rarely more than five pages in length. In some cases, especially in the case of the Conservative Party, a leader’s address would actually fulfil the function, rather than a formal document. It was only with the rise of social democratic parties, advocating wide-ranging policy change and with a broad-based mass membership that the manifesto started to take on its recognizable modern form, an extended booklet detailing a host of policies that would be implemented if and when the party entered power (Kavanagh 1981).
Yet this historical acknowledgment makes the shift no less important. The role of the party manifesto (as opposed to the contents) is actually quite under-discussed in political science literature, with relatively limited consideration of its institutional function existing, with some exceptions. Kavanagh, (Kavanagh 1981) for example, offers six roles for the document: as a mandate; a symbol; a battering ram (as a mechanism for achieving policy change against an intransigent civil service class); a mechanism to ensure responsible government by giving voters a yardstick to measure incumbents against at the next election; a tool of intra-party democracy; and a draft legislative programme. There is actually some overlap between these - for example, the manifesto can act as a battering ram against civil service intransigence, precisely because it does bestow a mandate on a new government to enact a specific legislative programme. However two ideas stand out if the manifesto is indeed becoming mediatized, as this shift may undermine these traditional elements of the manifesto’s function.
First is the idea of the manifesto as a mandate, wherein the statements made in the manifesto provide legitimacy for a legislative programme in the following parliament. However, if the legitimacy of this programme comes from making the public aware of the policies during an election campaign, then a mismatch between the content of the manifesto and what is communicated to the public directly by parties and politicians, as well as in the press, undermines that legitimacy. Second, and related to this point, the mediatized manifesto changes the nature of political accountability, with politicians’ success being judged not against the manifesto document itself, but instead against the distorted image of it created in the media.
Methods and Data
Computer-aided text analysis (often referred to as CATA) remains controversial (for an example of this discussion relating particularly to manifesto coding, see (Benoit and Laver 2007; Budge and Pennings 2007b; Budge and Pennings 2007a)). There are a number of reasons for this. Some of them relate to traditional critiques of content analysis, in particular, that simply counting the appearance of words or content actually limits rather than enhances our ability to understand texts. There is certainly an element of truth to this critique as, at the very least, we are making some assumptions if we employ content analysis-based techniques. We are, for example, assuming that the frequency of word appearance and the inter-relationship between those appearances has an intrinsic value to understanding the meaning of a text (Hart 2000).
There are also criticisms that can be made of the use of computer aided text analysis. Nacos et al (Nacos, Shapiro et al. 1991) conducted an experiment, comparing computer aided content analysis results with the outcomes generated by human counterpart. They found that the more complex a particular issue, the harder it was to replicate the results generated by human coders, and the greater the requirement for care in designing the protocols that the analyzing computers used. Certainly, this is research offers a good warning to would-be CATA users that attention must be paid to design. However, it also raises a more interesting epistemological question about the aim of CATA necessarily being to replicate the types-of findings that human coders would come up with. Hart (Hart 2000) argues that CATA in fact will not generate the same findings as a human coder, but that this should not be seen as a weakness. As such, CATA should be seen as a complementary method, capable of generating distinctive, but nonetheless important conclusions.
This study employs a dictionary-based method of CATA. The dictionary construction method used here is derived from Xu and Bengston (Xu and Bengston 1997). They argue that CATA dictionary construction is a part qualitative, part quantitative approach, as a level of human judgment is necessarily required when constructing the dictionary. The method they advocate is as follows:
1. Define the area of study and the types of content that can be used to address the research question. 2. Read the dataset, looking for the appearance of words and phrases that reflect this content. In the context of this study then, the dataset should be read to look for language that is indicative of policy discussion. Add this language to the dictionary. 3. In order to augment this early version of the dictionary, employ thesauruses. The software being used for this study, Wordstat, has a powerful thesaurus module included in it, which allows for the quick addition of synonyms and antonyms to the dictionary. 4. Use the keyword in context tool (KWIC) to assess the number of false positives individual dictionary items are generating. Modify and delete dictionary entries if more than 20 per cent of hits are false positives, under the terms originally defined in stage 1.
