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CONCLUSION

Performance politics and
the democratic process

This book has described the growing involvement of mass com-
munication 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 relation-
ship 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 communi-
cation 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.
I 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
eighty years after those words were written, their truth is self-
evident. They apply, moreover, not simply to those ‘in control of

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