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Political Communication, 18:421–431, 2001Copyright ã 2001 Taylor & Francis1058-4609 /01 $12.00 + .00

Politics as Cultural Practice

MICHAEL SCHUDSON

This essay reflects on the notion of politics and political communication as a form ofcultural practice. This requires locating political practice in both space and time andpaying close attention to empirical details—“drawing what you see.” These preceptsare illustrated in a discussion of different practices of voting in American history.The author argues that the study of political communication should include findingand observing people doing, and not just expressing or thinking about, politics.

Keywords citizenship, political communication history, political communication re-search methods, citizenship

Today most Americans, and many others around the world, know more about the detailsof voting procedures in obscure Florida counties than even well-informed political sci-entists or political journalists knew on or before November 7, 2000. I was one of arelatively small number of people who knew something about chads and the relativemerits of punchcard voting systems versus voting machines versus optical touch screensbefore November 7. In July 2000, I began to meet with the registrar of voters in SanDiego County and members of his staff to learn more about the nitty-gritty details that afew months later would dominate the nation’s media, bus stops, dinner tables, bars, andStarbucks.

I am not going to report on my research in any detail here, because it was onlyexploratory and, in the wake of the Florida debacle, a good deal of it is simply not newsany more. What I want to reflect on is what sense of politics and political communica-tion led me to a research project that struck most people I mentioned it to as stupen-dously boring. Why had it struck me as potentially so interesting?

Methodological Precepts

I will state them simply here and then devote the rest of this article to an extendedillustration of their use in examining the history and meaning of American voting prac-tices. I operate methodologically by two principles.

First, whatever phenomenon I look at I try to see located in space (how does itcompare with the same or similar things in other countries or other locations?) andlocated in time (how does it compare with the same or similar things in earlier or later

Michael Schudson is Professor of Communication at the University of California, San Diego.Address correspondence to Michael Schudson, Department of Communication, University

of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0503, USA. E-mail:mschudso@weber.ucsd.edu

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historical periods?). The historical or the cross-national comparisons can become studiesin themselves, but even if they do not, a student of the social world should have thoughtabout the question “Is the conclusion I am coming to about this phenomenon true gener-ally, or is it caused by something peculiar to this time and place?” If you want tounderstand growing scandal-ridden news coverage on American television, it is easy toattribute it to changes in ownership and a growing bottom-line orientation in the mediaindustry. But what if you discover (and it turns out that you will) that there is alsogrowing scandal-heavy coverage in non-commercial news in Europe and in Japan? Orthat in Latin America, scandal coverage is taken by many observers of the press to bea sign of progress, not deteriorating standards (Waisbord, 2000)? Or that in Sweden,changes in the content and style of television news have no apparent relationship to thearrival of commercial competitors to state broadcasting (Djerf-Pierre, 2000)? Then thewhole phenomenon takes on a very different look. It might still be that the corporatizationof American media industries in the past generation is a major factor in the promotingreporting of scandal. It might be that scandal reporting represents progress in LatinAmerica and at the same time deterioration in the United States. It could be that non-commercial media in Europe move toward scandal because the norms that govern theirwork have been infected by the growing presence in European media environments ofcommercial competitors. The conclusion that economic factors promote, or tend to pro-mote, a certain kind of reporting may prove true, but comparative perspective will forcea scholar to think through that generalization to the questions that will confirm it, proveit too hasty, or propel a more defensible, complex, and contingent formulation of it.

My second principle is a simple imperative: Draw what you see. This is a preceptthat I borrow from an artist from whom I once took a life drawing class in an adulteducation program. I was a complete novice. And I expected the instructor to teach methings about proportion and perspective and shading. Instead, he simply urged me toattend to the figure before me very, very closely. When the model sat with her kneestogether and her hands clasped around them, so that her hands and knees were thrustforward of the rest of her body, my inclination was to make them smaller than theyappeared to my eye because I knew that, relative to her torso, they should not be toolarge. In other words, I had some preconceptions, based on my experience of bodies andmy experience of art, about how this model in this pose should look on paper. My handwas then guided by these preconceptions more than by the figure in front of me.

