Political Communication 9783110238174, 9783110238167

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Carsten Reinemann (Ed.) Political Communication

Handbooks of Communication Science

Edited by Peter J. Schulz and Paul Cobley

Volume 18

Political Communication Edited by Carsten Reinemann

DE GRUYTER MOUTON

The publication of this series has been partly funded by the Università della Svizzera italiana – University of Lugano.

ISBN 978-3-11-023816-7 e-ISBN 978-3-11-023817-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2014 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Oliver Rossi/Photographer’s Choice RF/Gettyimages Typesetting: Meta Systems Publishing & Printservices GmbH, Wustermark Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Preface to Handbooks of Communication Science series This volume is part of the series Handbooks of Communication Science, published from 2012 onwards by de Gruyter Mouton. When our generation of scholars was in their undergraduate years, and one happened to be studying communication, a series like this one was hard to imagine. There was, in fact, such a dearth of basic and reference literature that trying to make one’s way in communication studies as our generation did would be unimaginable to today’s undergraduates in the field. In truth, there was simply nothing much to turn to when you needed to cast a first glance at the key objects in the field of communication. The situation in the United States was slightly different; nevertheless, it is only within the last generation that the basic literature has really proliferated there. What one did when looking for an overview or just a quick reference was to turn to social science books in general, or to the handbooks or textbooks from the neighbouring disciplines such as psychology, sociology, political science, linguistics, and probably other fields. That situation has changed dramatically. There are more textbooks available on some subjects than even the most industrious undergraduate can read. The representative key multi-volume International Encyclopedia of Communication has now been available for some years. Overviews of subfields of communication exist in abundance. There is no longer a dearth for the curious undergraduate, who might nevertheless overlook the abundance of printed material and Google whatever he or she wants to know, to find a suitable Wikipedia entry within seconds. ‘Overview literature’ in an academic discipline serves to draw a balance. There has been a demand and a necessity to draw that balance in the field of communication and it is an indicator of the maturing of the discipline. Our project of a multi-volume series of Handbooks of Communication Science is a part of this coming-of-age movement of the field. It is certainly one of the largest endeavours of its kind within communication sciences, with almost two dozen volumes already planned. But it is also unique in its combination of several things. The series is a major publishing venture which aims to offer a portrait of the current state of the art in the study of communication. But it seeks to do more than just assemble our knowledge of communication structures and processes; it seeks to integrate this knowledge. It does so by offering comprehensive articles in all the volumes instead of small entries in the style of an encyclopedia. An extensive index in each Handbook in the series, serves the encyclopedic task of find relevant specific pieces of information. There are already several handbooks in sub-disciplines of communication sciences such as political communication, methodology, organisational communication – but none so far has tried to comprehensively cover the discipline as a whole.

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For all that it is maturing, communication as a discipline is still young and one of its benefits is that it derives its theories and methods from a great variety of work in other, and often older, disciplines. One consequence of this is that there is a variety of approaches and traditions in the field. For the Handbooks in this series, this has created two necessities: commitment to a pluralism of approaches, and a commitment to honour the scholarly traditions of current work and its intellectual roots in the knowledge in earlier times. There is really no single object of communication sciences. However, if one were to posit one possible object it might be the human communicative act – often conceived as “someone communicates something to someone else.” This is the departure point for much study of communication and, in consonance with such study, it is also the departure point for this series of Handbooks. As such, the series does not attempt to adopt the untenable position of understanding communication sciences as the study of everything that can be conceived as communicating. Rather, while acknowledging that the study of communication must be multifaceted or fragmented, it also recognizes two very general approaches to communication which can be distinguished as: a) the semiotic or linguistic approach associated particularly with the humanities and developed especially where the Romance languages have been dominant and b) a quantitative approach associated with the hard and the social sciences and developed, especially, within an Anglo-German tradition. Although the relationship between these two approaches and between theory and research has not always been straightforward, the series does not privilege one above the other. In being committed to a plurality of approaches it assumes that different camps have something to tell each other. In this way, the Handbooks aspire to be relevant for all approaches to communication. The specific designation “communication science” for the Handbooks should be taken to indicate this commitment to plurality; like “the study of communication”, it merely designates the disciplined, methodologically informed, institutionalized study of (human) communication. On an operational level, the serieiis aims at meeting the needs of undergraduates, postgraduates, academics and researchers across the area of communication studies. Integrating knowledge of communication structures and processes, it is dedicated to cultural and epistemological diversity, covering work originating from around the globe and applying very different scholarly approaches. To this end, the series is divided into 6 sections: “Theories and Models of Communication”, “Messages, Codes and Channels”, “Mode of Address, Communicative Situations and Contexts”, “Methodologies”, “Application areas” and “Futures”. As readers will see, the first four sections are fixed; yet it is in the nature of our field that the “Application areas” will expand. It is inevitable that the futures for the field promise to be intriguing with their proximity to the key concerns of human existence on this planet (and even beyond), with the continuing prospect in communication sciences that that future is increasingly susceptible of prediction.

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Note: administration on this series has been funded by the Università della Svizzera italiana – University of Lugano. Thanks go to the president of the university, Professor Piero Martinoli, as well as to the administration director, Albino Zgraggen. Peter J. Schulz, Università della Svizzera italiana, Lugano Paul Cobley, London Metropolitan University

Contents Preface to Handbooks of Communication Science series

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Carsten Reinemann Political communication research. A brief history of the field and the idea of 1 this handbook

Section I: Foundations

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Hans Mathias Kepplinger Normative theories of political communication

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Manuel Puppis The regulation of political communication

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Winfried Schulz Political communication in long-term perspective

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Barbara Pfetsch and Frank Esser Political communication in comparative perspective: Key concepts and new insights 87

Section II: Situations

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Jesper Strömbäck and Spiro Kiousis Strategic political communication in election campaigns

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Claes H. de Vreese and Andreas R. T. Schuck Political communication in referendums 129

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James Stanyer Hypes, waves, and storms: Events and the dynamics of their coverage 151 James K. Hertog and Robert J. Zuercher Political Communication in social transformation and revolution

Piers Robinson 10 News media, war and world politics

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Section III: Political Actors Tamir Sheafer, Shaul R. Shenhav, and Meital Balmas 11 Political actors as communicators 211 Peter Van Aelst 12 Media, political agendas and public policy

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Spiro Kiousis and Jesper Strömbäck 13 Political public relations 249

Section IV: Mass Media and Journalism Susana Salgado 14 The media of political communication Brian McNair 15 The media as political actors

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Karin Wahl-Jorgensen 16 The production of political coverage: The push and pull of power, routines and constraints 305 Carsten Reinemann and Philip Baugut 17 Political journalists as communicators. The impact of individual characteristics on their work 325

Section V: Media Messages Olaf Jandura and Katja Friedrich 18 The quality of political media coverage

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Toril Aalberg 19 Issues, events and frames in political media coverage

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David Nicolas Hopmann 20 Politicians, parties and political candidates in the news media Patricia Moy, Courtney N. Johnson, and Michael L. Barthel 21 Entertaining and emotional elements in political coverage

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R. Lance Holbert, Megan R. Hill, and Jayeon Lee 22 The political relevance of entertainment media

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Section VI: Citizens Jens Wolling and Martin Emmer 23 Individual political communication and participation

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Hajo G. Boomgaarden 24 Interpersonal and mass mediated political communication Yariv Tsfati 25 Uses and perceptions of political media

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Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick 26 Selection, perception, and processing of political messages

Section VII: Effects on citizens Claes H. de Vreese and Judith Möller 27 Communication and political socialization

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Florian Arendt and Jörg Matthes 28 Cognitive effects of political mass media

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Christian Schemer 29 Emotional effects in political communication

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Marcus Maurer 30 Attitudinal effects in political communication

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Amy B. Becker and Dietram A. Scheufele 609 31 Media effects on political behavior Biographical sketches Index

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1 Political communication research. A brief history of the field and the idea of this handbook Abstract: This chapter has two objectives. It first gives a brief overview of the history of political communication research and then discusses the basic idea, limitations and structure of this volume. The chapter argues that questions of political communication have been addressed since ancient times and throughout the centuries by scholars of various disciplines. Moreover, questions of political communication have been a major topic and driving force for the establishment of (mass) communication research as an academic discipline of its own. However, it was not until mass communication research began to flourish and become more diverse in the second half of the 20th century that researchers began to identify themselves as political communication researchers. As a contrast to the myths surrounding the early beginnings of the field, this brief account tries to paint a more realistic and comprehensive picture of the development of the field, also addressing the criticism that has been voiced regarding its history and development. Key Words: Political communication research, history of political communication as a field

1 Introduction Political communication is a core field of media and communication studies. It is concerned with the communicative processes related to the distribution of power, the formation of collectively binding decisions, and the authoritative allocation of values in society (for other definitions of political communication see, for example, Graber 2005: 479; Schulz 2009). As politics is heavily depended upon communication between and among political actors, citizens, and the media, and even can be regarded a form of communication in itself, political communication research is highly relevant to modern societies – be their political systems democratic or authoritarian in kind. Political communication research by its very nature is interdisciplinary and comprises scholars from a wide range of theoretical approaches, methodological backgrounds, and academic disciplines of which media and communication studies and political science are the most important, but by far not the only ones. Today, the academic field consists of hundreds if not thousands of scholars, departments and centers, divisions and sections in academic associations

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across the globe. In addition, political communication research is also conducted outside of academia by foundations, pollsters, political consultants, and political actors and institutions. Political communication researchers and students produce a continuous and ever growing stream of publications on an enormous variety of topics. Although this means that individual scholars can no longer claim to be able to follow all the publications in the field, the enormous number of research projects, publications, and classes given at universities vividly shows the lasting interest in and the importance of the study of political communication. The steady flow of research is fostered not only by the fact that the functioning and wellbeing of political systems in general, and democratic systems in particular, is reliant upon political communication. It also is the result of processes of social and political transformation that often change processes and structures of political communication, too – and sometimes in rapid and dramatic ways. Moreover, the need for research is the result of the enormous dynamic that has characterized the development of mass and individual media especially in recent decades and the increasing relevance that is attributed to the media by political actors and citizens as well (see also, for example, the chapters by Schulz, by van Aelst and by Wolling and Emmer). Against this backdrop, the purpose of this volume of the Handbook of Communication Sciences is to provide a state of the art for a number of key issues of current political communication research. On the outset, this introductory chapter will provide a very brief history of the field. Given the complexity of this history, the criticism expressed in recent years regarding the traditional narratives and myths that surround the foundation of communication studies as an academic discipline as well as the numerous studies on the history of the field recently published, this chapter will only touch upon some key developments relevant to political communication in particular. It will not address the development of specific topics, fields of study, methods or theories because this is done more specifically in most of the chapters following below. A further objective of this chapter is to shortly explain the basic idea and structure of this handbook. This is done in the second part of the chapter. It will close with acknowledgements of the people that have made this volume possible.

2 A brief history of the field The establishment of a scientific discipline depends upon various factors: Among them are its scholars and institutions with their biographies and histories; there are its ideas, paradigms, theories, and methods; and there are the constellations of already existing academic disciplines that may have educated scholars of the new field and/or compete with it for topics of research and funding resources. In addition, the world outside of universities represented by politics, the economy

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or – in the case of media and communication studies – the media with their particular political, economic or cultural interests can heavily impact the development of a new discipline. Although this is not the place to present a full-fledged, comprehensive history of political communication research it should be kept in mind that against this background neither biographical, nor institutional or intellectual approaches alone can fully explain the development of the field of political communication. More valid descriptions and explanations are possible when all of these factors are taken into account. For example, the development of the field cannot be explained without taking into account the evolution of media, major historical events and the skills and charisma of key figures (e.g., Averbeck 2008: 1–2; Löblich and Scheu 2011: 6). Therefore, this short introduction does not just present a set of founding fathers, because this might contribute to an oversimplification of developments, an overestimation of the importance of individuals in the highly complex birth of a scientific field, and to an underestimation of contextual factors and driving forces from outside academia.

2.1 The origins of the field Interest in political communication is much older than what we know today as academic or applied political communication research. In fact, interest in political communication dates back to philosophers and scholars of politics and rhetoric in ancient Greece and Rome like Aristotle, Plato, Quintilian, and Cicero who were very much concerned with public communication in political contexts (see, for example, Oates 1948; Jackob 2007). The heritage of political communication research also includes “classics in the arts of persuasion penned by Sun Tzu, St. Thomas Aquinas, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and many others” (Nimmo and Sanders 1981: 17). In modern times, the invention of mechanical moveable type, the rise of the periodical press, and the advent of film and broadcasting – to name just a few media innovations – have urged scholars of various disciplines to reflect on and theorize about the nature, causes and effects of public and political communication, about the actors involved, and the processes ongoing. The simple reason for this is that the evolution of the means of societal communication oftentimes not only changes communicative structures but also has the potential to immediately affect structures of power. Examples for the consequences of media developments and the ability or inability of the powerful and the promoters of social change to adapt to or make use of those developments are documented in several chapters throughout this volume (see, for example, the chapters by Schulz, by Hertog, by Robinson, and by Sheafer, Shenhav, and Balmas). And these changes also have been major stimuli for the development of media and communication studies and political communication research. As Nordenstreng puts it: “(…) the origins of communication research are deeply rooted in politics (…). Histories of the field leave no doubt that each school of thought was founded as a more

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or less political call of the day” (Nordenstreng 2008). And while this political call often referred to the effects of propaganda in the beginnings of the field, this interest moved to another kind of recurring events later on – at least in democracies: Scholars, politicians, and the media where increasingly interested in understanding and predicting the dynamics of election campaigns and communicative effects on voting behavior. The desire to understand campaign effects became a major driving force in the development of political communication research. Even today, a considerable amount of political communication research is done in the context of election campaigns (see, among others, the chapter by Strömbäck and Kiousis). Until the late 19th century, most scholars’ thinking about communication and media exclusively stood in the tradition of the humanities, i.e. their theorizing and analysis was shaped by historiography, hermeneutics, linguistics, jurisprudence and others. With the rise of experimental psychology and the social sciences, among them economics, sociology and political science, a second disciplinary stream began to contribute to scholarly thinking about media and communication (Craig 2009). Around the turn from 19th to 20th century, scholars in the United States, France and Germany seem to have been among the first in the emerging field of communication and media studies, among them Albert Schäffle and Karl Bücher, Charles Horton Cooley and Gabriel Tarde. Sociologists in other important nations of the time, most notably Britain, were occupied by other research problems (McQuail 2009 and Simonson and Peters 2009). The difference between the ancient, medieval and early modern roots mentioned above and the academic discipline of (political) communication research developing since the 1920s was not so much the field of study and the general questions asked. It was the methodology applied, the self-definition as a unique field of study, and its institutionalization in university departments and scholarly organizations. While the theories and findings of ancient, medieval and early modern scholars were exclusively based on everyday observations, theoretical reasoning, and research traditions from the humanities, the emerging field defining itself as communication research strived for the rigorous application of (social science) scientific methods in order to gain reliable and valid evidence – and to establish itself as a “true” science (e.g., Pooley 2008; Löblich and Scheu 2011). In addition, what fundamentally changed over the centuries was, of course, the field’s subject of study. The explosion of mass, electronic and online media later on as a result of technical innovations and – in some regions – processes of transformation and democratization have contributed a lot to the establishment and expansion of the field because the need for a systematic and thorough investigation of (mass) communication became widely accepted in society and politics. Not only has this been the case in North America and Europe, but also in other parts of the world where the development of (free) mass media systems has begun later or is still ongoing (for East Asia see Kim, Chen, and Miyahara 2009; for Latin

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America see Martín-Barbero 2009; for Eastern Europe and Russia see Jirák and Köpplová 2009) – especially with respect to online media that are not as common across the globe as, for example, in North America, most of Europe or certain parts of Asia (see also the chapter by Wolling and Emmer).

2.2 The development of media and communication studies Communication studies as a social science discipline began its rise in the 1920s and 1930s both in Europe and the United States. The interest in media and public communication was caused by far-reaching societal changes (e.g., individualization, urbanization), the rise of film and modern mass media as well as by the experiences of World War I and totalitarian propaganda. The academic institutional roots of the field in the United States came from political science, speech communication, psychology and sociology, but also from professional journalism training. As recent research has shown, communication studies not only started at the University of Chicago, where the role of mass media had been on the agenda since the institution was founded in 1892 (Wahl-Jorgensen 2004: 550). They began to emerge at other universities and research institutions across the United States as well (Glander 2000: 62–63; see also Pooley 2008: 54). Moreover, in the 1930s, social science scholars emigrating from Nazi Germany and Austria like Paul F. Lazarsfeld, who headed the newly founded Office of Radio Research from 1936 onward, also contributed to the development of the field in the United States (e.g., Averbeck 2001; Morrison 2008; Pooley 2008; Rogers 2004). It is apparent from the early history of communication studies in the United States that the field to large part indeed was comprised of what we would call political communication research today. This is also reflected in the topics of early publications that have heavily influenced the field later on (e.g., Lippmann and Merz 1920; Lippmann 1922; Lasswell 1927; Cantril and Allport 1935; Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet 1948). As Sproule (1987) and Gary (1996) have shown, institutions outside of academia played a major part during that time: The Rockefeller Foundation and the US government crucially shaped the emerging field with their funding and activities related to World War II and later the Cold War, also influencing its agenda and probably the success of certain paradigms. For example, the foundation held a series of workshops from 1939 on in which prominent social scientist discussed the design and testing of propaganda (or psychological warfare) for an upcoming war with Germany – an effort the US government could not officially engage in at the time. It obviously was in the context of these workshops that the label communication was deliberately chosen as a replacement for and contrast to propaganda analysis, delineating US morale building efforts from Nazi propaganda. In fact, until the 1960s the term communication also slowly replaced public opinion research as a keyword that often had been used for studies of political communication before.

