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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Political communication has fundamentally transformed as digital technologies have become increasingly important in everyday life. Technology platforms have become powerful political instruments for world leaders, campaigns, social movements, journalists, and non-governmental organizations. Moreover, they are essential to how people communicate about politics, encounter and share political information, and take action to pursue their political goals. This is the first textbook to center digital platforms in understanding political communication. With global examples beyond the context of Western democracies, the text reveals how digital technologies such as social media and search engines are increasingly shaping political communication in countries around the world. It shows how the core processes of political communication are being reshaped by platforms, from how elections are contested to how issues make it onto policymaking agendas. Topics covered include public opinion, journalism, strategic communication, political parties, social movements, governance, disinformation, propaganda, populism, race, ethnicity, and democratic backsliding. Full of lively examples and pedagogical features, Platforms, Power, and Politics offers an exciting and innovative new approach to political communication. It is essential reading for students of political communication and an important resource for scholars, journalists, and policymakers.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction: Political Communication in the Platform Era
1.1 Introduction
1.2 Technology and Political Communication
1.3 Platforms and Global Political Communication
1.4 Structure of the Book
1.5 Pedagogical Features
2 Definitions and Variations of Political Communication
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Types of Political Communication
2.3 Overview: Varieties of Political Communication across the Globe
2.4 Political Systems and Political Communication
2.5 Media Systems and Political Communication: from Mass Media to Platforms
2.6 A Model of Platforms and Political Communication
2.7 Summary
Discussion Questions
Suggestions for Further Reading
3 Platforms and Their Power
3.1 Introduction
3.2 So, What Are Platforms?
3.3 What Platforms Mean for Political Communication
3.4 Platforms Are Not Neutral Technologies
3.5 The Dimensions of Platform Power
3.6 Summary
Discussion Questions
Suggestions for Further Reading
4 Platforms, Public Spheres, and Public Opinion
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Defining Public Spheres
4.3 Public Spheres in the Age of Platforms
4.4 The Consequences of Platforms for Public Spheres
4.5 Filter Bubbles and Echo Chambers
4.6 Public Opinion
4.7 Summary
Discussion Questions
Suggestions for Further Reading
5 Platforms and Journalism
5.1 Introduction
5.2 What Is Journalism?
5.3 Journalism and Its Connections to Politics
5.4 Journalism’s Relationship with “Fake News”
5.5 Journalists’ Relationship to Their Publics
5.6 Business Models for Journalism in the Platform Era
5.7 Data Journalism
5.8 Algorithmic Journalism
5.9 Summary
Discussion Questions
Suggestions for Further Reading
6 Platforms and Strategic Political Communication
6.1 Introduction
6.2 Strategic Communication and Public Opinion in the Platform Era
6.3 Strategic Communication in the Platform Era
6.4 Political Marketing
6.5 Public Relations and Public Diplomacy
6.6 Crisis Communication
6.7 Digital Lobbying
6.8 Summary
Discussion Questions
Suggestions for Further Reading
7 Platforms, Campaigns, and Campaigning
7.1 Introduction
7.2 Four Ages of Campaigning
7.3 Platforms and Election Outcomes
7.4 Campaigns and Advertising
7.5 Campaign Platform Strategies: Attention and Interaction, Persuasion, and Mobilization and Demobilization
7.6 Summary
Discussion Questions
Suggestions for Further Reading
8 Platforms and Movements
8.1 Introduction
8.2 Defining Social Movements
8.3 Theories that Shape Our Understanding of Social Movements
8.4 Movements in Platform Contexts
8.5 Platforms and the Communication of Movements
8.6 State Activities against Social Movements
8.7 Movements and Journalism
8.8 Summary
Discussion Questions
Suggestions for Further Reading
9 Platform Governance
9.1 Introduction
9.2 Governance as a Concept
9.3 State Regulation and Self-Regulation
9.4 National and Transnational Media Governance
9.5 Governance Issues: Media Pluralism
9.6 The History of Platform Governance
9.7 Platform Self-Governance
9.8 The Facebook Oversight Board
9.9 Summary
Discussion Questions
Suggestions for Further Reading
10 Platforms, Misinformation, Disinformation, and Propaganda
10.1 Introduction
10.2 Definitions and Delineations
10.3 The Dynamics of Platforms, Information, and Political Identity
10.4 Mis- and Disinformation and Propaganda (MDP)
10.5 How MDP Works
10.6 Public Knowledge, Information, and Democracy
10.7 What Should Be Our Response to MDP
10.8 Summary
Discussion Questions
Suggestions for Further Reading
11 Platforms and Populism, Radicalism, and Extremism
11.1 Introduction
11.2 What Is Populism?
11.3 Who Is “a Populist”?
11.4 Populism as Communication
11.5 Are Platforms Driving Populism?
11.6 Radicalism and Extremism
11.7 Summary
Discussion Questions
Suggestions for Further Reading
12 Platforms, Politics, and Entertainment
12.1 Introduction
12.2 The History of Politainment and Infotainment
12.3 Politicians and Celebrities
12.4 Media Monarchies and the Internet
12.5 Political Influencers
12.6 Music and Political Communication
12.7 Movies, Shows, and Political Communication
12.8 Fashion and Political Communication
12.9 Summary
Discussion Questions
Suggestions for Further Reading
13 Conclusion: Platforms and the Future of Political Communication
13.1 Why This Book
13.2 What We Have Not Covered in This Book
13.3 Future Trajectories
13.4 Final Thoughts
Revision: Chapter Objectives Revisited
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 2
Figure 1
A model of political communication in the digital age.
