Pub Date : 2023-06-08DOI: 10.1080/10584609.2023.2222267
Chris Wells, Lewis A. Friedland
ABSTRACT The theory of recognition has much to offer the field of political communication as it struggles to comprehend communicative dysfunctions, political polarization and governing crises across the industrialized democracies. Drawing on the work of Axel Honneth, Charles Taylor, Nancy Fraser and Michele Lamont, as well as more recent contributions, we put recognition theory into conversation with some of our field’s contemporary concerns. In particular, we show how the theory offers depth, nuance and synthesis to progress communication scholars are making in the study of how attention economics and social identity shape perceptions and communications in a hybrid political media system. In the process, we argue that we are experiencing a historically novel phase of recognition, in which the granting and denial of recognition are transformed at the individual level by the affordances of many-to-many social networking platforms, and at the group level by the use of recognition for attracting attention to commodified media properties. At the intersection of the modern attention economy, heightened articulation of identity-based messaging, and recognition processes is what we term a recognition crisis, in which claims of misrecognition by multiple, conflictual groups are unresolvable and undermine the solidarity that grounds social and political life. We conclude with a roadmap of new opportunities to understand existing research findings and pose new research questions. Moreover, we show that the field of political communication has a great deal to offer discussions of recognition occurring in related fields of the social sciences.
{"title":"Recognition Crisis: Coming to Terms with Identity, Attention and Political Communication in the Twenty-First Century","authors":"Chris Wells, Lewis A. Friedland","doi":"10.1080/10584609.2023.2222267","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2023.2222267","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The theory of recognition has much to offer the field of political communication as it struggles to comprehend communicative dysfunctions, political polarization and governing crises across the industrialized democracies. Drawing on the work of Axel Honneth, Charles Taylor, Nancy Fraser and Michele Lamont, as well as more recent contributions, we put recognition theory into conversation with some of our field’s contemporary concerns. In particular, we show how the theory offers depth, nuance and synthesis to progress communication scholars are making in the study of how attention economics and social identity shape perceptions and communications in a hybrid political media system. In the process, we argue that we are experiencing a historically novel phase of recognition, in which the granting and denial of recognition are transformed at the individual level by the affordances of many-to-many social networking platforms, and at the group level by the use of recognition for attracting attention to commodified media properties. At the intersection of the modern attention economy, heightened articulation of identity-based messaging, and recognition processes is what we term a recognition crisis, in which claims of misrecognition by multiple, conflictual groups are unresolvable and undermine the solidarity that grounds social and political life. We conclude with a roadmap of new opportunities to understand existing research findings and pose new research questions. Moreover, we show that the field of political communication has a great deal to offer discussions of recognition occurring in related fields of the social sciences.","PeriodicalId":20264,"journal":{"name":"Political Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":7.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44918581","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-07DOI: 10.1080/10584609.2023.2220666
Patrícia G. C. Rossini
How can political communication embrace diversity if it continues to be guided by theories and models that were not developed to deal with the inclusion of different voices and perspectives? How can political communication move forward if scholarship produced across most of the world continues to be treated as ‘case studies’—which few want to learn from or engage with – while we continue to interpret reality through the lenses of exceptional and privileged societies?
{"title":"Reassessing the Role of Inclusion in Political Communication Research","authors":"Patrícia G. C. Rossini","doi":"10.1080/10584609.2023.2220666","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2023.2220666","url":null,"abstract":"How can political communication embrace diversity if it continues to be guided by theories and models that were not developed to deal with the inclusion of different voices and perspectives? How can political communication move forward if scholarship produced across most of the world continues to be treated as ‘case studies’—which few want to learn from or engage with – while we continue to interpret reality through the lenses of exceptional and privileged societies?","PeriodicalId":20264,"journal":{"name":"Political Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":7.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43262398","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-16DOI: 10.1080/10584609.2023.2208057
J. Hamilton, Heidi J. S. Tworek
is important. It’s that it’s readily available. If it isn’t available on microfilm in a library, it can be obtained from another library through interlibrary loan. And the microfilm runs back 150 years. We have studies of simply the papers available in a given library – a group of papers chosen by a librarian who probably did not have in mind creating a representative sample of U.S. newspapers (Stempel & Stewart, 2000, p. 545).
