Topic: 1 The Elements of Political Communication
What is Political Communication?
As the name suggests we might simply define as a kind of communication addressed by
politicians. But McNair is of the opinion that it is difficult to precisely define this term as
both components of phrase are open to a variety of definition. Denton and Woodward,
for example, provide one definition of political communication “as pure discussion about the
allocation of public resources (revenues), official authority, and official sanctions.” In their
words "the crucial factor that makes communication 'political' is not the source of a message,
but its content and purpose. This definition includes verbal and written political rhetoric, but
not symbolic communication acts, which are of growing significance for an understanding of
the political process as a whole.
The American writer Doris Graber advances a more all-encompassing definition of what she
terms ‘political language’, suggesting that it comprises not only rhetoric but paralinguistic
signs such as body language, and political acts such as boycotts and protests (1981).
Brian McNair is more is more lucid. He emphasises the purposeful communication about
politics. His definition of political communication incorporates:
(1) All forms of communication undertaken by politicians and other political actors for
the purpose of achieving specific objectives.
(2) Communication addressed to these actors by non-politicians such as voters and
newspaper columnists.
(3) Communication about these actors and their activities, as contained in news reports,
editorials, and other forms of media discussion of politics.
McNair include all political discourse in this definition. By political communication,
therefore, he, has in mind not only verbal or written statements, but also visual means of
signification such as dress, make-up, hairstyle, and logo design, i.e. all those elements of
communication which might be said to constitute a political ‘image’ or identity.
David L. Swanson and Dan Nimmo, also key members of this sub-discipline, define political
communication as "the strategic use of communication to influence public knowledge,
beliefs, and action on political matters." They emphasize the strategic nature of political
communication, highlighting the role of persuasion in political discourse.
Political Communication Elements
Political Organizations
The political organizations include; political parties, public organizations, pressure groups,
terrorist organizations and governments. They use the techniques of appeals, programmes,
advertising and public relation in mass media to influence the audience. These are separately
discussed below:
Political Parties. This category of political actor includes, most obviously, the established
political parties: aggregates of more or less like-minded individuals, who come together
within an agreed organisational and ideological structure to pursue common goals.
These goals will reflect the party’s underlying value system, or ideology, such as the British
Conservative Party’s adherence to ‘individual freedom’ and the supremacy of the market; or
their Labour opponents’ preference for ‘capitalism with a human face’ and the principles of
social justice and equality. In the US the Democrats have historically been associated with
relative liberalism in social policy, and an interventionist approach to the economy, while the
Republicans aspire to reduce state involvement in all aspects of socio-economic life. In every
democratic society, similar distinctions exist.
Despite the ideological differences which may exist between political parties in modern
democracies they are expected to share a commitment to constitutional means of advancing
their objectives, attempting to convince a population as a whole of their correctness, and
putting their policies to the test of periodic elections.
When, until relatively recently, voting rights in capitalist countries were restricted to small
elites of propertied, educated men, it was enough for parties to use various forms of
interpersonal communication, such as public meetings and rallies, aided by newspaper
coverage, to reach their constituencies. But in an age of universal suffrage and a mass
electorate parties must use mass media.
Public Organizations. These are non-party organisations with political objectives, which
may include corporate lobby groups, labour unions, consumers' associations and different
types of NGOs. They deal with relatively narrow constituencies and issues. They themselves
engage regularly in political communication, or lobbying, designed to influence
governmental decision-makers or parliamentarians . These organisations have, to a greater
or lesser degree, institutional status and public legitimacy, as reflected in their access to
policy-makers and media, receipt of charitable donations, and official funding.
Pressure Groups. Pressure groups (or single-issue groups, as they are also known) may be
distinguished from the public organisations listed above in that they are typically less
institutionalised and more overtly ‘political’ in their objectives, being concerned with such
issues as the conservation of the natural environment, and the prevention of cruelty to
animals being reared for human food consumption or for use in the testing of drugs and
cosmetics. They tend to campaign around single issues, such as the anti-nuclear movement in
the early 1980s, and global warming in the early twenty-first century. The environmental
movement, it should be noted, is an example of a pressure group which sought to break into
the mainstream of the political process by establishing ‘Green’ parties throughout Europe. As
a political party the Greens have many elected representatives in Germany and other
European countries. Even in Britain, where the Green Party has only one MP, elected in
2010, the environmental movement has had a major impact on the political agenda, requiring
parties to develop at least the appearance of pro environmental policies.1 David Cameron,
elected as Tory leader in 2005 and prime minister in May 2010, put green policies at the heart
of his party’s programme for government.
Terrorist Organizations. These are groups which use terror tactics – urban bombing, hi-
jacking, assassination, and kidnapping, to list the most common – to achieve their political
objectives. In this sense, many of the world’s governments, including those of South Africa,
Israel, France, and the US, have at one time or another committed acts of (state) terrorism. In
2010 Israeli agents assassinated a Palestinian politician in Dubai. More commonly associated
with terrorism, however, are such organisations as the Irish Republican Army in Northern
Ireland (until the 1998 peace agreement ended ‘the war’, at any rate), Hamas and Hezbollah
in the Middle East, ETA in the Spanish Basque country, and the al-Quaida network which
destroyed the World Trade Centre in September 2001, TTP and recently emerging DAESH
and Bokoharam. All have shared a readiness to work for their goals outside of the
constitutional process, which they regard as illegitimate, and to use violence as a means of
‘persuasion’. Unlike state sponsored terrorists, who seek to avoid identification and publicity,
these organisations actively court media attention, striving to make their ‘target publics’
aware of their existence and their objectives, often by illegal or violent means.
