Page 244 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

CONCLUSION

their tendency to compare unfavourably contemporary realities
with idealised pasts. The liberal concern for the health of present-
day democracy presumes that there was such a thing as true
democracy beyond the elite circles of John Stuart Mill’s educated
men of property. But if democracy is, as Bobbio suggests, principally
about the legitimation of government by drawing more citizens into
the political process, then its expansion in advanced capitalism is
precisely coterminous with the development of mass media and,
through them, mass political communication.
The pessimists of the Left, on the other hand, continue to presume
that there is a natural constituency of left-wing voters, from whom
an ‘authentic’, clearly delivered left-wing message – as opposed to
‘shallow’ image-making – can produce an electoral majority. If such
a constituency exists, why should the presentational skills of a Tony
Blair or a Peter Mandelson prevent a socialist message from getting
through to it, if that indeed is what the Labour Party wishes to
promulgate?
In short, then, I would submit that the ‘romantic pessimists’, as I
shall call them, make the mistake of confusing form and content in
political communication, and of contrasting – unfairly – the current
reality of mass, albeit mediatised, political participation with a
mythical golden age when rational, educated citizens knew what
they were voting for and why. However imperfect modern
mediatised democracy may be, it is surely preferable to that state of
public affairs which existed not so long ago when political power
was withheld from all but a tiny minority of aristocrats and the
bourgeoisie.
The ‘pragmatic optimists’, by contrast, invite us to embrace
without reservation a new age of electronic, inter-active, ‘town-hall’
democracy, peopled by a media-wise, culturally-knowing electorate
immune to such blunt instruments as propaganda and brain-
washing. Subscribers to this view, many of whom have a vested
interest in the industry which manages and directs it, argue not only
that performance politics are here to stay, but that we are stronger
as democracies for it. This perspective challenges the view that what
one says is more important than how one says it, asserting instead
that the voter can learn as much from a politician’s more or less
spontaneous performance than from his or her rational debate of
the issues. The enhanced use of mass communication has made the
political process more open, rather than less.
One can have sympathy with this position. While politics has
indeed become, for the first time in human history, a mass spectator

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