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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
We are living in a period of great uncertainty. The rise of extreme populists, economic shocks and rising international tensions is not only causing turmoil but is also a sign that many long-predicted tipping points in media and politics have now been reached. Such changes have worrying implications for democracies everywhere.
This second edition of
Political Communication bridges old and new to map the political and cultural shifts and analyse what they mean for our ageing democracies. With new sections and revisions to all chapters, the book continues both to introduce and challenge the established literature. It revisits key questions such as: Why are polarized electorates no longer prepared to support established political parties? Why are large parts of the legacy media either dying or dismissed as 'fake news'? And why do some democratic leaders look more like dictators? In this fully updated edition, there is greater focus on digital developments, and it is enriched with new global comparisons and useful ancillary material.
Political Communication: An Introduction for Crisis Times will appeal to advanced students and scholars of political communication, as well as anyone trying to understand the precarious state of today's media and political landscape.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword to the Second Edition
Acknowledgements
Part I Introductory Frameworks
1 Introducing Political Communication in Crisis Times
The End of Old Certainties and Paradigms in Political Communication
Democracy at Crisis Point?
The Fourth Age of Political Communication
Defining Political Communication and the Outline of the Book
2 Evaluating Democratic Politics and Communication
Public Communication Ideals and Representative Democracy
Jürgen Habermas and the Public Sphere
Comparing Politics and Communication in Actually Existing Democracies
Conclusion
3 Digital Media and Online Political Communication
A Brave New World of Digital Democracy?
Normalization, Digital Disillusion and Techno-Pessimism
Digital Democracy Now: Fragmented, Anarchic and Polarized Public Spheres?
Conclusion
Part II Institutional Politics and Legacy News Media
4 Political Parties and Elections
From Traditional to Electoral-Professional Parties: Changing Campaign Communication
Political Earthquakes, Challenger Parties and Demand Side Explanations
Demand-Side Explanations
Supply-Side Explanations and the Failings of Centrist, Electoral-Professional Parties
Distinguishing Radical Populist Parties and the Basis of their Electoral Challenge
Conclusion
5 Political Reporting and the Future of (Fake) News
Liberal Pluralist and Critical Political Economist Accounts of Professional Newsmakers
The Organization of News as a Business
The Digital Revolution and the Future of (Fake) News?
Conclusion
6 Media–Source Relations, Mediatization and the Populist Turn in News and Politics
Media-Source Relations
Media Logic and Mediatization
Populist Media Meets Populist Politics
Conclusion
Part III Citizens and Organized Interests Beyond the Political Centre
7 Citizens, Media Effects and Public Participation
Citizenship, Rationality and the Decline of Formal Participation
Alternative Forms of Participation
Media Effects and Influences: From Strong to Limited … to Strong Again
Media Effects: Difficult Questions and a New Fourth Phase?
Conclusion
8 Civil Society, Powerful Interests and the Policy Process
Political Communication in Civil Society
Long-Running Debates on Politics, Power and Policy-making
Political Access, Lobbying and Policy-making
Corporate Influence Over Public Discourse About Economics
Conclusion
9 Interest Groups, Social Movements and Campaigning for Equality and the Environment
Political Communication and the Third Sector
Third Sector Legacy Media Campaigning and the Environmental Movement
New Social Movements and Digital Media After 2010: Occupy Wall Street, #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter
Conclusion
10 Globalization, the State and International Political Communication
Globalization and the Disruption of Nation-State Democracy?
International Political Communication
Back to the Future: Globalization and International Political Communication Now
Conclusion
11 Conclusions: Post-Truth, Post-Public Sphere and Post-Democracy
The Crisis of Twenty-First-Century Democracy
The Fourth Age of Political Communication
Seeking Options for Democratic Renewal?
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1
Political Communication within Nations
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1
Two Comparative Systems Typologies
List of Tables
Chapter 1
Table 1.1
Wider Evaluations of Democracy
Chapter 2
Table 2.1
Comparing Political Systems
Table 2.2
Comparing Media Systems
Table 2.3
Wider Evaluations of Democracy
Chapter 5
Table 5.1
Journalist and Public Views of Journalism (Worlds of Journalism and Reuters …
Chapter 7
Table 7.1
Comparing Political Participation, IDEA and World Values Survey
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword to the Second Edition
Acknowledgements
Begin Reading
References
Index
End User License Agreement
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Political Communication
An Introduction for Crisis Times
Second Edition
Aeron Davis
polity
Copyright © Aeron Davis 2024
The right of Aeron Davis to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First edition first published in 2019 by Polity PressThis second edition 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: 978-1-5095-5706-6
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023936712
The publisher has used its best endeavours 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
Foreword to the Second Edition
It is over four years since I put together the first edition of this book. Sadly, since then, the shocks to the systems of democracies have continued. If anything, we have hit additional tipping points and further declines. Donald Trump may no longer be in power, but Trumpism continues to have a strong grip on the political and media systems of the United States. Jair Bolsonaro and Boris Johnson may have been ousted in Brazil and Britain respectively, but their chaotic politics and supporters remain widely influential. Authoritarian, populist leaders, from Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel and Narendra Modi in India to Giorgia Meloni in Italy and Viktor Orbán in Hungary, persist in moving their nations back towards authoritarianism. Legacy news media, with its busted business model and lack of public trust, maintains its downward decline. The trends associated with social media, such as polarization, viral spreads of disinformation and surveillance, are only growing.
The global Covid-19 pandemic not only devastated the socio-economic systems of nations everywhere, but it also revealed the deep cracks in the international world order. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and growing Western tensions with China signal further breakdowns here. Each of these has also contributed to huge hikes in state debt and inflation levels not experienced in many countries for decades. The economic policy consensus of the last four to five decades appears to have hit a hard brick wall. Lastly, two years of extreme weather conditions, not to mention energy and food shortages, are revealing that the dire predictions of climate scientists are being manifested here and now.
All of this suggests democracies everywhere remain under threat; as much so now as at any time since the Second World War. They are being significantly eroded from within and challenged by non-democratic alternatives from without.
