Page 225 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

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CONCLUSION

Performance politics and the
democratic process

This book has described the growing involvement of mass
communication in a variety of political arenas, and the pursuit of
what we might call performance politics at all stages in the process
by which issues emerge in the public sphere to be debated, negotiated
around and, on occasion, resolved. We have examined the use of
public relations, marketing and advertising techniques by political
parties in campaigning and governmental mode (sometimes, of course,
the two are indistinguishable). We have noted the enhanced role of
opinion and media management in disputes between states, between
workers and their employers, and between governments and insurgent
organisations. We have considered the role of journalists and their
media as political reporters, interpreters, commentators and agenda-
setters, observing how their relationship of inter-dependence with
politicians has shaped the behaviours and professional practices of
both groups. And we have reviewed the debate about the impact of
these phenomena on citizens, on behalf of whom, finally, politics,
the media and the democratic process as a whole are supposed to
function.
While many of the processes described in the preceding chapters
are matters of fact, debate about the effects of political
communication continues to occupy all those involved in the processes
of public debate, election and government, whether as protagonists,
mediators or voters. I would like to end, therefore, with some remarks
on the current state of that debate, before identifying some of the
key outstanding issues.
We began with an epigraph from the pen of Walter Lippmann,
identifying a ‘revolution’ in the ‘art of creating consent among
the governed’, which would ‘alter every political premise’. More
than seventy years after those words were written, their accuracy
is self-evident. They apply, moreover, not simply to those ‘in

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