Chapter 5
Figure 2
Reporters Without Borders 2022 Press Freedom Index: https://rsf.org/en/index
List of Table
Chapter 3
Table 1
The most important platforms for political communication
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Begin Reading
Revision: Chapter Objectives Revisited
References
Index
End User License Agreement
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Platforms, Power, and Politics
An Introduction to Political Communication in the Digital Age
Ulrike KlingerDaniel KreissBruce Mutsvairo
polity
Copyright © Ulrike Klinger, Daniel Kreiss, and Bruce Mutsvairo 2024
The right of Ulrike Klinger, Daniel Kreiss, and Bruce Mutsvairo to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2024 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5359-4
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023933008
The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Acknowledgments
We have a lot of people to thank for their help in making this book possible.
Uta Rußmann, Anders O. Larsson, and Johannes B. Gruber read previous versions of the book, and their feedback was immensely helpful as we revised and restructured the manuscript. We’re also indebted to the anonymous reviewers for their very constructive and detailed suggestions for revisions.
Frederik Körber was an invaluable help in managing citations and references over the course of writing this book, as we kept adding and deleting paragraphs and pages. Walter Pepperle designed a previous version of the cover art, helping us to develop an idea into an actual cover.
At Polity, we would like to thank Stephanie Homer – who lent key support for this book’s production and marketing – and especially Mary Savigar. Mary believed in this book and its authors very early on and throughout the process, and provided valuable insights every step along the way as it moved from an idea to a reality. We thank her for believing in our ambition and vision for this volume.
Ulrike Klinger would like to thank the Center for Information Technology and Society (CITS) at the University of California, Santa Barbara, for hosting her as a visiting scholar from September 2021 to March 2022 – especially Joe Walther and Bruce Bimber. The amazing creative and intellectual atmosphere of UCSB provided the perfect environment while writing large parts of this book.
Daniel Kreiss would like to thank colleagues at the University of North Carolina Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP) for enduring numerous discussions of this project during its conception and writing. It has been an honor to work alongside such a trailblazing and brilliant group of researchers, and he hopes that our shared intellectual agenda is reflected here as an animating spirit in this book. Daniel would also like to thank the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and especially John Sands, for all the support over the years and for funding essential research in the fields of misinformation, disinformation, and journalism during the platform era, much of which is cited throughout this book and without which it would not be possible. Finally, Daniel would like to thank colleagues across the Knight Research Network; he hopes this book captures the vibrant research and debates about platforms in the field.
Bruce Mutsvairo would like to thank Ingrid Volkmer, Benedetta Breveni, Hayes Mabweazara, Ahmed al Rawi, and Saba Bebawi for sharing thoughts on recent developments in journalism across Australia, Africa, and the Arab World.
1Introduction: Political Communication in the Platform Era
The opening chapter provides an overview of this book. It introduces the relationship between technology and political communication and provides an overview of media and politics during the platform era. The chapter also defines a number of core terms used throughout the book, including media, digital media, the Internet, social media, platforms, and technologies. Finally, the chapter provides chapter descriptions and an overview of the pedagogical features of the book.
OBJECTIVES
By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:
detail the relationship between media, technology, and political communication
provide working definitions of key terms used in this book
understand how to use this book
know the content that will be covered in this book.
1.1 Introduction
After serving as German chancellor for four consecutive terms, from 2005 to 2021, Angela Merkel gave a long farewell interview just before leaving office. In addition to discussing many other things, she reflected on how digital platforms have changed politics and political discourse during her 16-year chancellorship:
Interviewer: When you think about Germany, what worries you?
Merkel: That the political climate in the country has become harsher. When I became chancellor, there was no smartphone. Facebook was a year old, Twitter wasn’t invented until a year later. We live in a completely changed media world, and that has something to do with it, too.
Interviewer: What does that mean for politics?
Merkel: It changes political communication. We have to ask ourselves: How do we reach people? How do we ensure that there are discourses in which different opinions are respected and not everyone hides in the opinion corner where they feel confirmed? Today, you can have your personal opinion confirmed by many more people than you even know. I’m afraid that we’re increasingly running into problems when it comes to compromise-building, which is essential in a democracy.
(Gammelin et al. 2021)
Merkel’s observations are a great starting point for the journey we will embark on in this book. The long-serving German chancellor is not alone in worrying about the “harshness” of political discourse, the distorting effects of social media on public opinion, and media bubbles as a barrier to compromise. While politics has never been a place of harmony and joy, and hate and so-called “fake news” are as old as humankind, the former chancellor is certainly right that digital platforms have impacted what political information people see and how they receive it, how citizens discuss politics and with whom, and how political leaders interact among themselves and with the public. At the same time, many popular perceptions and much common wisdom about social media and their impact on politics and social life are more mythical than reality. For example, people have long bemoaned “filter bubbles” and “echo chambers” – broadly, the idea that the Internet and social media lock people into impenetrable clusters of like-mindedness. However, social science research shows that these ideas do not capture how people actually engage in politics and encounter political information online. Indeed, to the contrary – and perhaps counter-intuitively – social media, and the Internet more generally, provide environments where citizens encounter, sometimes by accident, more diverse opinions and sources of information, as well as political contestation, than in their lives “offline.”
This book is about the fears, and hopes we have about platforms and social media and their effects on politics and democracy. It provides a survey of the things we know, the issues we have to reconsider, the things that are less of a problem than we thought, the problems we are just beginning to think about, and the many, many things we do not know (yet!). We draw our discussion primarily from the vast, complex field of political communication research, and especially the research on platforms and their relationship with politics that has been going strong for the past 15 or so years. This research will help us map the threats to and opportunities for democracy that platforms give shape to, and help us think in more nuanced and critical ways about the intersection of platforms, power, and politics.