The new, completely revised second edition is about more than re-emphasizing the earlier thesis with more current examples and up-to-date statistics. It does that. But it also seeks to respond to more recent shifts and disciplinary themes as well as attempts to close some of the gaps in the first edition. Thus, broadly speaking, the following elements have been incorporated into this volume.
First, although still Anglo-American-centric, a greater range of research and examples has been included from continental Europe and the Global South. Second, recent digital developments in both politics and communication have been inserted and a stronger attempt made to ‘rethink’ and re-evaluate the field with these shifts in mind. Third, there are now two chapters covering political communication in civil society, incorporating a wider range of organized interests and communication strategies, from lobbying to social media activism. Fourth, there is greater engagement with the symbolic, emotional and entertainment aspects of political communication as well as greater attention to populist parties. Fifth, some pedagogical features, such as diagrams, suggested readings and questions, have been added to the chapters.
Acknowledgements
I have many people to thank in relation to both editions of this book. The first is the set of amazing students who have taken my political communication courses at Goldsmiths and Victoria University of Wellington. I have learned a lot from our exchanges. Many thanks are also owed to the colleagues and visiting lecturers who have taught with me: James Curran, Natalie Fenton, Claire Fitzpatrick, Des Freedman, Paolo Gerbaudo, Vana Goblot, Mike Kaye, Gholam Khiabany, Jack Mosse, Jacob Mukherjee, Leon Salter, Emily Seymour and Jón Gunnar Ólafsson.
Over the years, I have also gained much-needed subject advice, inspiration and personal support from: Olivier Baisnée, Rod Benson, Mike Berry, Lisa Blackman, Clea Bourne, Roger Burrows, Andy Chadwick, Jean Chalaby, Stephen Cushion, Lincoln Dahlberg, Will Dinan, Joe Earle, Lee Edwards, Becky Gardiner, Peter Golding, Dave Hesmondhalgh, Dan Jackson, Anu Kantola, Mona Krewel, Bong-hyun Lee, Colin Leys, David Miller, Tom Mills, Mick Moran, Angela Phillips, Chris Roberts, Heather Savigny, Nick Sireau, Peter Thompson, Daya Thussu, Howard Tumber, Dwayne Winseck, Simon Wren-Lewis, Kate Wright and Sally Young.
I’m very grateful to Mary Savigar and everyone at Polity, including several anonymous reviewers who advised on this project.
Last of all I must, of course, mention the love and support of my close family: Anne, Hannah, Miriam, Kezia, Kelly, Helen and Neville.
Aeron DavisMarch 2023
Part IIntroductory Frameworks
1Introducing Political Communication in Crisis Times
The End of Old Certainties and Paradigms in Political Communication
For many people, the year 2016 marks a dramatic shift in the fortunes of Western democracy. Two particular moments stand out. The first was the day after the British went to the polls to vote on continuing membership of the European Union on 23 June. The public woke up to get the result no one thought possible just a couple of months earlier. Citizens in the UK and continental Europe struggled to predict what would follow. The second was the day following the US election on 8 November. For months no one took seriously the possibility that Donald Trump would win. His victory shook the US establishment. After both results, similar feelings of fear and the unknown quickly spread.
These elections did not simply produce shock outcomes. In multiple ways, they made the conventional wisdom about media and politics appear suddenly outdated. On both occasions the large majority of academics, journalists, experts and pollsters all got it wrong. The winning campaigns tore up the tried and tested playbooks. The established parties were as much at war with each other as with their opponents. Electorates swung wildly and did not behave as they should. Mainstream media, now struggling for economic viability, was frequently distrusted or ignored by citizens. US and UK politics seemed to have suddenly fallen down a deep, dark rabbit hole.
The historical upheaval was not just an Anglo-American problem, to be linked to those nations’ neoliberal policy frameworks and first-past-the-post electoral systems. Countries across the globe, with different political and economic systems, were also experiencing significant political uncertainties and throwing up erratic election results. Countries as diverse as Brazil, Mexico, South Korea, South Africa, Greece, France and Italy, all ejected established leaders and parties. In most cases they were replaced with fledgling parties, non-politicians or extreme political figures. Far-right parties grew in strength, disrupting the political balance of many parliaments.
Meanwhile, authoritarian leaders, such as Turkey’s Recep Erdoğan, India’s Narendra Modi, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, each consolidated their respective holds on power and began pushing back against the Western-dominated world order. They offered an alternative brand of authoritarian capitalism and international soft-power investment and alliances, alongside more aggressive military excursions.
It was these various challenges to democratic political and media systems that gave me the impetus to write the first edition of this book. In early 2016, having taught political communication for the best part of two decades, I felt confident in engaging with a clear set of theories and debates. Suddenly, as I began teaching the new cohort that Autumn, the discussions and arguments I had set out and participated in now appeared increasingly redundant. The subject textbooks, my own included, looked to be describing a past era. Debates around professionalized parties set against ideologically driven ones now seemed less relevant after Donald Trump’s victory. Discussions of the steady mediatization of politics appeared confused when mass, legacy news outlets were going bust everywhere. Traditional media effects research looked rather misplaced when so much of the population got their news in scraps from social media and elsewhere.
What was becoming clear was that several long-prophesized tipping points had finally been reached. Traditional left–right political spectrums were no longer the clearest means of identifying or uniting a party. The legacy media of the public sphere was dying. Social media was rapidly reconfiguring the basis on which politics and journalism operated. Electorates were more volatile than they were aligned. Economics and economic policy-makers no longer seemed to be describing real economies. Parties began looking more like new social movements. Meanwhile, pollsters and forecasters appeared to be as reliable as astrologers. No one could tell the difference between an ‘expert’ and a propagandist. And all the while, national publics were increasingly fragmenting into ever more polarized echo chambers.
