Page 41 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

to a political process in which it may appear to the individual citizen
that his or her vote does not matter. While democratic procedures
must include regular elections, it may be felt that voting once every
four or five years for one of two or at most three rather similar
parties is ineffective and pointless, particularly when, as was the case
in Britain over four consecutive general elections, one party (the
Conservatives) retained power with substantially less than 50 per
cent of the eligible electorate’s support. For Jean Baudrillard, the
guru of post-modern nihilism, voter apathy is viewed as an intelligible
strategy of resistance to bourgeois attempts to incorporate the masses
into a ‘game’ which they can never really win. The ‘silent passivity’
of the masses is characterised by him as ‘a defence…a mode of
retaliation’ (1983, p.23). If democracy is principally a set of rules
intended to legitimise bourgeois power, voter (and particularly
working-class) apathy (the denial of mass participation) may be
interpreted as an assertion of the fundamental illegitimacy of
bourgeois power. 3

Absence of choice
A further limitation on democracy is the absence of genuine choice,
or pluralism. One could reasonably argue that there are more
similarities in the policies and ideologies of the US Democratic and
Republican parties than there are differences. Even in Britain, where
the Labour and Conservative parties have traditionally been distinct
ideologically, the late 1980s and early 1990s saw a coming together
of agendas and policies on many social, economic, and foreign policy
matters. In the 1997 general election, ‘New Labour’ unashamedly
adopted many of what had previously been viewed (including by
most members of the Labour Party itself) as right-wing Conservative
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policies, such as privatisation of the air traffic control system. In
doing so, New Labour proclaimed itself at the ‘radical centre’ of
British politics, emulating the Clinton administration’s 1996 re-
election strategy of ideological ‘triangulation’ (Morris, 1997).
Triangulation in the US, like Labour’s radical centrism, meant taking
what was popular and common sensical from the free market right
(such as the reduction of ‘big government’), while adhering to the
core social democratic values of social justice and equality of
opportunity.
Although, in the post-Cold War environment, there may be good
reasons for the abandonment of long-standing ideological and
political slogans which reflect an earlier phase of capitalist

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