Page 206 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Hanspeter Kriesi

actorstolegitimatepolicydecisionstakenintheratherinaccessiblearenas
of policy making, which contribute little to the problem-solving activity
that takes place in those arenas. The current trend toward “governance by
networks” usually leads to less formal modes of decision making within
structures that are hardly visible for most of the public and remain in-
dependent from the official institutions of representative democracy.
This trend, which brings policy making in large, majoritarian countries
closer to the policy style that has always dominated in small, consensus-
oriented democracies, is quite compatible with the weakening of the
political parties and of parliament as an arena of policy making. But
contrary to what Manin’s vision of an audience democracy implies, this
trend leads to a system of “post-parliamentary governance” that increas-
ingly tends to institute expert sovereignty at the expense of popular
sovereignty.
Both visions of the trends in contemporary forms of representative
government – audience democracy and network governance – share the
notion of a declining functional relevance of the political parties and of
the parliamentary arena. But they differ fundamentally with respect to
the role of the public, that is, the citizens. In the audience democracy the
public is called upon to control and to influence the policy-making pro-
cess, while in the network governance the public is largely irrelevant for
the political process.
2
Given the crucial importance of the public sphere and of public opin-
ion today, it is surprising that the reciprocal topics of the impact of
political communication and mobilization on public opinion on the
one hand, and the impact exerted by public opinion on the political
process on the other hand, have so far not been studied more systemati-
cally. Thus, analyses of political decision and implementation processes
by political scientists hardly take the public sphere into account, and
focus instead on bargaining and debates in the parliamentary or admin-
istrative arenas. By contrast, analysts of social movements are primarily
interested in the movements’ mobilization of the public, but hardly ever
pay attention to their impact on bargaining inside the political system.
Finally, practitioners from the communication sciences concentrate on
how the opinions and electoral decisions of citizens are influenced by
the media. As far as they are concerned with the role of the media in the
political decision processes, they usually narrowly focus on the specific

2
The public sphere is defined as the arena where the political communication between
the political actors and the citizens takes place (Neidhardt 1994).

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