Since I wrote the first edition, such trends and tipping points have continued. They are part of the new normal. Although what that new normal is exactly and how best to analyse and evaluate it, is still uncertain. What is clear is that there have been several more historically significant events, each having a strong impact on societies everywhere. Most evident of these has been the devastating Covid-19 pandemic, bringing millions of worldwide deaths, while also profoundly affecting every nation’s political, economic and social structures. It has also spurred a plethora of organized anti-democratic groups, conspiracy theories and disinformation. Second was the 6 January 2021 storming of the US Capitol by Trump followers determined to overturn the US 2020 election results. That, as well as a similar attack by Bolsonaro supporters on the Brazilian Congress a year later, showed that Trumpism and Bolsonarismo were still very strong forces. Subsequent events, such as the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe Versus Wade, or multiple politically instigated legal challenges in both countries, show just how extremely polarized and volatile each nation is.
A third major event has been the February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia, bringing a level of warfare to Europe not seen since the Second World War. Of course, for many other countries, there will be other key dates and historical shifts to remember, such as China’s violent suppression of the prodemocracy movement in Hong Kong, the overthrow of the Rajapaksa dynasty in bankrupt and crisis-ridden Sri Lanka or the constitutional crisis brought on by Israel’s new far-right government coalition. No doubt, by the time this book is published, many more nation states will have been driven to crisis point by a combination of recent events. Indeed, in 2023, politicians and commentators have moved on to discussing not just ‘crisis’ but ‘polycrisis’.
Democracy at Crisis Point?
Crisis Thinking
The book postulates that democracy per se has reached a critical point in its history but are things really that bad? Works about the crisis of politics, communication and democracy have featured periodically since the 1970s. That in itself suggests the predisposition of critical academics to be doom mongers rather than documenters of change. Alternatively, for optimists, current circumstances might also be thought of as another temporary down cycle in democracy’s long-term upward evolution. Compared to a century ago, citizens and democracies are in far better shape now. Nations are experiencing significant change but not necessarily crisis. So, the question is, are current signs of democratic crisis something substantial or merely superficial and temporary?
The crisis debate itself has a long lineage. The 1990s and 2000s saw a plethora of accounts of democratic crisis. These revolved around the disengagement of governments, political parties and media from their publics. Each suggested that a long-term state legitimation crisis (Crozier et al., 1975; Habermas, 1977) could be developing.
Part of this was a sense that governments had become increasingly disengaged from and less accountable to their citizens. For some, this was best explained by the general process of ‘depoliticization’ observed across mature democracies in the UK, Continental Europe, North America and elsewhere (Hay, 2007; Mair, 2013). Political leaders of ‘electoral-professional’ parties had become disconnected from their core ideologies, members and the wider citizenry (Dalton and Wattenberg, 2002; Crouch, 2004; Hay, 2007; Tormey, 2015). Instead, they had embraced the professionals, media moguls and big funders needed to gain wider electoral success. Consequently, democratic politics linking governance to publics has suffered. Almost imperceptibly, democracy has been ‘hollowed out’.
There has also developed an established crisis literature in media and public communication (Blumler and Gurveitch, 1995). Several critics documented the steady downward trend of post-war journalism, towards something more simplistic, entertainment-oriented and market-driven (Hall Jamieson, 1996; Franklin, 1997; Deli Carpini and Williams, 2001). For others, journalism’s ‘fourth estate’ remit and attempts to ‘hold truth to power’ had similarly been hollowed out (Herman and Chomsky, 2002; Curran and Seaton, 2003; Bagdikian, 2004). What was also becoming clear was that the traditional business model, by which legacy news media has operated for centuries, was becoming unsustainable (McChesney and Nichols, 2010; McChesney and Pickard, 2011). News advertisers and consumers had been steadily falling, even prior to the digital revolution.
Those pursuing the crisis line located their most worrying findings in surveys of publics. These revealed that faith in institutional politics and media had reduced considerably (Putnam, 2000, 2002; Dalton, 2004; Hay, 2007; Mair, 2013). The clearest evidence of this was in the long-term decline in voter turnout in many democracies. From the 1950s to the 1990s turnout dropped an average of 10% across the nineteen OECD democracies studied. Likewise, membership of political parties went down from 14%, in the 1970s, to less than 6% in the 1990s (Putnam, 2002: 406). Dalton and Wattenberg (2002: 264) found that, of those nineteen nations surveyed in the 1990s, only 38% of their publics had confidence in their national governments. 38% had confidence in their parliament, 32% in their press and just 22% in their political parties. Similar poll declines were noted in relation to trust in legacy news media.
For several scholars in the 2000s, the wider trends all pointed towards a growing democratic crisis. Colin Crouch (2004) declared we were moving towards a state of ‘post-democracy’. Colin Hay (2007) asked how had citizens in democracies come to ‘hate politics’. For John Keane (2009) we were potentially looking at the ‘death of democracy’.
Change Not Crisis
However, for others, crisis talk was just talk. For ‘modernization theorists’ Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, such notions were superficial and a short-term reaction to changing times. What democracies really experienced were temporary cycles of disruption and renewal (Norris, 2000, 2002). New parties emerged where old ones died out and were a sign of democratic health rather than decline. Alongside a changing party system has come the expansive growth of civil society, with its range of interest groups and alternative media (Castells, 2001; Della Porta and Diani, 1999; Downing, 2001). While party memberships declined, so those of NGOs, such as Amnesty, Greenpeace or the Danish Refugee Council, have all risen considerably. Indeed, political participation in civil society continues to go up steadily (EIU, 2021).
The same themes of change rather than decline can be applied to public media. Complaints about the fakery and failings of ‘yellow journalism’ have been made regularly since the nineteenth century (Williams, 1997; Campbell, 2003). The death of news generally, and the newspaper in particular, has been falsely predicted with every new technological advance (Curran, 2009). Although legacy news media consumption has declined, so we have a new wave of alternative online publications, blogs, tweets and social networking spaces (Coleman and Blumler, 2009; Dalhgren, 2013; Castells, 2015). Consequently, politics, media and participation are simply being reconfigured, with multiple, vibrant alternatives springing up everywhere. Citizens have not lost interest in politics but have simply redirected it elsewhere.
