Other schools probe election

While the Annenberg School for Communication is taking major steps to understand the election process, other universities are making their own contributions. At Stanford University, Professor Shanto Iyengar has produced a CD-ROM sourcebook entitled "In Their Own Words," which contains every public speech by George W. Bush and Al Gore between June 1 and October 7, 2000, as well as television advertisements from the candidates and their parties. Iyengar, a political science and communication professor, said that the media can be made irrelevant in political campaigns. "We find that giving people autonomy -- giving them this freedom -- does have an impact on elections and the political process," Iyengar said. "It makes people much more enthusiastic ." The material on the discs came directly from the candidates and their campaigns, bypassing the media's analysis and punditry, which Iyengar said most people find distracting. The program's interface is designed to be interactive, wherein users can attach "sticky notes" and write in the "margins," allowing it to be a customized experience. Iyengar found that most people read only the pages that interest them. "With abortion, women were 50 percent more likely to consume it then men," Iyengar said. "And affirmative action and racial discrimination were totally ignored by whites, but they were the number-one topics with non-whites." Iyengar's Political Communication Lab distributed approximately 30,000 discs during the campaign through an online store. "The reason that it's CD-based is that, at this stage, with most people on conventional modems, can you imagine how long it would take to download a video of a 10-minute speech?" said Iyengar, who hopes that a civic organization -- like the League of Women Voters -- will sponsor a CD campaign for the next election. Harvard University conducted a year-long survey entitled "The Vanishing Voter," designed to increase citizen involvement in the election process, rather than trying to attempt to alter the media's influence. The survey was conducted weekly and 95,000 people were interviewed. "We take a deeper look at campaign involvement," said Tami Buhr, the project's research coordinator. While the final results are still years away, a mainstay of the project was the "Voter Involvement Index," a weekly measure of Americans' interaction with the campaign. "The election outcome will make our impact on public policy both harder and easier," Buhr said. "Easier because it got the public to think about how we elect people, harder because they are thinking about election day and how people vote, not about what's leading up to election day, which is what we're looking at." Philadelphia-based Pew Charitable Trusts was a major source of funding for both studies. "We don't do research for its own sake," said Michael Delli Carpini, director of Pew's Public Policy Program. "We come up with ways to get information to voters in the most practical way possible and make public shortcomings in the way we do them now."