No, my instructor said, you are drawing your idea of the model, not the model.Draw what you see. I tried. I tried to make those hands and knees as large on paper asthey appeared to be in front of me. That felt wrong. It felt like I was drawing a monster,with elephantine hands and knees, but I tried to fight my preconceptions to draw what Isaw. The effects did not make me Rembrandt. Still, the method of trusting what I ob-served, even when it violated my theory of what I thought I should observe, has guidedme ever since. It is perhaps more a moral disposition—of trust in the empirical worldand an affirmation of a certain kind of integrity in intellectual work—than it is a “method.”But it is a method of some sort, even if one that faculty are more likely to try to kickout of than into graduate students.

“Draw what you see” does not mean “say what you think.” It is nearly the opposite.“Draw what you see” means you should allow seeing to happen to you. You shouldallow the empirical world to work on you. You should be open enough to the world toacknowledge it and to be vulnerable to, and jarred by, uncomfortable facts.

Looking closely at empirical behavior is enormously important. In studying the his-tory of changing concepts and practices of citizenship in American life, I found myself

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repeatedly drawn to descriptions, when I could find them, of how Americans in differ-ent eras voted. Not what their theories of voting were; not what newspaper editorialsurged upon them. No, what intrigued me was learning how in actual everyday practicepeople cast their ballots. In eighteenth-century Virginia, they did not of course castballots at all. They announced their votes out loud, in the presence of election officials,neighbors, and often the candidates for office themselves. In much of the nineteenthcentury, they deposited “tickets” in a ballot box, tickets that listed one party’s slate ofcandidates and that voters picked up from party “ticket peddlers” on their way to theballot box. Today, as we all know now, there remain quite a variety of voting practicesin America, but they all have this in common: We vote on forms, be they cards orscreens or paper ballots, that are prepared by the state and that provide for us a choiceamong the various candidates and parties who have qualified to be on the ballot. We areobliged to make our intentions known by marking the form in some fashion, and wenormally do so in secret so that neither the election officials, nor our neighbors, norcandidates know for whom we have voted.

There is much more to it than this. But the focal point of my book, The GoodCitizen: A History of American Civic Life (Schudson, 1998), is the ways these votingpractices have changed over time and the ways in which the voting practices of an erasymbolize and materialize certain concepts of what citizenship is and should be andhow the ideals of a public life should be institutionalized.

Politics as Cultural Practice

This suggests a third principle that guides my work, more theoretical than methodologi-cal: the view that political acts are embodied and embedded, that political messages—including even the vote—are not only bits of information but also social and culturalpractices. Politics is not a category unchanging through time and space. Politics is cul-ture, too. Politics is a set of symbols, meanings, and enacted rituals. These symbols,meanings, and rituals, moreover, have changed dramatically in the course of Americanhistory. In particular, there has been a shift from an enthusiastic to an informationalpolitics in the United States in the past century. I see politics as a cultural practice. Acultural practice, to borrow a definition of “practice” from Michael Cole and SylviaScribner (Scribner & Cole, 1981), is “a recurrent, goal-directed sequence of activitiesusing a particular technology and particular systems of knowledge” (p. 236). It consistsof a culturally specific set of three components—technology, knowledge, and the skillsused to apply the knowledge in specific settings. A practice, they say, always refers to“socially developed and patterned ways of using technology and knowledge to accom-plish tasks.” To study political communication, then, is to study for any given historicalmoment the constellation of knowledge (including cultural presuppositions), skills, andtechnologies available and in use that people employ to seek political ends.

