Page 208 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Hanspeter Kriesi

latter includes all venues (parliamentarian and extraparliamentarian)
where political bargaining takes place and political decisions are made.
This arena is only partly visible to the public (e.g., plenary parliamentary
debates). The public sphere includes all venues visible to a large audi-
ence, where political communication among organized political actors
and between them and the citizens takes place. Political communication
in the public sphere can be understood as a process of agenda building
(McCombs and Shaw 1972; Lang and Lang 1983) in which the political
actors, the media and the audience of citizens mutually influence each
other by presenting information, demands, appeals, and arguments.
Political actors produce events and campaigns,which the media report
and comment upon. Some of these events are explicitly staged (so-called
pseudoevents) for the purpose of attracting the public’s attention and
eventually influencing political decision making. The media play a cru-
cial role in this process not only because of their reach but also because of
their limited carrying capacity (Hilgartner and Bosk 1988) and their ten-
dency to impose their own logic of selecting and presenting information.
The public sphere can be conceived as a loosely bound communicative
space in which a variety of individual and collective actors compete for
public attention and support. Given the restricted communicative space,
the public will pay attention to only a small proportion of all the mes-
sages that are available for inclusion in the public discourse every day,
and it will debate, let alone support, an even smaller proportion of these
messages.
Public opinion is the outcome of the process of political communi-
cation in the public sphere. Following Neidhardt (1994) and Converse
(1987), we can distinguish between two views on public opinion that do
not necessarily coincide – the notion of survey analysis and the notion of
the sociology of the public sphere. According to the survey analysts’ con-
ception, public opinion corresponds to the “opinion of the mass public”
or “the opinion of the population” as it is measured by opinion surveys.
According to the sociology of the public sphere, by contrast, public opin-
ion corresponds to the totality of the opinions, which is expressed in the
public sphere with regard to a specific theme. I will adopt the sociolo-
gists’ conception. The public opinion in this sense can be more or less
consonant, depending on the degree to which the public expression of
opinion about a given theme converges. It is an empirical question as to
what extent public opinion as publicized opinion is consonant and to
what extent it corresponds to the opinion of the population as measured
by opinion surveys.

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