Page 227 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

One might view both variants of this pessimism as ‘romantic’ in
their tendency to unfavourably compare contemporary realities with
idealised pasts. The liberal concern for the health of presentday
democracy presumes that there was such a thing as true democracy
beyond the elite circles of John Stuart Mill’s educated men of property.
But if democracy is, as Bobbio suggests, principally about the
legitimation of government by drawing more citizens into the political
process, then its expansion in advanced capitalism is precisely
coterminous with the development of mass media and, through them,
mass political communication.
The left pessimists, on the other hand, continue to presume that
there is a natural constituency of left-wing voters, from whom an
‘authentic’, clearly delivered, left-wing message—as opposed to
‘shallow’ image-making—can produce an electoral majority. If such
a constituency exists, why should the presentational skills of a Tony
Blair or a Peter Mandelson prevent a socialist message from getting
through to it, if that indeed is what the Labour Party wishes to
promulgate?
In short, then, the ‘romantic pessimists’, as we shall call them,
might be argued to make the mistake of confusing form and content
in political communication, and of contrasting—unfairly—the current
reality of mass, albeit mediatised political participation, with a
mythical golden age when rational, educated citizens knew what
they were voting for and why. However imperfect modern mediatised
democracy may be, it is surely preferable to that state of public affairs
which existed not so long ago when political power was withheld
from all but a tiny minority of aristocrats and the bourgeoisie.
The ‘pragmatic optimists’, by contrast, invite us to embrace
without reservation a new age of electronic, inter-active, ‘town-hall’
democracy, peopled by a media-wise, culturally-knowing electorate
immune to such blunt instruments as propaganda and brain-washing.
Adherents to this perspective, many of whom have a vested interest
in the industry which manages and directs it, argue not only that
performance politics are here to stay, but that we are stronger as
democracies for it. This perspective challenges the view that what
one says is more important than how one says it, asserting instead
that the voter can learn as much from a politician’s more or less
spontaneous performance than from his or her rational debate of
the issues. The enhanced use of mass communication has made the
political process more open, rather than less.
One can have sympathy with this position. While politics has
indeed become, for the first time in human history, a mass spectator

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