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It was in these workshops that its participants – among them Lazarsfeld, Cantril, and Lasswell – established quantitative methods and media effects as cornerstones of the emerging field. Although there were other methodological positions present, the group agreed that research focusing on these concepts would be most valuable in the effort to prepare the United States for the propaganda war with Nazi Germany (for an overview see Pooley 2008). After the war, major publications that came out of this group like the multivolume Studies in Social Psychology in World War II had a huge influence on social science (Sproule 2008: 166). Moreover, the resources committed to communication research immediately before, during and after World War II contributed to legitimizing the field and “the problems of communication, public opinion, and democracy (…) translated into a postwar appetite for research into how media influence society” (Wahl-Jorgensen 2004: 547–548). It thus seems fair to say that questions and scholars of political communication and public opinion have played a major role in the process of establishing communication studies as an academic field in the United States – alongside with government agencies funding projects. Or, as Sproule puts it: “Accounting for the rise of communication study was the desire of academicians to be of practical (and politically noncontroversial) service to a nation confronted by fascism (and, later, communism)” (Sproule 2008: 164). European origins of theorizing on political communication also date back much longer than is apparent from the history of university departments. For example, German scholars of the nineteenth century examined the political role of the press from a variety of perspectives and also delivered lectures on the topic (for an overview see Hardt 1979 and Lang 1996). Communication studies emerged “between and across diverse disciplines” with history and political economy being the most important “mother disciplines” (Löblich and Scheu 2011: 9). Early theorists of press and society include, for example, sociologist Max Weber. In his famous address to the first congress of the German Sociological Association in 1910 he called for a large-scale quantitative content analysis of newspapers (that was never carried out). The first European department of newspaper science was established as early as 1916 in the German city of Leipzig. However, just like in the United States, the main purpose of this department was the academic education of journalists suited for the modern press – it was mainly financed by newspaper publishers who wanted to promote the image of journalism. But like in the United States, the experience of World War I raised interest in research on mass media, propaganda, and its effects on public opinion in the 1920s. For example, in Germany the notion that a systematic investigation of mass communication was necessary “was fueled by the widespread believe that the German press had lost the wartime propaganda battle, and that this was one of the main causes of the Axis Powers’ defeat” (Pietilä 2008: 207). However, the number of professors and departments in Germany remained small and most of the leading scholars of the 1920 to 1940 saw themselves in the tradition of the

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humanities. There only was a small group of researchers influenced by sociological thinking and methodology (Averbeck 2008: 3). Because of that, newspaper scholars focused on newspapers “as a phenomenon sui generis” and were neither willing nor able to apply empirical social science methods (Pietilä 2008: 208; 212) or to systematically link the newspaper to its societal context and its effects on public opinion. They left these questions to other disciplines (Löblich and Scheu 2011; Pietilä 2008). Nevertheless, scholars in other European countries, for example in Finland or Czechoslovakia, were inspired by the German developments after World War I and began to develop academic thinking about media, journalism and public opinion on their own (Jirák and Köpplová 2009; Pietilä 2008). In the Soviet Union, university departments for journalism were established in the 1920 and 1930s. But their primary task was educating students for their objectives in the media, which were regarded the major means of mass persuasion and propaganda since Lenin’s writings on the importance of the press for the communist movement and state. This line of thinking spread across Eastern Europe and other socialist countries after World War II – and lasted until the fall of the iron curtain after 1989 (Jirák and Köpplová 2009). In German newspaper science of the Nazi-era, there had been an increasing division between established scholars following methods and thinking from the humanities, and younger ones promoting social science research. But as these younger scholars were closely linked to the Nazi regime, the call for more social science-orientated thinking and methodology ended abruptly with Germany’s collapse in 1945 (Averbeck 2001; Pietilä 2008: 213). It was not until the 1960s that the discipline in Germany overcame its deep post-war crisis. It slowly expanded to a larger number of universities and – under the influence of scholars impressed by US mass communication studies – the empirical social science approach became the dominant one. Other competing perspectives like critical communication studies in the tradition of the Frankfurt School founded by Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Jürgen Habermas were not able to “develop stable social and cognitive arrangements” (Löblich and Scheu 2011: 5) in Germany and therefore could not benefit from the boom of the discipline that began in the 1970s in Germany and other European countries, too, when the importance of the subject began to be recognized in politics and society as well (Löblich and Scheu 2011: 14; McQuail 2009). All in all, with a number of notable exceptions (e.g., Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands) media and communication studies were not very well developed as an academic discipline in most European countries before the beginning of the 1970s (e.g., McQuail 2009). But a lot of the scholars establishing the discipline after World War II and actually conducting academic research were heavily influenced by mass communication research as the mainstream version of US communication studies. It set the standards for the academic study of media and communication in many countries – theoretically, methodologically and as far as research

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topics are concerned (see, for example, Pietilä 2008 for the impact on Germany and Finland; why France did not follow is described by Averbeck 2008; see also Delia 1987: 70). Regarding the topics of research, many European communication scholars just like their counterparts in the United States were interested in the effects of propaganda and political influence via mass media which was later accompanied by an engagement in applied research for government. In fact, the questions of interest to both governments and researchers often were questions immediately relevant in the context of the Cold War which also was a struggle for winning public opinion in countries worldwide. Therefore, issues of political communication played a major role in the development of media and communication studies as a discipline in Europe, too (e.g., Averbeck 2008: 5; Löblich 2007; McQuail 2009).

2.3 The institutionalization of political communication research As is apparent from the above, communication and media research both in the United States and Europe had addressed issues of political communication from their very beginnings. In the 1960s, however, the scientific community began to reach a size and level of diversification that made it necessary to not only define the boundaries of the discipline to its outside, but also to establish various subdisciplines on the inside. And it seems about this time that some communication scholars began to identify themselves as political communication researchers. Nimmo and Sanders (1981: 12) date one of the first mentions of the term political communication research even back to a publication by Eulau, Eldersveld, and Janowitz (1956: 175). One of the first institutional tokens of this development probably was the establishment of a section for Legal and Political Research in the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) in 1958 (Nordenstreng 2008). It was one of four different sections of the association at the time. And in 1973, the Political Communication Division was approved as an official section of the International Communication Association (ICA). More scholarly associations around the world followed this example and established similar sections, including not only communication and media research but also political science associations. Today, political communication divisions of political science and communication communities often work closely together (for example in ICA or in the national associations of the United States, Germany etc.). As far as their success and importance are concerned, the divisions addressing issues of political communication, whatever their name may be, typically are among the largest in national and international academic associations of media and communication studies (e.g., in ICA, IAMCR, ALAIC, ECREA etc.). One reason for this is that the institutional consolidation of the field was paralleled in the 1950s and 1960s by an impressive rise in research activities and publications. In their comprehensive bibliography on politi-

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cal communication published in 1974, Sanders, Hirsch, and Pace listed no less than 1000 entries (Nimmo and Sanders 1981: 13). The second half of the 1970s then saw the publication of the first textbooks on political communication in the United States (e.g., Chaffee 1975) and in 1975 the small annual journal Political Communication Review was launched. It became Political Communication in 1991 which today is the leading international journal of the field, followed by The International Journal of Press/Politics. Since then, the field has seen a steady growth of research activities and publications that is hard to keep track of. Like other academic disciplines and sub-disciplines on the rise, political communication research itself has been going through a process of differentiation in recent years. In addition, social science political communication research no longer is restricted to the United States and some European countries, but has expanded across the globe. In almost every country with academic institutions devoted to the study of media and communication, issues of political communication play a major role (see, for example, de Beer 2009; Jirák and Köpplová 2009; Kim et al. 2009; Martín-Barbero 2009; McQuail 2009). The Political Communication Division of ICA today has more than 700 members from no less than 50 countries. But as theories, research questions, methods and findings are becoming more diverse and more specialized at the same time, the field is also increasingly confronted with the challenge of both setting its boundaries and integrating the variety of approaches, methodologies and subjects of study. In addition, it has to keep an eye on the theoretical and/or societal relevance of its findings – a quality that has always characterized and distinguished the field from other academic disciplines.

2.4 Debates on the field While the emergence of political communication as a field surely is an academic story of success, there have also been debates and criticism concerning its history, development and current situation. Two main aspects connected to each other deserve attention here: The methodological and theoretical mainstreaming of the field and the adaptation of the US research paradigm in countries and cultures across the world. Firstly, scholars critical of the historical development of the field hold the view that some of the roots of early research in the United States and Europe were set aside because since – among other things – their results did not seem to be so well suited for immediate application and the interests of governments or companies. In their view, theories and methodology from social psychology, political science, and mass communication ousted other origins of the field in the immediate post-war era including rhetorical analysis, linguistics, speech communication and other disciplines from the humanities. As Delia concludes: “The coalescence of American communication research was founded in the hegemony of quantitative social sci-

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ence (Delia 1987: 71; Nimmo and Sanders 1981: 16–27; Sproule 2008). This tradition, critics say, established a long-lasting, dominant research paradigm marked by key concepts like opinion and attitude, the notion of political communication as a process, a strong focus on media effects as well as a preference for quantitative empirical research. In fact, a social science perspective is indeed predominant among scholars that define themselves as “political communication researchers”. As the 2005 survey of the International Communication Association’s (ICA) membership shows, scholars in the Political Communication Division are much more likely to see themselves as part of the social sciences than of the humanities – which mark a sharp contrast to other divisions (Donsbach 2006: 442; see also Rogers 2004). Some critics argue that this dominance makes it hard for scholars from other traditions to get heard and to be successful in the field. As Ryfe (2001: 410) put it with respect to the concepts mentioned above: “Interests that lie outside them are possible, but they are not rewarded, valued, or respected in nearly the same way as research that accepts the core terms of the field (…) And it is why scholars who do work outside these boundaries rarely identify themselves as doing ‘political communication’ research” (see also Nimmo and Sanders 1981; Wahl-Jorgensen 2004). In fact, theoretical and methodological differences remain so important in research on issues of political communication that they have resulted in institutional consequences in some parts of the world. For example, the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) offers two distinct sections devoted to the topic. One is called Political Communication, the other one Communication and Democracy. While the former seems to be more in line with the mainstream research tradition and paradigm described above, the latter explicitly “aims at being representative of the different scholarly and linguistic traditions of European research in communication” (www.ecrea.eu). These traditions include, for example, critical theory, cultural studies, social constructivism or semio-pragmatics (Averbeck 2008). Given the expansion of the field and its diversification it is not unlikely that methodological and disciplinary differences may have gained importance in recent years with different theoretical and methodological camps reaching a critical mass of scholars on their own. Despite the often heard plea for crossing or tearing down boundaries, recognizing and citing each other’s work across theoretical and methodological traditions still is more the exception than the rule, and journals, associations or sections in fact often do prefer one type of research or the other. But that probably is not a problem specific for political communication research – but rather symptomatic for the theoretical and methodological diversity that has been characterizing communication and media research throughout its entire history (Craig 2009; see also Löblich and Scheu 2011; Pietilä 2008: 211). Secondly, scholars critical of the mainstream of the field regretfully conclude that the kind of empirical social science research that was most successful in the

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United States also spread across the world in the 1950s and 1960s either via activities of US-institutions or via foreign scholars educated in the United States and going back to their home-countries afterwards. As a result, local communities and researchers have been criticized for their “uncritical” adoption of theories, models and thinking from the west in general and the United States in particular. The two main problems of this adoption identified by critics are (a) that the specific historical and cultural conditions of non-US, non-western countries were faded out of theorizing and research in the process of adoption and (b) that alternative disciplinary and methodological traditions were marginalized (for Africa see de Beer 2009; for East Asia see Kim, Chen, and Miyahara 2009; for Europe, for example, Averbeck 2009; for Latin America see Martín-Barbero 2009; for Southern Asia/ India see Thomas 2009). However, looking at countries and communities across the world, there are numerous places in which non-quantitative or non-psychological research paradigms have been dominant and that have not completely adopted quantitative, psychological or effects-oriented ways of thinking. For example, traditions of linguistics and semiotics still are very strong among French scholars and in many other southern and eastern European countries (Averbeck 2008; Jirák and Köpplová 2009; McQuail 2009). Cultural studies have not only been strong in their homeland, the United Kingdom, but also have been adopted in other European countries and even the United States well (Redal 2008; Simonson and Peters 2009). And in Latin America, not only US-influenced empirical studies, but also critical studies of issues related to political communication are an important part of research. Here, thinking in the tradition of the theory of dependence and structuralist semiotics has been especially strong since academic studies of communication began in the 1960s (Craig 2012; Martín-Barbero 2009). In addition, processes of a localization of communication studies are going on in which local cultures, ontological and epistemological orientations towards communications, and academic, disciplinary traditions are re-incorporated into (political) communication studies (e.g., Kim et al. 2009). Finally, it has to be kept in mind that in many countries the adoption of western ways of thinking and research about media and communication has just been impossible to date because authoritarian regimes neither have an interest in the proliferation of the ideas of freedom of expression and the media nor in research on issues of societal communication and its relations to politics and society.

3 The idea, limitations and structure of this volume Given the enormous expansion and dynamics of the field and its subject of study, any effort to provide students and scholars with a comprehensive picture of contemporary research in political communication may seem futile and overly ambitious. At the same time, however, the diversification of the field and the steady

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stream of publications make it even more necessary to review extant research, integrate its findings, and develop perspectives for future research on these grounds. Therefore, the idea of this volume is to give an overview of some of the key issues, theories and findings accumulated by political communication research over the last decades. In order to do so, this volume is divided into seven sections addressing (I) foundations, (II) situations, (III) political actors, (IV) mass media and journalism, (V) media messages, (VI) citizens and (VII) effects on citizens. Each section includes several chapters that address specific issues and research problems in the form of review articles. In the first chapter of Section I: Foundations Hans Mathias Kepplinger discusses various normative theories of political communication and the degree to which they are backed by findings from empirical research. Although normative concerns have always played a major role in academic thinking about political communication, the normative ideas guiding research often are not made explicit. Therefore, this first substantial chapter is devoted to normative issues. Moreover, normative concerns are the key issue of the chapter on media quality (chapter 18 by Jandura and Friedrich) and they shine up in various other chapters, too. A case in point is the following chapter by Manuel Puppis who discusses the regulation of political and campaign communication in countries around the world, while the remaining chapters in this first section discuss longitudinal (Winfried Schulz) and cross-country perspectives of political communication research (Barbara Pfetsch and Frank Esser). In these chapters, key trends like mediatization and basic contextual factors of political communication processes that shine up in various other articles across the handbook, too, are extensively discussed. Section II: Situations comprises articles on the part played by political communication in important situations that societies are consistently confronted with. These chapters allow for the fact that political communication is not only depending on stable contextual factors and long-term developments but also upon situational conditions. The chapters of this section take a look at election campaigns (Jesper Stömbäck and Spiro Kiousis), referendum campaigns (Andreas R. T. Schuck and Claes deVreese), media hypes and news waves (James Stanyer), social transformation (James K. Hertog and Robert J. Zuercher) and international conflict and war (Piers Robinson). One common theme in these reviews is that the complex nature of the dynamics of political communication processes and the factors shaping them are an important challenge to research. Another issue coming up in several of these chapters is the part played by the new online media environment. Section III: Political actors takes a look at politicians and parties and their role in processes of political communication. Tamir Sheafer, Shaul Shenhav, and Meital Balmas discuss the consequences of mediatization and personalization that in their view foster the importance of charismatic communication and rhetorical skills of political actors. Peter van Aelst reflects on how the media influence politicians’ actions and decision making by, among other things, setting the agenda for the

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political system. And finally, Spiro Kiousis and Jesper Strömbäck provide an overview about the knowledge we have regarding the means and strategies of political public relations. As these chapters show, understanding the logic of political actors, their interests and their perceptions of media and the public is another key to understanding political communication. Section IV is completely devoted to Mass media and journalism. They obviously still are the most important mediators of political communication, despite the rise of online media that provide citizens with new possibilities to make their voices heard in public. The first chapters in this section discuss the various kinds of media that are available to politicians and citizens (Susana Salgado) and the role of the media as political actors (Brian McNair). The following chapters primarily are concerned with factors influencing the news making of political journalist with the article by Carsten Reinemann and Philip Baugut focusing on individual-level factors, and the review by Karen Wahl-Jorgensen concentrating on organizational aspects and working routines. One recurring theme in these chapters is the discussion about potentially harmful effects of increasing economic pressures on the performance of political journalism and the importance of organizational influences on political journalists. Section V: Media messages concentrates on the structures of political news and other forms of politically relevant media content. The number of chapters in this section reflects the outstanding importance of media content as the common frame of reference for all actors involved in political communication. In the section’s first chapter, Olaf Jandura and Katja Friedrich critically discuss the normative basis and theoretical foundations of assessments of political media quality. They conclude that due to the diversification of the media system and audience fragmentation, the traditional standards of quality derived from the liberal model of the public sphere need to be complemented by alternative standards. In the following two chapters, key concepts in the analysis of political media content are covered in more detail. While Toril Aalberg deals with issue and strategy/game frames of news coverage, David Hopmann reviews research on the visibility of political actors, the authenticity, personalization, and negativity of their portrayal and related issues. The remaining two chapters in this section account for the fact that entertaining elements and formats have long been neglected in political communication research despite their increasing importance. Therefore, Patricia Moy, Courtney N. Johnson, and Michael L. Barthel review research on the presence and effects of humor, visuals, negativity and fear in political coverage. And R. Lance Holbert, Megan R. Hill, and Jayeon Lee provide us with a critical reflection of research on the political relevance of entertainment media. The chapters in Section 6: Citizens focus their attention on the part played by citizens as audience and communicators in political communication. The section starts with an overview of how active citizens in countries across the globe engage in activities of interpersonal and mass mediated political communication and par-

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ticipation. Due to a lack of comparative research in this field, Jens Wolling and Martin Emmer base their chapter on a secondary analysis of the World Values Survey presented here for the first time. The complex and highly consequential interaction of mass mediated and interpersonal communication then is the main topic of the subsequent chapter by Hajo Boomgarden. As his review shows, there is a great need for integrating studies on mass mediated and interpersonal communication that has become even more urgent since the advent of social online media. Boomgarden’s chapter is followed by Yariv Tsfati’s reflection on the consequences that various kinds of audience expectations about media content and their effects may have on the individual effects of media messages. His article calls for a merger of the uses and gratifications approach and research on the thirdperson effect and hostile media perceptions. Finally, Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick gives a comprehensive overview of research into the politically motivated selective use and processing of political messages – a key issue of political communication research since its early days that has received increasing attention again in recent years especially in the United States against the backdrop of the country’s increasing political polarization. And finally, the last Section VII: Effects on citizens is devoted to a wide array of consequences that individuals may experience when they expose themselves to political communication. Although the authors of this section mostly refer to effects of mass mediated communication as the most frequent form of political communication, consequences of interpersonal communication are touched upon as well. First of all, Judith Möller and Claes de Vreese discuss the role of interpersonal and mass mediated communication vis-a-vis other agents in the course of political socialization. Then, our knowledge of cognitive (Florian Arendt and Jörg Matthes), emotional (Christian Schemer), attitudinal (Marcus Maurer) and behavioral (Amy B. Becker and Dietram Scheufele) consequences of political communication are discussed. Among other things, two main points emerge from this section’s articles. First of all, recipients’ political predispositions, their involvement, and their social surroundings play a major role in the way they engage in and are affected by media and interpersonal political messages. From this perspective, consequences of political communication on the individual are far from being a one-way road. Secondly, the importance of predispositions does not mean that the way political messages look like is without consequence. Quite the opposite is true, all the more when not only changes are defined as effects, but also the establishment of new and the strengthening of existing cognitions, emotions, attitudes, and behaviors. Acknowledgments: One purpose of this volume was to include perspectives from a variety of national backgrounds both within chapters and across authors. The editor therefore is thankful that authors from a considerable number of different countries agreed to contribute, including Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Israel, The Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Portugal, the

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United Kingdom and the United States. Although this list still does not fully represent the national and continental diversity of the field – no Asian, Latin American or African authors are included – the variety of countries involved is quite large. It has to be kept in mind, however, that all the authors come from more or less established western democracies, share a preference for democracy as their preferred type of political system and strongly believe in the freedom of expression and the media as their frame of reference for political communication research. Moreover, although some chapters (for example the chapter by Wolling and Emmer) explicitly integrate societies in which online media or television are not as important as they are in industrialized nations, most research reviewed here refers to nations with a highly diverse media system that includes press, broadcasting and online media. Is also has to be kept in mind, that given the importance of macro-level contextual factors for the patterns of political communication and its effects these findings may not easily be generalized to countries with completely different political and media systems. Finally, the editor wants to thank the people that have contributed to this volume in one way or another. First of all, this volume would not have been possible without the commitment of the colleagues and friends involved – and their patience with the editor. Given all the projects and responsibilities you have, I really appreciate your work on this! Secondly, I have to thank the editors of the Handbook of Communication Sciences, Peter J. Schulz and Paul Cobley, for the chance to be editing this volume. I hope the result is what you expected. In addition, I wish to thank Barbara Karlson from deGruyter Mouton for her assistance. And finally, I wish to thank my research and students assistants Magdalena Obermaier and Stefan Kost at the Department of Communication Science and Media Research at LMU Munich who worked hard to make sure that the formal guidelines were adhered to.

