Page 195 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Local Political Communication

Second, many local publics experience contestation in regard to their
strength in providing spaces for symbolic integration, most prominently
visible in the metropolitan spaces of large international cities. Here, the
attachment to the city as a whole is often minimal, while attachment
to diversified cultural groups or neighborhoods is stable or on the rise.
Local governments, quite aware of the need for citywide symbolic inte-
gration, try to foster attachments through symbolic event politics such
as sports attractions and festivals, or reinvent the identities of their mu-
nicipalities in glossy brochures and with the help of public relations
agencies. Yet in larger urban areas, we can see more symbolic integra-
tion in diversified subpublics of the local, as in neighborhood associ-
ations or historical societies that make it a point to reconnect citizens
to their sublocality by cognitive as well as symbolic means. Often it is
unforeseen events such as the opening of the wall in Berlin or 9/11 for
NewYork that ignite symbolic identification of citizens with their public
spaces.
Third, local publics face contestation as prime providers for interac-
tive, face-to-face and interpersonal communication, this mostly due to
the new interactive and interpersonal options that Web-based commu-
nication offers. Today, participating in issue-driven international e-mail
list communication might offer as much interpersonal contact and in-
teractive components as the local Greenpeace network or the urban
housing coalition. People do not necessarily need to put a face on face-
to-face communication in order to feel connected – for some it seems
as personal to engage with the imagined face behind the e-mail nick-
name. Those “imagined communities” can acquire more reality in some
people’s lives than can local neighborhood councils and coalitions.
The fourth contested dimension of local publics is their capacity to
become testing grounds for experiments in participatory democracy.
Local governments have as of yet made little use of these assets. The
prospects for development seem vast, yet suffer from latent neglect or
even deliberate underutilizing of the potential that is inherent in local
communication processes.
What follows from these four dynamics of contestation for the study
of local publics? In conclusion, I will identify several areas of research
that would need to be addressed in order to assess these dynamics more
in depth and fill existing research voids. Once again, the argument here
is based on a comparative reading of a small number of existing case
studies, thus leaving some issues underrepresented and others unad-
dressed. Moreover, the bias toward West European and North American

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