Modern terrorist organisations also use the public relations and media management
techniques of more mainstream political actors, such as news conferences, press releases and
leaks.
The Audience
The purpose of all this communication is, as has been noted, to persuade. And the target
of this persuasion – the audience – is the second key element in the political
communication process, without which no political message can have any relevance.
The audience for a particular political communication may be broad, as in a billboard
advertisement or a US election ‘spot’, where the objective is to persuade an entire nation of
voters. It may be narrow, as when the editorial of a leading newspaper ‘of record’, such as the
UK Guardian, calls on the Labour party to change its leadership (or to retain it, as the case
may be). The audience may be both broad and narrow, as in the case of the TTP bombing
a military installation. Such a ‘communication’ has at least two levels of meaning, and is
intended for at least two audiences. One, the people of Pakistan as a whole, are being told that
they should not view the TTP as something of irrelevance to them. A second, more selective
audience, the government, is being warned that TTP has the ability and the will to carry
out such acts, and that appropriate changes to policy should be forthcoming. Whatever the
size and nature of the audience, however, all political communication is intended to
achieve an effect on the receivers of the message.
From the general parliamentary elections campaigns to the lobbying of individual MPs and
senators, the communicator hopes that there will be some positive (from his or her point of
view) impact on the political behaviour of the recipient.
As every student of the media knows, the effects issue is one of great complexity and
unending controversy. In political communication, the audience’s relationship to the
message is ambiguous and extremely difficult to investigate empirically. It is contingent upon
many other factors and processes. As a general rule, the effects of political communications
of whatever kind are determined not by the content of the message alone, but by the historical
context in which they appear, and especially the political environment prevailing at any given
time. The ‘quality’ of a message, the skill and sophistication of its construction, count
for nothing if the audience is not receptive. President Clinton’s media adviser in the 1996
re-election campaign, Dick Morris, writes in his memoir that ‘if the public won’t buy your
basic
premise, it doesn’t matter how much you spend or how well your ads are produced; they
won’t work. ‘Also note that in election campaigns actions speak louder than words.
The Media
Media organisations, today comprise print, broadcasting and online channels. These
include websites operated by established media organisations such as the BBC, CNN, and
the Wall Street Journal; blogs and independent sites such as WikiLeaks which are devoted to
reporting, aggregating or commenting on political issues; and social networking sites
such as Facebook, and Twitter, which allow internet users to share information rapidly . In
democratic political systems the media function both as transmitters of political
communication which originates outside the media organisation itself, and as senders of
political messages constructed by journalists and other producers such as bloggers.
First, and most obviously, political actors use the media in order to have their messages
communicated to the desired audience. Political programmes, policy statements, electoral
appeals, pressure group campaigns, and acts of terrorism have a political existence – and
potential for communicative effectiveness – only to the extent that they are reported and
received as messages by the media audience. The media, of course, do not simply report, in a
neutral and impartial way, what is going on in the political arena around them. Despite
protestations to the contrary by some journalists, there are more than enough analyses of the
media in the communication studies literature to show that their accounts of political events
(as of any other category of ‘reality’) are laden with value judgments, subjectivities and
biases. Kaid et al. suggest that we may view political ‘reality’ as comprising three categories
(1991):
• First, we may speak of an objective political reality, comprising political events as
they actually occur
• There is then a subjective reality – the ‘reality’ of political events as they are
perceived by actors and citizens
• Third, and critical to the shaping of the second category of subjective perceptions, is
constructed reality, meaning events as covered by the media.
While arguments about the precise efficacy of the media’s political output continue, there
is no disagreement about their central role in the political process, relaying and interpreting
objective happenings in the political sphere, and facilitating subjective perceptions of them in
the wider public sphere. For this reason, media ‘biases’ are of key political importance.
Newspapers in most capitalist societies are relatively open about which political parties
they support (though some seek to maintain the appearance of neutrality). Broadcasters are
generally more silent, although, in the US Fox News has adopted an aggressively pro-
Republican, anti-Democratic approach to issues such as the Iraq war and health care reform.
The biases of online media are determined by their institutional links, and status as blogs,
‘tweets’ or other forms of individualised internet publication. Opinion and polemics are
commonplace online, to an extent regarded by some observers as problematic.
The media are important to the political process in more direct ways. All newspapers take
pride, for example, in their ‘public voice’ – the editorials in which they articulate political
opinions. Sometimes these are presented as the ‘voice of the reader’, and directed at policy-
makers. Alternatively, they may be constructed as the calm, authoritative voice of the editor,
viewing the political scene from a detached distance. In both cases, the editorial is intended
as a political intervention, and is often read as such by a government or a party.
Commentaries, analyses, and other forms of ‘authored’ journalism are also interventionist in
intention.
A striking feature of the evolution of the internet has been the growth of the ‘blogosphere’,
or web logs – regularly updated, individual websites on which authors place commentary and
opinion about events of the day.
The media are important in the political process, finally, as transmitters of messages from
citizens to their political leaders. The opinion polls and Readers letters in print media cover
public opinion. Similarly Broadcasting is awash with political debate and public access
programmes, in which members of the public are brought together to discuss the burning
issues of the day, and to express their opinions on these issues. In January 1997, for example,
Britain’s ITV broadcast Monarchy: The Nation Decides. Advertised as the biggest live debate
ever broadcast on British TV, the programme allowed 3,000 citizens, egged on by a panel of
pro- and antimonarchy experts, to express their views on the past and present performance of
the British monarchy, and its future role, in unprecedentedly critical terms, which both the
British royal family, and any government responsible for stewarding the country’s
constitutional development, would have been foolish to ignore.
