Page 38 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 17

POLITICS, DEMOCRACY AND THE MEDIA
of the population – men with property and/or formal education. For John
Stuart Mill, one of the great early theorists of liberal democracy, only this
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guaranteed the rational, informed electorate demanded by democracy. In
reality, of course, this restriction merely demonstrated the close relationship
between democracy and the rise of the bourgeoisie.
Gradually, voting rights were extended to the lower classes and, by the
early twentieth century, to women. In the US, only in the 1950s were blacks
able to vote. Conversely, societies which deprived the majority of their people
of voting rights, such as South Africa until the elections of April 1994, have
rightly been viewed as ‘undemocratic’.

Rational choice
A third condition of democracy, as already noted, is the availability of choice
(Democrat versus Republican, Labour versus Conservative, Christian
Democrat versus Social Democrat), while a fourth is the ability of citizens to
exercise that choice rationally. This in turn presupposes a knowledgeable,
educated citizenry.

PUBLIC OPINION AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE

The importance of an informed, knowledgeable electorate dictates that
democratic politics must be pursued in the public arena (as distinct from the
secrecy characteristic of autocratic regimes). The knowledge and information
on the basis of which citizens will make their political choices must circulate
freely and be available to all.
But democratic policies are public in another sense too. While democratic
theory stresses the primacy of the individual, the political process never-
theless demands that individuals act collectively in making decisions about
who will govern them. The private political opinions of the individual
become the public opinion of the people as a whole, which may be reflected
in voting patterns and treated as advice by existing political leaders. Public
opinion, in this sense, is formed in what German sociologist Jürgen
Habermas has called ‘the public sphere’.

By the public sphere we mean first of all a realm of our social life
in which something approaching public opinion can be formed. . . .
Citizens behave as a public body when they confer in an unrestricted
fashion – that is, within the guarantee of freedom of assembly and
association and the freedom to express and publish their opinions.
(Quoted in Pusey, 1978, p. 89)
Habermas locates the development of the public sphere in eighteenth-
century Britain, where the first newspapers had already begun to perform

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