Page 39 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Comparing Political Communication

which include the construction and encoding of political messages, their
reception by the public, and the changeable relationships between polit-
ical culture and the culture of journalism, between citizens and political
elites and between media and political institutions.
The perspective of this research agenda is consistently taken further
in the chapter by Barbara Pfetsch (Chapter 15, this volume). The con-
cept of political communication culture takes center stage here, and en-
ables comparative analysis of the orientations, which forms the basis of
the relationship between political spokespeople and journalists. Barbara
PfetscharguesthatinmodernWesternsocietiesaspecificenvironmentof
interaction has emerged between political spokespeople and journalists
where media and politics overlap that determines the patterns and the
results of political communication. The respective type of political com-
munication culture depends on the macrostructural constellations of the
political system and the media system. Four different forms of political
communication cultures are theoretically outlined and put to discus-
sion. Comparative analyses can contribute to clarifying the question of
whether the types of political communication culture that are presented
are empirically sustainable and under what postulated macroanalytical
conditions they occur. The connection of the structural contexts in the
realm of the political system and the media system with the emergence
of particular types of political communication culture is demonstrated
using the cases of the United States, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy.
Robert L. Stevenson (Chapter 16, this volume) puts the argument of
the particular significance of culture on a broader basis. He perceives
cultures as communities of values promoting a feeling of togetherness
that bestows identity, which often, but by no means always, coincide with
national boarders. Robert L. Stevenson identifies culture as a key variable
of comparative communication studies and complains that too little at-
tention has been paid to it so far, although he says that expressions such
as intercultural or trans-cultural are used by everybody. He encourages a
stronger emphasis on cultures instead of nations when conducting com-
parativework,andforfactualdifferencesbetweenculturestobeacknowl-
edged as well as for them to be systematically considered as descriptive
variables. Stevenson provides evidence that the differences discovered in
international research can best be described with reference to different
(cultural) circles. His social science–based viewpoint leads him, how-
ever, to reject cultural studies and other culturally critical approaches
because these do not use any strict comparative methodology based on
quasi-experimental designs. Furthermore, these approaches would not

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