Page 173 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Local Political Communication

use of interactive communication technologies (ICT) for engagement
processes on the local level. And in developing countries, resources are
allocatedtothemobilizationofruralareasandtotheideaofofferinglocal
communication infrastructure. Thus, local publics provide the ground
for much of today’s civic engagement and political activism.
The assessment of research on local political publics in this chapter
follows three main lines of inquiry. One theme addresses the question
of whether local publics expose specific cross-cultural traits that identify
them as relatively autonomous units of analysis and independent vari-
ableswithintheirrespectivelargercommunicationecologies.Second,lo-
calmediadevelopmentistracedbyfocusingonhowglobalizationputsits
imprint on local communication processes, possibly leading from path-
dependenttotransnationalsynchronizedlocalmediastructures.Because
the scope of existing research is limited, results from this inquiry are at
best preliminary. And third, I investigate how traditional local media
are embedded in the larger interpersonal and organizational commu-
nication arenas of localities and how alternative media, supported by
new technologies, may help to develop sustainable counterpublics on
the local level. The final part of the chapter will develop a comparative
set of research questions that draw on the voids of existing studies. The
conclusion maintains that while local publics exhibit fragmentation and
diversification similar to national publics in late modern societies, they
are undergoing transformations aimed at innovating governance and
citizen engagement.

WHAT IS A LOCAL PUBLIC SPHERE?

Defining local publics is as much of a challenge as defining national or
global publics, as their scope and form varies historically, across cultures
and across political systems. Besides the tangible variations, what seems
to be equally in flux is our individual understanding of belonging to
one or several local publics. Historically, the assumption that local com-
munication (up until the mid-nineteenth century) ended “in principle
at the city boundaries or on the village road” (Kieslich 1972, 96) has
proven to be misleading. As empirical historical research has revealed,
localcommunicationwasneverconfinedtothoseissuesthatmadeupthe
microcosm of the village commons (Lang 2001). Instead, local publics
always harbored a mix and interplay of information originating on the
local level with news that traveled from other informational hubs into

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