Page 207 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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StrategicPolitical Communication

interactions between journalists and politicians or the latter’s public
relations specialists, on politicians’ perceptions of one another or on the
media use of political decision makers. 3
Against the background of the fundamental transformation described
at the outset, the goal of this chapter is to clarify the role of the public
sphere in the political process of modern democracies in an interna-
tionally comparative perspective. Todoso,Ichoose an actor-centered
approach that asks (a) under which conditions actors choose strate-
gies to influence public opinion, and (b) under which conditions such
strategies succeed in influencing the political decision-making process.
By focusing on political decision making, I explicitly omit elections from
the subsequent considerations. I start out with the assumption that the
fundamental change in representative government not only concerns
periodically recurring elections, but especially the long periods between
these special occasions – periods during which the electoral public has
been attributed only a marginal role in the party democracies.
In the first part of the chapter, I present a simple heuristic framework
for the analysis of the mobilization of public opinion. In a second step,
the strategies that the different types of actors use to influence public
opinion are discussed. In an internationally comparative perspective it
becomes clear that the type of strategies and their success is to an im-
portant extent determined by the institutional conditions of different
national contexts. Therefore, in the third part, an attempt is made to sys-
tematize the political and media-related context conditions in Western
liberal democracies, which are likely to influence the public strategies
of political actors. Finally, some ideas are presented about how this ap-
proachcouldbeimplementedinaninternationallycomparativeresearch
design.

AFRAMEWORK FOR THE ANALYSIS OF THE
PUBLIC SPHERE’S ROLE IN THE POLITICAL
DECISION-MAKING PROCESS

Politicstakeplaceinvariousarenas.Simplifyinggreatly,Iwillonlydistin-
guish between the public sphere and the arena of decision making. The

3 Exceptions from this general assessment are, in political science, the studies by Page
et al. (1987), Baumgartner and Jones (1993), and Stimson et al. (1995), as well as the
sociological or communications’ studies by Linsky (1986), Pfetsch (1993), Burstein
(1998), Gerhards et al. (1998), Koopmans and Statham (1999, 2000), and Ferree et al.
(2002).

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