In effect, crisis talk returns periodically. Each time it ignores the progress that has taken place over the longue durée. Wars, economic collapses and periods of social unrest, each disrupt but are temporary, and are often followed by decades of welfare reform, growth and prosperity. Taking a ‘modernization’ or ‘big history’ approach (Christian, 2018), the world’s population has experienced steady increases in living standards, education levels and healthcare provision, all leading to rising lifespans. In 1900, average global life expectancy was 40. By 2022 it was just under 73.
Despite the growing apathy and cynicism of voters, democracy seems essentially sound in other ways. In 1975, 46 nations conducted competitive elections. By 2015, that number was 132 (IDEA, 2017). In the early 2000s in all those countries surveyed where trust and voting had been declining, between 88% and 98% of the public polled still believed in ‘democracy’ as a system of government (see Hay, 2007).
Putting this information together, Inglehart, Norris, Hanspeter Kriesi and others have concluded that the problem of ‘democratic deficit’ was one of perception rather than substance (Inglehart, 1990, 1997). Established democracies had produced a wealthier and more educated ‘postmaterialist’ generation, which was more critical but less participatory. Thus, expectations and criticisms of governments rose, while an appreciation of those in power declined.
Moving into the early 2010s, there remained a substantive case in the data to argue that, despite setbacks, democracies remained robust. In the sixth wave (2010–14) of the WVS (World Values Survey), citizens in the sixty countries studied still rated democracy highly, even if they were critical of their own polities. An IDEA (2017: 8) report on the global state of democracy in 2017 continued to note a number of long-term positive trends on a range of democratic measures. They reasoned that, despite the political shocks of 2016, ‘democracy today is healthier than many contend’. In 2020, Kriesi (2020: 256) similarly concluded that, between citizen support for democracy remaining strong and political institutions maintaining their stability, democracy would weather the recent storms: ‘This is no time to panic … democracy, in the long run, will impose itself as a result of the spread of the fundamental values that underpin it, even if we find some short-term reversal.’
Mid 2010s Tipping Points
Of course, as IDEA and the modernization theorists argue, it’s important to look at the big picture positives, to balance against the current negatives. That said, there is a growing case to be made that we are not simply in a temporary down cycle. Since the mid 2010s a number of positive trends, from aggregate lifespans to measures of democracy, have reversed course. With hindsight, the crisis claims of the 1990s and 2000s now appear to be relatively trivial set against today’s problems and wider sense of ‘polycrisis’.
Despite attempts to allay ‘panic’, overall metrics of democracy have clearly been going backwards for almost a decade. Brunkert et al. (2019), looking at 116 years of data, noted that continuous positive trends since the Second World War began peaking in the mid 2000s and then reversed downward from around 2015. Other democracy monitors traced similar patterns but with earlier peaks. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s (2021) Democracy Index noted widespread declines going back to 2006. Freedom House’s evaluations (2022) recorded that just 20.3% of nations could be classified as ‘free’ compared to 46% in 2005. A number of once robust democratic nations, including the US, France, Italy, Greece and Spain, were no longer classified as ‘free’ or ‘full’ democracies. Others, such as Turkey, Hungary, the Philippines, Poland, Brazil and India, had taken large steps back towards authoritarianism (EIU, 2021; IDEA, 2021; Freedom House, 2022). For Freedom House (2022: 1): ‘The global order is nearing a tipping point, and if democracy’s defenders do not work together … the authoritarian model will prevail.’
Global aggregate figures also hide the more dramatic shifts in individual democracies and regions. For example, a large number of high-income countries experienced drops in life expectancy in the mid 2010s, with further drops during the Covid peak years. Although global average voter turnout has dropped 12% since the 1950s, it has declined 20% in Europe since the 1980s (IDEA, 2016). Over a quarter of voters in some nations and among some demographics now question if democracy is still the best political system (see also EIU, 2016; Stefan and Mounk, 2016). Some countries, like the US, Australia, Brazil, Japan, Italy, South Korea, Mexico, Poland and Spain, have a number of strong negative WVS trust survey scores, often in conjunction with low electoral turnouts. Perhaps even more concerning, Graham and Svolik’s (2020) experimental survey study found that, although US citizens widely supported democracy, only 13% would change their vote if their candidate was behaving undemocratically. Partisan beliefs are stronger than adherence to democracy, thus explaining the enduring support for Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro, Benjamin Netanyahu and others.
Tipping points have also been reached in news media. The broken business model and lack of public trust have become more acute problems in many countries. The slow downward trends in consumers and advertising revenues became far sharper following the global financial crisis of 2007–08 (OECD, 2010). Papers like Hankook Ilbo (Korea), the National Post (Canada) and Le Progres (France) experienced circulation drops of 50% or more compared to the start of the century. The stark decline in US news, most obviously in the once dominant newspaper sector, has been tracked by Pew (2022a). Between 2006 and 2020, print media lost over 80% of its advertising and 58% of its employees. Similarly, news media has developed a growing trust problem in multiple nations (Reuters, 2022). A high proportion of citizens now gets its news from unregulated or verified social media and other online sources. Fake news creation and dissemination is now extensive. Populist politicians have exploited this uncertainty and distrust to create their own fake truths and news.
Table 1.1 looks at some of these shifts in relation to eighteen sample nations, to which I will return in later chapters: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Chile, the Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, India, Japan, Kenya, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Turkey, the UK and the US. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, twelve of the eighteen suffered a decline in their rating from 2006 to 2021. Although the ‘importance’ of, and ‘support for’, democracy remains high, there has been a steady drop from earlier surveys. Nine of the thirteen nations that were included in both the 7th (2017–22) and 5th waves (2005–09) of the WVS experienced a decline. Confidence levels in government, political parties and the press, in most countries, remain fairly negative. Only five of the eighteen nations that were in the 7th WVS wave had a positive aggregate rating for confidence in government. Only five had so for the press, and just two for political parties. Overall, nations in Europe and the Americas scored negatively on all three (except Sweden on government). The two with most confidence in parties and government were two of the least democratic (Singapore, Turkey). The ones most positive about their press were in Africa and Asia (South Africa, Kenya, India, Singapore, Japan).