What this means—to see political behavior as cultural practice—will be more clearif I provide an illustration. This is not the place to summarize my book, but it willbe helpful to outline the changing shape of voting behavior that became in the booka central metaphor for other changes in American political culture. Imagine how avoter in the world of colonial Virginia, where George Washington, Patrick Henry, andThomas Jefferson learned their politics, came to experience the political world. Imaginehow Virginians voted. As a matter of law, voting was confined to White males owningat least a modest amount of property. Of this group, turnout was 40% to 50% in thel780s. Because voting was required by law, there were substantial fines for not voting,

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but the law was rarely enforced. A voter’s journey to vote could take several hours ormore since there was ordinarily only one polling place in a county. A voter might spendthe night at the county seat. If this was George Washington’s district, there might besupper and a ball at the Washingtons’, with spirits flowing freely. During an election inl758, it is estimated that Washington provided a quart and a half of liquor per voter. Onelection day, as the voter approaches the courthouse, he sees the sheriff, supervising theelection, flanked by the candidates for office. He goes up to the sheriff, announces hisvote in a loud voice, audible to all those around him, and then goes over to the candi-date for whom he has voted and shakes hands in a ritual of social solidarity.

His vote has been an act of assent, restating and reaffirming the social hierarchy ofa community where no one but a local notable would think of standing for office, wherevoting is conducted entirely in public view, and where voters are ritually rewarded bythe gentlemen they favor.

In such a world, what information did a voter require? Colonial education aimed toinstill religious virtue, not to encourage competent citizenship. Schooling and readingwere understood to be instruments of inducting citizens more firmly into the establishedorder. When people praised public enlightenment, this is what they usually had in mind.A concept of an “informed citizen” was simply not a leading idea for the founders. Thewhole of citizens’ informational obligation was to recognize virtue well enough to beable to know and defeat its counterfeit. Citizens were supposed to turn back the ambi-tious and self-seeking at the polls. But they were not to evaluate public issues them-selves. That was what representatives were for.

In the colonial world, and during the first decades of the new nation, politics wasstill understood as a realm owned and operated more by a social elite than by the votersat large, let alone the general population. Although historians argue over just how extensiveand how deep were the patterns of deference in political and social life, it can at least besaid with assurance that habits of deference and norms of deference were considerablystronger then than they would be half a century later when a rollicking new democracy,organized by political parties rather than by established social elites, came to the fore.

Political parties—essentially invented in the 1820s and 1830s as membership orga-nizations with a machinery that could persist from one election to the next—not onlyran elections but directly or indirectly controlled most newspapers. They also ran themost visible agencies of the federal government—the post offices and the customs houses—as employment bureaus for their loyal members. (Remember Nathaniel Hawthorne’sintroduction to The Scarlet Letter where he describes his own experience as a customshouse clerk, a job he won in return for loyal support of the Democratic Party. Longbefore the National Endowment for the Humanities or National Endowment for the Arts,Hawthorne as well as Walt Whitman and Herman Melville after him supported them-selves in federal patronage positions.) In the rapidly growing cities, parties also con-trolled government contracts and services.

In this party-dominated world, picture a second scene of voting, a bustling scene,with the area around the polling place crowded with the banners of rival parties.Election day by then was not a convivial oasis, set off from other days, but the culmina-tion of a campaign of several months and many barbecues, torchlight processions, and“monster meetings.” If you (still a White male) were not active in the campaign, youmight be roused on election day by a party worker to escort you on foot or by carriage.On the road, you could encounter clubs or groups from rival parties, and it would not beunusual if fisticuffs or even guns dissuaded you from casting a ballot.

If you proceeded to the ballot box, you might step more lively with the encourage-

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ment of a dollar or two from the party, less a bribe than an acknowledgment that votingis a service to your party. A party worker would hand you a ballot with the printednames of the party’s candidates. You did not mark this “ticket.” You did not need toread it; there was no need for you to be literate. You had only to deposit the party ticketin the ballot box.

