Page 213 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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StrategicPolitical Communication

Journalists react to attempts of instrumentalization by declaring war. Po-
litical communication constitutes, as Neveu (1998, 450) has observed,
an ideal example of the reflexivity of social actors. The increasing ra-
tionalization of communication by political actors – in the sense of a
“scientific” anticipation of the media logic by spin doctors – creates its
reflexive resistance; the journalists acquire new competences allowing
them, in turn, to anticipate and understand the communication strate-
gies of the political actors.
Butevenif the public receives and supports the message of the po-
litical actors, there is no guarantee that the political opponents in the
bargaining arena will be impressed by public opinion. Thus, the strategy
of going public by certain political actors may be interpreted as breaking
traditional political rules and may have results that are counterproduc-
tive for the actors adopting such a strategy. As Kernell (1988, 3–4) has
pointed out, going public violates the traditional bargaining rules in two
respects: actors who go public fix their position publicly, which makes
searching for compromise solutions more difficult. At the same time,
such actors undermine the legitimacy of other political actors, because
they implicitly question their democratic mandate as representatives of
the citizens. Given these difficulties and given the restrictive conditions
for such a strategy, we may expect that it is only available for a select
group of political actors.
However, to the extent that some actors successfully apply such a
strategy, it will be copied by other actors. Thus, following the success of
the “media-centered personality party” of Berlusconi in the 1994 Italian
elections, the challenger Ulivo copied this strategy in 1996 (Seisselberg
1996). The enormous attention that politicians generally pay to the pub-
lic sphere finally implies that the strategy of going public will also be
adopted by established interest associations that have concentrated their
activities on the bargaining arena in the past. This kind of “outside lob-
bying” (Kollman 1998) will be treated in more detail in the section on
bottom-up strategies. As a result of the increasing use of such strate-
gies, contemporary politics becomes increasingly “populist” in charac-
ter and more focused on key leaders (M´ eny and Surel 2000). Moreover,
charisma increasingly becomes a crucial resource in the political process.
Grande (2000), for example, notes a search for a charismatic solution on
behalf of the citizenry, strengthened by the media that attempt to per-
sonalize politics for their own commercial reasons. It appears that non-
transparent forms of policy making are increasingly challenged by actors

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