From Tipping Points to Electoral Shocks and Polycrisis
By the middle of the 2010s, those tipping-point trends became manifested in a number of unexpected electoral outcomes and extreme political actions. Far-right parties (UKIP, Front National, Golden Dawn, Jobbik, DPP, AfD, PVV) began making serious challenges across Europe, displacing established parties and becoming part of coalition governments in multiple parliaments (Norris and Inglehart, 2019). In 2016, there was the Brexit vote, Trump’s victory, and Brazil’s impeachment of Dilma Rousseff. In 2017, Emmanuel Macron’s fledgling En Marche! beat Marine Le Pen’s Front National, edging out France’s two main parties, to win the presidency. Moves began for the impeachment of presidents in South Korea, Brazil and South Africa. Both the Dutch and German elections ended in stalemates and months of political uncertainty.
In 2018, Lopez Obrador won the presidency in Mexico, leading a party founded only in 2012. In that same year, Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right populist, was elected president of Brazil. Italy became ruled by a coalition of two radical populist parties, one of which was led by a professional comedian. In 2019, Boris Johnson, an authoritarian populist, became prime minister in the UK, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a comedian famous for playing the president in a TV show, was actually elected Ukraine president. Following elections in 2022, countries as diverse as Sweden, Italy and Israel each ended up with governing coalitions of far-right parties. The UK’s governing Conservative Party appointed its fifth prime minister in six years.
Table 1.1 Wider Evaluations of Democracy
* Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Chile, Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, India, Japan, Kenya, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Turkey, the UK and the US.(1) Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index Score change from 2006 to 2021 (on scale of 1–10)(2) ‘Importance of Democracy’ (scale 1–10, 10 highest), World Values Survey, 7th Wave 2017–22, Except India, South Africa (6th Wave 2010–14)(3) Recent Drops in Newspaper Readership, from Reuters Digital News Reports: Brazil, Germany, UK, US (2013–22), Czech Republic, Japan, Turkey (2015–22), Australia, Greece, South Korea, Sweden (2016–22), Argentina, Chile, Singapore (2017–22).(4) ‘Confidence in Government’ aggregate % score (those with minus those without), World Values Survey, 7th Wave 2017–22, Except India, South Africa (6th Wave 2010–14)(5) ‘Confidence in Parties’ aggregate % score (those with minus those without), World Values Survey, 7th Wave 2017–22, Except India, South Africa (6th Wave 2010–14)(6) ‘Confidence in Press’ aggregate % score (those with minus those without), World Values Survey, 7th Wave 2017–22, Except India, South Africa (6th Wave 2010–14)Source: Created by the author
Looking beyond media and politics, it is also clear that democracies have not found answers to a number of other major crises fast approaching. As yet, nation states, whether acting unilaterally or together, have been moving too slowly to avert human-made crises caused by: global warming, energy dependence on fast-depleting fossil fuels, drastic water and food shortages, rising inequality, future pandemics, an increasingly dysfunctional global financial system and a discredited economic policy paradigm. That was before the arrival of Covid-19, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and two years of extreme weather conditions, multiple supply shortages, raging inflation rates and cost of living crises. At the time of writing, we may also be heading into another major banking crisis.
Combining the trends with many recent election results suggests to me that capitalist democracies are not just struggling temporarily with one or more specific crises. Significant national instability and a sense of polycrisis can be detected in multiple regions. Currently there appear frightening parallels to the 1930s: international financial crisis, struggling and unstable economies, unhappy and distrustful populations, populist authoritarian leaders offering radical solutions, rising levels of nationalism and racism, international standoffs, and escalating military conflicts. Unsurprisingly, a number of volumes have appeared in recent years questioning the future prospects for democracy (Runciman, 2018; Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2018; Applebaum, 2020).
The Great Disrupters of Democracy
Whether democracies are experiencing a turbulent period of change or approaching an existential crisis, it is important to identify some of the great disrupters of current-day nation-state democracy. Three broad ones highlighted here are globalization, neoliberalism, and new information and communication technologies. Such disrupters hover in the background of many of the chapters in this book.
Globalization is one clear force that, whether positive or negative for national democracies, is certainly transforming them (see Chapter 10). Globalization involves greater interconnectedness, exchange and interaction across national borders (see Held and McGrew, 2003; Steger, 2009). Advances in transport and communication have facilitated more international, mobile networks of industrial production, finance, culture, communication and people. State politics and communication is increasingly bound up with inter-governmental and trans-governmental institutions.
For its many advocates, globalization has been largely positive for nation states and their publics. International integration has brought stability and efficiency, warding off large-scale trade wars and global conflicts (Slaughter, 2000; Held, 2002). It has enabled cross-border exchanges of culture and communication, helping the development of a ‘global public sphere’ (Volkmer, 2014; McNair, 2016) and a shared sense of ‘cosmopolitan identity’ (Beck, 2006; Albrow and Glasius, 2008).
However, for its detractors, globalization has eroded national democracies. Nations can no longer manage a range of international economic, financial, political, environmental and other issues that externally impact them. The largest transnational corporations, financial institutions and digital platform companies now have too much influence on national polities (Strange, 1996; Herman and McChesney, 1997; Thussu, 2007; Krugman, 2008). It thus becomes clear, to publics as well as politicians, that casting votes for national parties may have little impact on a range of matters affecting citizens. For several commentators, the success of Donald Trump, the vote for Brexit and the rise of far-right populism across Europe, Latin America and Asia, have each been driven by a rejection of globalization (Goodheart, 2017; Eatwell and Goodwin, 2018; Norris and Inglehart 2019).