In this era, voters voted not out of a strong sense that their party offered betterpublic policies; parties tended to be more devoted to distributing offices than to advo-cating policies, anyway. For most of the nineteenth century, national parties were looseaggregations of state parties with state or regional concerns, and voters’ enthusiasm forthe candidate at the head of the ticket was not necessarily linked to their interest inpolicy matters closer to home. Voter loyalty was more a matter of social comradeshipthan policy preference, more an attachment than a choice. Drink, dollars, drama, andmost of all fraternity brought people to the polls.

American democracy at that point still did not require much of a concept of theinformed citizen. Loyalty and regularity, not information, were the political virtues. Onlywith the reform efforts of the Mugwumps in the 1880s to make elections “educational”and of the Progressives in the 1890s and early 1900s to insulate the independent, ratio-nal citizen from the distorting enthusiasms of party did the ideal of the informed citizencome into its own. In the 1880s, political campaigns began to shift from parades topamphlets, and so put a premium on literacy. In the 1890s, the Australian ballot sweptthe nation and so for the first time in American history literacy was required to cast aballot (more about this in a moment). In the early 1900s, non-partisan municipal elec-tions, presidential primaries, and the initiative and referendum imposed more challeng-ing cognitive tasks on prospective voters than ever before. These changes enshrined “theinformed citizenry,” provided a new mechanism and a new rationale for disenfranchis-ing African Americans and immigrants, and inaugurated an enduring tradition of hand-wringing over popular political ignorance.

What happened between 1880 and 1910 is that the most basic understandings ofAmerican politics were challenged and reformed. Much of this change came about self-consciously as a challenge to the power of political parties. Mugwump reformers werenot keen on wild and woolly party democracy with its elevation of the election to anextraordinary collective, carnivalesque ritual. Canival was not their style.

There was, as some observers dubbed it at the time, a “Protestant Reformation” inAmerican politics, with a series of attacks on the emotional enthusiasm of political par-ticipation, attacks on corruption in campaign financing and campaign practices, and at-tacks on parties as usurping the direct connection between citizens and their governmen-tal representatives.

Political patronage, the very heart of nineteenth-century partisan political life, alsocame under fire. Every U.S. president from Lincoln to the turn of the century com-plained of the plague of “office seekers” that descended upon them. President Garfieldwas astonished by the “inundation” he faced. “My God! What is there in this place thata man should ever want to get into it?” Chester A. Arthur met with office seekers“only” three days a week. Grover Cleveland took a moment in his second inauguraladdress to condemn “the demoralizing madness for spoils”; he even made a statementasking people to stay away from Washington.

The parties raised money by requiring the candidates they supported for office tomake substantial contributions and by assessing the salaries of government workers whosejobs they had secured, usually taking 3% of their gross pay. So in this period of thedomination of government by parties and parties by patronage, with what amounted to

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an extortionate party-run income tax for government workers and candidates for office,civil service reform came into its own.

Civil service reform offered a new, nonpartisan model of government service. Ithonored expertise, not partisanship, and it cast suspicion on parties and partisanship as apolitical model. Ironically, so did changing campaign practices of the parties themselves.Party leaders began to accommodate the reformers’ perspective and sought a more re-strained style of political campaigning. By the 1880s and 1890s, leaders in both partiesbegan to praise the virtues of the “educational” campaign. Increasingly, they turned topamphlets and leaflets rather than marching companies and parades. In 1888, despiteGrover Cleveland’s failure to win reelection, Democrats took pride in their new educa-tional style and noted with pleasure that the companies that manufactured campaignparaphernalia suffered financial losses. By 1896 a Republican Party operative claimedthat the pamphlets he produced would eschew “all party epithets, all words generallyused in campaign abuse” and would indeed be “so non-partisan in character that no onewill be able from reading it to tell by whom it was prepared, beyond the fact that itcomes from somebody interested in sound money.” At the turn of the century, nonpartisan-ship became a watchword even to the parties!