1.2 Technology and Political Communication
Technologies are central to political communication, as they are to all social life. The forms of debate, storytelling, evidence, conversation, and public address that are central to human societies have long grown up alongside, and been shaped by, technologies. While we tend to think of “technology” narrowly in terms of things such as cars, virtual reality sets, or social media, in its broadest definition technology means knowledge, skills, processes, methods, and tools. Take political communication, for instance. Before writing, oral cultures developed extensive technologies to extend human memory. These included things such as songs and poetry that helped codify and accumulate knowledge and pass it between people and across generations. With the development of forms of writing – for example, on parchment – the rules and eventually laws of societies became more durable, specified, and the basis for institutions.
The codex (bound volumes that preceded the modern book) and the printing press helped make knowledge and information more portable, widespread, and, ultimately, accessible beyond religious and political authorities (Blair et al. 2021; Eisenstein 1980). The development of post offices, mail, and telegraph networks played key roles in knitting regions and nascent states together during the nineteenth century, including through the circulation of the newspapers and pamphlets that helped give rise to the imagined political communities of nation states (Anderson 2006; John 2009). The middle of the nineteenth through the dawn of the twenty-first century witnessed the refinement of point-to-point communication, including the telegraph and early radio, and the explosion of truly mass media-facilitated communication over increasingly greater, and even global, scales (Crowley & Heyer 2015). In many countries around the world, political communication during the second half of the twentieth century was structured around a set of mass media technologies – especially television – and routinized ways in which political and media elites could communicate with, create, mobilize, and shape local, national, and global publics.
Enter the Internet. The Internet grew to increasing prominence in social, cultural, economic, and, indeed, political life by the turn of the twenty-first century. The origins of the global Internet lay in the US and Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, but it reached widespread popular adoption in many Western democracies only in the mid to late 1990s (Benjamin 2019; Mailland & Driscoll 2017; Turner 2010). The Internet was primarily accessible through computer labs, desktop computers, and then laptops, during this time. With the boom in mobile phones and smartphones globally in the early and mid-2000s, especially in many regions of the world outside of the Global North, the Internet became central to social life and political communication around the globe. In political contexts, during this time elected leaders, parties, and candidates, as well as many other political actors, began a slow, unsteady, and often halting process of increasingly using the Internet through multiple different devices to do things such as address the public and campaign for office. Journalism outlets were also experimenting with ways to engage audiences in new ways, from dedicated internet sites to the adoption of new multimedia styles of storytelling.
The rise and explosive growth of social media, and technology platforms more generally, in the mid-2000s through the start of the second decade of the twenty-first century in turn brought much debate – and sweeping social, political, and economic changes. By 2010, “platforms” had grown to truly global proportions. Many of those most familiar to audiences around the world – American companies such as Meta (Facebook) and Google, and their subsidiaries such as WhatsApp and YouTube – have extended far beyond their national origins to become fundamental infrastructure for much in the way of commercial, political, and social life in countries around the world. The commonly referred to “Arab Spring” of the 2010s appeared to reveal the Internet’s new, democratizing power, when anti-government protests and uprisings organized in significant part online swept through countries such as Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain and deposed a number of political leaders. It seemed to many researchers (Boulianne 2015; Diamond & Plattner 2012; Howard & Hussain 2013) that social media were fueling a new wave of political participation, helping citizens exercise accountability over political leaders in countries around the world, and facilitating democratization efforts in authoritarian countries.
And yet the “Arab Spring” ended with generally failed democratic revolutions. Meanwhile, the 2016 UK European Union Membership Referendum (commonly known as “Brexit”) and the election of former US President Donald Trump, amid concerns over Russian state-sponsored propaganda and abuse of personal data by firms such as Cambridge Analytica, turned the narrative about social media, platforms, and politics much darker and less optimistic. Concerns over the spread of misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda on social media platforms have only proliferated since then – with some people even asking whether democracies can survive the Internet.
This narrative, however, sits uneasily alongside the continued global spread, fueled by social media, of unprecedented movements for gender, racial, social, and economic justice, such as the global Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall movements (Bosch 2017; Kilgo & Mourão 2019; Richardson 2019), whose activists tore down monuments to white supremacy in countries around the world and worked to hold police and states accountable for abuses of power against racial and ethnic minorities.
The platforms discussed throughout this book include those mentioned above, as well as the non-profit Wikipedia and private, global US companies such as Instagram (owned by Meta), Amazon, Twitter, Reddit, and Snapchat. In much of the world, US companies dominate the platform landscape, even though there are numerous smaller platforms, nationally and regionally, that matter for political communication. Indeed, some commentators have even suggested that we are moving to an era of a “splintered Internet,” where countries create their own firms and infrastructures according to specific state-granted political freedoms and content rules, instead of having one global Internet generally aligned with the expressive and commercial aims of US-based companies (Walker et al. 2020).
SPOTLIGHTED CASES
In countries such as China and Russia, for example, domestic companies provide similar products and services to US-based firms, but with strict content guidelines determined by the state. These platforms include Russia’s VKontakte and China’s Alibaba, WeChat, Weibo, Baidu, and Tencent. That said, new platforms such as the Chinese company-owned TikTok (known as Douyin in China) have also burst upon the scene to capture the time and attention of global users, including taking them away from comparatively more established platforms. These companies, like their American counterparts, tailor their content rules for the countries they operate in – which is often the price of doing business, provoking fierce debates about the harm, or benefits, they cause to democracy or democratization efforts.