The product of these steps can be seen in the dictionary included in the appendix to this paper. As can be seen, the research requires two distinct elements to the dictionary. First, and most obviously, there is a focus on words that can linked to specifically to a particular policy space. In all six policy areas are identifiable: economics; other education (i.e. not higher education); health; social welfare; foreign policy; higher education and immigration. A second strand of the dictionary involves the type of commitment language employed in the dataset. This is an established element of manifesto studies, where hard and soft commitments are coded for (Royed 1996). In this case, three distinct types of commitments can be identified:
1. Firm commitments (i.e. promises). 2. Weaker commitments or aspirations. 3. Policy verbs (for example, cut, abolish etc).
This second instrument should allow us to assess whether there is a difference in the way that certain policies are spoken of (whether, for example, some policies are referred to with greater commitment than others), and whether different types of commitment predominate in different communication environments.
In order to understand the evolving nature of the manifesto, this study will draw on three datasets, comparing and contrasting their content, and in particular the emphasis on and language deployed about particular issues. The four datasets selected will each reflect a stage of the mediatization process.
The full text of the Liberal Democrat manifesto (2549 paragraphs).
Press releases issued by the Liberal Democrats (730 paragraphs)
Press releases issued by Nick Clegg’s office during the 2010 election campaign (252 paragraphs).
National newspaper articles published in the UK press during the 2010 general election campaign (7172 paragraphs). This dataset was constructed by searching LexisNexis for major mentions of “Liberal Democrat” and “Policy” in national newspapers.
This data will allow us to address a couple of research questions relating to the Liberal Democrats policy presentation during the 2010 General Election. First, we will be able to ascertain how policy is presented not just in the manifesto, but by different parts of the party institution, namely the central party itself and the office of the leader. In addition, we will be able to see how policies are discussed and prioritised by the media.
Analysis
Wordstat offers a number of analysis techniques that can be employed with text data. This paper will deploy two of them: simple dictionary appearance counts and correspondence analysis. The former technique is employed to produce figure 1 below.
Figure 1: Appearances of dictionary words in various contexts
This diagram shows the distribution of content in the four elements of the dataset, calculated by the appearance of words contained in the dictionary. As can be seen, and as one would probably expect given the backdrop of events surrounding the election, the economy is the largest topic of discussion in all four datasets. However, this observation masks some differences in the level of focus. Notably, Nick Clegg refers to the economy rather less (64.7 per cent of all coded words come from this portion of the dictionary in his press release sample) than does the party manifesto (67.3 per cent) or the - by a significant margin - party press releases (81.3 per cent). In contrast, Clegg over-emphasizes higher education (as shown in figure 2).
Figure 2: Appearance of higher education related terms in various contexts
The implication here is obvious - in comparison with both the manifesto and the formal institution of the party, Clegg is laying greater stress on issues that might be deemed as more populist in their nature (healthcare offers a second example of this phenomenon). This is perhaps not surprising, but had consequences when the Liberal Democrats entered into negotiations with the other parties on the possibility of forming a coalition government, as the ordering of the priorities in the manifesto, which formed the basis of the negotiations, was not the same as the emphasis that had been presented to the public during the campaign.
An analysis of coverage of newspaper content tells quite a different story, as can clearly be seen in figure 1. Here, and as more clearly shown in figure 3 below, the emphasis on issues to do with immigration greatly outweighs discussion of the topic found in other sources. This is perhaps not surprising, especially given the efforts made by the Conservative supporting press (notably the Mail and the Express) to highlight this issue. It is also interesting to note that, perhaps aware that these issues had the potential to drag on his electoral momentum, Clegg downplayed the issue in his own press releases, relative to the party’s manifesto.
Figure 3: Appearance of immigration related dictionary term, various sources.
A different way of showing the same data is a correspondence analysis. This technique, largely pioneered by academics in France, scales data along multiple axis (figure 3 below uses 2 axises, but it is mathematically possible to use three or even more) based upon the distance between their appearance in a dataset. This can be used to observe patterns and relationships that exist between the uses of words (for any example of correspondence analysis in action see (Schonhardt-Bailey, Yager et al. 2012)).
