Decline of political parties, newspaper readers, influence elections
FAIRFIELD, Conn. - Dr. James Simon who holds a Ph.D. in public administration and has worked both as an Associated Press Statehouse Bureau Chief and as a member of Governor Michael Dukakis' administration, says the recent election outcomes show how volatile elections can be. Now an assistant professor of English at Fairfield University, Dr. Simon explains, "One of the reasons is the decline in political parties," he says. "It usually sounds good that people are voting for the candidate instead of the party, but the parties provide stability in public policy." That stability is threatened, he adds, by candidates who can avoid the party, such as Ross Perot, or even Mayor Rudy Giuliani in New York.
Another factor influencing elections is the voting turnout among newspaper readers, which is higher than for television viewers, according to a study Dr. Simon conducted for his doctoral thesis.
An example of how quickly voters can change their minds was seen in New Jersey, he said, where "Only six years ago Christine Todd Whitman was viewed as a fresh faced outsider who almost toppled Senator Bill Bradley. Four years ago voters found her refreshing and elected her governor of New Jersey. Even though she fulfilled almost all of her campaign promises, voters almost swept her out of office."
Dr. Simon went back to school following the Dukakis presidential bid. He says he is fascinated by the political socialization process that college aged students go through. "Those that pick up newspaper reading early on are more likely to become engaged in voting and lead active civic lives." He also wanted to study media and the political system from another perspective "in the hope that I could get students as excited and psyched up about journalism as I am."
It was in Boston that he served as the AP Statehouse bureau chief and from there as Assistant Secretary of the Environment in Massachusetts. He admits to being a political junky who has always been curious to know the inner workings of government. "A journalist on the best day only gets about 80 percent of a story," he commented, "so I went into government for three years to get the other 20 percent."
While studying for his master's at Arizona State University's Cronkite School of Journalism and Telecommunication, he sat in on a seminar where Walter Cronkite was the guest lecturer. Mr Cronkite told the students he had always been amazed that as the reliance on television for news had gone up, voter turnout had gone down. "Someone should take a look at that," Mr. Cronkite told the students and Jim Simon knew he had a master's thesis subject.
That subject would hold his interest through the master's thesis, which examined the relation of television and voting in Arizona, as well as his doctoral dissertation for his Doctor of Public Administration Degree at Arizona State where he examined the issue on a national level. His findings, published in the Newspaper Research Journal, confirmed Mr. Cronkite's suspicions: Americans who relied on newspapers for information about political election campaigns are more likely to vote than those who do not read newspapers or rely on other information sources.
"Newspapers generally attract a more educated and wealthier readership," Dr. Simon explains, "But even when you statistically remove those factors, there is something special about newspapers as an information source that other media sources do not have. Our great worry is that as the number of daily newspapers in the country slowly decreases and more citizens rely on TV and radio for information, the indirect impact of newspaper readership - in such areas as increased voter turnout - will be lost."
He said it took a lot of nerve but he decided to ask Walter Cronkite to read his thesis. "He was nice enough to wade through the material and wrote to me to say I had scientifically proven what he had always wondered about."
A native of Stratford, Dr. Simon is happy to be at Fairfield University where he says, "I'm very comfortable with the Jesuit teaching that seeks social justice; I think that is consistent with what many journalists try to do when seeking to expose inadequacies in society and government policies that perhaps unfairly favor certain groups at the expense of others."
Study results: Newspaper readers vote more
The finding by Dr. James Simon, assistant professor of English at Fairfield University, that Americans who rely on newspapers for information are more likely to vote was based on responses from 2,251 adults who were interviewed before and after the 1992 presidential election by the National Election Study. The Study is a federally funded research project at the University of Michigan that has tracked changes in voting patterns for more than 30 years.
A member of the faculty at the University of Pacific at the time, Simon initially looked at whether citizens used newspapers, TV, radio and magazines to follow the campaign and whether they voted in the presidential election. Those who used any of the four information sources were more likely to vote than those who did not.
Simon then introduced 27 other variables that are related to voting such as a person's age, education, income, race, marital status, political interest and party membership. When the impact of all of these factors was removed, newspaper readers were still more likely to have voted than citizens who did not rely on newspapers for campaign information. The more often they read a newspaper each week, the more likely it was that they voted.
However, citizens who relied on TV, radio or magazines were no more likely to have voted than those who did not use those news sources.
"The results for TV were surprising since the 1992 campaign will be remembered for the way candidates used a variety of TV formats to comunicate directly with voters," Simon, a former Associated Press political reporter and once the Assistant Secretary of the Environment in Massachusetts.
"In addition to conventional TV coverage of the campaign,you could see Ross Perot on 'Larry King Live,' Bill Clinton playing the saxophone on Arsenio Hall and George Bush wooing voters on the Nashville Network."
He added, "The advantage of newspaper coverage is clear if you think about how a story looks on the page. You have a chance to learn about the issue by just skimming the headline, or looking at an accompanying picture, or reading the entire story, or rereading a paragraph so you understand it better. On TV, the impact of a political story is more vivid, but the information often just washes over you and is quickly gone, often without the viewer learning much about a subject."
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