The media and elections
Without grassroots canvassing, a party's media campaign cannot influence voting.
ANUP KUMAR analyses how the dynamic between the two played out in the Delhi election. Pix: AAP~s Facebook page
For someone who studies the relationship between media and politics, it was really pleasing to see that the loser, and that too a really big one, did not resort to lazy explanations and say the AAP won because of ‘propaganda’.
The historic victory of the Aam Aadmi Party tells us that leadership, issues and the ground campaign matter more in elections than anything, including mass publicity and media coverage. I have argued that relying on propaganda ignores thinking about the agency of voters, the quality of leadership and substantive issues in elections.
In my research, I have found that media and politics feed into each other but in the absence of politics on the ground, a media campaign alone will not change outcomes. In what comes first, the chicken or the egg, it is the ground campaign, backed by a set of compelling issues and leadership that comes first.
In the just concluded election for the Delhi Assembly we saw that what made the biggest difference was the ground campaign by the AAP led by Arvind Kejriwal, a charismatic leader who had the support of the rank and file of his party. Contrast this with the BJP whose ground campaign never took off and where the courageous though reluctant Kiran Bedi did not have the full support of the party’s foot soldiers.
Moreover, on issues, the BJP was still running its media campaign on the agenda of development from the Lok Sabha election of the last year, whereas the AAP had a set of issues that were not abstract to the common man. For example, when the AAP said it would look into electricity and water rates, the ordinary voter was able to connect and exactly knew how she would assess the promise when the party was in power.
Additionally, the AAP had authenticity when it came to anti-corruption and the disdain of the ordinary man in the capital for VIP culture. No doubt these were populist issues but we cannot deny they were far from abstract for the average voter.
Contrast this with the vague and abstract articulation of issues in the ‘vision document’ of the BJP and you will see the logic in the argument here. Even on issues such as inflation, the BJP did not succeed in drawing mileage from the lower prices of many commodities compared to two years ago. Their big new idea for Delhi was the old idea for India – Sabka Vikas aur Modi.
While the AAP was re-building and shoring up its mohalla committees for an effective ground campaign, the BJP and leaders of the Delhi unit were either basking in the ‘charisma’ of their great leader, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, or were busy pulling out the moth-eaten Hindutva agenda from their jholas in cahoots with the radicals in the Sangh Parivar.
It looks like the BJP campaign strategists, led by its president and chief strategist, Amit Shah, had also come to believe in the myth of the power of a media blitzkrieg at the cost of ignoring the success of an effective ground campaign of the kind they waged in 2014. It seems they thought all the coolness of the chief brand ambassador, advertising and suave BJP spokespersons attacking AAP leaders on nightly TV panel debates would ensure that the party’s winning streak continued.
Research has shown that the media’s strong influence on both political attitudes and behaviour is highly overrated. In the absence of the promotion of substantive issues through interpersonal channels of communication, mass mediated channels can only create awareness, but not change or even effectively reinforce attitudes or behaviours.
To ensure that a mass media campaign is backed by interpersonal contacts, an effective ground campaign must be operated by grassroots workers who are from the peer group, i.e. the local community.
Established parties such as the Congress and the BJP were thought to be good at this because they had party organization reaching to the mohalla and village level. This has always served as a barrier to the entry either of a new political party or a compelling political entrepreneur in electoral politics.
The fact that the AAP had members in the party who had watched electoral politics from the sidelines made a huge difference. I am sure the presence of experts with this kind of knowledge, such as psephologist Yogendra Yadav and journalist Ashutosh, at the top table made a huge difference. Without that sophistication and grassroots party work, the AAP would have been merely a social movement in a political party’s skin.
These days, some of the grassroots campaigning and interpersonal communication also takes place via social media, especially among the youth. From a distance, I was closely following the campaign of the BJP and the AAP in the social media. My preliminary assessment is that the AAP beat the BJP in the social media sphere too. The AAP had more engaged interactions on social media which encouraged open deliberation, while the BJP had more of a band wagon approach – follow the great leader.
Again, it is not the media campaign that wins or loses election, even though it is a must to have; it is the ground campaign in the immediate neighbourhood that serves as a point-of-sale in the transaction between a political party and a voter. Finally, let us forget the twentieth-century model of propaganda and celebrate the agency of citizens of India first in 2014 and now of Delhi in 2015.
(Anup Kumar teaches communication at Cleveland State University and is the author of Masking of a Small State: Populist Social Mobilization and Hindi Press in the Uttarakhand Movement.)
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