{"title":"Not All the News That’s Fit to Print: The New York Times as a Research Tool","authors":"J. Hamilton, Heidi J. S. Tworek","doi":"10.1080/10584609.2023.2208057","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2023.2208057","url":null,"abstract":"is important. It’s that it’s readily available. If it isn’t available on microfilm in a library, it can be obtained from another library through interlibrary loan. And the microfilm runs back 150 years. We have studies of simply the papers available in a given library – a group of papers chosen by a librarian who probably did not have in mind creating a representative sample of U.S. newspapers (Stempel & Stewart, 2000, p. 545).","PeriodicalId":20264,"journal":{"name":"Political Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":7.5,"publicationDate":"2023-05-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47138184","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-14DOI: 10.1080/10584609.2023.2201175
Jill A. Edy, T. Adams
ABSTRACT Political leaders construct meanings for current events in support of their existing policy goals, but the constructed meanings do not change when policy goals change. Consequently, the established narrative of the past becomes part of the policymaking terrain, justifying existing policies and creating criteria for policy success. It must be navigated by leaders seeking to reach their policy objectives. References made by U.S. and Israeli political leaders to the event known as “9/11” from 2002 through 2019 reveal how they renegotiated its meaning as their policy goals evolved. Policy goals at the time of the event shaped the meanings made of the event. As policy goals changed, existing meanings could not be discarded or reshaped at will, nor could 9/11 simply be forgotten. Instead, leaders navigated and amended the inescapable public memory of 9/11 to support varying policy goals over a 20-year time span. For Israel, 9/11 made a chronic problem an international cause célèbre, offering potential to generate international response to a commonly marginalized threat, a narrative prime ministers sought to adapt as their policy goals changed. In the U.S. the George W. Bush Administration’s narrative of 9/11 promoted and sustained the administration’s policies and goals, making it difficult for Barack Obama’s administration to change course unless it could tell a different story. Both cases demonstrate that arguments made for or against policies are contingent upon how the past is narrated. Collective remembrance can affect the contours of public policy, for the remembered past constitutes the terrain of policymaking.
{"title":"The Past as Political Terrain: How National Leaders Navigate Memories of 9/11","authors":"Jill A. Edy, T. Adams","doi":"10.1080/10584609.2023.2201175","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2023.2201175","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Political leaders construct meanings for current events in support of their existing policy goals, but the constructed meanings do not change when policy goals change. Consequently, the established narrative of the past becomes part of the policymaking terrain, justifying existing policies and creating criteria for policy success. It must be navigated by leaders seeking to reach their policy objectives. References made by U.S. and Israeli political leaders to the event known as “9/11” from 2002 through 2019 reveal how they renegotiated its meaning as their policy goals evolved. Policy goals at the time of the event shaped the meanings made of the event. As policy goals changed, existing meanings could not be discarded or reshaped at will, nor could 9/11 simply be forgotten. Instead, leaders navigated and amended the inescapable public memory of 9/11 to support varying policy goals over a 20-year time span. For Israel, 9/11 made a chronic problem an international cause célèbre, offering potential to generate international response to a commonly marginalized threat, a narrative prime ministers sought to adapt as their policy goals changed. In the U.S. the George W. Bush Administration’s narrative of 9/11 promoted and sustained the administration’s policies and goals, making it difficult for Barack Obama’s administration to change course unless it could tell a different story. Both cases demonstrate that arguments made for or against policies are contingent upon how the past is narrated. Collective remembrance can affect the contours of public policy, for the remembered past constitutes the terrain of policymaking.","PeriodicalId":20264,"journal":{"name":"Political Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":7.5,"publicationDate":"2023-05-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47461314","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-09DOI: 10.1080/10584609.2023.2207492
King-wa Fu
ABSTRACT While many previous studies have investigated propaganda in connection with misinformation, disinformation, or “fake news” campaigns, they have given insufficient attention to the political messages which are not squarely factually inaccurate but manipulated. This study identifies a political communication strategy, the propagandization of relative gratification, through which propaganda media 1) highlight global chaos to nudge the public’s downward comparison to a relatively stable domestic situation; 2) portray the nation’s adversaries as worse than its allies; and 3) leverages the public’s anti-foreign attitude. This study empirically examines Chinese state media’s approach to the coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic in 46 countries in 2020 by analyzing more than 3 million Chinese social media posts using the semantic similarity found in word embedding models. The results reveal that the global pandemic was depicted by the state media as generally more severe than China’s domestic situation. The more distant a foreign country’s relationship with China, the more severe its COVID-19 representation in China’s propaganda, deviating from the country’s actual epidemiological severity and what the Chinese general public thinks about it, indicating that a country’s relationship with China is an important predictor of how its COVID-19 severity was presented in China’s state media. This study extends the understanding of the sophisticated nature of propaganda in the current era.