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Chaffee, Steven H. and Everett M. Rogers (eds.). 1997. The Beginnings of Mass Communication Study in America. A Personal Memoir by Wilbur Schramm. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Craig, Robert T. 2009. Communication as a field and discipline. In: Wolfgang Donsbach (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Communication. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Retrieved on October 22nd 2011 from: http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id= g9781405131995_chunk_g97814051319958_ss75-1 Delia, Jesse G. 1987. Communication research: A history. In: Charles R. Berger and Steven H. Chaffee (eds.), Handbook of Communication Science, 61–76. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Donsbach, Wolfgang. 2006. The identity of Communicaition Research. Journal of Communication 56: 437–448. Eulau, Heinz, Samuel J. Eldersveld and Morris Janowitz (eds.). 1956. Political Behavior. New York: Free Press. Gary, Brett. 1996. Communication research, the Rockefeller foundation, and mobilization for the war on words. Journal of Communication 46: 124–147. Glander, Timothy. 2000. Origins of Mass Communications Research During the American Cold War: Educational Effects and Contemporary Implications. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Graber, Doris. 2005. Political communication faces the 21st century. Journal of Communication 55: 479–507. Hardt, Hanno. 1979. Social Theories of the Press. Early German and American Perspectives. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Jackob, Nikolaus. 2007. Cicero and the opinion of the people – the nature, role and power of public opinion in the late roman republic. Journal of Elections, Public Opinion, and Parties 17: 293–311. Jirák, Jan and Barbara Köpplová. 2009. Communication as an academic field: Eastern Europe and Russia. In: Wolfgang Donsbach (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Communication. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Retrieved on October 22nd 2011 from: http://www.blackwellreference.com/ public/tocnode?id=g9781405131995_chunk_g97814051319958_ss61-1 Kim, Min-Sun, Guo-Ming Chen, and Akira Miyahara. 2009. Communication as an academic field: East Asia. In: Wolfgang Donsbach (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Communication. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Retrieved on October 22nd 2011 from: http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/ tocnode?id=g9781405131995_chunk_g97814051319958_ss60-1 Lang, Kurt. 1996. The European roots. In: Everette E. Dennis and Ellen A. Wartella (eds.), American Communication Research: The Remembered History, 1–20. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Lasswell, Harold D. 1927. Propaganda Techniques in the World War. New York: Knopf. Lazarsfeld, Paul F., Bernard Berelson and Hazel Gaudet. 1944. The People’s Choice. How the Voter Makes up his Mind in a Presidential Campaign. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce. Lippmann, Walter. 1922. Public Opinion. New York: Harcourt. Lippmann, Walter and Charles Merz. 1920. A test of the news. A supplement to The New Republic of August 4, Volume XXIII, part 2. Löblich, Maria. 2007. German ‘Publizistikwissenschaft’ and its shift from a humanistic to an empirical social science discipline. European Journal of Communication 22: 69–88. Löblich, Maria and Andreas Scheu. 2011. Writing the history of communication studies: A sociology of science approach. Communication Theory 21: 1–22. Martín-Barbero, Jesús. 2009. Communication as an academic field: Latin America. In: Wolfgang Donsbach (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Communication. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Retrieved on October 22nd 2011 from: http://www.blackwellreference.com/ public/tocnode?id=g9781405131995_chunk_g97814051319958_ss62-1 McQuail, Dennis. 2009. Communication as an academic field: Western Europe. In: Wolfgang Donsbach (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Communication. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Retrieved on October 22nd 2011 from: http://www.blackwellreference.com/ public/tocnode?id=g9781405131995_chunk_g97814051319958_ss67-1

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Morrison, David E. 2008. Opportunity structures and the creation of knowledge: Paul F. Lazarsfeld and the politics of research. In: David Park and Jefferson Pooley (eds.), The History of Media and Communication Research: Contested Memories, 179–204. New York: Peter Lang. Nimmo, Dan D. and Keith R. Sanders. 1981. Introduction: The emergence of political communication as a field. In: Dan D. Nimmo and Keith R. Sanders (eds.), Handbook of Political Communication, 11–36. Beverly Hills, London: Sage. Nordenstreng, Kaarle. 2008. Communication research and politics. In: Wolfgang Donsbach (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Communication. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Retrieved on July 20nd 201 from: http://www.blackwellreference.com/subscriber/uid=2380/tocnode?id= g9781405131995_yr2013_chunk_g97814051319958_ss97-1 Oates, Whitney J. 1948. Classical theories of communication. In: Lyman Bryson (ed.), The Communication of Ideas. A Series of Addresses, 27–36. New York, London: Harper. Park, David D. and Jefferson Pooley (eds.). 2008. The History of Media and Communication Research. Contested Memories. New York: Peter Lang. Pietilä, Veikko. 2008. How does a discipline become institutionalized? In: David Park and Jefferson Pooley (eds.), The History of Media and Communication Research: Contested Memories, 205–223. New York: Peter Lang. Pooley, Jefferson. 2008. The new history of mass communication research. In: David Park and Jefferson Pooley (eds.), The History of Media and Communication Research: Contested Memories, 43–69. New York: Peter Lang. Redal, Wendy W. 2008. Making sense of social change: Studying media and culture in 1960s Britain. In: David W. Park and Jefferson Pooley (eds.), The History of Media and Communication Research: Contested Memories, 269–290. New York: Peter Lang. Rogers, Everett M. 2004. Theoretical diversity in political communication. In: Lynda L. Kaid (ed.), Handbook of Political Communication Research, 3–36. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Ryfe, David Michael. 2001. History and political communication: An introduction. Political Communication 18: 407–420. Sanders, Keith R., Robert O. Hirsch and Timothy Pace. 1974. Political Communication: A Bibliography. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University. Schulz, Winfried. 2009. Political Communication. In: Wolfgang Donsbach (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Communication. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Retrieved on October 22nd 2011 from: http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9781405131995_chunk_ g978140513199521_ss51-1 Simonson, Peter and John D. Peters. 2009. Communication and media studies, History to 1968. In: Wolfgang Donsbach (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Communication. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Retrieved on October 22nd 2011 from: http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/ tocnode?id=g9781405131995_chunk_g97814051319958_ss88-1 Simpson, Christopher. 1994. Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945–1960. New York: Oxford University Press. Sproule, J. Michael. 1987. Propaganda studies in American social science: The rise and fall of the critical paradigm. Quarterly Journal of Speech 73: 60–78. Sproule, J. Michael. 2008. ‘Communication’: From concept to field to discipline. In: David Park and Jefferson Pooley (eds.), The History of Media and Communication Research: Contested Memories, 163–178. New York: Peter Lang. Thomas, Pradip Ninan. 2009. Communication as an academic field: South Asia. In: Wolfgang Donsbach (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Communication. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Retrieved on October 22nd 2011 from: http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id= g9781405131995_chunk_g97814051319958_ss65-1 Wahl-Jorgensen, Karin. 2004. How not to found a field: New evidence on the origins of mass communication research. Journal of Communication 54: 547–564.

Section I: Foundations

Hans Mathias Kepplinger

2 Normative theories of political communication Abstract: This chapter reviews the empirical foundations of key normative theories of political communication, which are the fundaments of media politics, media law, and media research. Because of the complexity of the theories and the contradictions between them, this essay focuses on a few criteria that allow for comparing them. More specifically, the theories are first compared with respect to their concept of man, their idea of society and their perspective on public communication. In a second step, theoretical assumptions are contrasted with empirical findings from political communication research. The author concludes that theories holding extreme positions are based on empirically untenable assumptions and argues that eliminating such deficits is one of the main future challenges for political communication research. Key Words: theories of political communication, democratic theory, rationality, participation, equality, dissent, societal flow of information

1 Introduction Normative theories of political communication are fundaments of media politics, media law and media research. Examples are the international debate on a free or balanced flow of information, national regulations and laws regarding ownership of media organizations, studies on the knowledge gap, the agenda setting-function and the spiral of silence. Meta theories like Fred S. Siebert’s, Theodore Peterson’s and Wilbur Schramm’s (1963) Four Theories of the Press, Jürgen Wilke’s (1984) collection of writings on Pressefreiheit (Freedom of the Press), J. Herbert Altshull’s (1990) analysis of the The Ideas Behind American Journalism, Andreas Beierwaltes’ (2000) comparative study on Demokratie und Medien (Democracy and the Media), Daniel C. Hallin’s and Paolo Mancini’s (2004) comparison of Three Models of Media and Politics and Jesper Strömbäcks four models of democracy (2005) provide comprehensive overviews of the issues, approaches and literature. Because of the complexity of the theories and the contradictions between them, the present essay will not present minimized and inevitably stripped versions of normative theories but outline a few criteria which allow for comparing them. The theorists briefly presented in the following were selected for the purpose of comparisons with respect to two criteria – the heterogeneity of their assumptions and their partly contradictory conclusions from similar premises.

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2 Theorists and basic assumptions In his Contrat Social (Social Contract), first published in 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) distinguishes the General Will (volonté generale) from the Will of All (volonté des tous) and private interests or desires. According to Rousseau, the General Will rests on common interests and is threatened by private interests. Small differences between individuals may be balanced if they are not structured by powerful organizations. The General Will is not the consequence of competing interests; rather, the General Will presupposes common interests that might be endangered by public discourses which might establish antagonistic organizations (Rousseau [1762] 2006). James Madison (1751–1836), Alexander Hamilton (1755 or 57–1804), and John J. Jay (1745–1829) – the authors of the The Federalist Papers, 1788 published under the title The Federalist – distinguish democracies and republics. They argue against democracy in its classical meaning because they fear a tyranny of the majority. According to Madison, the author of the most relevant Federalist No. 10, the written law is an insufficient barrier against the ambitions of the majority. Freedom can be defended only by the power of many factions, by what balance can be achieved. Thus, the freedom of individuals depends on the existence of competing factions. If these conditions are met, the sovereignty of the people in a republic replaces the sovereignty of the state (Madison, Hamilton, and Jay [1788] 1987). Alexis deTocqueville (1805–1859) distinguishes aristocratic and democratic nations in his two volumes De la démocratie en Amérique (Democracy in America), first published in 1835 and 1840. He argues that the structure of society and government deeply influences human mind and behavior. Citizens in unequal societies believe in human imperfectability. The ideal of equality suggests human perfectibility and stimulates related attempts. In aristocratic nations, despots may use physical means to suppress deviant opinions, in democratic nations, everyone may express deviant opinions within invisible barriers. However, public opinion punishes individuals who dare to cross these boundaries. Consequently, freedom of opinion is more restricted than it appears (Toqueville [1835/1849] 2004). In his book On Liberty, first published in 1859, John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) characterizes complete liberty of opinion as a precondition of positive societal development. He presents epistemological and sociological reasons for this assumption: In his view, the assurance of liberty is the only way to correct errors and to stimulate discourse: “If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind” (Mill [1859] 2009: 52). Every attempt to suppress deviant voices would be based on an “assumption of infallibility”. Silenced opinions might represent the whole truth or missing elements of the truth. Therefore, even if the govern-

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ment and the majority could be in complete agreement, controversial public discourses must be stimulated rather than silenced (Mill 2009). In his volume Public Opinion, first published in 1922, Walter Lippmann (1889– 1974) diagnoses a gap between the assumptions of traditional theories of democracy about the nature of humankind and the actual ability and willingness of the majority to educate themselves about public affairs and to participate in politics. Therefore, he argues, the empirical implications of theories of democracy are something like a taboo. According to Lippmann the mass media cannot close this gap because the majority is not willing to pay the price for excellent information. Even if the majority would be willing to pay the price, the mass media could present only a fragmentary picture of political reality, which would be partly based on the questionable assessments of journalists (Lippmann 1961). In his book Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentarismus (The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy), first published in 1926, Carl Schmitt (1888– 1985) contrasts democracy and parliamentarism and argues in favor of democracy in the classical sense. According to Schmitt, parliamentarism is based on heterogeneity of opinions. However, the members of parliaments do not represent the elites of nations, and their discussions are not guided by the search for truth but driven by interests of antagonistic groups. In contrast, democracy presupposes the equality of citizens and the exclusion of all noncitizens (e.g., slaves, foreigners) from power. Under these conditions, the will of the people may not be articulated in public debates and manifested in elections; rather, the will of the people is expressed by acclamation to decisions by the leader(s) (Schmitt 1988). Alfred Schütz’s (1899–1959) essay The Well-Informed Citizen was first published 1964, several years after his death. In this work, Schütz distinguishes wellinformed citizens from experts and the “man on the street”. According to Schütz, well-informed citizens voluntarily assign relevance to issues that will not necessarily affect their way of living. Their information and opinions are not based on personal experiences or learned expertise but are derived from mass media and other sources. To the extent different individuals agree on the issues they consider as relevant, they share a common reality and constitute a virtual reference group. The dominant opinion in this social environment is a source of social prestige but it is increasingly replaced by opinions of the uninformed man on the street identified by polls (Schütz 1964). In his book on The Passing of Traditional Society, first published in 1958, Daniel Lerner (1917–1989) presumes a linear development from traditional to modern societies characterized by increasing urbanization, literacy, mass media exposure, economic and political participation. The transition is based on geographic and psychic mobility; the latter is driven by the growing importance of mass media. As a consequence, more people “are expected to ‘have opinions’ on public matters – and the corollary expectation of these people that their opinions will matter” (Lerner 1963: 51).

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Herbert Marcuse’s (1898–1979) essay Repressive Tolerance was first published in 1965. According to Marcuse unlimited tolerance is necessary, the only emancipator is a society of citizens with free and equal access to information. In an only formally “free” society, in which the opinions and behavior of its citizens are manipulated by the ruling class, political engagement reinforces the existing power structures because it testifies to principles of democracy that have lost relevance. Political engagement unconsciously acquits repressive systems (Marcuse 1968). In Meinungsforschung und repräsentative Demokratie (Opinion Polls and Representative Democracy), first published in 1957, Wilhelm Hennis (1923–2012) criticizes the influence of opinion polls on political decisions. According to Hennis, opinion polls do not indicate public opinion because interviewees do not present their opinions in a public setting. Their answers do not indicate reasoned opinions; rather, they indicate spontaneous choices. Because such answers cannot be traced back to their sources, interviewees are not responsible for their statements. Therefore, in his view, the influence of opinion polls on political leaders and their decisions weakens the system of representative democracy (Hennis 1968). In his essay Aktive und passive Öffentlichkeit (Active and Passive Citizens), first published in 1967, Ralf Dahrendorf (1929–2009) rejects the idea that a fixed proportion of citizens is interested in politics. He proposes a typology of latent citizens (citizens who are not interested or involved), passive citizens (occasional voters) and active citizens (members of political organizations). In addition, he argues that the size of the segments changes depending on the issues. According to Dahrendorf a maximum of 10 percent of the general population normally belongs to the category of active citizens (Dahrendorf 1986). According to Jürgen Habermas’ (*1929) work Stukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere), first published in 1962, the quality of public discourse has deteriorated over the last centuries. In the 17th century, newspapers developed into platforms for the political discourses of citizens aiming to control their government. Since the late 19th century, newspapers then became platforms for business interests because of their growing dependency on advertisements. Therefore, consensus in public affairs is no longer based on the rational arguments of citizens; rather, such consensus is based on the strategic communication of powerful organizations (1992).

3 Empirical foundations A discussion of the explicit and implicit assumptions underlying normative theories of democracy and political communication is important for three reasons: First, one can determine whether a theory has a solid empirical basis. Certainly, one cannot explain all of the implicit assumptions with a sufficient level of preci-

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sion. However, a well-founded judgment regarding the quality of such theories permits the examination of a range of fundamental assumptions. Second, we can establish whether the often precise descriptions of deficits and mistakes in political communication are accompanied by similarly precise analyses of the conditions that would be necessary for realizing the desired alternatives. In this case, the difficulty lies in the prognostic content of the theories. Third, the premises and conclusions of theories of political communication are often unchallenged, but such theories underlie the decisions of governments, law courts, and authorities. These decisions fundamentally interfere with the communicative relations between citizens, politicians and the media. Therefore, the immediate practical implications of theories of political communication are highly significant. Most theories of political communication contain, implicitly or explicitly, empirically substantive assumptions regarding three essential foundations of political communication: (I) the concept of man, (II) the character of society, and (III) the structure of public communication. Each of the assumptions surrounding these three foundations has a minimum of two facets. The assumptions regarding the nature of humankind apply to (1) the degree of human rationality and (2) the degree of political participation. The assumptions regarding the character of society apply to the need for (1) equality and (2) dissent. The assumptions regarding the structure of public communication apply to (1) the direction of the flow of communication and (2) the anatomy of societal controversies.

3.1 The concept of man Assumptions regarding the nature of human beings apply to (1) the degree of political rationality and (2) the degree of political participation. The first category involves the extent to which people are willing and able to make rational judgments by weighing facts and opinions. The second category concerns the ways in which a population actively participates in the process of forming political opinions. This goal is achieved through discussions or other activities. With respect to the rationality of human beings, one may distinguish three groups of authors: The first group comprises theorists who generally regard people to be able and willing to engage in rational thinking and decision-making – at least if the necessary preconditions are met which include freedom of expression and freedom of the press. Mill and Lerner are examples of such authors. According to Mill, even “people of extremely ordinary understanding” can achieve the “rank of thinking beings” (Mill 1980: 48). According to Lerner the population becomes literate through the establishment of schools and develops “empathy” through the spread of the media during the evolution from traditional to modern societies (Lerner 1963: 47–52). This evolution involves the development of willingness and ability to ascribe attributes to other people which are then valued (projection), and the willingness and ability to ascribe to oneself other people’s attributes which are

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valued (introjection). Neither Mill nor Lerner suggest that all people will achieve the same degree of rationality even under favorable circumstances. Nevertheless, their horizon of expectations is unlimited and open for far-reaching aspirations. In contrast to them, the Federalists, Lippmann, Schütz and Hennis are considerably more skeptical making them representatives of the second group of thinkers. According to Lippmann, experts, and interested citizens can indeed come to a relatively good assessment of politically relevant issues. Nevertheless, in his view, the overwhelming majority of people is incapable of making such assessments because of the complexity of the issues and their lack of political interest. Furthermore, the media are incapable of remedying this situation because their reporting must be geared to the limited interest of the recipients and because an essential portion of the politically relevant information is not at any rate truth-apt. For these reasons, freedom of expression is not a sufficient condition for the public to make rational judgments regarding politics in Lippmann’s view (Lippmann 1961: 253–275). According to Schütz (1964) the number of well-informed citizens can increase under certain conditions because an individual determines how relevant a particular fact is to him or her. However, within every population a relatively small minority of citizens is well-informed. Ralf Dahrendorf expresses a similar view with his distinction between an active, a latent, and a passive public (Dahrendorf 1986: 59). According to Hennis, only those citizens who have independently formed “their own opinion” participate in public opinions. Moreover, the opinions must be distinguished by the “representative character of being committed to the truth” and must be maintained in public by its authors (Hennis 1968: 134–136). By this definition, Hennis limits the bearers of public opinion to a very small percentage of the population. Schmitt, who argues in favor of democracy in the classical sense, represents a third category of theorists. According to him, neither the majority of the population nor the parliament is capable of forming a reasonably justified opinion. Furthermore, according to him, parliamentarians lack the prerequisites for forming rational judgments in open public communication: openness, independence, and selflessness. Schmitt argues that no one believes “that true and correct policy can result from newspaper articles, meetings and parliamentary debates” (Schmitt 1969: 8–9, 62–63). On the basis of the arguments, one can locate the empirically substantive assumptions of authors and other theorists in a two-dimensional typology, albeit in greatly simplified form. One pole is represented by Schmitt, who is reluctant to believe that the majority or even a remarkable minority is capable of rational judgment and considers the majority to be largely inactive in a political sense. The other extreme, Lerner, expects rational judgment from the majority and a high level of political activity. One can derive similarly optimistic views from the presentation of the supposed decline of the bourgeois public by Habermas (1969: 193). Positioned between these extremes are Rousseau, Lippmann, Schütz, Dahrendorf,

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Political activity Rationality of political judgment

Low

Medium

High

Habermas Lerner Mill Rousseau Lippmann Hennis Schütz Dahrendorf

Medium

Low

High

Schmitt

Fig. 1: Concept of man as viewed by theorists of political communication – Potential of the majority.

