Page 243 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

COMMUNICATING POLITICS

affairs’, but to those groups of greater or lesser marginality whose
political objectives are to challenge, subvert or capture that
control.
The revolution in the ‘persuasive arts’ is the consequence, as we
noted above, or far-reaching political and technological develop-
ments leading to universal suffrage on the one hand and ever more
efficient media of mass communication on the other. For as long as
democratic principles underpin advanced capitalism and communi-
cations technologies develop further towards simultaneity and
inter-activity, the revolution can be expected to continue. Political
fashions may change, but the need to fashion political messages
will not.
Most participants in the political communication debate will
agree with these assertions, and with the further point that, as
political actors and media have grown dependent on each other,
politics has become not only a persuasive but a performance art, in
which considerations of style, presentation and marketing are of
equal if not greater importance than content and substance. It is
here, of course, that the arguments begin.
Chapter 3 identified two broad perspectives on the democratic
significance of modern political communication. One might be said
to be pessimistic, in so far as it asserts that our culture is degraded
and democracy undermined by the intrusion of the ‘persuasive arts’
into politics.
A liberal variant of that argument is founded on adherence to
the notion of the rational citizen, the importance of choice in
democracy and the role of the media in promoting material which
makes that choice meaningful. In the liberal critique, mediated or
performance politics lack rationality and substance, breeding voter
apathy and shallow populism. They are more a means of ‘self-
promotion [for politicians] than of information for the public’
(Denton, 1991a, p. 93).
Pessimists on the Left of the ideological spectrum share many of
these objections, but add that the pursuit of performance politics is
inconsistent with a coherent, radical Left message. Thus, Greg Philo
has criticised the post-1985 Labour Party and blamed its 1992
defeat on its reliance on ‘the shallow science of Imagistics’ (1993b,
p. 417). For much of the post-war period, as Chapters 6 and 7
indicated, such views drove the British Labour Party’s communi-
cative strategy, and despite the scale of the 1997 and 2001 victories,
they remain influential amongst the Left in Britain and elsewhere.
One might view both variants of this pessimism as ‘romantic’ in

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