Page 174 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Sabine Lang

the local scene. This traffic between local, regional, and international
news flows has increased greatly with the advent of globalized informa-
tion systems. The local today is infused more than ever with translocal
issues, with ideas that are conceived and decisions that are taken else-
where. Therefore, we can describe the local political public – in contrast
to ageographically defined and closed unit of analysis – as a relatively
open space in which information flowsoflocal origins intersect with
translocally important news, and together create a common discursive
space of political activity.
How can we systematically distinguish the local communication
sphere from national and global publics? My claim is that there are
four aspects of local communication practices that identify it as a spe-
cific unit of analysis, entailing a cognitive, a symbolic, an interactive,
and a democratic dimension (Lang 2003a). The cognitive dimension
refers to shared knowledge about the history and facets of the com-
mon public space. The symbolic dimension points to the experience
of being part of a locality in which people share specific cultural, so-
cial, and political practices. The interactive aspect alludes to the local as
providing relatively more “face-to-face” interactions and interpersonal
communications than larger publics. And the fourth dimension ad-
dresses the inherent democratic potential of local publics by way of pro-
viding easy access to political communication and participation forums.
The narrow spatial dimension of local publics encourages the exercise
of deliberative and participatory citizenship in addition to representa-
tive decision making. Taken together, these four key elements make up
asoftframe for the local public sphere. Some citizens identify more
with some parts of urban public cultures than with others. Some don’t
have a sense of belonging to a local communication system at all. In
urban spaces, most visibly, local publics are made up of dominant, sub-
and counterpublics. Yet the majority of citizens draw their sense of be-
longing to a public sphere at least in part from the above-mentioned
notions.
Assessing existing studies on local political communication, we can
roughly distinguish three research eras, each informed by respective de-
velopments in media systems as well as by general trends in the social
2
sciences (Lang 2003a). In afirst phase from the 1950s to the 1960s, local

2
I include studies that are not explicitly part of the relatively new field of political com-
munication research, yet have analyzed communication processes from the perspective
of political science and sociology as well as urban studies.

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