and Hennis, who have a different appreciation of the population’s capacity for rational judgment and its willingness to engage in political activity (Figure 1). There are only few representative studies on the distribution of the factors mentioned in democratic societies. W. Russel Neumann (1986: 82–94) has produced one of the most copious empirical analyses of political knowledge, opinions, and activities of the American population. According to Neumann, political activists represent approximately 5 percent of the population. In contrast, 75 percent of the population can be described as a mass that can be motivated, and 20 percent are characterized as apolitical and correspondingly unresponsive (Neumann 1986: 169–189). Essentially nothing has changed over the course of decades. Thus, political knowledge at all educational levels in the U.S. has not increased despite strong quantitative growth and change of the media (Delli, Carpini, and Keeter 1996). In their analysis of the situation in Germany, Martin Emmer and his colleagues distinguish five types of citizens based on their patterns of political communication. Only two of them can be regarded as politically interested and engaged. They vigorously follow political coverage in the media, look up facts in books, actively participate in political discussions and are often part of political organisations or citizen initiatives. This social category represents about 20 percent of the population. Opposite them are 80 percent who are either not at all or only slightly interested in politics. Among them are 43 percent “passive mainstreamers” who are not interested in the media’s political reporting, do not participate in political discussions and yet vote in elections (Emmer, Füting, and Vowe 2006: 225). From 1949 till 2008 there was no linear trend in the degree of political knowledge in Germany. Instead, there were several ups and downs (Maier, Glantz, and Barthelt 2009) (see also the chapter by Wolling and Emmer). Most theorists of political communication are concerned with the development of the population’s political involvement on account of the approval and use of free media. On this score, too, there are some empirical findings on the basis of

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which one can assess how realistic their assumptions are. First, the type of media system influences the citizens’ chances of getting interested and involved in public affairs and related variables. Comparing 186 nations, there are clear relationships between freedom of the press and media access on one side and political stability, rule of law and government efficiency on the other side (Norris 2003; see also Trappel and Meier 2011). Comparing four nations with public service broadcasting, public service and commercial broadcasting (dual model), and commercial broadcasting only, the public service model is superior in presenting hard news and enhancing knowledge of national and international affairs. In addition, it reduces the knowledge gap between citizens with low and high education and income (Curran et al. 2010) (see also the chapters by Aalberg and by Hopmann). Second, the spread of television in Germany has, even taking into account other factors such as the development of the level of education, broadened the political interest of the population in correspondence with the assumptions of, say, Lerner. This applies to the general admission that one is interested in politics (Schulz 2011: 208–209). Third, the spread of television and political interest mentioned in surveys did not extend to a deeper interest that manifests itself in the regular reading of a quality newspaper. The use of newspapers has deteriorated in Germany and among those under the age of thirty the percentage of those who want to keep abreast of current events has declined to less than 10 percent (Kolo and MeyerLucht 2007). The rise of the Internet might open new chances for the flow of information from individual, unorganized citizens to decision makers in business and politics and the success of some blogs seems to underline this argument. On the other side, there is some evidence that the increased number and greater variety of available information does not increase but decrease the variety of sources used (Bennett and Iyengar 2008; Nir 2012). In line with these views are findings which indicate that in online-groups politics is not a major topic of deliberation and that in these groups participants gather who already share common opinions (Wojcieszak and Mutz 2009). The aforementioned findings are not an adequate basis for a final verdict on the effect of freedom on the population’s political education and activity. However, these findings do lead to the preliminary conclusion that the optimistic assumptions of authors such as Mill, Lerner and Habermas are probably as false as the pessimistic assumptions of Schmitt: The various types of media systems might increase political knowledge within the limits mentioned. Hennis’s classification of bearers of public opinion is not likely to conform to reality, because it circumscribes the circle of those who participate actively in political communication too narrowly. The assumptions of Schütz, Lippmann, and Dahrendorf are considerably more realistic. However, Schütz and Dahrendorf explicitly refer to the possibility of a flexible expansion and contraction of the politically relevant public and offer explanations regarding this phenomenon.

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3.2 The character of society Assumptions regarding the character of society relate to the necessity of (1) equality and (2) dissent. Discussions of equality are concerned with whether equality is desirable and achievable. Discussions of dissent are concerned with whether serious differences of opinion and conflicts of interest represent risks or benefits for the formation of political opinion. In this regard there are also significant differences among the theorists: Rousseau, the Federalists and Schmitt discuss democracy in the classical sense, refer to different alternatives and draw different conclusions. Rousseau distinguishes democracy from aristocracy and monarchy and argues in favor of democracy. According to Rousseau, the elimination of strong economic differences is the precondition for an efficient political decision-making process. Therefore, he demands a high measure of equality for all through the formation of small and weak interest groups (Rousseau 2006: 30–32, 115–118). Schmitt distinguishes democracy from parliamentarism and argues in favor of democracy in the classical sense. He adopts and radicalizes Rousseau’s argument, regards equality as an indispensable prerequisite for democracy and therefore calls for the elimination of unequality (Schmitt 1969: 13–24). The Federalists distinguish between democracies and republics and argue in favor of republic – “the delegation of the government … to a small number of citizens elected by the rest” (Federalists 1987: 126). According to the Federalists, those “who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society”. Furthermore, “the latent causes of faction are (…) sown in the nature of man”. It causes “the diversity in the faculty of men, from which the rights of property originate” and “the protection of these faculties is the first object of government” (Madison, Hamilton, and Jay 1987: 124). Similar differences exist in the assessments of these authors with regard to the diversity of opinions. Although Mill and Rousseau credit human beings with a high degree of political rationality, their views of intellectual dissent differ markedly. According to Rousseau, both economic and intellectual differences endanger the functioning of democracy in the classical sense. Similarly, Schmitt is concerned with “physical and moral qualities” such as “the conformity of religious beliefs” and “national homogeneity” (Schmitt 1969: 13–22). In contrast, Mill demands the preservation of differences of opinion and conflicts of interest, and the strengthening of the viewpoints of minorities, because these differences are indispensable driving forces of social development. Consequently, conformity between the opinion of the government and that of the people represents the greatest threat to free political communication (Mill 2009: 52, 134). According to Tocqueville, the majority represents a power against which an individual cannot effectively defend himself even if he or she is objectively correct. Although legally guaranteed freedom of speech exists, conformity is generated by psychological pressure (Tocqueville 2004: 289–294). Marcuse (1968) outlined similar views in his critique of public opinion in modern societies.

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Equality Dissent

Positive

Ambivalent

Positive

Negative Mill Dahrendorf Federalists

Ambivalent

Habermas

Negative

Rousseau Schmitt

Tocqueville Lerner Lippmann

Fig. 2: Character of society as viewed by theorists of political communication – Assessment of the usefulness of dissent and equality.

Between the Federalists and Mill on one side and Rousseau and Schmitt on the other side, one can plot Lerner, Habermas, Hennis, Dahrendorf and a number of other theorists. According to Lerner, the path to the modern age leads to the homogenization of society through empathy. Habermas posits that the elimination of inequality represents a fundamental value. However, inequality is just as much beyond dispute for Hennis as it is for Lippmann and Schütz. Dahrendorf, like Mill, regards regulated conflicts as a driving force of social development. Therefore, the views of Habermas and Lerner are closer to Rousseau, whereas the views of Lippmann, Hennis and Dahrendorf are closer to that of Mill (Figure 2). Whereas the structure of society is a major issue in many normative theories of democracy, there are only a few empirical studies which may help to test the validity of these assumptions. Among these studies is Seymour Martin Lipset’s analysis of “some social requisites of democracy” (1959; see also Lipset 1994). Based on theoretical considerations of Max Weber (1946) and Joseph Schumpeter (1947), Lipset analyzed the relationship between the wealth of 48 nations (per capita income, number of persons per motor vehicles, number of newspapers per thousand persons etc.) and the type of their political systems. As expected, in stable democracies in European and English-speaking nations were wealthier than unstable democracies and dictatorships. Maybe more important, in stable democracies, the per capita income was not only higher but slightly more evenly distributed than in unstable democracies and dictatorships. For Latin American nations, he found even larger differences. Jacob Groshek (2011) analyzed the influence of sociopolitical instability in 122 countries over a period of 58 years. He calculated Granger correlations and found that in nations with high degree of sociopolitical instability the diffusion of traditional media caused the growth of democratic institutions. In these nations, also the growth of gross national income contributed to the development of political systems. In contrast, there was not such a correlation in nations with low levels of sociopolitical instability. He concludes that “increased media access may have activated citizens to apply pressure on their governments

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through a variety of means that were manifested here as elements of sociopolitical instability” (Groshek 2011: 1175). The influence of societal antagonisms on political communication is the subject of several approaches. Georg Simmel’ s study on the Intersection of Social Circles (1908: 403–453) forms a theoretical basis from which Paul F. Lazarsfeld and his co-authors have derived their theory of the influence of heterogeneous peer groups on the formation of political opinion and electoral behavior (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet 1969: 150–158). Seymour Martin Lipset’s and Stein Rokkan’s (1967) theory of social cleavages could provide another theoretical basis for empirical analyses. However, it plays no significant role in communication science, for example in the examination of the “knowledge gap thesis” (Gaziano 2008). Dissent can be defined as a facet of societies (“structural heterogeneity”) referring to the “distribution of social groups within a specific geographic space or polity” and of individuals (“network heterogeneity”) referring to the type of their specific interlocutors. To a certain degree, structural heterogeneity is a condition for network heterogeneity (Scheufele et al. 2006: 732–735). Because structural heterogeneity is typical for modern societies, the concept can be linked to Lerner’s (1963) theory of modernization. As Scheufele and his colleagues have shown, there are significant positive correlations between structural heterogeneity (macro level), individual network heterogeneity (micro level) and the use of hard news, factual political knowledge and political participation (Scheufele et al. 2006). In the 2000 national election in the US nearly half of a representative sample reported networks in which everyone shared their candidate preference, one-fourth reported truly heterogeneous networks (Huckfeld, Mendez, and Osborn 2004) (see also the chapters by Wolling and Emmer and by Boomgaarden). Citizens exposed to heterogeneous messages in election develop ambivalent attitudes towards candidates (Huckfeld, Mendez, and Osborn 2004). Exposure to disagreement contributes “to people’s ability to generate reason, and in particular reasons who others might disagree with their own views” (Price, Capella, and Nir 2002: 95). On the other hand, especially frequent confrontation with opposite view reduces the intensity of a broad variety of political participation (Eveland and Hively 2009). In addition, the discussion of value loaden issues polarizes opinions of extreme participants (Wojcieszak 2011). Taken together, the few findings support the optimistic ideas of Mill and other theorists about the influence of deliberation on reasoned thinking. Nevertheless, the same findings raise doubts in the assumption that reasoned thinking necessarily stimulates political participation (see also the chapter by Becker and Scheufele).

3.3 The structure of political communication Assumptions regarding the structure of public communication are concerned with (1) the direction of the flow of communication and (2) the anatomy of public debates.

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The first concern theorizes as to whether communication can and should flow from top to bottom, from bottom to top, or horizontally. The second concern pertains to whether public debates realistically proceed through an exchange of thesis and antithesis or whether they are generally characterized by a dominant opinion. None of the philosophers discussed in this paper makes explicit statements regarding the flow of political communication from citizens to governments or from the government to citizens. Nevertheless, based on their general assumptions and from their statements to related issues, one can draw some informed conclusions regarding their views. As Rousseau believes in a possible identification of governors and governed political communication involves the horizontal flow of arguments in his version of democracy. Tocqueville and Mill intensively address the involvement of the average citizens into the public debate but their views differ remarkably. Tocqueville believes in top-down communication and regards the involvement of the masses as a threat to the quality of intellectual life. Lippmann and Hennis present similar perspectives; they believe that the bottom-up flow is limited to a small elite. As Lippmann argues, the press cannot improve this situation because the majority lacks interest and is unwilling to pay a reasonable price for excellent information (Lippmann 1961: 317–365). Schmitt posits that political communication must flow from top to bottom and that the goal of such communication is to gain the assent of the masses by any means possible. Therefore, decision-making by acclamation is a reasonable means of political communication and action. In contrast to Tocqueville, Mill believes that the masses are enlightened when they become involved in political debate: “There have been outstanding thinkers in an atmosphere of intellectual slavery, but there has never been an intellectual active population in such an atmosphere” (Mill 1974: 48). On the basis of Mill’s assumptions, one can conclude that there will be a significant flow of political communication from the masses to the decision-makers in the long run. In addition, according to Marcuse communication can and should flow from bottom to top, i.e. directly from individual citizens or via the media to those in power – at least to the extent that they still exist (Marcuse 1968). To a certain degree, Habermas holds a special position. In his early writings he created the impression that a bottom-up flow of political communication would be possible, given the appropriate economic conditions; in a more recent article, however, he has become more skeptical in this respect than he was in the 1960s (Habermas 1992, 2006). There are similarly marked differences with respect to the anatomy of public debates. Rousseau distinguishes between the General Will representing the public interest (volonté generale), and private interests (volonté des tous). According to Rousseau, even common people are difficult to deceive if each individual perceives him or herself as a member of a community. However, if special interests of powerful groups become dominant, then the formation of opinions that serve the public interest becomes endangered or impossible. Habermas generally considers that it

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Anatomy of public debates Direction of the flow of communication

One-sided dominating

Ambivalent

Top-down

Schmitt

Mill Tocqueville Lippmann Federalists

Horizontal Bottom-up

Schütz Hennis

Two-way, free of domination

Rousseau Habermas Marcuse

Fig. 3: Structure of political communication as viewed by theorists of political communication.

is possible to achieve discourse that is free of domination; in such discourse stronger arguments prevail or a consensus based on the best arguments of both sides is achieved. In contrast, according to Tocqueville the dominant opinions of the masses limit the expression of dissonant minority opinions. This notion is especially applicable if there is a consensus between the opinions of the masses and of the opinions expressed by the government. According to Schmitt, a consensus between the government and the mass is the ultimate goal of democracy in the classical sense. The position of Mill appears to be a mixture of the views of Tocqueville and Habermas. Like Habermas, Mill believes in the explanatory power of the two-way exchange of arguments. However, like Tocqueville, Mill emphasizes the psychological pressure to which the minority is exposed during important debates. Consequently, one cannot expect that such discussion will be absolutely free of domination even given the right to freedom of expression (Figure 3). Paul F. Lazarsfeld and his co-authors (1969) presented the most important empirical studies in the flow of communication. According to them information and opinions published by the mass media primarily reach opinion leaders, who are found in all social classes, and who pass them to the masses. The empirically based argument that leaders of public opinion exist in all social strata has been confirmed and clarified by several studies (Noelle-Neumann 1985; Weimann 1991). In addition, there are data from observational studies and surveys indicating that especially dominant members of various types of groups mention the media mostly passing information to their interlocutors (Kepplinger 2010; see also Eveland, Morey, and Hutchens 2011) (see also the chapter by Boomgaarden). However, it still remains unclear to what extent information and opinions that opinion leaders pass on to their interlocutors correspond with those which they received from the mass media. If they just pass on unchanged information and opinion, there is a top down flow, if they significantly change them (as Lazarsfeld and colleagues indicate), information and opinions flow horizontally. There is no empirical evidence for a remarkable flow of information or opinions from the bottom to the top. For example, from 1951 till 1995 the number of

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statements on political issues from individual citizens and interest groups published in the German quality press remained extremely low whereas the number of such statements from politicians more than doubled, already starting from a high level (Kepplinger 1998: 164–171). Similarly, covering President George W. Bush’s tax proposals on 2001 and 2003, major TV stations quoted mainly top politicians, experts and administration officials (74.9 percent). In contrast, unaffiliated citizens and public opinion polls were seldom quoted (Bell and Entman 2012) (see also the chapters by Jandura and Friedrich and by Hopmann). Even with the Internet, the chances of an individual to become heard by people with similar socioeconomic status are extremely small, not to speak about people in the upper social strata or decision makers in politics and business. Although it is obvious that information about the distribution of opinions in the general public influences political decisions, only aggregated opinions are visible. The visibility of a few individuals in traditional media and the Internet nearly has no practical relevance – it is only relevant as a symbol. A basic prerequisite for dialectical communication is the need for arguments and counter arguments to be weighed against one another in a balanced manner. Content analyses of the coverage of controversial issues raise doubts that this really is the case. Most editorial departments tend toward dissemination of information and opinions which support their editorial line (“instrumental actualization”). For example, in the coverage of the German press on the Sandinistas in Nicaragua a considerable amount of information supporting one side was accompanied by only an insignificant amount of information representing the other side. The representatives of the weaker side generally did not grapple with the information and opinions of the stronger side but instead switched to other aspects which were more favorable to their point of view (Kepplinger 1992). Similar phenomena can be seen in there porting of US media on nuclear energy (Lichter, Rothman, and Lichter 1986: 166–219), international crises (Herman and Chomsky 1988: 87– 295), and controversial accidents (Entman 1991) (see also the chapters by Robinson, by Aalberg, by Jandura and Friedrich, by Hopmann and by Moy, Johnson, and Barthel). Freedom of speech does not necessarily provide all participants with equal chances in public debates of controversial issues, because the supporters of minority opinions risk to become socially isolated. Therefore, they tend to conceal their opinions, which cause the majority to appear larger than it actually is and increases the pressure on the minority (spiral of silence) (Noelle-Neumann 1993: 37–57). If dominant opinions in media coverage contradict the dominant opinions in the public (“dual climate of opinion”), media coverage helps the minority to overcome the pressure felt from the majority and to succeed in the long run (NoelleNeumann 1993: 167–169) (see also the chapters by Arendt and Matthes and by Maurer).

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4 Summary and conclusions After surveying some basic theories of political communication, three general observations can be offered: First, those authors that embrace an optimistic concept of man, consider a harmonious society to be possible and desirable, and regard a complex communication structure as achievable are inclined to fundamentally criticize the existing forms of political communication and demand radical change. Marcuse and to a certain degree Habermas are examples for this type of authors. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky could also be mentioned. Authors who consider some of these assumptions as correct but other assumptions as false are inclined to offer a more moderate level of criticism of the existing conditions and to suggest more moderate demands for change. Mill and Lerner are examples of this type of theorists. Authors holding a more negative view of man, who consider a harmonious society and complex public communication to be illusions also tend to fundamentally criticize the existing patterns of political communication and call for radical change. The most prominent theorist of this type is Schmitt. Because the legitimacy of the criticism of the status quo and the demand for alternatives essentially depend on whether their explicit or implicit premises are correct, an analysis of the empirical foundations of such theories also provides insight into the substance of the criticism and the prescriptions of the theorists. If one examines the theories of political communication discussed here one can conclude, with the restrictions formulated at the outset of this paper, that authors who hold extreme positions are based on empirically untenable assumptions. Among these authors, one must consider not only Schmitt and Hennis but also Rousseau, Marcuse, Lerner, and Habermas. Accordingly, their criticism of the status quo should also be taken with reservations: these authors demand or suggest alternatives to justly perceived deficits. However, the alternatives that they articulate are not realistic and are therefore likely to provoke other deficits that are at least as serious as those that they were meant to correct. Legitimate criticism of the present does not substitute for realistic alternatives for the future. The elimination of such deficits is one of the main challenges facing theoretical and empirical communication research in current and future decades.

