Page 192 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Sabine Lang

civil disobedience, or the staging of protest events should be as much
taken into account in conceptualizing local publics as the media. NGOs
and activists offer new venues for political communication, and they
challenge the traditional leverage of established elites as being the pri-
mary, sometimes the only “legitimate” voices on local issues. The shift
in late modern societies from local government to governance there-
fore marks a shift from the “government of communication” through
the local state, corporatist elites, and the media to the “networked gov-
ernance of communication” with a wider array of engaged voices and
communication practices appearing on the public stage.

Government Communication and E-Democracy
Government, however, remains central to communication arrange-
ments in local publics. Government agencies, as we have argued, are still
the largest providers of political communication content, and they have
aninterestinframinglimitsandsubstanceoflegitimatepublicdiscourse.
Moreover, the local state plays a pivotal role as developer and facilitator
of citizen participation and mediation processes. In the United States,
high fragmentation in local governance authorities, the emphasis on
“freedom of information,” and strong interest groups are contributing
factors to governments’ investment in expanding public communication
resources. But while democratization of procedural communication and
some creative experiments with civic engagement are well under way in
anumber of communities, technical achievements and innovation often
lack perspective.
Cable and Web-based information and communication systems are
heralded as the main imprints of the future of local communication.
Empirical studies, however, ask for a more cautious evaluation. Aside
from the rhetoric of “electronic democratization” we see little actual evi-
dence either in Europe or in the United States that these new media have
indeed contributed substantially to the thickening of democratic prac-
tices or the establishment of new participatory cultures (Vedel 2003). In
the United States, cable and Web-based systems are employed mostly to
professionalizeandfacilitatethetransferofinformationinlocalcommu-
nity. In California, in 1996, 112 out of 460 cities had their own Internet
presence; this ratio doubled in 1997 (Weare et al. 2000). Yet the quality of
Internet platforms is inconsistent and it is impossible to establish a direct
correlation between a Web-based presence and transparency or infor-
mational density of local government. Effects of these new technologies

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