Political parades were dying fast as the new century dawned. By l908 “the occa-sional parade was simply a curiosity, a pale reminder of an earlier time.” In that year thebusinessmen’s parade in New York City for the Taft-Sherman ticket was half the size ofthe sound-money parade of 1896. People “do not take their parades so seriously now,”the New York World calmly noted. Banner-raisings and pole-raisings fell off. The partiesstopped hiring the glee clubs and brass bands that had once accompanied rallies. Parti-sans no longer illuminated their homes and businesses on behalf of their champions.Public interest in political spectacle was increasingly hard to find. Where it survived, thedisplays it supported were regarded as distinctly “old-fashioned.”

Amidst a multitude of reforms and revisions, one that deserves special mention is the“Australian ballot.” Instituted in the mid-nineteenth century in Australia, and shortlythereafter adopted in Britain, the Australian ballot was essentially the modern state-printedballot Americans still use. It swept the country beginning in 1888, endorsed by the sameset of genteel reformers who sponsored civil service reform but supported as well bylabor and other groups. By 1892, most states employed it. Until this time, a voter on hisway to the polls was handed the party-printed ticket already described, thus concretelyreaffirming the voter’s affiliation with a party. Under the new system, the voter receivedhis ballot from the state, making the act of voting a civic obligation enforceable only byprivate conscience, not a party obligation enforceable by social pressure.

Before the Australian ballot, it took a concerted effort for voters to “split” a ticket.“Scratchers” could scratch out a name and “pasters” could paste a name over the one onthe ticket. But the machinery of voting clearly favored party loyalty. The new ballot,especially in its “office-block” form (listing candidates from the different parties undereach office) rather than its “party-column” form (listing all of the candidates for thevarious offices from a single party in one column where a simple mark at the head ofthe column registered one’s preference for the entire party slate), encouraged ticket-splitting. So did the growing independence of newspapers from parties. So did the in-creasing emphasis in campaigns on issues rather than party slogans. And so did the factthat, with the Australian ballot, voting became secret for the first time in Americanhistory—not an affirmation in front of one’s neighbors, and not a visible election-dayexchange with a party worker, but a marking of a state-printed form within the clois-tered voting booth.

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All of this placed new cognitive demands on the American voter—in fact, demandsgreat enough to strike many contemporaries as onerous and even dangerous. A newreform emerged to correct reform: the “short ballot” movement of 1910–1915. Politicalscientist William Munro, who supported “short ballot” reform, cited ballots containing300 to 400 names and one whopper in a New York state assembly district listing 835candidates! “There is something wrong with an electoral system which requires fromevery man a service that not one in ten thousand is willing to give.” Governor CharlesEvans Hughes of New York in 1910 urged a reduction in the number of state electiveoffices: “The ends of democracy will be better attained to the extent that the attention ofthe voters may be focussed upon comparatively few offices, the incumbents of whichcan be strictly accountable for administration.”

The Australian ballot shifted the center of political gravity from party to voter. Thenew ballot asked voters to make a choice among alternatives rather than to perform anact of group loyalty. With this, the “informed citizen” as a civic ideal was born and, forthe first time, institutionalized in the ritual of voting.

The Progressives faced the curse of getting what they wished for—the elevation ofthe individual, educated, rational voter as the model citizen. They made voting morerational but less enjoyable, more information-centered but less dramatic.

The result: Voter turnout fell. The large voting public of the late nineteenth centurywith voter turnout routinely at 70% or higher became the vanishing public of the 1920swith turnout under 50%. For the voting public, the road to rational public participationwas finally open, but the festive ritual of community and party affiliations and rivalrieswas now closed.

The Meaning of Politics

But what, before the reforms, did politics mean? At the national level, it was a self-perpetuating game for organizing the federal patronage. It was a “game” in that theparties did not generally stand for anything but getting into office. The national govern-ment was, in Theodore Lowi’s (1964) terms, “distributive” rather than “regulative” in itsfunctions, and so parties divided “over spoils, not issues,” as Richard Hofstadter (1948,p. 169) put it. In Theda Skocpol’s (1992) terms, this was “patronage democracy”—andlittle else (p. 72).