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Kolo, Castulus and Robin Meyer-Lucht. 2007. Erosion der Intensivleserschaft. Eine Zeitreihenanalyse zum Konkurrenzveralten von Tageszeitungen und Nachrichtensite. Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft 55: 513–533. Lazarsfeld, Paul F., Bernard Berelson and Hazel Gaudet. 1969. The People’s Choice: How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign. New York: Columbia University Press. First published New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce [1944]. Lerner, Daniel. 1963. The Passing of Traditional Society. Modernizing the Middle East. Glencoe: The Free Press. Lippmann, Walter. 1961. Public Opinion. New York: Macmillan Company. Lipset, Seymour M. 1959. Some social requisites of democracy: Economic development and political legitimacy. The American Political Science Review 53: 69–105. Lipset, Seymour M. 1994. The social requisites of democracy revisited. American Sociological Review 59: 1–22. Lipset, Seymour M. and Stein Rokkan. 1967. Cleavage structures, party systems, and voter alignments. An introduction. In: Seymour M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan (eds.), Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross National Perspectives, 1–64. New York: Free Press. Madison, James, Alexander Hamilton and John J. Jay. 1987. The Federalist Papers. Edited by Isaak Kramnick. London: Penguin Classics. First published [1788]. Marcuse, Herbert. 1968. Repressive Tolerance. In: Robert P. Wolff, Barrington Moore and Herbert Marcuse (eds.), A Critique of Pure Tolerance, 95–137. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Maier, Jürgen, Alexander Glantz and Severin Barthelt. 2009. Was wissen die Bürger über Politik? Zur Erforschung der politischen Kenntnisse in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1949 bis 2008. Zeitschrift für Parlamentsfragen 39: 561–579. Mill, John S. 2009. On Liberty. Stuttgart: Reclam. First published [1859]. Mutz, Diana C. 2002. Cross-cutting social networks: Testing democratic theory in practice. American Political Science Review 96: 111–126. Neumann, W. Russell. 1986. The Paradox of Mass Politics. Knowledge and Opinion in the American Electorate. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nir, Lilach. 2012. Cross-national differences in political discussion: Can political systems narrow deliberation gaps? Journal of Communication 62: 553–570. Noelle-Neumann, Elisabeth. 1993. The Spiral of Silence. Public Opinion – Our Social Skin. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Noelle-Neumann, Elisabeth. 1985. Identifying opinion leaders. European Research 13: 18–24. Norris, Pippa. 2003. Globale politische Kommunikation: Freie Medien, gutes Regieren und Wohlstandsentwicklung. In: Frank Esser and Barbara Pfetsch (eds.), Politische Kommunikation im internationalen Vergleich. Grundlagen, Anwendungen, Perspektiven, 135– 178. Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag. Price, Vincent, Joseph N. Cappella and Lilach Nir. 2002. Does disagreement contribute to more deliberate opinion? Political Communication 19: 95–112. Price, Monroe E., Susan Abbott and Libby Morgan (eds.). 2011. Measures of Press Freedom and Media Contributions to Development. New York: Peter Lang. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 2006. Gesellschaftsvertrag. Stuttgart: Reclam. First published [1762]. Scheufele, Dietram A., Bruce W. Hardy, Dominique Brossard, Israel S. Waismel-Manor and Erik Nisbet. 2006. Democracy based on difference: Examining the links between structural heterogeneity, heterogeneity of discussion networks, and democratic citizenship. Journal of Communication 56: 728–753. Schmitt, Carl. 1969. Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentarismus. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Schmitt, Carl. 1988. The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Schulz, Winfried. 2011. Politische Kommunikation. Theoretische Ansätze und Ergebnisse empirischer Forschung. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag.

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Manuel Puppis

3 The regulation of political communication Abstract: This chapter offers insights into the regulation of both political campaign communication and the regulation of media structures and content across the globe. The author first discusses conflicts between media regulation and media freedom as well as different possibilities for the regulation of media structure, infrastructure and content that are aimed at securing the surrounding conditions for democratic political communication. Then, the chapter reflects on the rationales for regulating campaigns before providing an overview of existing regulation in countries worldwide. Specifically, limits on contributions and expenditures, transparency requirements, public subsidies and other restrictions are touched upon. In the final section, the author draws several conclusions and examines the delicate influence of political actors and media organizations on the regulatory measures that directly affect themselves. Key Words: media regulation, media freedom, content regulation, media structure, campaign regulation, public subsidies, spending limits

1 Introduction Political communication encompasses all forms of communication by political actors, communication addressed to these actors as well as communication about these actors and their activities (McNair 2003: 4). While political communication research often focuses on individual behavior and content, it is important to remember that communication is shaped by political and media structures at the macro-societal and meso-societal level (Jarren and Donges 2011). Structures of the political system and of political organizations are essential conditions for the communication of political actors. The political system – including factors like the type of government system, party system or electoral system as well as regulatory requirements that apply to campaign organizations and their activities – affects the mode and type of campaigning. For instance, (semi-)presidential and majoritarian systems are said to offer more incentives for modern and post-modern campaigns than parliamentary systems and consensus systems. At the same time, campaign behavior is guided by the inner workings of political organizations which depend on party type, manifesto and available resources (Esser and Strömbäck 2012a: 296; Esser and Strömbäck 2012b: 317–318) (see also the chapters by Pfetsch and Esser, by de Vreese and Schuck and by Strömbäck and Kiousis). Structures of the media system and of media organizations are important conditions for the campaign strategies and activities of political actors as well (Esser

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and Strömbäck 2012a: 296). In addition, and even more fundamental, the nature of media systems and structures of media organizations are pivotal in explaining journalism and the production of media content. News is not just an individual but also an organizational product made in a larger societal environment (Becker and Vlad 2009: 59; Hirsch 1977: 17; McQuail 2005: 277; Puppis 2010a: 29). Different types of media (print vs. broadcasting; elite or quality vs. popular vs. tabloid press), different forms of institutionalization (public vs. commercial media; ownership type), the structure of news organizations and editorial policies are important conditions of news production by journalists (Esser and Strömbäck 2012b: 316–317, 321; Jarren and Donges 2011: 159–165, 261–274) (see also the chapter by Salgado). Thus, media structures affect the style and extent of political coverage. For instance, a commercialized media landscape is said to foster media depoliticization as well as negativity, interventionism and personalization (Esser and Strömbäck 2012b: 321). Yet media systems do not emerge naturally. Media regulation determines structures of media systems which for their part shape media content. Moreover, media content is subject to certain regulatory requirements and restrictions as well (Freedman 2008: 1; McChesney 2008: 131–132; Puppis 2010a: 30). This chapter aims to offer insights into both campaign regulation and the regulation of media structures and media content. Section 2 focuses on areas of media regulation relevant for political communication. After dealing with conflicts between media regulation and media freedom, possibilities to regulate media structure, infrastructure and content are discussed. Section 3 then discusses rationales for regulating campaigns before providing an overview of existing regulation. Specifically, limits on contributions and expenditures, transparency requirements, public subsidies and other restrictions are touched upon. The final section draws a conclusion and examines the delicate influence of political actors and media organizations on regulation that directly affects them.

2 Media regulation 2.1 Safeguarding the media’s contribution to democracy In modern democracies the mass media are the primary source of political information. They “provide an arena of debate and a set of channels for making policies, candidates, relevant facts and ideas more widely known as well as providing politicians, interest groups and agents of government with a means of publicity and influence” (McQuail 2005: 4). The mass media offer citizens access to information and a full range of different views so that they are able to make informed judgments about political issues (Habermas 2006: 412). Aside from informing citizens, the media play a role in mobilizing voters and controlling those in power (Esser and Strömbäck 2012b: 308; Feintuck and Varney 2006: 5; Freedman 2008: 7). This significance of mass media for democracy is one of the main rationales for media

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regulation. While some believe that a free marketplace of ideas is best achieved through competition, others argue that correcting market failure is not enough. Rather regulation going beyond the economic that aims at diversity is seen as necessary in order to guarantee that media contribute to the well-functioning of democracy (Feintuck and Varney 2006: 55–65; Freedman 2008: 5–10; Humphreys 1996: 111–116; Napoli 2001: 24–26; Puppis 2010a: 71–90). At first sight, it might appear paradoxical to use media regulation to enhance media performance. After all, media freedom – one of the cornerstones of democracy – would appear to militate against regulation. Yet “effective communication depends on effective regulation of communication” (Feintuck and Varney 2006: 56). In this view, only regulation going beyond the economic ensures that the media act in accordance with democratic principles instead of potentially undermining them. In commercial media systems, the main source of pressure on media content is not necessarily government but concentrated private media ownership that seeks success with advertisers: Media freedom is restricted by communication markets because individuals are treated as costumers and not as citizens (Freedman 2008: 125; Keane 1991: 89–91). It goes without saying that independence of the media from government interference is essential for democracies. This is the main reason why regulation mostly deals with media structures. By shaping media structure policy-makers intend to influence media performance in desired ways and to facilitate that the media better serve their public interest objectives (McQuail 1992: 95; Napoli 2001: 138). Aside from statutory regulation, self- and co-regulation play an important role in the media sector. While self-regulation involves an industry-level organization setting rules and standards relating to the conduct of the media (Black 1996: 26– 27; Gunningham and Rees 1997: 364–365), co-regulation refers to mandated selfregulation or self-regulation with some oversight by government (HBI/EMR 2006; Jarren et al. 2002; Latzer et al. 2002; Schulz and Held 2004). In democracies, these non-statutory forms of regulation are considered essential for reconciling media regulation with media freedom. At the same time, media regulation takes place on different levels. National regulation was complemented by international cooperation of nation-states early on (Ó Siochrú and Girard 2002). And in Europe, regional integration gave rise to a whole new level of regulation with organizations like the European Union (EU) and the Council of Europe. Additionally, transnational cooperation between nation-states, corporations and civil society organizations is gaining in importance, for instance when it comes to the Internet (Kleinwächter 2008). The concept of media governance encompasses these different forms and levels of regulation (Puppis 2010b: 138). Yet it is important to remember that historically different models of media regulation for print, common carrier and broadcasting have developed (Pool 1983). While this divergence of regulatory regimes is not a necessary consequence of technology (Cuilenburg and McQuail 2003: 191), it heavily shapes media regulation

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to this day, limiting the role of government with respect to press regulation and legitimizing broadcasting regulation.

2.2 An overview of media regulation In the following, media regulation relevant for political communication will be discussed in more detail. Obviously, no regulation is adequate for the media sector as a whole. On the one hand, the print, common carrier and broadcasting models of media regulation are traditionally distinguished. While the print model for the press is one of freedom from any statutory regulation, and the common carrier model for telecommunications is limited to regulation of infrastructure, broadcasting has been subject to regulation by the state from the beginning (Cuilenburg and McQuail 2003: 190–191; Pool 1983). On the other hand, following Napoli (2008: 2974), it is useful to differentiate between the regulation of media structure, infrastructure and content (see Table 1). While statutory regulation prevails in many structural areas (e.g. there is no self-regulation of media ownership), self- and coregulation prove to be especially important with respect to content, for instance with respect to protection of minors or journalism ethics (Puppis 2010b: 141–142).

Tab. 1: Domains of media regulation.

Media Structure

Infrastructure Media Content

Statutory Regulation

Self- and Co-Regulation

– – – – – – – –

no self- or co-regulation

formation of regulatory agencies public service broadcasting press subsidies regulation of ownership concentration must carry obligations access to the Internet editorial content political advertising

no self- or co-regulation – editorial content

2.2.1 Regulation of media structure In broadcasting and telecommunications, regulation is mostly carried out by socalled regulatory agencies that are formally independent from government (e.g., the Federal Communications Commission in the US or Ofcom in the UK). However, by deciding upon the competencies of regulators and appointing their boards, governments and parliaments are able to shape media regulation as well (Puppis 2010a: 110–114; Robillard 1995).

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The institutionalization of public service broadcasters is a main element of structural regulation in many Western European countries and beyond. For long, public service broadcasters had a monopoly. Today, thirty years after the introduction of private broadcasting, public broadcasters still have a market share of between 30 and 50 percent in most countries (Puppis 2010a: 213). The normative idea behind public service is to have a broadcaster that serves the public interest “by meeting the important communication needs of society and its citizens” (McQuail 2005: 179). Given increasingly commercialized media systems and modern campaigning strategies, public service broadcasting is hoped to “keep the torch burning for the role of reasoned argument in electoral choice” by “investing heavily in both news and current affairs resources, seeking substance and not just spectacle in political conflicts, and resisting the temptation to tell only the tactical story” (Blumler 1993: 406). An organization that is able to achieve these goals has to meet certain structural conditions. In essence, a public service broadcaster has a public remit, is to some degree publicly funded, is independent from government and has to be accountable to society (McQuail 2005: 180). While some countries use tax revenues to fund public service, in most a license fee exists (European Audiovisual Observatory 2010: 16–243; Puppis 2010a: 220). Having a public service broadcaster also requires the appointment of its board by political institutions. More recently, debates about the remit of public service intensified due to the growing importance of the Internet. In both academia and politics it is discussed whether public service broadcasting should be allowed to develop into public service media (e.g., Lowe and Bardoel 2008). Public media are not the only ones benefitting from public money. On the one hand, commercial as well as community broadcasters may receive public funding in exchange for the production of certain programs. On the other hand, many countries have a long tradition of press subsidies. Such subsidies aim at strengthening the financial situation of newspapers in order to counteract declining circulation and advertising revenues. Some form of indirect support (e.g., reduced VAT or preferential postal rates) is granted in most European countries and in various Latin American (e.g., Mexico, Argentina, Brazil) and Asian countries (e.g., China, India, South Korea, Pakistan, Singapore). Several Western European countries also implemented direct subsidies (e.g., Austria, Belgium, France, Italia, Portugal and the Nordic countries). The latter tend to be selective and are directed towards financially weak papers (Fernández Alonso et al. 2006; Holtz-Bacha 1994; Humphreys 1996: 102–107; Puppis 2010a: 178–184; WAN-IFRA 2010: 1211–1218). Concentration of media ownership is suspected to have not only economic effects but also implications for the diversity of media content. It is possible to distinguish horizontal (within the same market), vertical (different stages of the supply chain) and diagonal or cross-media concentration (Doyle 2002: 22–23). Most research has focused on the consequences of concentration for local news, the political function of the media and access to various voices and viewpoints

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(McQuail 2005: 232). While there is no doubt that media structure has an effect on media performance, the relationship seems to be more complicated than is usually thought (Aslama, Hellman, and Sauri 2004: 113). As competition law (merger control) is generally considered insufficient to safeguard diversity of content, mediaspecific regulation of ownership concentration has been adopted in many countries. For instance, it is possible to limit the number of licenses a company may hold, to limit financial participation in media companies, to implement ceilings for market shares a media company may reach on viewer or advertising markets or to restrict the number of media sectors a company is allowed to be active in (Puppis 2010a: 277–280; Sánchez-Tabernero and Carvajal 2002; Trappel and Meier 1998; Ward 2004). Regulation varies widely across countries.

2.2.2 Regulation of Infrastructure Many countries have implemented so-called must-carry obligations that require cable, satellite or terrestrial network operators to carry the signal of certain stations. Mainly the availability of public service channels and minority programs to all households is considered essential for safeguarding pluralism, freedom of expression and the provision of valuable content otherwise not available to all citizens (Gorini and Eijk 2006: 194; Feintuck and Varney 2006: 27–28). A second aspect of infrastructure regulation that touches the political function of the media is the access of citizens to the Internet. In order to prevent a digital divide, countries may adopt universal service obligations that cover broadband access, subsidize the construction of next generation access networks or stipulate net neutrality (Napoli 2001: 178–179; Marsden 2007; Simpson 2012). These different regulatory measures try to ensure that citizens have the possibility to inform themselves and take part in political discussions online (see also the chapters by Boomgarden and by Wolling and Emmer).

2.2.3 Regulation of media content Looking at content regulation, it is possible to distinguish between negative (content restrictions) and positive regulation (content requirements). While negative regulation excludes certain types of content or allows them only subject to certain conditions (e.g., in order to protect minors or human dignity), positive regulation prescribes certain content in order to preserve and promote diversity, freedom of expression and pluralism (Puppis 2010a: 241–242). Moreover, regulation may apply to editorial content or advertising (see Table 2). Media coverage is often called “free media” because it allows political actors to appear in the media without paying for it. In contrast, political advertising which allows to deliver messages without

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Tab. 2: Regulation of content.

Editorial content

Advertising

Positive Regulation

Negative Regulation

– general requirements (e.g. diversity, fairness) – journalism ethics – free airtime

– blackout provisions

– ban of political advertising – restrictions to amount and/ or content of advertising

interference of journalists or political opponents is often referred to as “paid media” (Holtz-Bacha and Kaid 2006: 3; Plasser and Plasser 2002: 205). Statutory regulation of editorial content needs to be well-considered and implemented with caution as it affects media freedom. Content requirements that stipulate a diversity of viewpoints, political balance and fairness in news coverage, current affairs programs, talk shows and debates are considered essential by many scholars (Plasser and Plasser 2002: 205; Semetko 1996: 260; de Vreese 2010: 124) (see also the chapters by Jandura and Friedrich and by Hopmann). Most countries adopted such fair balance rules for broadcasting (see Table 3). Content requirements for public service broadcasters tend to be more elaborated than for commercial channels: Principles of impartiality and democratic pluralism became a fundamental ideal of public service broadcasting (Humphreys 1996: 114–115; McQuail 2005: 179–180). Moreover, blackout provisions that ban news coverage of the campaign and of polls in the days before an election or a referendum are possible (Semetko 1996: 259–260). The idea behind such content restrictions is to give voters time to reflect on the campaign, prevent confusion and counteract poll-driven horse race journalism (Gauja 2010: 133; Plasser and Plasser 2002: 156). Such provisions exist in 28 of the 53 countries investigated by Plasser and Plasser (2002) (see Table 3). In a growing number of countries so-called press or media councils try to ensure that the media adhere to ethical standards. These self-regulatory organizations focus on areas where there tends to be no statutory regulation, e.g. the responsibility of journalists in opinion formation, truthfulness, fair means in gathering and presenting information or protecting the rights of sources (Laitila 1995: 538; Puppis 2009; Tambini, Leonardi, and Marsden 2008: 68–70). In addition to editorial content, political actors can present themselves to voters using advertising. While newspapers are not subject to regulation in most democracies, in broadcasting both regulation that restricts the possibility to purchase advertising and that allocates free airtime to political organizations exist. Political advertising may also be prohibited completely or not be regulated at all (Zellweger, Serdült, and Renfer 2010: 202). Numerous countries allow political parties to buy advertising in broadcasting, both during and between campaigns (see Table 3). Yet there exist various rules and

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Tab. 3: Overview of content regulation in broadcasting. Editorial Content – Fair Balance Rules – Ban on publication of opinion polls

100 % (18/18 countries) 53 % (28/53 countries)

Advertising – Ban on political advertising – Free/subsidized airtime for parties – Free/subsidized airtime for candidates

28 % (19/67 countries) 70 % (115/165 countries) 50 % (83/165 countries)

Sources: Öhman (2012); Plasser and Plasser (2002: 156–159, 218–221); de Vreese (2010: 125).1

limitations. First, only few countries allow for advertising time to be purchased on public channels. Second, the total amount of airtime and the frequency of ads are mostly restricted (e.g. equal time provisions or proportionately to previous election results and/or the number of seats a party holds in parliament). Third, style and content of political spots may be regulated as well. Several countries forbid negative campaigning, personal attacks, hate speech or the publication of misleading statements (Plasser and Plasser 2002: 233; Gauja 2010: 133, 136). Free or subsidized airtime for political parties or candidates during campaign periods is made available in 70 percent and 50 percent of countries respectively (see Table 3). This is mostly the case in countries with a strong public service broadcasting tradition. However, in some countries free airtime is also provided on commercial stations (e.g., in Italy, the UK and Canada). Broadcasting time is mostly allocated based on the principle of equal time; in some countries the performance in the last election, the number of candidates running in the current election or a combination is used (Öhman 2012: 28). Looking at referendum campaigns, it is possible to distinguish between countries that grant free airtime to political parties only (e.g., the Netherlands, France, Slovakia or Argentina) while others make time available to all campaign organizations, including civil society groups (e.g., Portugal, Poland, Montenegro, Brazil, Panama or Columbia) (Zellweger, Serdült, and Renfer 2010: 220–222). The United States clearly stand out with their openness towards political advertising in broadcasting. In comparison, the situation in Western Europe is rather restrictive (Plasser and Plasser 2002: 216). There are even countries that do not have electoral advertising on television (paid of free airtime) at all, e.g. Switzerland. This may be one reason why TV advertising is much more frequently investigated in the US than in many other countries.

1 Newer data are available for selected countries worldwide (Holtz-Bacha and Kaid 2006: 9–10) and for Latin America (Gutiérrez and Zovatto 2011: 560–570).