Neoliberalism has been another great disrupter of national democracies (see Chapter 8). The term has become a catch-all phrase, covering a set of political regimes, economic policies and broader ideas linked to individualism, free choice and free markets (see Larner, 2000; Harvey, 2007; Davies, 2014). Neoliberals have favoured market-based solutions to economic and political problems. That meant the roll-back of the state, regulations, welfare systems, union rights and tax rates wherever possible. Its supporters became increasingly influential in governments and international institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund from the 1970s onwards.
For its many advocates, neoliberal principles of economic and political management were instrumental in stabilizing economies everywhere after the economic crises of the 1970s. Billions of people, particularly in poorer nations, have been lifted out of poverty since then (IDEA, 2017). However, for its critics (Harvey, 2007; Mirowski, 2009; Crouch, 2011), neoliberalism has been extremely damaging. As a basic philosophy, it is antithetical to democracy, replacing elected, accountable politicians with unelected, unaccountable business leaders with ulterior objectives (Varoufakis, 2016; Streeck, 2016, 2017). It has contributed to income stagnation and extreme levels of inequality (Piketty, 2014; Oxfam, 2017), the collapse of multiple industries and communities, large trade imbalances, debt mountains, and a powerful but unstable international financial sector (see Epstein, 2005; Palley, 2013). For such critics, Brexit, Trump’s election and the social instabilities encountered elsewhere are best explained by neoliberalism’s corrosive influence.
A third major disruptive force for democracies has been new ICTs (information and communication technologies, see Chapter 3). The internet, digitalization, wireless technology, mobile phones, and advanced computing power have combined to reconfigure politics, media and communication. The digital revolution was initially accompanied by a positive narrative, which viewed the new technology as making up for modern democracy’s failings (Norris, 2002; Castells, 2001; Coleman and Gotze, 2001). Indeed, the earlier years of the worldwide web were positive, as a flurry of new parties and politicians, interest groups and social movements, alternative news and social media sprang up (Gillmor, 2004; Beckett, 2008; Jenkins, 2009).
Early optimism about digital democracy, however, has given way to more realist and pessimistic assessments. Digital divides have mirrored social divides, digital monopolies replaced old industry ones. Surveillance capitalism has been rolled out. In effect, old power structures were reasserted (see variously Morozov, 2012; Tufekci, 2014; Curran et al., 2016; Fuchs, 2017; Zuboff, 2019). All of which suggest that, on balance, new ICTs have failed to re-energize democracies. More than that, they have contributed to the financial and reputational collapse of legacy news, growing polarization, the proliferation of misinformation and fake news (Bennett and Livingstone, 2018; Benkler et al., 2018; Sunstein, 2018).
The Fourth Age of Political Communication
Jay Blumler is most associated with discussions of both crisis and change in his account of the three ‘ages of political communication’. In 1995, with Michael Gurevitch, he published The Crisis of Public Communication. This pulled together their decades of research on UK and US politics and media to identify a series of worrying trends. The ever-more-powerful media were reshaping politics to the detriment of democracy. Blumler followed this up in 1999 with an article co-authored with Dennis Kavanagh in the journal Political Communication, entitled The Third Age of Political Communication: Influences and Features. This focused on change more than crisis, although the two were linked. The first age, in the two decades after the Second World War, was the ‘golden age’ of political parties and news presses. Party membership was large, citizens loyal and print media deferential. The second age, from the 1960s to 1990s, was driven by the introduction of limited-channel national television, taking politically interested audiences away from their partisan presses. While engaging more citizens, TV politics also created ‘an emptier and less nourishing communication diet’.
They then documented the features of what they saw as an emerging ‘third age’ at the turn of the century. This had developed, on the one hand, out of wider social shifts (e.g., individualization, secularization). On the other, it was also linked to the growing ‘media abundance, ubiquity, reach’ of the new 24-hour, multi-channel environment. They highlighted the following emerging trends: the increased professionalization of parties, which now prioritized media strategy in political policy-making; more intense political and media competition; an anti-elitist and short-term populism replacing traditional political ideologies; a growing diversification of media outlets, topics and agendas that included ‘identity politics’; and a less homogenous and more fragmented audience, which could pick and choose its news sources. A quarter of a century later, all those trends now appear fully incorporated into today’s political communication ecology.
However, we have also been witnessing other distinct trends across politics, media and communication. The most obvious of these has been in the area of communication technologies. In the 1990s, multi-channel television and a partisan press dominated in many wealthy countries. The internet was an interesting distraction. Smartphones, social media and many of the titans of today’s online age did not exist. Now, these digital tools are increasingly dominating aspects of political communication in much the way television or the press did in earlier ages.
In a 2013 keynote address, Blumler responded to this, suggesting that digital developments could be driving democracies towards a fourth age of political communication. He speculated that the new communication architecture could mean the end of the top-down, ‘pyramidical model’ of elite to mass communication. If so, he concluded that ‘the model of political communication process that dominated our scholarship in the past, my own included, is kaput’. Since then, others have also pointed towards the emergence of a new fourth age (e.g., Magin et al., 2016; Bennett and Pfetsch, 2018), with extensive shifts in politics, institutions, democracy and the public sphere, and potential threats to contemporary democracies.
All these trends, combined with the events of the last decade, have led me towards three contentious conclusions. One, modern democracy itself is in the midst of an existential crisis as weighty and disturbing as any since 1945. The trends of ‘post-democracy’, outlined by Crouch (2004), Mair (2013) and others, are coming to fruition as the key institutions, norms and practices of politics and communication have become significantly eroded. Two, several core foundational elements of the scholarly field of political communication are in desperate need of a rethink (see also Davis, 2010; Bennett and Iyengar, 2010; Chadwick, 2017; Bennett and Pfetsch, 2018). Three, however the changes are evaluated, the fourth age of political communication has well and truly arrived for wealthy, Western capitalist democracies if not other nations and systems. Leaving aside the very valid objections to the idea of set ‘ages’, what are the defining features of today’s fourth age of political communication in crisis times? Those recorded and explored in the following chapters include:
A significant weakening of sovereign state institutions
’ ability to enact policy or operate accountably: as globalization, financialization, digitization, pandemics and so on move across borders, it becomes increasingly difficult for politicians and bureaucrats to manage economic, environmental and other policy areas, to collect corporate taxes, maintain regulations, ensure adequate energy, food and other supply lines, etc.
