Abstract:

Political choices are all about the future. Through democratic elections, citizens select which political personnel, what policies and which values will guide societies into the times that lie ahead. Yet, it remains uncertain what futures await a society, which policies will deliver what outcomes, or how elected officials will behave. To exercise their democratic rights, citizens need to imagine possible futures and evaluate these to inform their political choices.

In the present study, we investigate how voters rely on a wide range of resources and strategies to project their collective futures. We draw upon data from 25 focus group interviews, conducted over the duration of the two rounds of Israeli general elections in April and September 2019, which were marked by substantially different levels of political uncertainty. Five groups of 7-12 participants with heterogeneous political views (four groups of Jewish Israeli voters, thereof one with young adults, and one group of Arab Israeli voters) were reconvened five times each to discuss their expectations for the elections and the future course of the country. Applying an abductive discourse analytic approach, we studied participants’ discursive strategies for presenting, justifying and negotiating their respective expectations. Specifically, we identified how participants anchored their projections in available evidence, knowledge and experience, how these anchoring strategies differed under higher or lower uncertainty, and how participants’ projections, in turn, enabled them to derive political orientation and efficacy. In order to link participants’ projections to the available information environment offering possible anchors and projections, we additionally analyzed a broad repertoire of news coverage and social media feeds (by political actors, journalists, experts, other public figures).

Our analysis documents that voters rely on a broad range of anchors and inferencing strategies, routinely combining personal observations and convictions with a creative use of media narratives (or fragments thereof). Depending on the use of narrower or broader anchors, as well as the degree of political uncertainty, distinct implications arise for the specific kinds of projections that can be derived, and the degree of confidence that they inspire in the formed expectations. Given low uncertainty during the first election campaign, for instance, knowledge about the agendas and character of individual leaders sufficed to project broad governmental programs and their implementation. After the political crisis that led to the second election round, by contrast, the same knowledge carried no further than predicting parties' negotiation strategies; numerous additional anchors had to be mobilized to project broader implications for government formation and beyond. Media reliance increased with raised uncertainty, but served more to interpret present observations than to infer their future implications. Other anchors were resilient against raised uncertainty: For instance, the exaltation of specific leaders as political ‘saviors’ inspired unbroken confidence in their prowess to effect far-reaching implications. Likewise, most continuity heuristics withstood the raised uncertainty (e.g., predicting rising religious influence, stable democratic institutions, or politicians’ unchanging characters). Reviewing the underlying heuristics and interrogating those cultural scripts enabling the formation of different projections, we discuss implications of future-oriented discourse for political communication scholarship.

Notes:

ECREA Political Communication Section Best Abstract Award 2021