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3 Campaign regulation 3.1 Generating a level-playing-field and fighting corruption The regulation of political communication is not limited to the mass media’s coverage of politics. Rather, campaign organizations may be subject to specific regulation as well. Campaigns involve communication flows between political actors, the media and citizens (Esser and Strömbäck 2012a: 289). While research predominately focuses on election campaigns, campaigning is a larger phenomenon that also includes votes on referenda and taking positions regarding specific policies (Kaid 2008: 558–559). This implies that not only political parties but also interest groups and social movements form campaign organizations. All these political actors strategically aim at shaping public opinion for or against certain policies by way of planned, coordinated communication efforts, either through direct or through indirect and mediated channels of communication (Esser and Strömbäck 2012a: 289; de Vreese 2010: 119) (see also the chapters by de Vreese and Schuck, by Strömbäck and Kiousis and by Kiousis and Strömbäck). The regulation of campaigning touches upon the “power of government to set the rules of electoral competition and especially to provide public funds for use in the electoral process” (Alexander 1989: 9). Any regulation in this field is highly controversial as it is confronted with a conflict of goals between equality and freedom (Nassmacher 2001: 15). It can either be seen as a necessity to prevent both an unfair advantage of those candidates with privileged access to money and a dependence of elected officials on contributors or as a wrongful limit to freedom of electoral candidates to disseminate speech (van Biezen 2010: 72; Cutler and Witten 1986: 9; Fogg, Molutsi, and Tjernström 2003: 170; Gauja 2010: 131; Katz 1996: 124). As Hopkin (2004) shows, the two positions can be traced back to the theory of democracy one adopts. While populist theories of democracy emphasize the question of political equality and ask for a level playing field, liberal theories are less worried about social and economic inequalities entering the political arena and put a higher emphasis on freedom from state intervention. Consequently, these two broadly accepted strands of democracy theory point to different regulatory solutions. In the last decades, campaign regulation has been attracting growing interest. This is in part due to structural changes within party systems. Most importantly, in Western Europe the mass party model that has traditionally been successful in connecting parties with large parts of the adult population has increasingly become unsustainable. A steady decline in party membership, partly intensified by new competitors like citizen initiatives and interest groups that challenge the unique representation of the people by parties, reduced the traditional income base of party membership fees (van Biezen 2010: 67–68; Hopkin 2004: 631; Katz 1996: 117, 120; Plasser and Plasser 2002: 161). At the same time, due to both an

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increased professionalization regarding staff and consultants and the use of advanced campaign techniques, the financial needs of political parties increased dramatically (Plasser and Plasser 2002: 161). With their steady stream of income by membership fees gone, new types of parties with alternative forms of funding replaced the traditional mass parties rooted in a particular segment of society. Today, privately funded elite parties and subsidized cartel parties prevail. While elite parties are funded either by donations of wealthy individuals that hope to benefit of future policies or by wealthy candidates themselves, cartel parties depend on public subsidies. As a form of collective action, major parties form a cartel that secures state funding and solves the problem of declining mass participation (Hopkin 2004: 632–635; Katz 1996: 120). In the absence of bottom-up financing from the grass roots, some parties will give more prominence to the role of private money, while for others the resources of the state will acquire more significance. Externally financed elite parties come to rely on private donations from individuals or private business to fund their increasingly capital-intensive campaigns, while the self-financing of wealthy candidates such as Ross Perot, Silvio Berlusconi or Thaksin Shinawatra might equally become an increasingly prevalent phenomenon in modern democracies. Cartel parties, on the other hand, come to depend primarily on the subsidies provided by the state (van Biezen 2010: 68).

Yet generating a level playing field and ensuring that parties confronted with increasing campaign costs and declining party membership survive and are able to perform the role of an intermediary between citizens and state is not the sole rationale behind campaign regulation. A second reason is the influence of interested money and incidents of finance scandal and corruption which have led to rising popular disengagement, disillusionment and cynicism with politics (Alexander 2001: 197; van Biezen 2010: 65; Fisher and Eisenstadt 2004: 621; Fogg, Molutsi, and Scarrow 2007: 201; Gauja 2010: 162; Nassmacher 2003a: 9; Fogg, Molutsi, and Tjernström 2000: 169–170). A third reason for regulating political finance is the empowerment of voters as it is argued that rules regulating the transparency of campaign finance might help voters to make more informed decisions (Fogg, Molutsi, and Tjernström 2003: 170–171).

3.2 An overview of campaign regulation As campaigning is expensive, political finance is a central area of regulation. It encompasses limits on contributions and/or expenditures of political actors, transparency or disclosure requirements as well as direct and indirect forms of public subsidies (van Biezen 2010). It is also possible to distinguish between regulation concerning political parties and candidates (Öhman 2012: 16). In addition to political finance, campaign regulation may also restrict the period and the conduct of campaigning. Existing research is mostly descriptive and systematical large-N comparative studies are a more recent phenomenon (Scarrow 2007: 194–195). The

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Tab. 4: Election campaign regulation in international comparison. Limits on Contributions and Expenditures – – – – –

Ban on some sources of donations Ceiling on contributions to parties Ceiling on contributions to candidates Ceiling on expenditures for parties Ceiling on expenditures for candidates

55 % 31 % 31 % 30 % 44 %

(61/111 (53/171 (51/167 (51/170 (75/169

countries) countries) countries) countries) countries)

Transparency Requirements – Disclosure of contributions – Disclosure of expenditures

53 % (59/111 countries) 48 % (53/111 countries)

Public Subsidies – Direct subsidies – Indirect subsidies

67 % (116/172 countries) 68 % (110/162 countries)

Other Restrictions – Limitation of campaign period

37 % (19/52 countries)

Sources: Austin and Tjernström (2003); Öhman (2012); Plasser and Plasser (2002: 155).2

most recent and comprehensive study by Öhman (2012) looks at election campaign regulation in up to 180 countries worldwide and is based on earlier work by Austin and Tjernström (2003). Analyses of referendum campaign regulation are rare. Only a study by Zellweger, Serdült, and Renfer (2010) compares regulation in 41 European and Latin American countries. The following overview draws mainly on results of these studies (see Table 4).

3.2.1 Limits on contributions and expenditures The regulation of private funding of political actors can take the form of contribution or expenditure limits. Contribution limits are intended to prevent that wealthy individuals buy campaign organizations or candidates. Such limits include prohibitions of contributions from certain sources (e.g. anonymous donations, foreign contributions or corporate donations), restrictions of the acceptable amount of money from single donors or ceilings on the total sum of private donations (Alexander 2001: 199; van Biezen 2010: 72–74; Katz 1996: 124, 127; Nassmacher 2001: 27;

2 The study by Öhman (2012) offers an introduction to the Political Finance Database of the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) which is available at http:// www.idea.int/political-finance/. As the database is constantly updated, this chapter uses the most recent available data (accessed on August 3rd 2012) which sometimes differ from the numbers reported in the study.

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2003a: 10). “As private contributions may tempt the recipient to privilege the interests of its donors over those of the general public, there is a danger that certain private interests rather than the general public interest will guide the conduct of parties and elected officials” (van Biezen 2010: 74). Comparing contributions limits shows that 55 percent of countries ban contributions from some sources and 31 percent set a ceiling on how much a single donor can contribute (see Table 4). While limits are almost non-existent in Africa and Oceania, they are more common in Europe (Öhman 2012: 10). For referendum campaigns, only 3 of 41 countries adopted any contribution limits (Zellweger, Serdült, and Renfer 2010: 217–218). In the United States, contribution limits have been particularly controversial as they are often perceived as a restriction of free speech. The Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 caps the amount of contributions by individuals and political action committees (PACs) to political candidates. The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 raised these limits but also attempted to restrict so-called “soft money” donations to political parties, i.e., contributions made to parties for purposes not directly related to election campaigns (Grant 2005: 82; Kaid 2008: 562). More recently, the US Supreme Court held in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) that restricting corporate and union political expenditures is unconstitutional and the US Court of Appeals decided in the case of SpeechNow.org v. FEC (2010) that contributions to so-called Super PACs (PACs that make only independent expenditures but no contributions to candidates) cannot be limited. In contrast to contribution limits, expenditure limits are intended to prevent candidates, parties and other campaign organizations from buying elections or referenda (van Biezen 2010: 72; Katz 1996: 124–126). Aside from concerns regarding the disproportion of funds among campaigners, the rising costs of modern campaigns have also been a reason for considering limits on expenditure (Alexander 2001: 198). Expenditure limits may either restrict the total amount a campaign organization or a candidate is allowed to spend or limit the amount spent in particular ways, including the possibility that some forms of spending will be banned altogether (van Biezen 2010: 72; Katz 1996: 125). In order to be effective, expenditure limits need to cover associated organizations that have close ties to registered political parties or candidates (e.g., PACs) as well. Otherwise, these organizations may be used as investment vehicles to circumvent the spirit of the law (Gauja 2010: 189; Nassmacher 2003b: 142). Expenditure limits prove to be more controversial than contribution limits as they may be seen as an unrightful restriction on freedom of speech. In the United States, the Supreme Court found spending ceilings to be unconstitutional in the case of Buckley v. Valeo (1976) except when imposed as a condition of acceptance by a candidate of public funding (Alexander 2001: 198–199; Grant 2005: 79; Kaid 2008: 562). Restrictions on campaign expenditures are more common in Europe (van Biezen 2010: 74). Comparative research shows that spending limits of some

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kind exist in 30 percent of countries for parties and 44 percent of countries for candidates (see Table 4). Regarding referendum campaigns only 3 countries in Europe and Latin America have spending ceilings in place (Zellweger, Serdült, and Renfer 2010: 217–218).

3.2.2 Transparency requirements Transparency requirements aim at enhancing the accountability of political actors by providing information about the level and sources of contributions as well as the level and use of expenditures (van Biezen 2010: 76). Disclosure rules are thought to fight potential corruption or influence buying and to empower citizens by letting them know who backs a political actor. “Light thrown upon transactions involving money illuminates political processes and behavior and improves our understanding of the flows of influence and power” (Alexander 1989: 10). Financial disclosure is widely supported, even in countries where limits on contributions and expenditures are rejected. Quite often disclosure rules are used as a substitute for limits on expenditure and contributions. Especially “those who contest the feasibility or desirability of other forms of party finance regulation” (Fogg, Molutsi, and Tjernström 2003: 170–171) argue that transparency requirements are sufficient. However, such rules may very well supplement ceilings and bans in a useful way (Katz 1996: 128). The effectiveness of transparency requirements depends on several conditions. First, the information must be available in a timely fashion, i.e. before elections. Second, reports need to be detailed and comprehensive so that the information can really be used to scrutinize political actors. Third, reports have to be subject to independent audit, for instance by a national election management body or a regulatory agency. Finally, and most importantly, for disclosure requirements to have any effect, independent media and civil society organizations that are ready and able to bring the information to the attention of the electorate are needed (Katz 1996: 128–129; Fogg, Molutsi, and Tjernström 2003: 172). Looking at the regulation in place, a majority of countries has implemented disclosure rules of some kind for election campaigns (see Table 4). Of the long established democracies in the Western hemisphere only Austria, Sweden and Switzerland do without any transparency requirements (van Biezen 2010: 85–89). Yet in 25 percent of cases (40/162 countries) there is no body responsible for examining financial reports and only half of countries require reporting from both parties and candidates, thus opening up potential loopholes to circumvent regulation (Öhman 2012: 38, 41). Given the wide proliferation of transparency requirements for parties during elections, it seems rather surprising that only six out of 41 analyzed countries feature any regulation (Zellweger, Serdült, and Renfer 2010: 217– 218).

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3.2.3 Public subsidies As a result of both concerns with the dominance of private money in the political process and raising financial needs of parties, direct public funding is now wellestablished across the globe (Alexander 1989: 19; van Biezen 2010: 82; Fisher and Eisenstadt 2004: 621). The development of new campaign technologies has been associated with an explosion in the cost of political campaigns. (…) In the face of these dramatic increases in perceived need, and the failure of membership-generated income to keep pace, many parties have turned to the state for financial support, arguing that effective democracy requires vigorous parties and campaigns. Public support has also been justified by claiming that the alternative is excessive dependence of parties and politicians on contributors (Katz 1996: 129–130)

The provision of direct public funding forces the state to decide which candidates or parties are eligible to receive support and upon the allocation of money. Political actors can either receive equal funding or subsidies may be calculated proportionally to the parliamentary strength of a respective party at the most recent elections (vote shares or seats in legislature) (Katz 1996: 130–131; Öhman 2012: 26–27; Plasser and Plasser 2002: 159). However, since party activities are not restricted to campaigning but also encompass parliamentary work, the maintenance of the party organization as well as research and other assistance to the leadership and representatives of the party, it is also possible to provide constant support to parties instead of subsidies during elections or referenda (Alexander 1989: 13; van Biezen 2010: 80; Fisher and Eisenstadt 2004: 620; Katz 1996: 132; Pinto-Duschinsky 2002: 70). A majority of democracies worldwide (67 %) have direct public funding of parties in place (see Table 4). Looking at Western Europe, only Switzerland does without subsidies. In the United States, public financing at the federal level is only offered for presidential candidates during both the primaries and the general election. Candidates that agree to take this money must adhere to an overall spending limit in exchange (Kaid 2008: 562; Jones 2008: 77–78). Provisions for how public funding should be used (“earmarking”) exist in 52 percent of cases (59 out of 112 countries) (Öhman 2012: 27). With respect to referendum campaigns, Zellweger, Serdült, and Renfer (2010: 215–217) show that only six countries allocate money to campaign organizations or to official “yes” or “no” camps. In contrast, seven countries prohibit the use of public funds for referendum campaigns. Less controversial than direct public funding are indirect forms of support granted to political actors. The preparation of an official voters’ registry list by public authorities, the ability to deduct political contributions against the income tax, tax exemptions for parties, the provision of services without charge (e.g., free use of meeting halls or free airtime on radio and TV for campaign purposes) and artificially low prices (e.g. reduced postal rates for direct mail or regulations for broadcasters to make time available at below-commercial rates) all indirectly bene-

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fit candidates and political parties (van Biezen 2010: 80; Gauja 2010: 155–156; Katz 1996: 130; Jones 2008: 78; Nassmacher 2001: 26, 2003a: 9).3 Most countries (68 %) have provisions for some indirect public funding of parties (see Table 4). In three countries, indirect support is also granted for referendum campaign organizations (Zellweger, Serdült, and Renfer 2010: 216).

3.2.4 Other restrictions Campaign regulation might also limit the official campaign period. Such limits are of relevance when it comes to free airtime provisions, access to political advertising in broadcasting and expenditure limits (Plasser and Plasser 2002: 155). “In some systems, the applicability of spending limits is triggered by the calendar – either on a fixed date or a specified number of days before the election will be held. In others, the trigger is some action by the candidate or the party” (Katz 1996: 126). The factual power of such limitations is at least doubtful, as unofficially campaigns often start well before the official announcement of the election date. Nevertheless, in 19 out of 52 democracies the campaign period is limited (see Table 4). Finally, additional restrictions exist in individual countries. To name just a few examples, the frequency, timing and conduct of campaign rallies and speeches as well as the size and content of posters and newspaper ads may be regulated as is the case in Japan, or there may be detailed provisions regarding the distribution of advertising materials as in South Korea (Plasser and Plasser 2002: 137–144; Esser and Strömbäck 2012a: 297).

4 Discussion and conclusion This chapter shows that various options exist for regulating the media and campaigns. A variety of regulatory measures that affect media structure, infrastructure and content try to guarantee that the media enable citizens to make informed judgments about political issues. Institutionalizing non-commercially funded public service media, supporting the press and limiting ownership concentration enhances structural diversity which is believed to lead to a greater diversity of content (Napoli 2001: 133). Must-carry and universal service obligations are a safeguard that citizens have access not only to commercial services. And the few general requirements regarding editorial content and provisions for political advertis3 Indirect subsidies that involve access to media are dealt with in section 2 as such regulation applies to the media directly.

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ing aim at generating a level playing field. Such regulation of the media is crucial for campaigns: Modern and post-modern campaign styles are argued to be more likely in media systems characterized by a predominance of commercial television channels and in countries with unrestricted access to paid advertising or substantial amounts of free airtime than in media systems with strong public service media and rigid restrictions on political advertising (Esser and Strömbäck 2012a: 296– 297; Plasser and Plasser 2002: 233, 237). While there are many countries with almost no campaign regulation at all, other states directly and/or indirectly grant public support, require the disclosure of donors and the amount of money spent, or even cap contributions and expenditures of campaign organizations. Plasser and Plasser (2002: 137–152) thus distinguish between and minimally (e.g., the US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada or Switzerland), moderately (e.g., Taiwan, Russia or Latin American and many Western European countries) and strictly (e.g., Japan, South Korea, Turkey or Israel) regulated campaign environments. As with media regulation, regulation of campaigns helps in explaining campaign strategies: Esser and Strömbäck (2012a: 297) argue that “modern and post-modern campaign practices are more likely in minimally regulated environments”. Rules are one thing – their enforcement is an entirely different matter. Despite the widespread use of campaign regulation there seems to be little satisfaction with regulatory impact. Due to the fact that regulation not always applies to both political parties and candidates, loopholes that allow for circumventing regulation exist (Öhman 2012: 51). Yet no matter how detailed the regulations, enforcement mechanisms and meaningful sanctions are needed in order for such rules to have any effect on the behavior of political actors. It can even be argued that a lack of enforcement reinforces the disenchantment and cynicism towards the political system (van Biezen 2010: 76; Fogg, Molutsi, and Tjernström 2003: 172). Even if there is political will to enforce existing regulation, enforcement agencies are often unequipped and thus fall short of being able to satisfactorily monitor implementation (Fogg, Molutsi, and Tjernström 2003: 171). Donors and campaign organizations are frequently unwilling to comply with the spirit of legislation and tempted to find ways of circumventing restrictions. Moreover, regulation could not put an end to the arms race of campaign spending (Fisher and Eisenstadt 2004: 623; Grant 2005: 85; Pinto-Duschinsky 2002: 80–81; Plasser and Plasser 2002: 173–174). Public subsidies, for their part, did not succeed in preventing corruption and illegal finance practices. Parties will not stop looking for private money because of public subsidies and do their best to outspend their opponents. Moreover, public funding does not necessarily lead to greater equality in the electoral contest but has also been used to privilege major parties (Gauja 2010: 163; Fisher and Eisenstadt 2004: 621; Pinto-Duschinsky 2002: 78–79; Plasser and Plasser 2002: 174). In the end, it is essential to realize that both campaign regulation and media regulation touch upon vested interests of powerful actors. Policy-makers are di-

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rectly affected by the very rules they adopt. First, any regulation of campaigns is constantly under suspicion that political actors try to adopt policies that benefit themselves. For instance, public subsidies to parties are often criticized as selfservice and politicians might have no incentive to implement effective disclosure rules and spending caps that constrain their own campaign activities (Grant 2005: 84; Fisher and Eisenstadt 2004: 623; Nassmacher 2001: 10). Second, politicians have a self-interest in media regulation. It is not only important for them to be featured in the media and to have favorable conditions for their advertising campaigns but they might also try to exert party political influence on the media (Jarren 1998: 617). On a more general level, the media’s “potential for social and political influence places communications policymakers in a position to have a powerful indirect effect – via their political decisions – on social and political attitudes, beliefs, cognitions, and values” (Napoli 2001: 14). As with politicians, the media also have an interest in media regulation. In contrast to pluralist perspectives on politics and policy which argue that there is no clear center of dominant influence on the policy-making process and that no single interest group possesses enough power to impose a solution (Dahl 1961: 168), the media themselves take an increasingly active role in policy-making (Freedman 2008: 87). On the one hand, media organizations rely on lobbying efforts to prevent regulation that would interfere with their economic interests (Freedman 2008: 93–97). In addition, many politicians are quite reluctant when it comes to stricter media regulation as they have no desire to “antagonize powerful newspaper proprietors or media commentators and risk unfavourable coverage” (Freedman 2008: 88). On the other hand, and even more significant when focusing on political communication, a coverage of media policy in the public interest may be at risk. Obviously, the media always distribute chances for attention (and influence) with their decisions to cover or not to cover a certain political issue (Habermas 2006: 419). However, the media might deviate rather strongly from the ideal of acting as a “neutral” intermediary between citizens and the political system that channels input into the political arena and communicates output to the public when it comes to media policy (Mancini and Swanson 1996: 9; Mazzoleni and Schulz 1999: 250; Puppis 2010a: 43).4 As has been shown for other areas, the self-interests of media owners take precedence over the public interest as soon as the economic interests of media owners are directly affected (Kepplinger 2000). Thus, news organizations rarely scrutinize themselves, their parent organizations or organization-advertiser business relations (Turow 1994: 35). For instance, ownership influences the coverage of the media company’s business development (Herkman 2004) and of media mergers (Beck 2001; Kemner, Scherer, and Weinacht 2008). Similarly,

4 Another special case that might damage editorial independence occurs when media owners develop political ambitions and use their media for their own career (Habermas 2006: 421).

