Page 223 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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StrategicPolitical Communication

public, which limits the incentives to use such strategies outside of
direct-democratic campaigns. In a country such as Switzerland, mem-
bers of government who go public over the heads of their colleagues are
violating the rules of the game and will most likely obtain counterpro-
ductive results.
Media-centered strategies generally become more probable if the op-
position does not fulfill its role, if elections lose their character of demo-
cratic renewal, and if distrust in the political elite increases. This may
happen in both types of democracies. Thus, unveiling scandals and at-
tacking unfair privileges and irregularities constituted a key element of
¨
the strategy of the Austrian Liberal Party (FPO) after Haider had taken
¨
over the party’s leadership in 1986. From the start, the FPOappealed to
the public in terms of its “young dynamism” as opposed to the “inertia
of the old parties” (Plasser and Ulram 2000). In a majoritarian democ-
racy similar to Spain, the media also played a crucial role in breaking
the “coalitions of silence” at a given moment in time. Pujas and Rhodes
(1999) believe that the role of the opposition is increasingly taken over
by the press in Spain. Even in Great Britain, the paradigmatic case of a
majoritarian democracy, the disinformation practiced by leading politi-
cians and high officials implies that the media increasingly take over the
role of the opposition. 8
While the type of democracy is more pertinent for the strategies of de-
cision makers, the institutional accessibility of state actors is more relevant
for the strategies of challengers.Highly accessible institutional settings
invite inside strategies. The reverse, however, does not necessarily apply.
Acomparative study on the mobilization of new social movements in
four Western European countries (Germany, France, the Netherlands,
and Switzerland) has shown that poorly accessible institutional settings
induce outside collective actors to adopt radical public strategies (Kriesi
et al. 1995). But low institutional accessibility does not increase the
volumeofpublicstrategies.Onthecontrary,thelargestamountofpublic
eventswasproducedinthemostaccessiblesettings.Thisisbecausepublic
strategies (at least bottom-up ones) depend on political access to achieve

8 Ms. Thatcher for example has never tried to hide her displacement and cover-up
strategies: to the great merriment of backbenchers, she used to answer troublesome
questionsintheparliamentaryquestionhourbycitinglistsofirrelevantstatisticshaving
no relationship with the question (cf. NZZ, International Edition Nr. 14; January 18,
2001; 5: “Kontrollfunktion der britischen Medien”).

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