The idea that politics should be about policies and that parties should provide someclarity on policy by lining up on different sides of “issues” that they help to define isnot a general truth about the world. It is a particular view of that peculiar sphere ofhuman activity we call “politics” (a sphere, of course, whose boundaries have shifteddramatically over time), one concerned generally with allocating rights and resourcesand determining membership and participation in the entities that decide the allocations.The Founding Fathers did not share this perspective. Their understanding was, generallyspeaking, that the populace need not have and really should not have strong views aboutpolicies and issues. Voters should support candidates of sound character and of strongfamiliarity with local needs and preferences. But once elected, representatives should beagents free to listen to the arguments of other representatives familiar with other localneeds and preferences and should use their best judgment to deliberate on these mattersto arrive at the public good. “Politics” of the policy-making sort should normally hap-pen only in the legislatures.

For the founders, then, electing representatives was supposed to be an activity thatappears, from a twentieth-century perspective, almost apolitical. Like an election of

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captain of a sports team, election meant choosing esteemed leaders, not settling on poli-cies. So it was consistent for the framers of the Constitution to both champion represen-tative democracy and oppose any kind of political campaigning or “electioneering.” Theycould both support republican governmental forms and oppose the organization of po-litical parties and the expression of political views by private voluntary associations.

Politics was occasionally about issues, to be sure. Most obviously, elections in the1850s and especially in the presidential campaign of 1860 concerned above all else thequestion of the extension of slavery into the territories. But even this, perhaps, makesthe general point: The Democrats and Whigs in the 1840s and 1850s had tried to keepslavery off the agenda, and it took finally a new party, the Republicans, to break intonational prominence riding the issue of “free soil.” An issue-oriented politics exploded,then, but the post–Civil War years saw a rapid return to the politics of organizationrather than ideology.

The emphasis on issues emerged with the formation of parties and their effort toappeal to a mass electorate. However, it did not become part of the canonical under-standing of what politics means until Mugwumps and Progressives challenged politicalparties at the end of the nineteenth century. Their efforts were symbolized and strength-ened not only by the parties’ move to conduct “campaigns of education” rather thancampaigns of enthusiasm, but by reforms like the initiative and referendum, and by theincreasing tendency of presidents from Theodore Roosevelt on to identify themselveswith specific legislative programs.

Most political commentary today operates within the culture of Progressivism andassumes what we might term the Progressivist fallacy—that politics equals policy. Thisis one view of politics. But other views not only have been powerful in the past butpersist in other domains of our social worlds today. Think of electoral activity that hasno evident relationship to policy of any sort—elections of team captains, elections inschools of class presidents or student councils, elections in fraternities and sororities,most elections of school boards and many elections of local government, elections inprofessional associations. Sometimes candidates for office in such elections feel obligedby Progressivist ideology to concoct some pseudo-policy views, but only under the mostunusual circumstances would any voter in these elections make a decision on the basisof such statements.

This raises questions about what kind of a human activity is “the political.” Cer-tainly some of the organizations at the heart of the political are strange sociologicalbeasts, none more than the political party. In the United States, the leading parties donot require membership dues or attendance at meetings or anything other than, at most,a declaration of affinity (formally required in voter registration in some states but not inothers). The parties have generally had very slight ideological coherence. They havebeen machines for competing for office and for organizing elections, and they haveevoked a surprisingly high level of loyalty even as, simultaneously, citizens who pledgeallegiance to one party or another are inclined to accept the widespread view that partiesstand in the way of a truly self-governing democracy.

I point out the peculiarity of our sense of formal, institutionalized political lifewithout offering any clear answer to the question of what kind of a human experience“politics” is. But the general tendency of my historicist approach to these matters, clearly,is to say that there will be differences over time in what constitutes the “political” forpeople, socially constructed differences. There will also be differences over space.