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it can be expected that news coverage of media policy will be biased as well. Indeed there is a conflict between the stance of media organizations towards particular laws or regulatory measures and their coverage of these issues (Freedman 2008: 87). The few existing studies found systematic evidence that newspapers owned by companies with substantial investment in broadcasting were more likely to favor regulatory change beneficial to broadcasters (Gilens and Hertzman 2000; Pratte and Whiting 1986; Puppis, Zwicky, and Künzler 2009; Snider and Page 1997; Weiß 1985, 1986, 1988). The media “are in an ideal position to control the public perception, or lack thereof, of any possible debate regarding the control and structure of the media. The media have shown two basic responses to efforts to challenge their legitimacy. First, they simply ignore the issues or provide it minimal coverage. (…) Second, the (…) media distort the issues to suit their own purposes” (McChesney 2008: 349–350). This is where we leave the observable first face of power and focus on “means by which alternative options are marginalized, conflicting values delegitimized, and rival interests derecognized” (Freedman 2010: 347). By treating media policy as a non-issue, the media control the decisionmaking agenda. This second face of power limits “the scope of the political process to public considerations of only those issues that are comparatively innocuous” (Bachrach and Baratz 1962: 948) to media organizations. Consequently, policy inaction and non-decision-making suppress new regulation in the public interest (Freedman 2008: 29). Political communication in media policy still marks a largely unexplored special case (Jarren 1998: 619). Due to the vested interests of both political actors and media organizations, communication strategies and news coverage can be expected to differ from other policies. At the same time, the powerful role of the media in media policy-making by way of lobbying and framing the decisionmaking agenda may have serious repercussions for their contribution to the functioning of modern democracies. If the media successfully assert their own interests, this adds to a development called by some scholars the “neo-liberalization of media policy” (Freedman 2008: 224), favoring light-touch regulation at the expense of the public interest. It is at least debatable whether a purely commercial media system would still provide an arena of debate, make ideas widely known and cater for the political needs of citizens. Thus, as Jones and Pusey (2010: 453) put it, from the viewpoint of media policy empirical research on political communication is needed to “aid the case for improved regulatory and related measures to facilitate informed citizenship”. Acknowledgments: I wish to thank Frank Esser, Matthias Künzler and the editor, Carsten Reinemann, for their valuable suggestions and comments.

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Weiß, Hans-Jürgen. 1986. Rundfunkinteressen und Pressejournalismus. Abschliessende Analysen und Anmerkungen zu zwei inhaltsanalytischen Zeitungsstudien. Media Perspektiven (2): 53– 73. Weiß, Hans-Jürgen. 1988. Meinungsgestaltung im Interesse der Zeitungen? Eine Analyse der Zeitungspublizistik zur Erhöhung der Rundfunkgebühr (Oktober 1987 bis Januar 1988). Media Perspektiven (8): 469–489. Zellweger, Tobias, Uwe Serdült and Irène Renfer. 2010. Referendum campaign regulations in Europe and Latin America. In: Karin Gilland Lutz and Simon Hug (eds.), Financing Referendum Campaigns, 201–228. Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Winfried Schulz

4 Political communication in long-term perspective Abstract: This chapter reviews research on the long-term development of political communication, mainly focusing on the changes occurring over the last decades. The overview first discusses conceptual, theoretical and methodological issues, addressing trends like mediatization and professionalization as well as several phase models developed to describe changes of political communication. Then, the author reflects upon the evolution of mass media and political communication, including technological, organizational and economical changes and their consequences for political media content and political journalism. After that political communication is looked at in a broader perspective of political and social changes which both condition and stimulate the transformation of political communication (e.g., Americanization, modernization, globalization, localization). Finally, the political consequences of this transformation are touched upon by discussing recent trends in election campaign communication. Key Words: social change, media expansion, mediatization, media logic, professionalization, Americanization, modernization, globalization, localization

1 Introduction Trends and tendencies of political communication, frequently referred to by “ization” words such as Americanization, professionalization and mediatization, have been attracting much scholarly attention. Publications assessing long-term developments as well as empirical studies with a longitudinal design are growing in number, particularly since emerging new media technologies seem to accelerate the transformation of political communication. The changes are judged differently. Some scholars highlight the beneficial consequences of changing political communication, while others hold that political communication has been plunged into a serious crisis. This overview of political communication in long-term perspective concentrates on recent decades, yet includes historical retrospect as far as the more distant past helps to understand the extent of changes that have occurred (Negrine 2008: 3). This chapter will focus on the public communication of political actors in their roles as both communicators and recipients.1 As communication in modern 1 Communication is considered political if it relates to collectively binding decisions on the distribution of scarce societal resources. The term political actors relates to 1) groups and organizations (collective and corporate actors), 2) members and officers of these bodies, 3) citizens (e.g., as voters, party members, protesters, bloggers, authors of letters to editors). In addition, professional

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mass societies in order to become public has to be published, the focus will necessarily be on how emerging mass media and new media technologies mediate the communication of political actors. Quite obviously, changes may also occur when the actors’ organizational contexts are restructured and when their political or social environments are changing. The transformation of political communication most often has an incremental character and is noticed only by hindsight, but sometimes it comes as a “major burst” accompanying political upheavals such as in Eastern Europe around 1989 (Gurevitch and Blumler 1995: 182). Dramatic “key events” may have lasting impact on subsequent media coverage and public opinion (Boomgaarden and de Vreese 2007; Kepplinger and Habermeier 1995). Communication within political organizations or in private settings will here be largely neglected, even though the boundaries between the public sphere and arcane areas – as well as private lives – are increasingly blurred. Making the private public, intentionally or unintentionally, has become a preferred strategy of election campaigning and of political reporting, and it is a key feature of communication in social networks on the Internet (see the chapter by Hopmann). This research overview begins with a discussion of conceptual, theoretical and methodological aspects of the long-term perspective on political communication. The next section deals with the evolution of mass media and of political communication, including technological, organizational and economical changes and their consequences for political media content and political journalism. Then political communication will be looked at in a broader perspective of political and social changes which both condition and stimulate the transformation of political communication. Changing political communication, on the other hand, has political consequences. A case in point is election campaign communication on which the final section will focus. As nations differ in respect of their political history and institutional order, their media system and media evolution, there are considerable differences in the passing of political communication in different countries. Such differences can be accounted for only by looking at long-term developments in a cross-national comparative perspective. Some recent publications are making headway in this direction (see, e.g., Esser et al. 2012). But studies combining the long-term perspective with a cross-national approach are still in short supply (see the chapter by Pfetsch and Esser).

2 Concepts and models Examining political communication in a longitudinal perspective may be fertile even if it is confined to a mere description of what has been changing over time. communicators, like journalists and media organizations, are political actors when dealing with political topics, e.g., reporting or commenting on political events and issues.

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A descriptive approach contrasting different time points (or eras) meets conditions of the comparative method and thus an important prerequisite of systematic insight (Mill 1843). However, the evidence of such an approach will increase considerably if, beyond a plain description, patterns of change can be discovered and explained with reference to causes and driving forces.

2.1 Process models und longitudinal designs A number of intensely researched concepts of political communication imply transformation processes that can be observed only by comparing at least two points in time. This applies to the spiral of silence theory, the knowledge-gap hypothesis, agenda-setting and framing, the diffusion of innovations approach, the concepts of cultivation and mainstreaming, and other dynamic models of media effects and media dependency (see also section VII).2 All these concepts and models play a central role in studying dynamics of political communication and sometimes, though not always, trace processes over long time periods. While the distance between pretest and posttest of most media effects studies is too short to be categorized as longitudinal in the usual sense, there are also approaches with several time-delayed posttests pursuing, for example, sleeper effects (Kumkale and Albarracín 2004) or effects that accumulate over longer time periods (Neuman and Guggenheim 2011). In addition, there is a growing number of panel studies as well as time series analyses typically covering months or even years when investigating political media coverage, media usage, audience cognitions and attitudes, voting intentions and electoral behaviors (see, e.g., Albright 2009; Emmer, Wolling, and Vowe 2012; Kleinnijenhuis, van Hoof, and Oegema 2006; Reinemann and Wilke 2007; Semetko and Valkenburg 1998).3 A special feature of time series analyses of media content is that they can be based on very dense measurement sequences. Analyses of media content some-

2 The spiral of silence model refers to public opinion changes, while the knowledge-gap hypothesis assumes growing knowledge differences between population segments. Also, concepts like agenda-setting and framing imply a time perspective as they refer to issue dynamics. Cultivation studies and the concept of mainstreaming focus on changing world views over time. Similarly, studies of diffusions of innovations as well as all campaign studies imply a longitudinal perspective. 3 The Pew Research Center offers a wealth of longitudinal studies as well as data sets for secondary analyses (http://pewresearch.org/about/projects/). Another useful resource are the repeatedly launched election studies going back in the United States already to 1948. Following the US model of the American National Election Studies (ANES) such longitudinal data are now available for many countries (though for time spans that are shorter than in the United States). The opportunities for time-based analyses have been considerably improved since the ANES and other election projects are using a rolling cross-section design with daily samples, combined with a panel element (see Brady and Johnston 2006).

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Note: The trend lines #1 and #2 are constructed under the assumption that there were only few survey results available, measured with long intervals (a fictitious assumption in this case, though not an unrealistic practice). The time series of actual results shows the percentage of respondents who are in general “rather satisfied” with the democracy in Germany. Data are from “Politbarometer” surveys, fielded with (mostly) monthly intervals by Forschungsgruppe Wahlen (data for West Germany only). Source: www.gesis.org. Fig. 1: Different trends derived from differently timed measuring points

times spread over long time periods in retrospect (see, e.g., Lasswell 1941; Danielson and Lasorsa 1997; Wilke 1987). They take advantage of archives such as LexisNexis which are hosting historical editions of newspapers, magazines, and other message types (see Skalski 2002). The density of measurements in longitudinal studies is not only a question of money and parsimony. It affects also the validity of a study. Increasing the number of measures usually goes along with higher research investments, but it reduces the risk of being mislead by long intervals between measuring points (Fahr and Früh 2011: 22). Figure 1 shows, as an example, that differently timed surveys may lead to completely different assumptions about public opinion trends.

2.2 Trend concepts Complex relationships between changing political institutions on one side and political communication on the other complicate the theoretical modeling of political communication dynamics. Due to feedbacks and reciprocities a clear distinction between independent and dependent variables, as required by the standard

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design of social research, is often lacking. This explains why diffuse trend concepts ending on “ization” frequently serve to characterize the changes. Trend concepts suggest steady changes, but usually do not specify the beginning, speed, driving forces, or other features of the developments. Professionalization and mediatization are among the most widely used trend concepts referring to changing political communication. Professionalization, as defined by Negrine (2007: 14), denotes in general “a better way of doing things, be it winning an election, achieving consensus, gaining support for policies, ensuring successful governance, that is made possible by technological and communications innovations, as well as a more general process of skills specialization.” A typical measure of professionalizing political communication is to employ experts for advertising and public relations, for marketing and opinion research. These specialists take over political communication functions that have formerly been exercised in a more or less amateurish way. Mediatization, in general, denotes an increasing media dependence of the society as more and more institutions, including politics, draw on media functions and adapt to the media logic. Mediatized politics has become dependent in its central functions on the media and is continuously shaped by interactions with mass media (Mazzoleni and Schulz 1999; Strömbäck 2008). Mediatization connotes a loss of autonomy of political actors and institutions (see the chapters by Shaefer, Shenhav, and Balmas and by van Aelst). Developments such as professionalization and mediatization are often viewed in the broader context of societal modernization. Inglehart and Welzel (2005) conceptualize modernization as a multi-dimensional and multi-level process affecting people’s material, cognitive, and social resources. Processes of socioeconomic and cultural modernization encompass growing wealth, improved education, increased social interaction and communication. Modernization stimulates people’s demand for political freedom and advances processes of democratization. In a macroperspective Hallin and Mancini (2004b: 76–85) emphasize that modernization increases the complexity of social systems as a result of the functional differentiation of social roles and institutions which are becoming more precisely adapted to the specific demands of different political (and other) actors in society.4 Other trend concepts that will be described in more detail below (see section 3 of this chapter) relate to media content and format. For example, dramatization,

4 The concept of modernization offers much leeway for interpretation. After World War II modernization became the key concept of the United States’ development policy. Modernization was understood as the transfer of the values, economic and political standards of Western industrial societies to “underdeveloped” countries. Free, politically independent mass media were considered the main vehicles of change. The approach came under harsh criticism in the late 1960s. It was argued that modernization fosters the dependency and exploitation of developing countries. More recently, the focus has shifted “from the modernization or exploitation of developing societies to a view of globalization as a universal phenomenon that is transforming the entire world” (Curran and Park 2000: 7).

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entertainization, and tabloidization characterize developments of political communication, especially of political journalism, with a critical overtone (see the chapters by Jandura and Friedrich and by Hopmann). Personalization is being considered a problematic trend of political media presentations and especially a certain communication style of “Americanized” election campaigns (see the chapter by Hopmann). The notion of Americanization, in its most simple variant, supposes the adoption and imitation of the style and strategy of US-American election campaigns. Finally, fragmentation and polarization trends denote transformations of public opinion and political discourses. They refer to audiences of political communication and, at the same time, signify structural changes of the public sphere (see the chapter by Wolling and Emmer).

2.3 Phase models When long-term changes are examined empirically with longitudinal designs, prior states and observation periods have to be specified. Theoretical reasoning though is often less precise in this respect. Vague notions of “the past”, or even a “good past”, sometimes glorifying bygone times, are widespread (Corner 2011). Diagnoses of declining or decaying political communication can be found quite frequently (see final section below). One of the most prominent long-term comparisons is Habermas’ (1989) analysis of structural transformations of the public sphere. By contrasting recent developments with 18th century Europe when bourgeois individuals met to exchange views in parlors and coffee houses Habermas identifies a decay of the contemporary public sphere. Norris (2011) with her retrospect compares the “classical era” of the 18th and 19th centuries, the “modern era” following the end of World War II, and finally the present stage of political communication demarcated by the rise of the Internet. Blumler and Kavanagh (1999) also suggest a threefold phasing, though confined to the period after the end of World War II. They distinguish three “ages” of political communication of which the second age “dawned in the 1960s when limited-channel nationwide television became the dominant medium of political communication” (212). In their view, the third age as the “still emerging phase is marked by the proliferation of the main means of communication, media abundance, ubiquity, reach, and celerity” (213). Similarly, Asp and Essaiasson (1996) propose a three-stage model for subdividing the mediatization process of politics. Strömbäck (2008) extends this model to four phases of which each is characterized by a specific “dimension” of change. In essence, the four phases differ in the degree to which political actors and institutions either dominate the media or are media dependent. The author holds that in different societies each phase may start at a different historical period and may evolve at different speed. This allows, in principle, to generalize the model across time and space.

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Whereas trend concepts offer hardly more than a plain description of changes, phase models structure change processes with regard to breaks and turning points. This allows research to better target the forces of change. Gurevitch and Blumler (1995) provide an example in their longitudinal analysis of election communication in Great Britain. Their four-phase model serves to structure a detailed exploration of the factors and influences which fundamentally transformed the relations between politicians and broadcasters between 1966 and 1992. Another example is Maarek’s outline of the evolution of political marketing in the United States which he partitions into three main stages with several subdivisions of which each is characterized by specific innovations in communication (Maarek 2011: 11–30).

3 Media evolution and mediatization The evolution of communication media has significant consequences for political actors’ communication behavior as well as for the content and format of political communication. The most striking feature of media development is that political messages considerably gained in reach and effect. Even non-medial communication forms like political demonstrations and election campaign rallies reach the majority of their audience and attain most of their intended political impact through media coverage. Televised speeches and talk shows provide politicians the highest amount of collective attention. World-wide live broadcasting and satellite transmission enable a global audience to simultaneously share the experience of “media events” like political summit meetings or inaugural ceremonies, military invasions or terrorist attacks (Dayan 2009; Dayan and Katz 1992).

3.1 Emerging media of public communication Due to technological and organizational innovations political messages span increasingly larger distances and reach growing publics. Political content can be published with higher fidelity, stored more economically, and produced and distributed at lower costs. Mass media expanded and diversified the supply of content, attracting a growing audience with topical information. Media functions such as surveying the environment, identifying the key issues of the day, providing a political platform, and constructing a public sphere comply with the specific needs of political actors (Gurevitch and Blumler 1990). Political leaders, interest groups and individual citizens take advantage of these functions, and they do so to a larger degree just as soon as new media emerge. Gutenberg’s improvement of the printing technology in the 15th century made it possible to distribute leaflets and pamphlets to large audiences (Eisenstein 1979: 303–313). When in the 19th century the newly established news agencies took advantage of the invention of electrical telegraphy, readers – including politi-

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cians – learned about political events much faster than ever before. Starting in the 1830s the American Penny Press “made it a regular practice to print political news, not just foreign but domestic, and not just national but local” (Schudson 1978: 22). Advances in printing technology and growing advertising revenues enabled newspapers to reduce the copy price drastically and thus make political news affordable for a mass audience. Newspapers played a key role in the democratic revolutions of 18th and 19th century Europe by promoting ideas of freedom of information and expression (Chapman 2005: 11–54). In early 20th century political parties began addressing their electorate with fascinating new audiovisual media, gramophone records and films (Negrine 2008: 34, 50). Live radio reports of major events reached increasingly larger audiences in the 1930s (Chapman 2005: 143–179). In Nazi Germany radio speeches and propaganda movies served to indoctrinate the population and to raise the readiness for war. Political propaganda became an object of intense study after World War I and has remained on the research agenda since then (Lasswell 1927; Wilke 1998). Television which rapidly began to spread in the 1950s combined the advantages of radio transmission – broad reach and live reporting – with the entertaining quality of film presentations. As political content on television appeals even to audiences with little or no interest in politics the new medium delivers “politics by default” to the viewers’ living rooms (Bennett and Iyengar 2008; Neuman 1996). This situation has been gradually changing since the 1990s with the advent of the Internet and of digital devices such as DVDs, MP3 players and smart phones offering “politics by choice”, time-controlled and on demand (Prior 2007). The World Wide Web now serves as a global platform for all kinds of media, including the messages of a plurality of political organizations, individual bloggers and private web users. The new media offer a vast range of choices and empower citizens to participate actively in political discourses. But because in the new media environment entertainment content proliferated much more than political content, it became increasingly difficult for audience members to find out the relevant information and to resist the temptation of media amusement (see also section IV). Digitization, globalization, and commercialization are key features of recent media developments characterizing, first and foremost, the Internet owing to its commitment to free market principles. Commercialization tendencies gained ground due to the deregulation of broadcasting systems, starting in Great Britain already in the 1950s, in most Western European countries in the 1980s, in Eastern Europe and South-East Asia in the 1990s. Deregulated media markets pander to the interests of media conglomerates in globalizing their activities and influencing politics. The names of Silvio Berlusconi and Rupert Murdoch symbolize these tendencies (see the chapter by Puppis). As expanding media were shaping political communication processes, politics became more and more media-centered. Political actors and institutions are

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increasingly dependent on media functions such as receiving relevant information, being recognized in a media-constructed public sphere, and competing in the struggle of defining the political agenda. Adapting to the “media logic”, to production routines and presentation formats of mass media is a precondition for governments’, political parties’ and other actors’ public visibility. Hence, media and politics have been merging into a “political-media complex”, defined by Swanson (1997) as “a constantly revolving relationship between media institutions and the institutions of politics and government and the way in which both relate to the public” (1265). Political spectacle and “symbolic politics” complement, or even substitute, political decision making, and especially serve to evoke emotions in public opinion (Edelman 1964, Sears 2001). These processes of mediatization, of substituting political functions by media functions and of accommodating politics to the “media logic”, have been progressively transforming political communication during recent decades (Schulz 2004) (see the chapters by Shaefer, Shenhav, and Balmas and by van Aelst).