A pronounced
break-down of faith in political institutions, scientific rationality, experts and elites
: not only have people become increasingly untrusting of politicians and political organizations, but they are also more critical of elites, experts and institutions of all kinds. Science and technocracy have lost their ‘objective’ status.
Ideologically fragmented parties and precarious coalitions
: Once large and stable political parties have either been wiped out or splintered into factions, immobilizing them in ongoing civil wars or reshaping them into more extreme entities. More governments are being formed out of precarious coalitions of such parties.
Cultural identity and nationalist challenges
to traditional left–right politics: Increasingly, issues of race, nation, gender, sexuality, immigration, the environment, anti-elitism and religion cut across established class divides and economic policy differences.
Rapidly growing
unstable new parties, interest groups and social movements
: new parties and social movements can now grow rapidly to sizeable entities that challenge or even take power, but they can fade or become paralysed just as quickly.
Established political parties and leaders are far less central to communication about politics
in our fragmented public spheres and are increasingly usurped by
new hybrid political actors
communicating directly to extensive social media audiences.
Hollowed-out legacy news media
operations: the business model of many established news organizations, especially in the print press, has been broken, either bankrupting them or leaving them to struggle as pale shadows of what they were in the era of ‘post-industrial journalism’.
Unaccountable and untraceable news and information flow across
social media networks and evolving forms of hybrid media
: Advertisers, nation states, campaign strategists, politicians, business entrepreneurs, and journalists themselves, have all helped shift substantial communication resources and politics into such networks and platforms.
Problems of
information overload and ‘truth’
: political information and opinion continues to grow exponentially, leaving individuals struggling to find valid sources and verifiable, objective facts and information. This is exacerbated by internet bots and the deliberate dissemination of fake news and information on social media by a mix of click-bait profit seekers, state-sponsored propagandists, conspiracy theorists and unethical, extreme political actors.
Unaligned and very volatile electorates
: numbers of strongly aligned voters are now frequently outnumbered by undecideds, with election-period swings getting much larger and pollsters finding it hard to make accurate predictions.
Very different patterns of news and information consumption
: In many countries, and among specific audience demographics such as younger voters, a large majority of them get their news and share political information and opinion using social media, not legacy news producers. Consumption is no longer linear and through single media. It is non-linear and simultaneous in a
hybrid and polymediated age
.
Audiences fragmented and polarized
across multiple divides: as numbers and types of media have multiplied so audiences have increasingly been subject to both separation and intensification of exchanges. Divisions are multifaceted, based on age, education, wealth, political interest, race, gender, language and geography.
A growing divide
between the world of public, visible, symbolic politics, on the one hand, and that of private politics, encompassing opaque policy-making, lobbyists and experts, on the other.
Each of these elements is transforming political communication ecologies substantially. They severely undermine the core foundational norms, values and institutions of established political systems everywhere, and democracies in particular. They present substantial challenges to political actors of all kinds and to scholars trying to observe and analyse what is happening.
Defining Political Communication and the Outline of the Book
What Counts as Political Communication?
This book has several objectives, one of which is to challenge and broaden the boundaries of the discipline. But, to do that, one has to begin by clarifying what the discipline covers. Demarcating the boundaries of political communication is tricky because there isn’t definitive agreement on what constitutes ‘politics’ and what is politically relevant ‘communication’. Brian McNair’s 6th edition introduction to the subject defines political communication as:
‘purposeful communication about politics’. This incorporates: ‘1. All forms of communication undertaken by politicians and other political actors … 2. Communication addressed to these actors by non-politicians such as voters and activists. 3. Communication about these actors and their activities, as contained in news reports, editorials and other forms of media …’ (McNair, 2018: 4)
McNair’s (2018) definition is as good a place to start as any and offers a degree of flexibility. But he also acknowledges that what counts as a political actor, or a politically relevant form of communication, is open to debate. Like most books on the topic, he makes selective choices about what to focus on. Doris Graber’s 11th edition (with Dunaway, 2022) of Mass Media and American Politics orients itself towards mass news media as it relates to a variety of formal political actors, processes and reporting conditions. A glance at Shanto Iyengar’s (2018) textbook suggests that the major actors and concerns of the discipline are elected politicians and parties, election campaigns, news media and media effects on voters. Each of these very much relates to formal politics, old legacy media and governing institutions in democracies.
Figure 1.1 Political Communication within Nations
Source: Created by the author
These established and highly regarded authors have made their own selective decisions about what counts. Their books offer relatively little on other types of political actor or process, beyond governments, legislatures, voting and legacy media. They are also very much focused on their US case. But, of course, politics involves many other types of participants, activity and forms of communication (see Figure 1.1). Political communication goes beyond election campaigns, and includes day-to-day party conflicts and compromises over legislation, budgets and appointments. Wars, disasters, demonstrations and technical debates all involve communication and media coverage that is political.
There are many additional kinds of political actor too. Governments and parliaments are supported by extensive bureaucracies and often unseen but influential civil servants. Corporations, interest groups, trade unions, religious institutions, think tanks and others all work with parties, lobby ministers and civil servants. Politics is now full of professional communicators, in public relations, marketing, advocacy and so on. Citizens are not just voting fodder but frequently become political actors, when making financial contributions, demonstrating, as ‘citizen journalists’, organizing around local issues, or sharing alternative news stories through a plethora of social media platforms.
Communication in or about politics also takes many forms. Legacy news media (print, broadcast, online) and the practices of journalism are the most traditional form. There is also the ever-growing surfeit of specialist publications, political websites and digital networks. So too, we might consider interpersonal communication, of the kind that takes place between journalists and political sources, lobbyists and government bureaucrats or across social media. We might also think more about political culture as politicians appear in entertainment programmes or celebrities become politicians. This appears all the more significant in an age of ‘culture wars’, ‘emotional political communication’, electoral volatility and the viral speed at which images flit across social media.
