The Method is the Message: the Current State of Political Communication

(Forthcoming in Political Communication) Political communication has emerged as a central concern to scholars in political science, communications, and allied social sciences. While the prominence of the field can be attributed, in part, to well-documented changes in the American political process, it's new-found stature also stems from the gradual accumulation of a body of evidence showing that the use of the media to achieve political objectives does, in fact, yield significant rewards (for a review of the media effects literature, see Iyengar and Simon, 2000). In charting the progression of political communication as a distinct field of research, one cannot but notice the close overlap between developments in the field and the scholarly career of Steven Chaffee. Over the past thirty-plus years, Chaffee's work can be found in virtually every nook and cranny of the political communication literature. One of the major themes running through his work is methodological, even though Chaffee himself is more of a methods gadfly than a practicing methodologist. He was among the first to recognize the liabilities of survey research, and responded by developing more precise indicators of media exposure