Not only do new platforms continually emerge, their user bases evolve over time, as does their design and what scholars call “affordances” – broadly the activities that users perceive they can do on platforms, and what platforms technically make it possible to do (Bucher & Helmond 2018; Nagy & Neff 2015). Some platforms – such as Facebook – have become sites that many, many people use for diverse purposes, crossing generations in countries around the world. Others – such as WhatsApp – have broad user bases that utilize them as basic communications infrastructure for much of everyday life. Still others, such as Twitter, have more niche uses for welldefined communities such as journalists and political and entertainment elites. Others, such as TikTok, have found particular appeal in well-defined user bases, including among creatives and young people (Literat & Kligler-Vilenchik 2023). Platforms are both different (supporting different types of communication) and continually add new functionalities in their attempts to grow, and keep, audiences – especially adopting features they see others successfully rolling out. And users also innovate on platforms! Most famously, the Twitter hashtag (#) and @ symbol before usernames were both user innovations to group and direct tweets before being formally adopted by the company.
1.3 Platforms and Global Political Communication
This book provides an overview of the various actors, institutions, and processes involved in political communication during the platform era. The information environments that we inhabit are in part created, and increasingly dominated, by global platform companies. At the same time, the political systems these companies and their technologies operate in matter too. We cannot understand contemporary political communication without simultaneously accounting for the diversity of political communicators, the technological underpinnings of global public spheres, and the workings of governments and political institutions and systems in countries and regions around the world. In other words, while platforms are central actors in countries across the globe in the twenty-first century, they exist alongside and are shaped by many different forms of media and media institutions more generally, as well as states, institutions, norms, laws, social groups, social structures, economic systems, and cultures.
Let’s unpack this a little bit. First, as the political scientist Andrew Chadwick (2017) has pointed out, media are hybrid and exist in systems. To take an example, even in our screen-saturated world, we still communicate face to face. We still watch television and listen to the radio (forms of mass media) even as we share videos on YouTube. In our daily lives, we seamlessly talk to our friends and families, listen to podcasts, and share updates on social media (and sometimes all at the same time!).
This is the very definition of hybrid! Thinking about any one of these things in isolation abstracts away from the fact that we use many different forms of media and communication contextually (depending on considerations such as what we want to accomplish, the settings we are in, the ways we want to pass the time, etc.) and continually in the course of our daily lives. And many different forms of media and communication are arranged into systems where they interact with one another.
SPOTLIGHTED CASE
Let’s think about another example to illustrate hybrid media systems. Imagine that a political leader tweets a controversial opinion. Their followers might agree and retweet it, amplifying it. And so might the political opposition, quote-tweeting it to criticize or ridicule the political leader. Journalists might then take note, and interview party members to get a response. Pundits on opinion television might start breathlessly stating their positions on the brewing controversy (while promoting themselves on Twitter!). Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) might rally in the streets in protest against the political leader, all the while producing visually arresting images for journalists and social media that in turn get a lot of engagement and drive more coverage, tweets, and, of course, controversy. Other party members might then feel pressured to take action, such as sanctioning the party leader.
As in the box above, media systems are hybrid and many different forms of media and communication interact with one another. This happens sequentially – during a controversy, different political and media actors interact in dynamic, responsive ways. In the example above, journalists, party members, and civil society groups all responded to one another as the controversy unfolded. At the same time, what is also clear is that we have to think about not just media systems, but also political systems. Established political actors and institutions, such as political party members, journalists, and NGOs, used platforms – and many other media – in ways that aligned with their strategic goals, professional understandings, and economic incentives. Media equally matter, though. Platforms provide new contexts for political elites to share their opinions – including instantaneously to their thousands (or millions) of followers on platforms such as Twitter – and they provide members of the public with unprecedented ways to engage around those opinions and to share their own. In this sense, politics shapes how media are used, but media also shape political communication strategies, processes, and contexts.
On a broader level, nations provide the context and orientation for platforms and media institutions to emerge, function, thrive, or die. Nations provide the economic and regulatory contexts that platforms and media institutions develop and work within. This includes defining the communicative rules that platforms and media outlets must follow (for example, laws regulating activities including hate speech, defamation, libel, pornography, etc.). Nations also provide frameworks for political systems, including through legal rules (such as constitutions), organizational and political-cultural contexts (such as parties and norms of public life), and political-economic contexts (Hallin & Mancini 2011).
But nations are not the only things that matter! Media have long been transnational, including operating at regional and even global scales, as have political institutions and systems – and so are platforms. We can think of journalism outlets such as the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and Al Jazeera English as truly “global” media, even if they might not operate in every country. Outlets such as the French-language Africa 24 have a presence in French-speaking countries in western and northern Africa, France, and the Middle East. From a political perspective, look no further than the United Nations (global) and the European Union (regional) as examples of transnational institutions. The Internet itself is governed not only by national rules, but also by formal and informal international bodies and networks that create protocols and standards (DeNardis 2009), such as the global Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) that is responsible for things such as domain names.
SPOTLIGHTED CASE
Political systems indelibly shape media systems and political communication. At the same time, media and political communication shape the workings, and potentially even the structure, of political systems. To take a US example, political reforms furthering open party primaries (where anyone can run for office, not simply people chosen by the party elite) during the 1970s led to the greater role of media in electoral processes and the increased independence of candidates. These changes helped open the doors to office for celebrity candidates, such as Donald Trump, who have in turn shaped the parties they are a part of – as well as the nations they lead.
