Page 218 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Hanspeter Kriesi

create windows of opportunity for the challengers, which allow them
to get access to the media. The escalation of the reporting on the Gulf
Warin 1991, for example, allowed for even small demonstrations to get
media attention. The media attention cycle may even trigger protests, as
Koopmans (1996) has shown in his study on the question of political
refugees in Germany.
Media attention, however, is not sufficient. Challengers also need
to obtain supportive resonance in the media. According to Wolfsfeld’s
(1997, 45–9) “principle of resonance,” challengers who are able to pro-
duce events that resonate in the professional and political culture of
important news media will be able to compete with more powerful
adversaries. The difficulty for the social movements in this context is that
the factors that allow them to gain access to the media do not necessarily
contribute to their credibility and, consequentially, to public support.
The dramatization of their concerns in protest events necessarily im-
plies a simplification of their message, which parallels the “sound bites”
uttered by decision makers. Contrary to the expectations by Habermas
(1992), the reasoning of challengers is not characterized by a particularly
high level of rationality. In fact, in their analysis of the German abor-
tion debate, Gerhards et al. (1998, 149–52) showed that challengers are
“specialized in one-sidedness.”

Counterstrategies of Decision Makers
To meet the challenge of media-centered and challengers’ strategies
the decision makers react with counterstrategies designed to drive actors
and issues out of the public sphere. Among these techniques of sym-
bolic politics (Sarcinelli 1989) we can distinguish between issue- and
actor-centered strategies. The issue-centered strategies include displacing
problems, shifting debates to secondary arenas, and transforming sub-
stantive conflicts into moral ones. Decision makers generally react to the
strategies of the media and challengers by trying to avoid hot issues in
the public sphere. Instead, they produce “campaign issues” that allow
them to detract attention from the hot issues, minimize the differences
between the actors, or, alternatively, gloss over the fact that the real dif-
ferences between them are actually negligible. The issue of prisoners’
furloughs in the presidential campaign between Bush and Dukakis in
1988 illustrates this strategy. According to a study by Kahn and Kenney
(1999), candidates for the American Senate generally try to avoid debates
about political issues. Only a third of their advertisements address issues
at all, and even in issue-specific advertisements the candidates mention

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