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180 | THE PROFESSIONALISM OF POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

decisions.Since,in their view,citizens do not always understand that the political choice
is in fact made by the people and for the people, the professional intermediary is
essential to explain that what was decided without direct consultation with the citizens
is still in their best interest.

The tentative conclusion may be that the current professionalisation of political
communication further widens the inequality between politicians and citizens in terms
of the capacity to manipulate political messages,perceptions and opinions.

Is a better informed citizenry and more inclusive citizenship developed so that the
citizen’s influence on public choice may be more significant?

Key to the democratic process is the notion that if citizens cannot directly take
decisions about public matters, their influence upon public choice should at least be
maximised. A prerequisite for this is obviously the need for citizens to be properly
informed about matters of public interest. In principle one might then expect that
professionalisation serves primarily the maximisation of information flows to citizens.
However, for electoral and party political reasons, the professionals tend to narrow
down information flows to those selected audience segments that they consider useful
in the electoral sense. By implication they do not contribute to the broadening of
information flows so that a well-informed citizenry may emerge. Because of their
limited assignment, they do not see it as their task to promote processes of well-
informed deliberation among all citizens. As a result, specially targeted audiences may
be relatively well informed but always – selectively – on those issues that matter to the
politicians.This segmentation and selective targeting of the public sphere (Gandy,2001,
p. 104) conflicts with the normative standard – as among others proposed in the
The Professionalisation of Political Communication
writings of Habermas – that the process of political deliberation should be inclusive.
When – as is common procedure in commercial advertising and marketing – people
become targets for electoral campaigns, and they are divided into useful and excluded
segments, they become political consumers. Much professional political information
caters for groups that face specific problems that they want to see addressed, and that
they perceive as more urgent than the interests of the overall society. This isolates
people from each other; it undermines a general social commitment and a shared
notion of the common good. The selective targeting of political information to
segmented audiences erodes a common knowledge and understanding of public
issues and thus the common engagement of people with political issues.This approach
to political communication also tends to reinforce incidental and short-term populist
politics rather than serve long-term politics for sustainable societies in which
citizenship implies that people search for solutions to common problems. Political
consumership replaces citizenship.

The tentative conclusion may be that the professional political communicators
contribute to the development of ‘democracy without citizens’.
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