Page 38 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Barbara Pfetsch and Frank Esser

PROSPECTS OF INTERNATIONAL COMPARATIVE COMMUNICATION RESEARCH.
The contributions in this volume show that a variety of aspects of the
modern political publicity process have been explored based on scenar-
ios of Americanization, modernization, and globalization. In so doing
it hardly comes as a surprise that the established Western democracies
exhibit very different modernization phenomena in the field of politi-
cal communication. The conclusion of the research carried out to date
alsoshowsthattheprospectsofcomparativepoliticalcommunicationre-
search must not lie in the further accumulation of studies on a multitude
of objects of comparison. Instead, Gurevitch and Blumler (Chapter 14,
this volume) call for an assertive intellectual strategy, which is aimed at
developing a general conceptual framework for future research.
Apossible starting point for such a prospect is the conclusion that the
various phenomena in political communication can only be explained
andinterpretedinameaningfulwayoncetheyarelinkedwiththerespec-
tive relevant contexts. If this consideration is consistently taken further,
political communication in comparative perspective must be conceived
as a system that has a structural and a cultural dimension. The structure
of political communication implies the institutional and cultural con-
texts of the political system and the media system on the macro- and
mesolevels. The cultural dimension refers to the observation of actors
and denotes the interaction processes of political actors and media actors
as well as their preconditions, results, and effects. If political communi-
cation processes are conceptualized as interplay of actor’s behavior and
structural contexts then the comparative approach offers considerable
potential for insight. Comparing in that case means varying the struc-
tural and contextual conditions in terms of quasi-experimental designs
and enquiring as to how the orientations and behavior of the actors are
laid out in relation to these contexts.
This view is not new to research in political science. It is the view of
political culture, which Michael Gurevitch and Jay Blumler (Chapter 14,
this volume) suggest as a future trajectory of comparative political
communication: “Just as comparative communication research can be
regarded as a subset of the comparative study of culture, comparative
political communication research should be seen as the examination
of political cultures and their impact on political communication in
different societies.” The main objective of Michael Gurevitch and Jay
Blumler is to identify key dimensions, which are applied in various soci-
etiestoregulatepoliticalcommunication.Thedesideratalie,therefore,in
the relationships between political culture and political communication,

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