Page 205 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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StrategicPolitical Communication

Finally, they begin to speculate about the arrival of a third age of po-
litical communication (Blumler and Kavanagh 1999), where the public
possesses greater autonomy with regard to the media. Characteristics of
this new style of political communication include the multiplication of
the means of communication, an affluence of communication channels,
increasing commercialization, the omnipresence of the media, and fur-
ther acceleration of the speed with which political information becomes
accessible for a significant part of the public.
In the ideal audience democracy, a much larger part of political ac-
tion becomes public action. If the political actors are more frequently
going public, they are also much more frequently challenged by the pub-
lic. Today, as Kitschelt (2000, 164) has observed, parties are, much more
than they were some years ago, confronted with political preferences that
are exogenously determined by spontaneous developments in the elec-
torate or by independent media and political entrepreneurs who operate
outside of the parliamentary arena. In this new form of representative
government, public support becomes volatile and unpredictable, but at
the same time crucial for political success. Political communication and
political mobilization are now indispensable components of governing,
“because the substantive action space of politics is diminishing and the
need for legitimacy is rising in a context of intense political competition”
(Pfetsch 1998, 249).
The idea that the public sphere and public opinion become increas-
ingly important for policy-making today is met with some skepticism on
the part of public-policy analysts. Thus, von Beyme (1994, 332) suggests
that we should not overrate the relevance of media-oriented strategies
of political actors for the policy-making process. The routine political
process remains, as far as he is concerned, largely separate from the
public sphere. As Kingdon (1984, 69–70) had already noted many years
ago, “there are ... severe limits on the ability of general public opinion
to affect policy formation. Many important spheres for one thing, are
nearly invisible to the general public.” Habermas (1992, 432–3) concedes
empirically and normatively that routine decision making is a matter to
be dealt with by the central decision makers without public participa-
tion. By contrast, he argues that questions of great importance or with
strong normative implications should be dealt with by an “extraordinary
problem-solving procedure” that also includes actors of the periphery –
social movements, citizens’ initiatives, and the like.
Public-policy analysts remind us that the audience democracy may
largely consist of “symbolic politics” – events carefully staged by political

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