Page 209 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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StrategicPolitical Communication

The actors who appear in the public sphere are first of all individual
persons – members of the political elites in parties and associations, and
journalists and movement activists. These persons, however, typically do
not act as individuals, but as representatives of political organizations,
which can be classified into three categories:

Decision makers: the dominant coalitions and oppositional minori-

ties in the arenas of decision making – the executive, parliament,
and the judiciary
Media: the press – individual newspapers; radio; television – indi-

vidual channels
Challengers:oppositional actors among insiders – political par-

ties and interest associations; and outsiders – social movement
organizations

Decision makers may be grouped into dominant coalitions that deter-
mine the decisions in the parliamentary and administrative arenas and
oppositional minorities that do not get their way. These coalitions con-
stitute both “advocacy coalitions” (Sabatier 1993; 1998) and “discourse
coalitions” (Hajer 1995). Among the challengers, we can distinguish be-
tween outsiders (social movement organizations) and more oppositional
actors among insiders (parties and interest associations). Contrary to
insiders, outsiders do not have institutionalized access to the arenas of
political negotiation. In reality, this distinction is a gradual one and may
vary from one issue to the other. With respect to the media, we note that
as the importance of the public sphere increases for politics and as po-
litical communication becomes increasingly media centered, the media
themselves become producers of events – contradicting the traditional
labor division between media and politics.
Depending on the type of actors involved, we can distinguish between
three types of public strategies, that is, political strategies centered on
influencing public opinion:

The strategies of decision makers (top-down strategies)

The strategies of challengers (bottom-up strategies)

The strategies of the media, which become actors in their own right

(media-centered strategies)
Arenas,actors,theirstrategies,andtheeventstheyproduceconstitutethe
keyconceptual elements for the analysis of the “politics of public sphere”
that I propose here. Figure 8.1 summarizes the heuristic framework that
illustrates how the relationship of these elements can be perceived. In

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