Page 23 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Comparing Political Communication

Reorientations in a Changing World

Barbara Pfetsch and Frank Esser

This volume intends to assess the state of the art of comparative research
in political communication and to make reference to potential ways in
which political communication could and should develop. When Jay
Blumler and Michael Gurevitch urged political communication to adapt
to the perspective of international comparison more than 25 years ago
they were able to refer to only a few studies (Blumler and Gurevitch
1975). At the time, the neglect of comparative work in communication
researchwasevenmoreblatantasthisapproachhadbeenwellestablished
inneighboringsocialsciencessuchaspoliticalscience.However,scholars
in comparative politics were never really interested in the mass media
and political communication. In communication science on the other
hand, political communication has always been a central subject; though
it was believed for a long time that it would suffice to describe singular
phenomena in the realm of national politics or to subscribe to historical
studies. Thus, until the early 1990s communication research lacked an
international orientation comparable to that of political science (Kaase
1998; Schoenbach 1998).
From today’s point of view it is surprising how long it took for
the comparative approach to be acknowledged as a necessary and use-
ful strategy and tool of communication research. Doris Graber (1993,
305) rightly points out that political communication cannot be suit-
ably studied without comparative research “as its form varies between
cultures, which makes it necessary and instructive to analyze it from
different cultural perspectives.” Comparative research in political com-
munication deserves more attention because it enables us to inspect our
own findings critically by using the examination of others, and only
by doing so enables us to reach conclusions with an extensive claim to
validity.

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