Meanwhile, national economies have long been embedded in global systems, including globalized forms of racial and social differentiation. As the sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom (2020) has argued, platforms operate in a global economy premised on international and national rules, patterns of low-paid labor – especially in the Global South – and the monetization of global forms of culture. Indeed, to understand the effects of platforms in societies, one should look beyond digital practices in the “west” (Arora 2019). Historically, media have been central to international, diasporic communities and cultures, which use them for identity and information.
In our own era, platforms serve as essential infrastructure for immigrants, refugees, and other global communities knit together through shared culture and identity (e.g. Retis & Tsagarousianou 2019). Ideas travel globally through platforms and media, produced by international scientific and social scientific institutions, writers, artists, and religious groups, which give shape to our understandings of morality, gender, class, sexuality, and race and ethnicity (Adams & Kreiss 2021). Ideas developed locally or within specific countries can spread far beyond them and help to structure politics and political conceptions around the world (Hooker 2017). Look no further than the global #MeToo movement that shone a light onto women’s experiences in workplaces across the world (Mendes et al., 2019). Meanwhile, international human rights frameworks and legal and cultural understandings shape things such as the content moderation engaged in by platforms (Douek 2020), as do the national contexts companies originate or operate in. International advocacy organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International make media, document abuses, and strive for accountability on a truly global scale (Powers 2018).
SPOTLIGHTED CONTENT
We want to pause a moment and consider the terms that we are using. One important aim of this book is to provide examples of political communication as it looks in countries around the world. To do that, we deliberately use terms such as “Global South” and “Global North.” We do so despite the criticism such terms have received in some academic disciplines. These criticisms include claims that such terms homogenize diverse populations. In contrast, we see the concept of the “Global South” defined not by geography, but by the collective determination of historically and currently dominated nations and groups to achieve social and political agency. This struggle comes in the context of a well-documented history of sociopolitical marginalization and economic subjugation through European and US empirebuilding, colonialism, and Cold War geopolitical occupation, war, and interventions (including US-sponsored coups). We recognize these groups’ and nations’ determination to shape their destiny through struggle, knowledge production, and independence. In doing so, we follow scholars such as Gayatri Spivak (2008), Marlea Clarke (2018), and Anne Garland Mahler (2018), just to name a few, who have made a case for the analytical value of such concepts.
Political and media systems are also dynamic entities that are constantly changing. For far too long, much public and policymaking discourse and academic scholarship in the democratic West presumed that democracies are stable and political systems are generally enduring. Many have had faith in progress-oriented narratives that the world is trending in democratic directions – where suffrage is inevitably expanded, systems of exclusion such as racism are relics in the process of being dismantled, and polities will eventually achieve equality and justice. This is especially a feature of research on media development begun during World War II and continuing through the global Cold War and its aftermath. Researchers assumed both that greater media freedoms and commercialization would mean progress toward multi-ethnic, multi-racial, pluralist democracy, and that, once achieved, there was no going back.
However, history has taught us that these assumptions are generally wrong. They are flawed in presuming both that (1) political and media systems are fundamentally stable, and that (2) their underlying dynamics push toward greater democratic liberalism. It is easier to see this now than it was at the end of the last century. The decade from 2010 to 2020 revealed both democratic gains and democratic backsliding (or crises) in countries around the world. As such, this book argues that democracy – like any political system – must be continually performed, legitimated, and protected by many institutions and political actors, including citizens themselves. Like any other political system, democracy is always an achievement that needs to be cared for in order to be sustained.
Sometimes, over many decades, political systems democratize and are able to maintain these hard-won gains (Voltmer 2013) – but it is always a contingent achievement and never permanent. The global rising tide of illiberalism, racism, and authoritarian leaders, movements, and parties in many countries around the world reveals this. To take the US case, it was only with the passage of bills such as the Civil Rights Act in 1964 that the country became a truly multi-ethnic, pluralist democracy, whose stability is still fraught today given the growing extremism of the white political right (Mills 2017). Despite many idealistic sentiments and active misremembering, the US was at best a hybrid regime for much of its history, with colonially subjugated populations within its borders living on reservations (which still persist to this day) and white authoritarian one-party rule in its southern regions and circumscribed citizenship on the basis of race and ethnicity existing across the nation through the 1960s. And deep inequalities in policing, wealth, political representation, and health persist across racial lines.
Similarly, despite claims of being democratic, European colonial empires set up elaborate systems of racial, ethnic, and religious differentiation to extract resources from their colonies (Chakravartty & Da Silva 2012). While many of these colonial regimes have manifestly ended, their consequences are still deeply with us in patterns of global inequality – all of which shapes political communication and media systems around the globe (Aouragh & Chakravartty 2016).
Throughout this book, we use a number of key terms – including media, digital media, the Internet, social media, platforms, and technologies. These are all closely related terms – but they are different! While we go into greater depth in some individual chapters, we wanted to briefly define them there.
First, by “media,” we simultaneously mean devices that carry messages and information (such as television sets, radios, computers, mobile phones, etc.), entities that produce those messages and information (multi-media outlets such as CNN and the BBC, newspapers, etc.), and, broadly, the complex environments that we navigate every day when we encounter things and others in the world.
Second, by digital media, we mean media that consist of information in digital bits of 1s and 0s – which is at the heart of much modern communication (i.e., computers, Apple Watches, video games, digital photographs, etc.). The Internet is a global network of computers and other devices linked together through a number of different means (from cables that run under the ocean to satellites in the sky). Not all digital media are on the Internet, of course – but the Internet is premised on the connections between and information shared by digital devices.
