Page 200 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

DISCOURSES ON POLITICS 189

CONCLUSION
Political information, as reconstructed by individuals and social groups,
may become a resource for political debate and action. This is an
important premise of the public sphere as an agent of representative
democracy. In this light, the apparently widespread thematic
understanding of politics may be a mixed blessing. Themes are certainly
useful mechanisms for translating the discourse of politics into other
discourses of human experience. However, unless the reverse translation
process—from the experience of the human impact of, for example,
particular economic policies or of class difference, into specific courses
of political action— is promoted by the institutions and processes of
political communication, the legitimacy of the political process is
compromised. Perhaps this is most clear in the case of the news stories
from Danish television, which pertain to concrete decisions being
implemented, but the implications for political participation are of a
general nature.
The public sphere should be conceived of, not just as a set of social
institutions, but as a collective, communicative process through which
people engage in political life. Citizenship must be enacted in social
practice if it is not to remain an abstract, static bill of rights. The present
studies suggest that research on political conceptualization and
reception is necessary for the understanding of how and to what extent
the public sphere works from the perspective of the individual citizen.
Depending on the specific, social and cultural context, such studies can
lead to debate about the conditions of political communication, and may
imply changes in the journalist’s presentation of political information, in
civic education and the place of media literacy in the curriculum and
ultimately in the institutions of legislative politics.
Research may support such deliberations in several respects, even if
much of the effort of necessity remains concentrated on basic research.
To develop a framework of explanatory theory, more comparative
studies of a variety of political cultures are needed. Furthermore,
variations in the thematic conceptualizations, especially according to
gender and socio-economic status, should be examined in depth, and
projects should be developed in order to study the stability of themes over
time. A variety of sources of political socialization need to be
considered to account for the development of thematic
conceptualizations. The fictional genres of mass communication and the
stories and jokes of interpersonal communication may have been under-
researched as aspects of political communication and understanding.