Page 150 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

THE USE OF NEWS IN ‘COALITION’ GOVERNMENT 139

these numerous political groupings relations, alliances, overlapping
representation and/or situations of preconceived and historical hostility
exist which render the political system even more complex. Other
countries, France, Spain, Greece and Portugal, to keep within the
European sphere, have similar, highly complex political systems.
Another of the variables from which to begin analysing the role of
political communication is the widely spread so-called ‘affiliation’ vote.
For those who cast it,

it entails a relative departure from taking an objective position on
a series of policy alternatives and instead casting their vote as a
statement of subjective identification with a political force they
believe to be integrally, and not just representively, identified with
their own social group.
(Parisi and Pasquino 1977:224)

This affiliation is expressed not only during elections; it continuously
characterizes relationships between most Italian citizens and the parties,
and consequently determines the symbolical context within which
political communication is developed in Italy. The messages issued by
the political players within this context must take into account the
importance of identification and therefore the need for confirming or
invalidating, a need associated with the predominance of the affiliation
vote. Some recent studies (Parisi 1980, Mancini 1984, Mannheimer and
Sani 1987) have hypothesized a slow spreading of the opinion vote, but
it is not yet capable of significantly affecting the predominance of the
affiliation vote, and hence the electoral picture remains substantially
static. The affiliation vote and its shift towards the opinion vote is a
characteristic which is common to most Western European countries
(France, Great Britain, etc.).

THE NEGOTIAL USE OF POLITICAL
COMMUNICATION
In this situation, political communication becomes the instrument for
interaction among the players in the political system: by using it they
can mediate their respective positions and reach or break agreements.
This use appears perfectly congenial to the complex coalition system
which seems to require, as an indispensable ingredient for it to function,
a place and the instruments through which to settle the differences of
the various groups and reach the minimum threshold necessary for