ABSTRACT
This chapter explores empirically a central element of the vision of elections as political spectacles. It presents some ideas about the process in which explanations are created for election results and examines the implications for an understanding of politics. The mythology can be found not only in popular language but in media accounts as well. The effort to explain election results became more parsimonious over time. Both the variety of explanations and the mean number of explanations cited per article declined steadily over the two-week period following the election, reaching a much lower level by the time of the inauguration and remaining at that level through the State of the Union address. Conventional wisdom frequently cites the national economy in explaining presidential election results. Yet in the 1984-1985 coverage, explanations involving national conditions, most of which had to do with the economy, declined slightly over time.
