Page 221 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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StrategicPolitical Communication

Here,Iwilldeal only with the structure of the national context. Recent
work on political mobilization has emphasized that levels and forms of
mobilization by social movements, interest groups, and citizens’ action
groups are strongly influenced by so-called political opportunity struc-
tures – the set of opportunities and constraints given by the institutional
structure and political culture of the political system in which mobiliza-
tion takes place (e.g., McAdam 1982; Kitschelt 1986; Kriesi et al. 1995;
McAdametal.1996;Tarrow1998).Wecanassumethatthesefindingsnot
only apply to political mobilization, but also to political communication
and to public strategies more generally. This assumption is substantiated
by more recent efforts to introduce the concept of discursive opportuni-
ties (Koopmans and Statham 1999). Although quite a number of specific
aspects of national settings are potentially of interest for the selection of
thecountriestobeincludedinacomparativestudy,wewillhavetoignore
this complexity for practical reasons by focusing on a limited number
of structural features that are likely to have a major impact on whether
or not the political actors will choose a strategy of mobilizing public
opinion. For the characterization of the political context at the national
level, I propose the following two criteria:

The concentration of power in parliament and government (majori-
tarian versus consensus democracy): This criterion corresponds
to Lijphart’s (1999) “executives-parties”– dimension, which ranges
from democratic systems of government that highly concentrate
power in parliament and government (majoritarian democracies)
tothosethathighlyfragmentpowerbetweenandwithinthesearenas
(consensus democracies).
The institutional accessibility of the state actors (low versus high

accessibility): This criterion resembles Lijphart’s second dimen-
sion, but is not quite equivalent. It also resembles various other
veto-player indices of democratic regimes (see Fuchs 2000). In con-
structing this index, we assume that the accessibility of the state
actors increases with the number of institutional access points. 7

7 Our index of institutional accessibility of state actors has four components: (1) bicam-
eralism; (2) decentralization (= federalism); (3) direct-democracy (= factual use); and
(4)opennessofcivilservicecareersystem(=lackofprofessionalizationofcivilservice).
Every component is scaled 0 (low), 1 (medium), or 2 (high accessibility). Components
1 and 2 come from Colomer (1996); component 3 from the Research and Documen-
tation Center on Direct Democracy at the University of Geneva (www.unige.ch/c2d)
and component 4 from Schnapp (2000, 38; Table 4).

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