Page 186 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

Chapter 8
Discourses on politics: talking about
public issues in the United States and

Denmark
Ann N.Crigler and Klaus Bruhn Jensen

INTRODUCTION
Coping with the currently available amount of politically relevant
information represents a major challenge for anybody conceiving of
themselves as participants in national, much less international, political
processes. Today, citizens who wish to exercise their political rights
find themselves in a new and complex environment of communication.
The new media age may imply a redefinition of the public sphere from
the perspective of the audience.
The strategies by which people cope with this information
environment have been studied using a number of different
methodological and theoretical approaches. Several scholars have
suggested that in-depth, qualitative approaches are particularly suited to
examine the public’s orientations towards and experience of political
life (Graber 1984, Jensen 1986, Lane 1962, Morley 1980, Van Dijk
1988). For this article, we draw on recent empirical studies in two
different cultural settings—the United States and Denmark—to propose
a set of thematic conceptualizations which citizens employ to make
sense of political issues. The emphasis is placed on a secondary analysis
of the findings in each study with the aim of generating explanatory
theory, which, in turn, may be used to design further comparative
research. There are important differences as well as similarities between
the two countries that are reflected in the themes which citizens use to
discuss political topics. We suggest that a theoretical analysis which is
grounded in the qualitative, empirical data (Glaser and Strauss 1967)
establishes dimensions of politics that cut across cultures.
The analysis primarily seeks to accomplish two objectives. First, we
present a methodological argument for the relevance of qualitative
approaches to political cognition; in-depth interviewing is the common