The discipline has other forms of inclusion/exclusion. Many scholars only count surveys and quantitative studies, while others prefer qualitative approaches or engage with complex social theory. More recently, a growing number of researchers have turned to computational methods, bringing both advances and complications (see Theocharis and Jungherr, 2021). Most scholars cannot avoid country-specific and cultural biases, often interpreting the wider world in relation to their own national norms, actors and institutions. Some attempt to separate the political from wider social, economic and technical changes and influences, while others insist on linking all these things, at times losing focus in the process.
These divides were very apparent in the early days of the discipline’s development and can still be seen. But there is also a wider appreciation of the various approaches, actors, theory and interdisciplinary nature of the subject. So too, there is now a much greater understanding of difference and variation across nations and systems. This book attempts to reflect the plurality of the work now being produced but, of course, it makes its own selective choices, and I can’t escape my own Anglo-centric biases.
Bearing all this in mind, the book’s approach is guided by the following objectives. First, the book is presented as an advanced introduction to the subject of political communication. Each chapter offers a bridge between the old and the new. The old covers the debates, institutions and actors that have defined the field for some decades. Key political actors, systems, institutions and communication media are introduced, as well as ways of evaluating and analysing them. Having set out the traditions, each chapter then explores how recent trends are challenging our understanding of these.
The second is to document the challenges to the established paradigms that have defined the field in recent decades. As the various chapters argue, evolving trends have now become tipping points, in some cases fatally undermining the institutions, organizations and democratic models that have sustained polities. In other words, a paradigm shift is required. Intellectually, scholars must re-evaluate their models, assumptions and norms. Practically, nations must step in either to resuscitate these institutions and principles or replace them with something else.
The final objective is to bring together diverse approaches and findings from a mix of disciplines and countries. These are primarily from politics, media and journalism, drawing on a combination of theory, quantitative and qualitative studies. But there are also attempts to stretch the subject boundaries, pushing into adjacent disciplines, including sociology, economics, international relations, cultural theory and political economy. At the same time, the book is more focused on Western democracies generally and the US and UK in particular. That does not mean to assume some form of crude universalism or that English-speaking democracies are ‘more advanced’.
Chapter Outline
Part I introduces the core concerns and parameters of the book and offers three interpretive frameworks for analysing and evaluating modern political communication. This chapter has focused on crisis and change. Chapter 2 sets out different ways through which we might think about what ‘good’ democratic political and media systems might look like. Its first part skirts through philosophers and democratic theorists. The second part explores comparative systems work in politics and media.
Chapter 3 both frames wider debates about digital developments in political communication and explores some of the significant changes wrought by them. Classic fault lines, between techno-optimists and pessimists, technological determinist and social-shaping approaches are juxtaposed in varied investigations of political communication participants and settings.
Part II focuses on the formal institutions and actors of political systems: parties, legacy news media and government institutions. Chapter 4 traces the evolution of political parties and election campaigning, as ideologically driven parties first became mass, catch-all organizations and then electoral-professional institutions and, more recently, radical and populist entities.
Chapter 5 turns to legacy news media operations. Even though digital developments have powerfully disrupted traditional news organizations, they still play a major role in institutional politics and elections, and provide core content for social media. Questions about truth and objectivity, liberal pluralist and critical political economy accounts, as well as the future prospects for the sector are explored. Chapter 6 looks at the evolving relations of political actors and media. Starting with journalist–politician relations, it also covers media management and mediatization, and the increasing overlaps of popular culture, populism and populist politics.
Part III turns away from formal politics and institutions to civil society, individuals and organized interests. Chapter 7 looks at citizens, unpacking two related discussions on individual political participation and media effects. Questions about who participates and how, as well as a reappraisal of the effects tradition in the digital age, are each explored.
Chapters 8 and 9 move on to organized interests, the policy process and mediated campaigns. Chapter 8 focuses on lobbying and the policy process, looking in particular at the ways and means elites and large corporations influence both political decision-making and media, thus enabling decades of neoliberal policy bias and rising inequalities. Chapter 9 turns attention to a wider range of third sector interest groups, social movements and causes. It offers specific mini cases of the environmental movement, Occupy Wall Street, the #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter campaigns.
Chapter 10 looks at global media and political communication. A variety of perspectives is explored including shifting flows of international news and culture, notions of cosmopolitanism and global civil society, and international competition and conflict through conventional media and digital communication.
Chapter 11 pulls together the findings of the previous chapters. It concludes that we have both entered into a new fourth age of political communication, and that democratic systems are indeed in a state of crisis rather than simply change. In which case scholars and political actors need to go back to first principles, rethinking the norms, institutions and practices of modern, representative democracies.
Question Topics
How is a crisis of democracies and public communication defined? What are the key areas of debate here?
Is the current crisis experienced in many democracies something substantial or superficial and part of a temporary cycle of change and renewal?
Whether substantial or superficial, what are the major causes?
What changes distinguish the fourth age of political communication?
How should we define and boundary the topic of political communication? What should be included and what not?
Further Reading
Bennett, W.L. and Pfetsch, B. (2018) ‘Rethinking Political Communication in a Time of Disrupted Public Spheres’, Journal of Communication, 68: 243–55.
Blumler, J. (2013) The Fourth Age of Political Communication, Keynote Address at Frei University, Berlin, 12 September 2013. https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_PDC_006_0019--the-fourth-age-of-political.htm#no1
Crouch, C. (2004) Post-Democracy, Cambridge: Polity.
Hay, C. (2007) Why We Hate Politics, Cambridge: Polity.
Ingelhart, R. and Norris, P. (2016) Trump, Brexit, and the Rise of Populism: EconomicHave-Nots and Cultural Backlash, Harvard Working Paper No. RWP16–026, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/trump-brexit-and-rise-populism-economic-have-nots-and-cultural-backlash