Figure 4: Correspondence analysis of all datasets
Figure 4 shows a correspondence analysis for the data, reflecting the spatial relationship of both the appearance of dictionary word and the placement of individual texts within the dataset. This once again reflects Nick Clegg’s focus on higher education and healthcare in his personal press releases. What is perhaps most interesting though is the extent to which Liberal Democrat institutions of all kinds - manifesto, leader’s press releases and party press releases - have been unable to limit the press coverage on the party’s policies, which have tended to disproportionately focus on immigration, an issue that the Liberal Democrats barely mentioned themselves. Foreign policy is, unsurprisingly perhaps, a second issue that stands aloof from the major issues, most commonly referred to in the manifesto, but with limited reach in other communication spaces. That newspapers sit somewhere in closer proximity to the issue is indicative of a slight focus on party policies relating to the European Union, which were widely reported on in the period around the Liberal Democrats poll boost mid-campaign.
Figure 5: Language type used to make policy undertaking in various sources
The final figure (figure 5) is shown above. This shows the second element of the dictionary, the different types of words used to make commitments. Two things are of note here. First, the vast majority of commitments are made with reference to particular policy actions (i.e. cut, raise etc). Second, it notable that Nick Clegg’s press releases do have a tendency to use slightly more aspirational words than other communication environment (i.e. hope). This would suggest that Clegg’s office were aware that the types of policies being focused on would end up being the issues that could be subject to negotiation in a hung parliament scenario.
Discussion and going further
The morning after the 2010 election, it was hard to judge if Nick Clegg was a lucky or unlucky politician. The nature of the result offered what, for Liberal Democrats, had long been the Holy Grail - the chance to enter into a coalition government. However, the very nature of the agreement that would have to be forged to do this meant compromise on policy pledges made during the campaign. The party had done little to prepare supporters for what these compromises might look like.
The defence that the manifesto document contained a particular set of priorities that would be the basis for negotiations only goes so far. One obvious problem with this argument is that voters rarely read party manifestos. More problematic though is that voters do learn about policy positions through the sound-bites, speeches and media coverage, and politicians are quite capable of re-ordering policy priorities and emphasis in their media appearances. The data presented above suggests that Nick Clegg did focus on certain issues, while downgrading the significance of others. In part, a closer examination of the data suggests that this was driven by audience - many of his speeches took place on university campuses, and this was referenced in the press releases. This however makes the strategy of focusing on the tuition fees policy even more central to the communication output of the leader’s office, as it combines both audience and message.
Will these events change the way policy is communicated in the UK? Maybe - it has been noted that Dutch politicians, for example, avoid hard manifesto commitments, not employing phrases such as “we will” and instead use the softer language of aspiration (Mansergh and Thomson 2007: 313). It certainly seems likely that, come 2015, politicians are more likely to be pushed on what compromises they will be willing to make from their stated policy positions.
The idea of the mediatized manifesto challenges the traditional institutional role that the document holds in parliamentary democracies that Kavanagh outlined, in that it offers a different metric for the public to judge the success of politicians against when they go onto the form a legislative agenda. It might be argued that this has indeed been Nick Clegg's problem following 2010 - his and his party's involvement in government has been assessed against the meditized manifesto rather than the formal document.
Communication of this kind might also be seen as an additional nail (admittedly one of many) in the coffin of the idea of traditional forums of party policy making, as it offers the leadership a powerful tool for bypassing policy made by internal institutions of democracy within political parties, articulated in the manifesto. Certainly, thinking about policy communication in this way allows us to move beyond the idea that a party is a single entity articulating fixed and uniform policy preferences.
This is a very early stage study, so it should be noted that there are a number of limitations on it in its current formulation. First, the data could be given a more complete clean with extraneous text removed or coded in different ways (for example, meta-information included by LexisNexis maybe exerting some effect on the CATA process). Likewise, the dictionaries could be developed further. At this moment in time, the keyword-in-context tool has been used to ascertain that the terms employed are a reasonably good fit for their intended purpose. However, formal second coding would have the potential to considerably increase the level of accuracy. It should be noted too that the statistics in this paper are highly descriptive in nature and the analysis could certainly be enhanced with more complex statistical methodology.