Everything I have said here is familiar to historians. Historians are well aware,almost as an article of professional faith, that things change. Things change, including

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concepts, including practices, including ideals, including the categories through whichwe understand the world and our roles in it. To observe that there have been differentstandards and meanings of citizenship in U.S. history is obvious, not earthshaking. Butpeople forget all this. We forget that the citizenship standards of one day are differentfrom the next. We forget that the model of the “informed citizen” is a specific historicalformation. We forget that the citizenship of rights, that is today the partner of andcompetitor with the model of the informed citizen, is relatively new and not yet ab-sorbed into our everyday civic education and civic understanding. As a result, mostdiscussions of the decline of civic virtue or the poverty of contemporary political dis-course are themselves historically impoverished, I think, seeking to judge (harshly) thepresent by some standard from the past that is not well understood.

Today’s political pieties come from this reform era and separate us dramaticallyfrom mid-nineteenth century politics. They also separate American politics from thepolitics of most other democratic systems in the world where an anti-party reformationdid not take place. Today’s dominant views about citizenship share in the Progressiveimpulse. As the Progressives abandoned politics for science, party for city manager,parades for pamphlets, streets for parlors, education in the context of action for educa-tion outside it, so we have accepted an ideal of citizenship at once privatized, effortful,cerebral, not much fun. Citizenship became spinach, if you will, distasteful but goodfor you.

The third scene of voting, any American voter knows well. What the Mugwumpand Progressive reformers produced is with us still a century later. It is variable—opticaltouch screens in some counties, punchcard systems in others, but the basic social act iseverywhere what the turn-of-the-century reformers provided us.

A Methodological Reprise

The Good Citizen is a kind of retrospective political anthropology. I have nothing againstquantitative methods—no professed democrat, who subscribes to the one political sys-tem in which counting is fundamental, should. I have nothing against the analysis ofpolitical symbols or speeches or rhetoric. Our powers of understanding the social andpolitical world are poor enough that we do not need to make them poorer by foreclosingone or another methodological approach. My own preferences have to do not only withwhat I find intellectually legitimate—there are many approaches I recognize as legiti-mate—but also with what I find personally satisfying. I want to be able to know what,on the ground, political communication feels like. I want to get close enough to theground of human experience to be able to trust in its reality.

In a long essay on how political authority in Washington has changed in the pasthalf century, Hugh Heclo (1978) cites a remark by Senator Moynihan, that when he wasa junior aide to New York Governor Averill Harriman in the 1940s, it was a rare andgrand event for a governor to go to Washington—“You’d spend time planning howmany shirts to take. Going to Washington was a very big deal” (p. 95). It’s the shirtsthat got to me, that detail, a nugget of trustable truth. It is that kind of nugget that I keptlooking for in my historical reading, and I tried to include in The Good Citizen.

Where is there available a ground-level experience of political reality for scholarsof today’s politics? One place would be in the experience of producing a political act, asin the work of conducting polling for a candidate or meeting in the “war room” todesign a candidate’s media strategy. Close ethnographic observation of people in themidst of doing politics would seem to me to satisfy my “nugget” criterion. Focus groups

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430 Michael Schudson

with voters about how they responded to candidates’ ads or speeches would be at onelarge remove from that. They might well be illuminating, but they abstract from whatreal people do in real political activity. A focus group forces people to reflect on theirexperience of an ad or a speech at a level of depth and detail that they rarely take on oftheir own accord.

Rather than assemble people who you think should do politics, better to find in situthose who are in fact doing it. That’s why I watched people vote. That’s why I observed“Midnight Madness” at the San Diego Registrar of Voters office, where people regis-tered to vote on the last hours of the last day on which they could. In their pickuptrucks and vans and sedans, sometimes with their kids in pajamas in the back seat, theydrove to the registrar’s office on a rainy evening at 8 p.m. or l0 p.m., or even after ll asthe midnight deadline loomed. It’s why I was interested in the men and women whotrained the poll workers, and why I observed their own training. This, not someone’sfocus group idea of it, is actually existing politics.

