Page 34 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Barbara Pfetsch and Frank Esser

transnational developments that the democratic potential of local press,
radio, and television are compromised above all by economic compe-
tition and horizontal and vertical concentration processes. This causes
achange in the culture of local journalism as well as in local media
contents, which is not necessarily beneficial to a pluralistic local pub-
lic sphere. In view of this disillusioning conclusion, Sabine Lang argues
that local communication must not be limited to the local mass media.
Rather, the public sphere at a local level is decisively shaped through
the contacts and communications of groups in civil society, which in
particular make use of the new electronic media for forming networks.
PROCESSES OF POLITICAL COMMUNICATION: POLITICAL MOBILIZATION AND
ELECTION CAMPAIGNS. Even though free and independent media have to
be considered as necessary structural conditions of the modern demo-
cratic process, the logic and the mechanisms of media communications
in the Western democracies lead to “‘the growing intrusiveness of media’
in politics, resulting in a perception, shared by many influence-seeking
political actors, of the greater centrality of the mass media to the conduct
of political conflict and its outcomes. This has propelled emergence of
a‘modern publicity process,’ defined as involving ‘a competitive strug-
gleto influence and control popular perceptions of key political events
and issues through the mass media’” (Seymour-Ure 1987; Blumler and
Gurevitch 1995, 84). One of the merits of comparative research is that it
presents concepts and findings that describe this modern political pub-
licity process in a cross-national perspective.
Hanspeter Kriesi (Chapter 8, this volume) characterizes the mani-
festation of this process as “audience democracy.” Essentially, political
actors, media, and outsiders mobilize public opinion so as to assert their
positions in the political decision making. The mass media act as the mo-
tor and means of the mobilization of public opinion. Hanspeter Kriesi
discusses which political publicity strategies are successful under which
conditions, thereby promoting a model that differentiates between top-
down strategies, media strategies, and bottom-up strategies of political
actors. Different conditions regarding events, actor constellations, and
speaker attributes are connected with each strategy, so that audience
democracy appears to be a complex set of interrelations, which, on the
one hand, is shaped by situational political constellations and on the
other by the structural contexts of the political system and of the media
system. Hanspeter Kriesi presents a classification of the system contexts
and argues that politically top-down strategies ought, above all, to be
successful in majority-vote democratic systems.

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