Page 32 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

POLITICS IN THE AGE OF MEDIATION

examples of such efforts, including the Falklands, Gulf, and
Yugoslavian wars, and the broader propaganda campaigns which
accompanied the seventy years of East-West conflict, the Cold War.

CONCLUSION
This book, then, is about political communication in the very broadest
sense, incorporating the communicative practices of all kinds of
political organisations (and some, such as British public service
broadcasting, which are not supposed to be ‘political’ at all), in both
domestic and international arenas.
Throughout, I have referred to the form of polity with which the
book is chiefly concerned as ‘democratic’, although the discussion,
particularly of international political communication, will necessarily
include societies, such as the former Soviet Union and Iraq, which
could not be so described. By ‘democracies’ I mean, simply, societies
in which governments rule primarily through consent rather than
coercion; where political leaders have popular legitimacy, if not
necessarily always popularity, and where the views of the citizen as
expressed through the ballot box and elsewhere are declared to be
meaningful. In the next chapter we examine how such societies are
supposed to work, and the role played in them by political
communication.

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