Beyond these procedural improvements though, there are a number of further questions that might be built on the preliminary analysis presented in this paper. An interesting aspect of the analysis that has emerged is the difference between Nick Clegg and his party, as well as the traditional manifesto document. As such, this method might also be used to consider existing questions about the relationship between the leader and the broader political institutions of the party. A comparative angle between different parties would also be interesting here. Do party leaders, as some theories would suggest (May 1973), gravitate towards the political centre, as distinct from their parties, which are more likely to remain nearer the ideological poles?
This issue more broadly opens up the question of whether the idea of the mediatized manifesto, in particular, the policy utterances from politicians outside of the formal manifesto document, can be used to revisit and reassess the core questions of manifesto studies, notably the idea of the political spectral arrangement and assessments of the ability of politicians to fulfil their legislative agenda. This has the potential to offer an interestingly revisionist element to an important existing body of literature.
APPENDIX: PRELIMINARY DICTIONARY FOR WORDSTAT CATA
PROMISES AND COMMITMENTS
FIRM COMMITMENT COMMITMENTS; COMMITTED; DUTY; ENSURE; GUARANTEE; GUARANTEED; GUARANTEEING; GUARANTEES; PLEDGES; POLICIES; POLICY; PROMISES; SECURE; WE_WILL.
HOPES AND ASPIRATIONS AMBITION; CHANGED; DREAMS; FAIR; GOAL; GOALS; HOPE; HOPEFUL; PLANS; WISH.
POLICY VERBS ABIDE; ABOLISH; ACT; AIM; CHANGE; CUT; INCREASE; MAKE; SUPPORT; REFORM.
POLICY AREAS
ECONOMICS ASSETS; BAILED_OUT; BANKING; BANKS; BUSINESS; BUSINESSES; CAPITAL; CASH; COMPANIES; COMPANY; CORPORATION; CORPORATIONS; EARNINGS; ECONOMIES; ECONOMY; EMPLOYED; EMPLOYING; EMPLOYMENT; ENTERPRISE; ENTERPRISES; EQUITY; FINANCIAL; FISCAL; INCOME; INCOMES; INVEST*; INVESTMENT; INVESTMENTS; JOB; JOBS; LEVY; MARKET; MARKETS; MONEY; PAY; REVENUE*; SALARIES; SALARY; SAVING; SAVINGS; SELL; SELLING; SOLD; SPEND; SPENDING; SPENT; TAX; TAXATION; TAXED; TAXES; TAXING; TRADE; TRADED; TRADING; UNEMPLOYMENT; WAGE; WAGES; WEALTH; WORK; WORKED; WORKS; WORKING.
OTHER EDUCATION ACADEMIES; APPRENTICESHIP; APPRENTICESHIPS; COLLEGE; COLLEGES; EDUCATION; EDUCATIONAL; INSTRUCTION; LEARNING; SCHOOL*; STUDY; STUDYING; TRAINING; TEACH*.
HEALTH DOCTOR; DOCTORS; HEALTH; NATIONAL_HEALTH_SERVICE; NHS; NURSE; NURSES; PATIENTS.
SOCIAL WELFARE ANTISOCIAL; CHILDCARE; HOME; BENEFITS.
FOREIGN POLICY AFGHANISTAN; AID; EU; EUROPE; GLOBAL; INTERNATIONAL .
HIGHER EDUCATION ACADEMIC_FREEDOM; DEGREE; DEGREES; HIGHER_EDUCATION; PEER-REVIEWED; TUITION_FEES; UNDERGRADUATES; UNIVERSITY; UNIVERSITIES. IMMIGRATION AMNESTY; BORDER; BULGARIA; IMMIGRANTS; IMMIGRATION; ASYLUM; POLAND; ROMANIA; QUOTA_SYSTEM
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