Page 175 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

parties, governments, business organisations and other collectivities
will often be unable to act coherently and rationally as one body.
The existence of such divisions means that political elites, and others
who could in Hall’s terms be described as potential primary definers,
circulate. Their fortunes rise and fall: as one ‘faction’ loses power
another takes it on.
Sometimes the removal of one elite member from power, such as
occurred at the end of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, is a tactical
manoeuvre designed to preserve the power of a wider group, in this
case the Conservative Party in government. At other times, such as
the transfer of power from George Bush’s Republican Party to the
Democrats in 1992, or from Conservative to Labour in 1997, the
shift signals a more fundamental change in the direction of a country’s
government. At other times still, such as the tangentopoli crisis in
Italy, a wholesale cleansing of the political establishment takes place,
with commentators speaking of ‘revolution’.
In none of the above cases is the rotation of elites ‘revolutionary
in the true sense of signalling a transition from one type of social
system (what Marx called ‘mode of production’) to another, and
the weakening of the primary definition thesis (and similar Marxian-
structuralist accounts of how power is exercised at the cultural
level) does not imply that the political arena is completely open to
unlimited dissent. But the reality of recent political history has
encouraged a movement away from sociological approaches which
view political, economic, and cultural power as essentially static,
located in relatively fixed or rigid categories of class, sex, ethnicity,
etc., to one which focusses on the openness of the political
communication process, and the opportunities available for
subordinate groups to intervene meaningfully in the public sphere,
having their alternative definitions of events reported and taken
seriously by the media, at which point they are much more likely
to be viewed as legitimate in public debate.
Such an approach asserts that there is no single ‘primary definition’
of an event or an issue circulating in the public sphere at any given
time, but a multiplicity of definitions, reflecting the interests of various
collectivities, within and outside the ‘establishment’; that while one
definition may be dominant at a particular time, challenges will
continually be mounted, as opposition groups seek to advance their
alternative definitions; that structures of access to the media, through
which the struggle for definitional principally takes place, are not
rigid but flexible, and capable of accommodating, even under certain
circumstances welcoming challenges to the establishment; and that

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