Social media refers to sites that have as their basis, at least in some part, user-generated content shared with other users. These users can be individual people or institutions (such as a media outlet). Communication on social media can take various forms. These include communication directly between users, communication that flows across users’ social networks (or their set of social ties), or communication that is presented in some algorithmically determined way based on interests or behavior. (An algorithm is a set of defined rules for doing something, such as displaying content on a social media platform.) At their heart, social media feature some form of user-generated content (the ‘social’ in ‘social media’).
We spend an extensive amount of time defining platforms in Chapter 3. Briefly, for now, platforms refers to data-intensive technologies that rely on algorithms to deliver content, goods, services, relationships, etc., to users. To provide a few examples, the Nintendo Switch is a platform for video games, Facebook is a platform for social relationships and market transactions, Amazon is a platform for goods and services (such as cloud computing), and Google is a platform for information services, search, and collaborative work.
Finally, by technologies, we broadly mean artifacts (whether they are material or virtual), knowledge, processes, and organization. Think about all of these things together! Technologies are not always, and not just, physical and virtual things you hold in your hand, such as iPhones; they are also the organized knowledge required to build and use them. To understand technology, you have to understand how it is produced and consumed, social narratives about what it is and who should use it, how it is designed, what it does, and what people perceive that it does. You also have to understand how institutions – routine ways of doing things – are built around technologies.
1.4 Structure of the Book
With this book, we introduce readers to political communication in the age of platforms. We focus on the ways in which platforms have become central to how political communication works across many contexts, from public spheres to journalism to politics and entertainment.
Chapter 2 introduces the definitions of our key concepts and provides an overview of varieties of political communication across the globe. We also outline our approach and provide a model for understanding the role of platforms in political communication.
Chapter 3 focuses on platforms, detailing their political power and impact on political life as distribution channels, infrastructures, technologies, policymakers, and profit-making firms. This chapter is especially focused on the intersection between platforms and political actors such as campaigns, journalists, governmental bodies, and citizens, and addresses platform products, design, and affordances.
Chapter 4 discusses the relationship between platforms, public spheres, and public opinion. This chapter shows what has changed with respect to public spheres, how, and with what consequences for political communication. The chapter also provides an extended discussion of how platforms shape public spheres and public opinion in countries around the world.
Chapter 5 offers our analysis of journalism during the era of platforms. This chapter discusses how we should think about journalism in an era of democratized publishing, the increasing debates over journalistic professionalism and objectivity amid growing international movements for political and social equality, changing business models for journalism, trends toward data journalism, and the legitimacy of and trust in journalism as an institution.
Chapter 6 introduces readers to strategic communication, shifting our attention to things such as political advertising, political marketing, public relations, and public diplomacy. We discuss the history of political strategic communication, what practitioners do and the ethical considerations involved, and how platforms have changed nearly all aspects of mobilizing publics and shaping public discourse.
Chapter 7 focuses on campaigns, elections, and referendums in democratic states. The chapter details the history of campaigning and elections, and discusses what transitions during the platform era mean for voters, political information, and discussion, as well as the people and organizations who practice politics.
Chapter 8 provides an account of social movements, protest cultures, and revolutions within democratic and non-democratic states during the age of platforms. We begin by discussing the history of ways of making claims on the state or powerful elites and institutions, before detailing the relationship between media, platforms, and movements and the various outcomes of movements, in different regions around the world.
Chapter 9 provides an analysis of the relationship between media, platforms, and governance. It provides us with an opportunity to explore the relationship between political communication and policymaking processes, legal systems, executive agencies, and bureaucratic functioning, with a focus on goals and strategies for policymaking and regulation over platforms. The chapter ends with a case study of an innovation in platform governance: the Facebook Oversight Board.
Chapter 10 focuses on a set of current and pressing issues of central concern to contemporary democracies, namely the relationship between how we come to know and accept things as true or propaganda, misinformation, disinformation, and polarization. The chapter takes up questions about how informed the public should be and the role knowledge-producing institutions play in democracy.
Chapter 11 takes up questions about social and political identity, populism, and extremism in the platform era, detailing case studies from different social and political contexts. We pay particular attention here to the role of media in what scholars call “democratic backsliding” (Haggard & Kaufman 2021), or the erosion of democratic institutions and governance.
Chapter 12 details the relationship between entertainment media and politics. Indeed, political communication does not only happen around expressly political things! We aim here at showing how ostensibly non-political things have political meaning, such as lifestyle selfies on Instagram, reality shows, and video games, and how this affects us politically and socially in a world where many genres of political communication are being reinvented.
Chapter 13 summarizes the book, offering conclusions and points for further exploration and discussion.
1.5 Pedagogical Features
This book has a number of key features that we hope will make for an engaging read. First, the chapters are designed to be read either in the sequence of this book, or as standalone introductions to the concepts they cover. We deliberately set out to write a book that could be applicable across many different courses and contexts, and that covered content ranging from journalism and strategic communication to campaigning and disinformation. As such, while no doubt reading the book straight through will provide deeper context for understanding the content covered by specific chapters, the individual chapters can also stand on their own and be readily accessible to those encountering their ideas for the first time.
Second, as you have no doubt noticed, the text features a number of elements that are designed to help students understand the core ideas in this book. At the start of every chapter, we outline a number of objectives – things we hope you will take away from the text. Each chapter covers a lot more! However, we hope to capture the main ideas of the chapters in these objectives so you can be sensitive to them while reading. Each chapter also has what we call “Spotlighted Content” or “Spotlighted Case(s).” These are extended discussions of core concepts or detailed examples that we offer to illustrate key themes in the text. We conclude chapters with a set of discussion questions – these are useful for instructors and readers for thinking through the key themes of the chapter (and hopefully talking through in classes or among peers!). Finally, each chapter has a brief list of suggested readings to accompany this text, for readers who would like to go further into the subjects addressed in the chapter.
