Page 187 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

COMMUNICATING POLITICS

Thatcher in 1990 can be viewed partly in terms of the reassertion of
British manufacturing capital in the context of a government whose
opposition to the concept of European union was endangering
future markets and prosperity. The same Conservative hostility to
European union has been cited as one explanation for the shift in
business support to Labour from 1994 onwards (in addition to the
political communication factors discussed already).
If economic classes (in the Marxist sense) can be divided and have
contradictory political interests, so too the members of political
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 focuses 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.

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