One trouble with such observations, of course, is that they are slow. Per minute ofobservation, they yield much less interpretable political data than a focus group thatforce-feeds political questions to people. No doubt, we can learn from both methods.But one provides information at the political ground level, as I am calling it here, andthe other at one remove.

My emphasis on the empirical and on letting the world happen to you does notsuggest that any given observer has or can ever have privileged access to the world. Ido not suggest that my way of seeing is correct, or neutral, or above criticism. I do notthink one can get past one’s own location and limitations in the world entirely or thatone can fully bracket one’s preconceptions. In other words, I do not think any of us inthe end will rise to the challenge of drawing what we see. What I see is influenced notonly by the object in the world before me but also by what I have seen in the past andwhat you have seen—and by how we as a culture have seen. There’s no way aroundthat.

Steven Lukes (1977) addressed this problem a generation ago in a wonderful essayon the study of ritual, and he is worth quoting at length:

There are a number of acute methodological problems involved in the studyof ritual, chief among them being how to establish whether one interpretationof its symbolism is more valid than another. The observer cannot simplyaccept the actors’ interpretations, the ‘rationalizations of the devout’; indeed,these will themselves need to be interpreted. On the other hand, he cannotbe completely uncontrolled in his interpretations. His task is to interpret theritual within its context: the objects of thought and feeling which are thereferents of the symbolism, and their special significance within a givensocial context, are matters that must be empirically established. . . . Probablythe most one can hope for in this area is to achieve interpretations whichcan be compared with one another for plausibility and tested (supported andeven sometimes refuted) in the light of new data. (p. 55)

I do not think we should seek heroic measures of endlessly recursive self-reflexivityas a means toward more objective interpretation. The danger in this is that we willabandon studying the world altogether and be content to dazzle ourselves and our stu-dents—and no one else—with ever greater precision about why no study of the empiri-cal world can be accomplished. But nor does the answer lie in forbidding interpretive

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Politics as Cultural Practice 431

studies and trusting only in formal methods. The criticism that formal methods are alsointerpretive, only with their interpretive frameworks, choices, and presumptions morecarefully hidden, seems to me compelling. Lukes has it about right: We do the best wecan, aided by the best the scientific community has come up with to guide us and girdedby as much moral rectitude as we can muster.

Are there dangers in this? Of course. These dangers come from the limitations inviewpoint and framework in the scientific community itself. Scholars are susceptible tofashion, to prejudice, to convention, and to occupationally enhanced blindnesses, likeeverybody else. Nonthinking is always easier than thinking, and often more attractiveand more flattering. The devil of nonthinking comes dressed in the most politically,ideologically, and aesthetically attractive garb. It is the world that keeps lapping atthe shores of certitude and washing away the sands that we had taken to be rock. Thetrick of responsible inquiry, in my view, is to stay open to the world and to draw whatwe see.

References

Djerf-Pierre, M. (2000). Squaring the circle: Public service and commercial news on Swedishtelevision 1956–99. Journalism Studies, 1, 239–260.

Heclo, H. (1978). Issue networks and the executive establishment. In A. King (Ed.), The newAmerican political system (pp. 87–124). Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute.

Hofstadter, R. (1948). The American political tradition and the men who made it. New York:Alfred A. Knopf.

Lowi, T. (1964). American business, public policy, case-studies, and political theory. World Poli-tics, l6, 677–7l5.

Lukes, S. (1977). Political ritual and social integration. In S. Lukes, Essays in social theory (pp.52–73). New York: Columbia University Press.

Schudson, M. (1998). The good citizen: A history of American civic life. New York: Free Press.Scribner, S., & Cole, M. (1981). The psychology of literacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press.Skocpol, T. (1992). Protecting soldiers and mothers: The political origins of social policy in the

United States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Waisbord, S. (2000). Watchdog journalism in South America: News, accountability, and democ-

racy. New York: Columbia University Press.

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