2Definitions and Variations of Political Communication
Chapter 2 provides an overview of a number of key concepts in political communication, as well as details how political communication looks different in various media and political systems in countries and regions around the world. This chapter provides a guiding definition of political communication, details shifts in media and political systems with technological change, and discusses the relationship between platforms, political communication, and political processes. It concludes by providing a model of platforms and political communication as they are embedded in media and political systems and shaped by historical, cultural, social, and economic forces, which they in turn shape.
OBJECTIVES
By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:
define political communication
contextualize political communication from a global perspective
understand the transition from the mass media era to the platform age
explain the relationship between political systems, platforms, and political communication
reflect on how political communication is mediated.
2.1 Introduction
This book is about political communication. And, broadly speaking, political communication is communication about politics. Even more, communication creates what people understand to be political. By communication, this book means any form of symbolic expression, whether it entails spoken words, texts, visual symbols, digital videos, or, most likely, some combination of all the above.
Some of these forms of communication have long lineages of being important politically, while newer ones are central to the ways we communicate about politics today. For example, oration has long been a preferred form of authoritative address for political elites, whereas digital video has exploded in popularity globally in the last decade. Digital video has become a means for everything from campaigns introducing candidates to everyday people documenting war and police abuses. Indeed, we are awash in new forms of storytelling through multimedia on global video-hosting platforms such as YouTube (which has more than 460 million users in India alone) and Youku (more than 500 million users in China). Whether printed or digital, texts provide vehicles for political ideas and debate, and they can range from newspapers, books, and the white papers of think tanks to tweets, Facebook posts, and pamphlets circulated by social movements. Visual symbols include everything from flags and images on Instagram to campaign and party logos and emojis.
As such, communication is an expansive concept and takes many different forms through different media, including the human voice. Communication is something people do verbally and non-verbally all the time, beginning the moment they enter the world. Communication becomes symbolic when people develop the capacity to create, convey, and understand meaning. What makes it political is when communication concerns the distribution of power or resources in a society; who the members of that society are and should be; the problems that collectively need to be identified and solved; the ways we should live and what values and goals we should have; the very nature of the community itself and its relations with other communities; or who legitimately holds power and what the nature of that power is. In short, politics deals with relations, power, identity, and decision-making.
This book takes as its starting point that political communication concerns public life – the things we share with others and our relations with others. This is an expansive definition, and deliberately so. It includes not just the things we take for granted as political – such as elections and policymaking. But also those things that people want us to have a collective response to, whether they concern manners, morals, or issues – anything that relates to our ways of living together.
Even ostensibly private things can suddenly become matters of public concern, depending on what people talk about when they talk about politics – or disappear from public concern when they stop talking about politics (Wells et al. 2017). What is considered private versus public is often the result of communicative struggles that are inherently political.
SPOTLIGHTED CASES
Here are a few examples of how what was formerly private became political. Women in countries around the world successfully redefined what had once been commonly seen as violent “private” spousal relations as “domestic violence,” transforming it into a public issue. Even further, naming what occurred between husbands and wives as violence was also a broader political argument about equality that defines how we should treat one another in private and public life and what the role of the state should be with respect to protecting its citizens. The same goes for Black activists pointing to discrimination in private real estate markets, religious advocates arguing for public standards of dress or prayer in public schools, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex, or asexual plus (LGBTQIA+) activists fighting for equality in labor markets and public accommodations.
In addition, things that we do not ordinarily think about as being political are full of political meaning. Politics is all around us. Think about entertainment programs that convey ideas about how to live and who has money and power, even if these things are tangential to the main plot. Think about TikTok videos that celebrate selfexpressive joy and free expression. Think about all the athletes around the world who knelt during their national anthems or wore black armbands during “end racism” campaigns and global Black Lives Matter protests. And think of all the advocates around the world who argue that representation – in sports, entertainment, media, corporate board rooms, and education – matters for the types of future that children believe they can achieve.
2.2 Types of Political Communication
Accordingly, the types of actors that produce and engage in political communication are many and diverse – whether they are people, organizations, institutions, media, or even technologies. Indeed, everyone or everything is a potential political communicator if their expression relates to matters of public concern – or argues that something should be a matter of public concern. When a member of the public gives an interview to a journalist to express her concerns about a polluting business nearby, it is political communication. When a woman comes forward publicly about a harassing famous boss, she is engaging in political communication. When a person comes out publicly as LGBTQIA+, they are engaging in political communication in affirming who they are in ways that have political implications (Garretson 2018). When a religious person declares a set of tenets that they believe a moral or just society as a whole should adhere to – that is political communication. When people produce entertainment media that represent immigrant lives and communities, this is inherently political communication as well.
And when a global platform company such as Meta (formerly Facebook) designs an algorithm to remove what it defines as “racist” content, someone builds a bot on Twitter to try to shape public opinion around an election, or TikTok’s algorithms shape the “for you pages” of its users in ways that influence how they think about their social identities, these are also forms of political communication. Indeed, not only are the corporate employees and engineers behind the policies and algorithms engaging in political communication, these technologies, such as bots and algorithms, are engaging in political communication by restricting, promoting, or shaping the incentives for certain types of content (Brevini & Swiatek 2020; Noble 2018; Tripodi 2022).
