Page 211 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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StrategicPolitical Communication

actors, and which is not simply determined by the conditions of polit-
ical communication imposed by the media (Schmitt-Beck and Pfetsch
1994, 115). Instead, one should presuppose a “symbiotic constellation
of mutual dependence,” where all the participants are trying to opti-
mize their control over the events. The extent to which the different
actors arrive at controlling what is happening depends on the respective
contexts.
All three types of strategies focus on the actors’ efforts to put their
interests on the public agenda and to win the public’s support for their
ownpositions. In all three strategies, the media play a central role. On
the one hand, under the conditions of a transformed public sphere, for-
mation of public opinion is largelyled by professional communicators
who speak to each other and to the public through the media. On the
other hand, under such conditions the political elite no longer receives
a direct feedback from the citizens it represents, but also depends on the
professional communicators – media and public opinion researchers –
for finding out what is on the citizens’ minds. While citizens now tend
to perceive politics exclusively through the media, politicians also tend
to rely exclusively on the media for their perception of the citizens’
concerns.

Decision Makers’ Top-Down Strategies
Decision makers habitually address the public. They not only produce
institutionalized events on which the media report in a routine fashion,
they also stage pseudoevents, which are routinely reported on by the
media, too. In this domain, the “principle of cumulative inequality”
holds sway (Wolfsfeld 1997, 24): he who has shall be given. According to
the “beat system,” journalists are assigned to a given institution or policy
area in order to routinely collect information from the participants in the
politicalprocessandfrompublicauthoritiesingeneral.Atthesametime,
the established political actors have important resources for professional
public relations and political marketing at their disposal. This provides
themwithimportantadvantagesindealingwiththemedia,asisshownby
the studies of the German debates about abortion (Gerhards et al. 1998,
113) and about political refugees (Koopmans 1996, 176): The debates
about these issues were dominated by the political elites.
Against the background of the increasing importance of the pub-
lic sphere for the political process, political actors now generally try
to reinforce their position in the decision-making arena by directly

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