{"title":"Propagandization of Relative Gratification: How Chinese State Media Portray the International Pandemic","authors":"King-wa Fu","doi":"10.1080/10584609.2023.2207492","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2023.2207492","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT While many previous studies have investigated propaganda in connection with misinformation, disinformation, or “fake news” campaigns, they have given insufficient attention to the political messages which are not squarely factually inaccurate but manipulated. This study identifies a political communication strategy, the propagandization of relative gratification, through which propaganda media 1) highlight global chaos to nudge the public’s downward comparison to a relatively stable domestic situation; 2) portray the nation’s adversaries as worse than its allies; and 3) leverages the public’s anti-foreign attitude. This study empirically examines Chinese state media’s approach to the coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic in 46 countries in 2020 by analyzing more than 3 million Chinese social media posts using the semantic similarity found in word embedding models. The results reveal that the global pandemic was depicted by the state media as generally more severe than China’s domestic situation. The more distant a foreign country’s relationship with China, the more severe its COVID-19 representation in China’s propaganda, deviating from the country’s actual epidemiological severity and what the Chinese general public thinks about it, indicating that a country’s relationship with China is an important predictor of how its COVID-19 severity was presented in China’s state media. This study extends the understanding of the sophisticated nature of propaganda in the current era.","PeriodicalId":20264,"journal":{"name":"Political Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":7.5,"publicationDate":"2023-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42218569","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/10584609.2023.2173872
Karolina Koc-Michalska, U. Klinger, L. Bennett, Andrea Römmele
ABSTRACT With the advent of digital media and social media platforms, the speed of innovation and technology adoption in campaigns have increased tremendously. At the same time, the campaign environment and its rules are in constant flow, as platform logics, party operations, and voter alignments both reflect and create instability in many political systems. Additionally, disinformation, foreign interference in campaigns, hyper-partisan media ecologies, and hyperactive users have all created changes in opinion climates. In light of these developments, and building on the theoretical concept of increasingly disrupted and dissonant public spheres (developed by Barbara Pfetsch and Lance Bennett), this special issue seeks to expand research on campaigning beyond assumptions of well-functioning political systems, to better understand the erosion of institutional legitimacy and trust, and their effects on communication processes. The special issue is organized within two conceptual approaches. The first cluster of manuscripts observes how political candidates, organizations, and parties optimize their behaviour within the dissonant political environment. The second part examines responses, perceptions, and consequences of the disrupted environment on the public. Finally, four integrated forum essays look into how dissonant public spheres may disturb democratic processes, discuss the role of data-driven campaigning, and address how limited access to platform data affects our understanding of dissonant public spheres.
{"title":"(Digital) Campaigning in Dissonant Public Spheres","authors":"Karolina Koc-Michalska, U. Klinger, L. Bennett, Andrea Römmele","doi":"10.1080/10584609.2023.2173872","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2023.2173872","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT With the advent of digital media and social media platforms, the speed of innovation and technology adoption in campaigns have increased tremendously. At the same time, the campaign environment and its rules are in constant flow, as platform logics, party operations, and voter alignments both reflect and create instability in many political systems. Additionally, disinformation, foreign interference in campaigns, hyper-partisan media ecologies, and hyperactive users have all created changes in opinion climates. In light of these developments, and building on the theoretical concept of increasingly disrupted and dissonant public spheres (developed by Barbara Pfetsch and Lance Bennett), this special issue seeks to expand research on campaigning beyond assumptions of well-functioning political systems, to better understand the erosion of institutional legitimacy and trust, and their effects on communication processes. The special issue is organized within two conceptual approaches. The first cluster of manuscripts observes how political candidates, organizations, and parties optimize their behaviour within the dissonant political environment. The second part examines responses, perceptions, and consequences of the disrupted environment on the public. Finally, four integrated forum essays look into how dissonant public spheres may disturb democratic processes, discuss the role of data-driven campaigning, and address how limited access to platform data affects our understanding of dissonant public spheres.","PeriodicalId":20264,"journal":{"name":"Political Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":7.5,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48648276","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/10584609.2023.2207486