While political communication is all around us all the time, there are institutionalized political communicators who play more defined, specialized, and routine roles in journalistic, political, and public communication processes. These types of communicators are at the heart of this book. By “institutionalized,” we mean that certain political actors play defined roles in political processes and communicate in generally patterned and routinized ways that persist over time (Cook 1998; Schudson 2002). These political communicators include journalists, political pundits, political parties and elected representatives, social media managers, political candidates, political advertising agencies, think tanks, political marketers, political public relations practitioners, press secretaries, advocacy and social movement organizations, government agencies, transnational bodies such as the European Union – and many, many more besides. These are the individuals and organizations that address publics routinely and play established and often well-defined roles in public debate, electoral politics, and governance processes across the world, as well as the creation, circulation, and diffusion of ideas and arguments that shape what people see as matters of public concern. This includes the issues that need to be addressed and their causes, ideas how polities should be structured, and arguments about who has legitimate power and status.
The addressing of publics and debates within public spheres take shape through media and genres that are institutionalized according to particular settings and contexts for political communication. One way to think about media is in terms of technologies and the organizations, institutions, and cultures that surround them. To take an example, television sets are forms of media, but to truly understand television we also need to consider the content that they display, the organizations that manufacture and produce content for them, the cultures (Brock 2020) that shape that content and norms for their use, and the regulatory and economic landscapes that govern how television sets are produced and what content can be shown, how, and when. Genres are patterned ways of communicating that exist across media, which are in turn also shaped by the organizations that produce media, the economic and other reasons they have for doing so (such as audience demand), and the regulations that shape discourse in the public sphere. Think about how news broadcasts usually follow a particular, patterned format, with an anchor who narrates headlines according to shared standards of newsworthiness. There are many different genres in political communication. What appears on the news pages of a newspaper differs, for instance, from what appears in the opinion section and on cable news. Taken together, genres constitute the patterned ways in which political and media elites and everyday people alike express, discuss, and debate public issues.
Finally, there are often defined settings and contexts that shape political communication. How elected officials address parliaments or other governing bodies is different from how they speak at a campaign rally or to their colleagues behind the scenes in legislative offices. Declarations of war, funerals, and public health crises are all contexts that call for staid, somber, and authoritative addresses, respectively, by political and state leaders, whereas other settings (such as national holidays) might be causes for celebration or uplift. Citizens speak differently in legislative hearings than in public meetings. Citizen discourse also differs substantially across platforms, with their different social norms and rules around things such as anonymity. For example, on platforms such as Facebook that require real names, people can be more cautious about expressing controversial opinions, given the ways “contexts collapse” (Marwick & boyd 2011), drawing work, social, and familial ties together. Different political and media actors, meanwhile, have different norms and expectations for political expression, especially when communicating across fields. Think about the often deferential way journalists communicate when asking questions of political leaders, versus their approach to citizens such as victims of a crime or eyewitnesses to a natural disaster.
2.3 Overview: Varieties of Political Communication across the Globe
Political communication is not the same everywhere and for everyone, of course. Historical, social, economic, and cultural contexts matter profoundly for political communication, including shaping who has power in societies. Political communication is textured by different state and regime types, political systems, party systems, electoral systems, media systems, and journalism cultures (e.g. Esser & Pfetsch 2020). One way to illustrate this is the paradox of the “Americanization” of election campaigns. On the one hand, elements of US presidential campaigns spill over and influence campaigns in other Western democracies, such as in the use of professional public relations experts or social media to obtain microdonations and for microtargeting. On the other, campaign managers from outside the US will tell you that, no, unfortunately they cannot just copy-and-paste the playbooks from the Obama 2012, Trump 2016, or Biden 2020 campaigns, as they would not work in the specific political setting or media system in their country (e.g. Lilleker et al. 2020).
In fact, US elections are unique among Western democracies. The presidential system gives extraordinary power to the White House, and a polarized two-party system means that parties do not share power in governing coalitions, but that the winner (however slim the victory) takes it all (the presidency or House and Senate majorities). The presidential prize that can be won (or lost) is so big that both sides spend enormous amounts of resources in the race, focused on only a handful of states due to an election system based not on the popular vote, but a complicated and anachronistic institution: the Electoral College. Because of this specific setting, innovations often arise in US presidential election campaigns – there are abundant financial resources, strong incentives to implement new technologies and to move beyond the known strategies, comparatively few regulations (especially compared to Europe), and no reason to be soft on your opponent (Kreiss 2016).
Compare this to the situation in Switzerland, for instance. Here we find a multi-party system in a parliamentary democracy premised on power sharing. After each election, the parties in parliament elect a government, the Federal Council, a collegial body of seven members with equal rights. The presidency rotates among them each year, but it is the council as whole that collectively serves as head of state. Since 1891, the idea behind this government formation has been to include all major political movements in the government. This, of course, means that there is no opposition – all major parties are part of the government, and they govern by the consensus principle. It is also a political tradition to not vote out a sitting member of the Federal Council. Thus, elections hardly ever change anything – parties can hardly win or lose anything, and politicians meet again in roughly the same coalitions after the election. It is also impossible to vote out the government. Against this backdrop, there are few incentives to spend many resources on campaigning or pursuing innovations, or to be tough on your competitors. This is an entirely different story when it comes to referendum campaigns, which is the Swiss playground for political conflicts and ideological battles.
These two cases illustrate how very differently the stage can be set for political communication – even given the fact that the US and Switzerland are both wealthy Western democracies with highly media-literate and technology-savvy citizens. There is much more variation in the world beyond these two countries, of course. For example, the role of platforms in political life can look very different across countries. Even as social media and platforms influence democratic political change in some countries (Howard & Hussain 2013), some leaders have proven remarkably adept at holding on to power, and even at dying in office, at whatever cost. These leaders often use informational tactics on platforms to stifle the political opposition and democratic movements.