R. Gibson
Concern about whether contemporary societies face a “crisis of democracy” has grown in recent years (Kreisi, 2020). While the severity of the malaise may be disputed, there is growing suspicion that the increasing reliance of political actors on digital technology and particularly new “data driven” campaign techniques may be contributing to growth in citizen disengagement and discontent (Bennett & Lyon, 2019). The grounds for this claim are essentially three-fold. First, data-driven campaigns promote a more individualized form of political targeting that allows parties to narrow their appeals to the most persuadable and “perceived” sections of the electorate (Hersh, 2015), and thereby effectively bypass those harder to reach groups of under-mobilized voters, i.e. the young, the disinterested, and the marginalized. Furthermore, through these microtargeting techniques, campaigners can more accurately target demobilizing messages at opposition supporters to dissuade them from turning out. Second, social media platforms provide powerful new channels for the release of automated, anonymized, false information or “computational propaganda” by rogue actors, both foreign and domestic. These disinformation campaigns are explicitly designed to mislead and confuse voters and are escalating in scale and sophistication (Woolley & Howard, 2018). Finally, campaigns themselves are now increasingly reliant on the “wisdom” of AI and computer modeling for basic tasks such as resource allocation and message construction. This shift creates a new technological elite at the heart of campaigns that operate in an opaque and unaccountable manner (Tufekci, 2014). The combined impact of these developments is a further shrinking of the public sphere and decline in the representativeness and accountability of democratic institutions. Voters who do actually make it the polls face the increasingly difficult task of making an informed choice, as they struggle to discern both the accuracy and source of the political content they encounter online. Given the potentially serious harms that DDC presents to democracy, systematic investigation of its adoption and usage across countries is now a priority for academic research. This is precisely the goal of a new ERC funded project, Digital Campaigning and Electoral Democracy (DiCED). In this short essay we highlight in brief, the key questions the project will pursue and that we urge the wider literature to explore.
{"title":"Data-Driven Campaigning as a Disruptive Force","authors":"R. Gibson","doi":"10.1080/10584609.2023.2207486","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2023.2207486","url":null,"abstract":"Concern about whether contemporary societies face a “crisis of democracy” has grown in recent years (Kreisi, 2020). While the severity of the malaise may be disputed, there is growing suspicion that the increasing reliance of political actors on digital technology and particularly new “data driven” campaign techniques may be contributing to growth in citizen disengagement and discontent (Bennett & Lyon, 2019). The grounds for this claim are essentially three-fold. First, data-driven campaigns promote a more individualized form of political targeting that allows parties to narrow their appeals to the most persuadable and “perceived” sections of the electorate (Hersh, 2015), and thereby effectively bypass those harder to reach groups of under-mobilized voters, i.e. the young, the disinterested, and the marginalized. Furthermore, through these microtargeting techniques, campaigners can more accurately target demobilizing messages at opposition supporters to dissuade them from turning out. Second, social media platforms provide powerful new channels for the release of automated, anonymized, false information or “computational propaganda” by rogue actors, both foreign and domestic. These disinformation campaigns are explicitly designed to mislead and confuse voters and are escalating in scale and sophistication (Woolley & Howard, 2018). Finally, campaigns themselves are now increasingly reliant on the “wisdom” of AI and computer modeling for basic tasks such as resource allocation and message construction. This shift creates a new technological elite at the heart of campaigns that operate in an opaque and unaccountable manner (Tufekci, 2014). The combined impact of these developments is a further shrinking of the public sphere and decline in the representativeness and accountability of democratic institutions. Voters who do actually make it the polls face the increasingly difficult task of making an informed choice, as they struggle to discern both the accuracy and source of the political content they encounter online. Given the potentially serious harms that DDC presents to democracy, systematic investigation of its adoption and usage across countries is now a priority for academic research. This is precisely the goal of a new ERC funded project, Digital Campaigning and Electoral Democracy (DiCED). In this short essay we highlight in brief, the key questions the project will pursue and that we urge the wider literature to explore.","PeriodicalId":20264,"journal":{"name":"Political Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":7.5,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45084690","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/10584609.2023.2207488
Claes H. de Vreese, Rebekah Tromble
ABSTRACT This article articulates why the lack of social media platform data access for researchers is a huge problem, for research and society. We then review a number of ongoing initiatives and opportunities towards ensuring sustainable data accees.
{"title":"The Data Abyss: How Lack of Data Access Leaves Research and Society in the Dark","authors":"Claes H. de Vreese, Rebekah Tromble","doi":"10.1080/10584609.2023.2207488","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2023.2207488","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article articulates why the lack of social media platform data access for researchers is a huge problem, for research and society. We then review a number of ongoing initiatives and opportunities towards ensuring sustainable data accees.","PeriodicalId":20264,"journal":{"name":"Political Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":7.5,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49128409","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-28DOI: 10.1080/10584609.2023.2208083
Kathleen Searles, Jessica T. Feezell
ABSTRACT Most major platforms and news portals use the feed approach to information display, which offers people the ability to engage in continuous scrolling. This affordance, “scrollability,” is an understudied feature that changes how people consume news. The endless scroll presents opportunities to monetize attention for advertisers, and a seemingly bottomless supply of headlines for news consumers. Moreover, more people report scrolling headlines than actually reading news stories. A scrollable technical environment creates circumstances that encourage headline reading, or what we call “news-scrolling,” and yet we know little about the consequences of scrollability for other behaviors. In this paper we set forth an argument for increased scholarly attention to scrollability in the context of online news consumption, and articulate a theoretical framework for explaining the behaviors of news-scrollers and news-clickers.
{"title":"Scrollability: A New Digital News Affordance","authors":"Kathleen Searles, Jessica T. Feezell","doi":"10.1080/10584609.2023.2208083","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2023.2208083","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Most major platforms and news portals use the feed approach to information display, which offers people the ability to engage in continuous scrolling. This affordance, “scrollability,” is an understudied feature that changes how people consume news. The endless scroll presents opportunities to monetize attention for advertisers, and a seemingly bottomless supply of headlines for news consumers. Moreover, more people report scrolling headlines than actually reading news stories. A scrollable technical environment creates circumstances that encourage headline reading, or what we call “news-scrolling,” and yet we know little about the consequences of scrollability for other behaviors. In this paper we set forth an argument for increased scholarly attention to scrollability in the context of online news consumption, and articulate a theoretical framework for explaining the behaviors of news-scrollers and news-clickers.","PeriodicalId":20264,"journal":{"name":"Political Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":7.5,"publicationDate":"2023-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41510585","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-27DOI: 10.1080/10584609.2023.2193554
B. Pfetsch
Political campaigns have always been closely related to the technical conditions of media infrastructures, the social conditions of voters, and the political opportunities within which parties and movements compete. As campaigning has developed through the four ages of political communication (Blumler, 2015; Norris, 2002), it is now shaped by the affordances of digital platforms and networked communication ecologies in addition to legacy media infrastructures. In the environment of hybrid media systems (Chadwick, 2013), campaigning has also become hybrid – a task divided between the use of conventional information subsidies and the dynamics of social media and digital platforms (Azari, 2016; Wells et al., 2016). What is more, contemporary political communications and voter mobilization are taking place under two significant context conditions: dissonant public spheres (Pfetsch, 2018) are coinciding with a profound crisis of liberal democracy (Bennett & Livingston, 2018). The communication ecology and the state of democracy have produced a style of campaigning that is no longer geared toward a consensus among the established political elites and parties to engage in civilized speech, to conduct fair competition, and to stay within the limits and norms of democracy. In this essay, I shall discuss some of the features and consequences of these contextual conditions. I shall further argue that the coincidence of disrupted democracy and dissonant public spheres is related to profound structural changes in the party organization, campaigning and political leadership.
{"title":"Conditions of Campaigning in Dissonant Public Spheres and Crisis of Democracy","authors":"B. Pfetsch","doi":"10.1080/10584609.2023.2193554","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2023.2193554","url":null,"abstract":"Political campaigns have always been closely related to the technical conditions of media infrastructures, the social conditions of voters, and the political opportunities within which parties and movements compete. As campaigning has developed through the four ages of political communication (Blumler, 2015; Norris, 2002), it is now shaped by the affordances of digital platforms and networked communication ecologies in addition to legacy media infrastructures. In the environment of hybrid media systems (Chadwick, 2013), campaigning has also become hybrid – a task divided between the use of conventional information subsidies and the dynamics of social media and digital platforms (Azari, 2016; Wells et al., 2016). What is more, contemporary political communications and voter mobilization are taking place under two significant context conditions: dissonant public spheres (Pfetsch, 2018) are coinciding with a profound crisis of liberal democracy (Bennett & Livingston, 2018). The communication ecology and the state of democracy have produced a style of campaigning that is no longer geared toward a consensus among the established political elites and parties to engage in civilized speech, to conduct fair competition, and to stay within the limits and norms of democracy. In this essay, I shall discuss some of the features and consequences of these contextual conditions. I shall further argue that the coincidence of disrupted democracy and dissonant public spheres is related to profound structural changes in the party organization, campaigning and political leadership.","PeriodicalId":20264,"journal":{"name":"Political Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":7.5,"publicationDate":"2023-04-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49123519","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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