3.2 Changing political communication content Innovations in media technology and in media business are increasingly pushing public communication, and so do progressively shorter news cycles. When in early 17th century newspapers began periodical reporting it took weeks, even months, till important political events were published. News agencies reduced this time span in mid 19th century to days or even hours. The news agencies specialized in collecting and selling news, using new media technologies: first wired telegraphy, then radio technology, and nowadays satellite and Internet transmission. In the course of time news reporting developed as a distinct profession. The improved news logistics successively advanced the topicality of political reporting and finally led to an end of its periodicity. Nowadays newspapers are updating their online editions almost continuously, depending on the news flow. In their early days radio and television had a daily news production cycle. Meanwhile many radio stations broadcast news every hour, some even more frequently. Specialized television news channels offer 24-hour non-stop news, partly live from the scene, distributing international reporting via satellite to a global audience (Cushion and Lewis 2010). CNN introduced this 24/7 news format in 1980. A latent function of international news channels is to pursue national interests in foreign policy and to serve as means of “media diplomacy” (Gilboa 2002) (see also the chapter by Robinson). Issues and opinions on the daily news market multiplied as a result of an ever growing number of channels and also because reports and commentaries provoke political reactions that in turn are picked up in the news. A characteristic of public communication is the tendency of self-reinforcement. The Internet contributes to this more than any other medium. Large parts of the political web content are

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adopted from or are produced by off-line media. Index and category sites provide links to other relevant sites, helping to access the abundance of political online content. In addition to the primarily journalistic news sources a plethora of political organizations, bloggers and web users compete for public attention (Deuze 2003). Still, the conventional mass media play an active part in defining the political agenda, in framing events and issues, and promoting their own political interests. They take stances, criticize, scandalize and sponsor certain political actors thus further broadening the plurality of opinions in the public sphere (see also the chapter by McNair). While the supply of political content is proliferating, the quality of the news seems to suffer (see the chapter by Jandura and Friedrich). Normative news standards such as objectivity and impartiality are accomplishments of Anglo-Saxon journalism (see the chapters by Kepplinger and by Reinemann and Baugut). The move from press partisanship to objective reporting originated in late 19th century in the United States as a consequence of the newspapers’ growing market orientation, but also as a byproduct of political reforms (Hamilton 2004: 37–70; Schudson 2005). In Continental Europe the principle of separating news and commentary succeeded only after the Second World War, in Eastern Europe only after the liberation from Soviet Communism. By now the species of party newspapers – apart from countries with an authoritarian regime – has almost died out (Katz and Mair 1994). But there is a huge number of partial sources on the Internet. And many offline media have been resorting to means of hidden partiality through interpretative coverage and “instrumental actualization” (Patterson 1997, Kepplinger, Brosius and Staab 1991). Radio and television channels in the United States are blamed for segregating into “red media” and “blue media” paralleling the ideological polarization of the party system (Iyengar and Hahn 2009). A changing journalistic profession is contributing to these developments. As new generations of journalists with specific historical and socialization experiences enter the profession, their views and ethics are likely to alter political journalism (Lang et al. 1993). Ongoing professionalization results in shifting norms and orientations of journalists. A growing number of journalists is benefiting from college education and improved vocational training so that they are better equipped for investigative reporting and critical commentary. This may, at least partly, explain the rising tendency of negativity in political reporting, documented by longitudinal analyses for several countries (Kepplinger 2000, Vliegenthart, Boomgaarden, and Boumans 2011). Studies also show that growing negativity in political reporting and media’s framing of politics as a strategic game have contributed to political cynicism among the American population (Cappella and Jamieson 1997). A similar trend has been documented for Germany (Kepplinger 2000), whereas results for other European countries confirm the trend only with major qualifications (de Vreese 2005) (see also the chapters by Jandura and Friedrich and by Hopmann).

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4 The political and social context of changing political communication A more holistic perspective may help to understand the complexity of political communication changes (Blumler 2012). Variations in major components of a political system are likely to alter political communication. In the same manner may exogenous factors acting upon the system as a whole affect the communication of political actors. This applies to political macro trends such as globalization, democratization, and commercialization as well as to socioeconomic changes involving individual citizens and the entire political culture. Pertinent evidence stems mainly from studies of election campaigns which have been monitored over long periods of time.

4.1 Political macro trends Regime changes leading to a reconfiguration of the legal and institutional conditions of states usually have far-reaching consequences for political communication (see, e.g., Gunther and Mughan 2000; Voltmer 2006b). During recent decades due to the ‘third wave’ of democratization the number of countries classified as liberal democracies has more than doubled 5. Democratization processes usually include a reorganization of media systems, bringing freedom of information and expression and thus altering fundamentally the communication of political actors. These changes in turn are likely to stimulate democratization processes. The revolutions in Arab countries that have erupted in 2011 provide impressive examples. Important catalysts of the dramatic upheavals were social media, Internet blogs, videos posted on YouTube and picked up by satellite television channels like Al Jazeera (Tufekci and Wilson 2012). Democratization takes different pathways depending on the regime type from which the process starts. A number of case studies covering communist oligarchies, military dictatorships, and states with a one-party rule, show that regime changes result in differently reorganized media systems, different styles of electoral campaign communication, and in different communication effects on citizens (Voltmer 2006a, 2007). While democratization usually leads to a privatization of the press, broadcasting systems quite often remain under the influence of the state or of public authorities. Ceasing state financing forces the media to adapt to the commercial logic and cater to large audiences with the result of softening and “dumbing down” the news at the expense of serious political reporting. On the one hand, such tabloidization tendencies are at odds with normative theories of 5 According to the criteria of the Freedom House organization (see www.freedomhouse.org/ template.cfm?page=439; retrieved on July 7th 2012).

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media functions in democratic societies. On the other hand, there are signs that “infotainment” – political content blended with entertaining elements and politics inserted into entertaining formats, particularly on television – may have positive effects on people’s political participation (Baum and Jamison 2006) (see also the chapters by Moy, Johnson, and Barthel and by Holbert). Commercialization and tabloidization tendencies as they are most pronounced in established liberal democracies like Great Britain and the United States have been spreading after World War II to countries in Western Europe, then, after the fall of the Soviet Empire, to Central and Eastern Europe, and meanwhile to many other countries in the world. This is part of universal processes of globalization, affecting national economies, politics and the media. Media companies follow a general trend to operate transnationally, particularly those in the entertainment business, but also in news and current affairs (Thussu 2007). The fact that big players in the media business are US-based corporations gave rise to criticism of growing media imperialism and Americanization, particularly during the Cold War era with its strong confrontations between East and West, North and South (Schiller 1970; Tunstall 1977). Meanwhile the criticism has eased as a result of new constellations in world politics and in view of the growing regional and domestic media markets in the “global south” (see, e.g., Fletcher and Young 2012; Tunstall 2008). Regulations and conventions of supra-national organizations have been advancing the globalization of political communication.6 And an increasing number of political actors are addressing audiences across national borders. Issue agendas and political discourses converge in the supra-national public spheres of Europe and beyond (Castells 2008; Wessler et al. 2008). The global communication platform of the Internet is considerably contributing to these trends (Dahlgren 2005). Globalization processes may constrain the influence of national governments on domestic political communication. On the other hand, tendencies of domestication and localization are countervailing the globalization trend (Curran and Park 2000). Governments can still resort to conventional measures of controlling political communication such as legal regulations, fiscal measures and regulatory authorities (see also the chapter by Puppis). These instruments have been complemented by instruments of communication management including issue framing strategies, spin doctoring, and image building (Esser, Reinemann, and Fan 2000; Negrine 2008: 117–142) (see the chapter by Kiousis and Strömbäck). Other political actors, particularly parties, interest groups and protesting activists, are skillfully using these instruments too (see the chapter by Hertog). Communication management, partly by employing public relations agencies, became also common prac-

6 Examples are the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the European Union’s directive Television Without Frontiers, the standards and regulations of the International Telecommunication Union and of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

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tice in foreign affairs and international relations of states (Taylor 1997) (see the chapter by Robinson). During recent decades, governments, political parties and other major corporate actors have implemented communication departments, furnished with growing financial resources and an expanding staff. This reflects the rising significance of communication in political processes. At the same time, political communication professionals have been specializing in skills of public relations, media counseling and political marketing (Maarek 2011). Universities react to these developments by expanding both the range of courses in communication and related research. This further advances the professionalization and specialization of political communication.

4.2 Consequences of societal changes Socioeconomic changes as well as changing values and beliefs are among the forces that shape the communication of political actors, including ordinary citizens. As people’s material and cognitive resources grow, they benefit from broadening choices. They tend to emphasize self-expression values and demand political liberties (Inglehart and Welzel 2005: 2). This often goes along with a secularization of politics (see, e.g., Hallin and Mancini 2004a; Swanson 2004). Developments in many Western countries show that ties to traditional institutions like churches and labor unions weaken; memberships to social class and religion lose their formative role for political behavior. As a consequence, citizens’ commitments to political parties become volatile, leading to, what has been termed, political dealignment (Dalton 2000). The notion of cognitive mobilization offers a somewhat optimistic interpretation of partisan dealignment. According to this view rising levels of education and increasing political interest enable more and more voters, when making electoral choices, to rely on their political competences and on political information provided by the media rather than on the ideological guideline of a party identification (Dalton 1984). However, empirical analyses based on longitudinal data disprove the causal links supposed by the cognitive mobilization hypothesis (Albright 2009). There is no clear evidence whether improved education and proliferating political information did empower citizens in the long term. The “chronic knownothings” observed by Hyman and Sheatsley (1947) more than half a century ago have hardly become fewer (Bennett 1988). Neither media abundance nor the significantly improved education of the American population led to a considerable increase in political knowledge (Delli Carpini 2005). However, longitudinal studies tracing citizens’ political knowledge during decades of media expansion are available only for the United States. It remains an open question whether these results

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can be generalized to other social systems and media environments, in particular when taking account of the significant differences of political knowledge documented by cross-national comparative research (Bennett et al. 1996; Curran et al. 2009) (see the chapters by Kepplinger and by Wolling and Emmer).

4.3 Changing election campaign communication Election campaigns are large-scale experiments in political propaganda and public opinion (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet 1944: 1). Campaigns regularly serve to deploy new strategies and practices of political communication. As campaigns repeat cyclically they offer researchers favorable conditions for comparisons over longer time periods. Systematic campaign research going back over more than half a century makes long-term changes traceable on the basis of empirical data (see, e.g., Albright 2009; Norris 2000: 293–306; Reinemann and Wilke 2007; Schulz, Quiring, and Zeh 2005) (see also the chapters by de Vreese and Schuck and by Strömbäck and Kiousis). Phase models of long-term changes are contrasting characteristic aspects that distinguish “modern” or “postmodern” from “pre-modern” campaigns (see the chapter by Strömbäck and Kiousis, Table 1). Campaign changes resulted, above all, from an increased professionalization of campaign management by adopting commercial marketing approaches and techniques. Gibson and Römmele (2009) suggest an index of ten items for comparing different parties’ campaign professionalization. The index includes practices like the use of public opinion polling, the use of outside public relations experts and media consultants, the use of direct mail to own members and outside target groups. Another strategy is “permanent campaigning”, i.e., extending the campaign to the entire legislature. Most of these practices were introduced for the first time in the United States and then spread around the world, partly because parties in many countries engaged American campaign consultants (Plasser and Plasser 2002). Several authors have interpreted this as a global trend of Americanization (see Swanson and Mancini 1996). However, as Blumler and Gurevitch point out, the notion of Americanization does not reveal the complexity of changes which include practices such as direct imitation as well as selective importation and adoption of American campaign styles, and also the assimilation of new instruments into older ones. Another important aspect the Americanization concept neglects is “the role of indigenous conditions both in sustaining unique features of national systems and in precipitating changes in such systems” (Blumler and Gurevitch 2001: 400). Professional campaign management is one of the facets accompanying the modernization of political parties. While the traditional mass membership parties of Western democracies evolved into modern “electoralist” parties they had to modify the relations with their constituents and to reorganize their leadership

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structure (Beyme 2002; Gunther, and Diamond 2003). Traditional cleavages, such as social class and religion, ceased to decide on party membership. Weakened party affiliations and rising electoral volatility require intense propaganda efforts, in particular advertising investments. Modern professionalized campaigns have become highly media-dependent. As political parties in most Western countries have lost their own partisan channels of communication, be this a party press or a party broadcasting system (Mair 1994), they have to adapt to the news values and presentation formats of the media, particularly of television. As long as television is still most voters’ main source of campaign information, getting access to television news and entertainment programs is a precondition of electoral success (see also the chapters by Kiousis and Strömbäck and by Holbert). Resulting from its broad reach, its strong audience appeal and its high credibility, television over decades has been – and in almost all countries continues to be – the dominant campaign medium (Kaid and Strömbäck 2008). Television owes a large part of its dominance to the debates between the top candidates which have become an integral part of campaigning dramaturgy in many countries since they were televised for the first time in 1956 in the United States (McKinney and Carlin 2004). As the debates are usually preceded by a build-up in the news media and followed by broad coverage of the candidates’ performances, they are influencing both the course of the campaign and the election outcome. Opinion polls that are continuously monitoring who is leading the contest are contributing to the horse race character that has become typical of modern election campaigns (Steeper 2008) (see the chapter by Aalberg). The dominance of television is supposed to spur the personalization of political communication. In general, personalization means that attention focuses on the top candidates at the expense of issues and party platforms. The concept may relate to different trends: First, a candidate-centered campaign strategy, second a media coverage focusing on the personal characteristics and private lives of candidates or third an electoral behavior oriented toward candidates rather than issues. While there is no evidence of a general personalization trend, an increasing personalization of the campaign coverage of television is empirically well-documented (Adam and Maier 2010; Karvonen 2010). The specific presentation formats of television, especially its demand for “talking heads” seem to be akin to a highly personalized reporting. Although television coverage concentrates on the protagonists of the campaign, their chances of being presented with their own voice have been declining dramatically in the United States (Farnsworth and Lichter 2006).7 Results for Britain and Germany, however, show different developments, partly pointing to the opposite direction (Deacon, Wring, and Golding 2006; Schulz and Zeh 2005) (see the chapter by Hopmann).

7 In spite of shrinking sound bites, US network television has devoted increasingly more time to the visual appearances of candidates on the screen (Bucy and Grabe 2007).

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The advent of the Internet once more extends the reach of campaign communication and offers political parties a plurality of new instruments (see, e.g., Maarek 2011: 158–175). Net-based communication advances both campaign management and intra-party communication through mobilizing supporters and raising funds, counteracting rumors and fighting back on attacks of contenders. Political parties and candidates can target their constituencies efficiently by using blogs and chats, emails and SMS, and by engaging in social media. As the Internet allows to bypass journalistic gatekeeping the campaign influence of conventional mass media, particularly of television, is dwindling. On the other hand, the Internet limits the power of political parties to control their campaign image projected by the mainstream media. Occasionally, candidates’ misbehaviors or blunders that are multiplied by viral videos on YouTube get enormous public attention and are thus counteracting the parties’ campaign strategies. The Internet is extending the citizens’ information resources and altering the communication behavior of the electorate. Particularly the younger age cohorts favor the Internet not only for accessing campaign information but also for participating in political discourses on social networking sites. Online participation takes on many forms: Interacting with certain parties and candidates, even supporting their campaigns, or satirizing the parties’ posters and television ads, creating an attack website, or virally spreading campaign related spoof. The Internet is blurring the boundaries between official and unofficial campaigns (Wring and Ward 2010) (see the chapter by Wolling and Emmer).

5 Conclusion: Is political communication on the slide? Emerging new media technologies as well as political and social changes are transforming political communication with increasing speed. In response to these developments the study of political communication has gradually expanded its horizon and entered a wide range of new research areas, including long-term and crossnational comparative studies (see, e.g., reviews by McLeod, Kosicky, and McLeod 1994; Norris 2011; Vowe and Dohle 2007). Many of the shortcomings Rosengren (1980) complained about decades ago have been remedied. However, the research evidence about changing political communication is evaluated differently. Some observers paint a bleak picture, leading to the question: “Is political communication on the slide?” (Blumler 1997). Based on longitudinal observations Blumler concludes that “political communication has become more artificial, less nourishing, less trustworthy, more negative, and sometimes less relevant to the central tasks of government” (see also Blumler and Gurevitch 1995; Gurevitch, Coleman, and Blumler 2009). Much of the concern relates to the changing style of election campaigning that seems to diminish participation, restrain responsible

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decision making and even fuel cynicism in the electorate (Patterson 2002; Kleinnijenhuis, van Hoof, and Oegema 2006). Skeptics fear that as a consequence of information abundance in the new media environment the accelerating fragmentation of the public sphere may lead to “a balkanization of interests, outlook, and knowledge” (Swanson 1997: 1279). Worries are also expressed about the fact that in media-affluent societies major parts of the audience, particularly the younger age cohorts, are turning away from conventional news media. This may further expand the knowledge gap between attentive and less attentive publics (Bennett and Iyengar 2008). By the same token, disparities in computer and Internet access are expected to deepen the “digital divide” within societies as well as between developed and less developed countries (Selwyn 2004). But there are also optimistic views on recent developments. Popkin (2006: 339), for example, holds that political communication is actually improving, “that we are wising up instead of dumbing down”. Referring, among other sources, to studies by Hamilton (2004) and Baum (2003) he concludes that increased media competition and softening of the news have resulted in a politically better informed citizenry. Similarly, Norris (2000) assumes, based on data from the United States and Europe, that the well-documented association of political media use with political interest and knowledge give rise to a virtuous circle. In her view, the long-term, repeated exposure to political content advances political interest and knowledge which, in turn, increases political media use with the result of growing civic engagement. Authors who welcome the new media emphasize, among others, that the Internet turned out to be a rich resource of political information and a global communication platform for political elites as well as for citizen-activists and protesters. Citizens benefit from new opportunities of being heard in public, taking part in political processes and organizing political interests, particularly if suitable policies and institutional support help to realize the emancipatory potential of the Internet (Coleman and Blumler 2009). New media enable citizens to engage in politics while escaping government control (Castells 2008). As the Arab revolutions that erupted in January 2011 have shown, the social web can be a highly effective catalyst of democratization (Tufekci and Wilson 2012). In view of the whole range of voices assessing political communication in long-term perspective, it may well be that both positions – optimistic and pessimistic – are justifiable. Not only do social, political and media changes always imply beneficial as well as problematic consequences. It is also common that the same development may appear in a different light, depending on different observers’ premises, expectations and evaluative standards. The ambivalence which is, according to McQuail (2010: 89–91), typical of theories explaining the role of communication in society, also prevails in assessments of changing political communication.

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5 Political communication in comparative perspective: Key concepts and new insights Abstract: In this chapter the state of the art in comparative political communication research is reviewed. First, the chapter reflects upon the development of comparative research that today aspires to knowledge about social prerequisites and political consequences of communication that go beyond a single country, region or field of communication. Second, the authors discuss key approaches to theorize and measure political communication beyond the nation state and national publics. They propose more meaningful frameworks for comparative research than the seemingly outdated country category (e.g., media systems, political communication cultures, political information environments). Finally, the substantial progress made by applying new concepts, complex designs and sophisticated measures is discussed. Applications and examples include election campaigning, the interaction between media actors and political actors, and the impact of the Internet on democracy. The chapter closes with a summary of core advances and promising areas of future scholarship. Key Words: comparative research, media systems, political communication cultures, political information environments, political communication process

1 Introduction The study of political communication has always been closely tied to the advancement of democracy and to the development of media. If we trace the roots of the discipline, we discover that research has been driven by the reflection about democratic governance and the “interactive process concerning the transmission of information among politicians, the news media, and the public” (Norris 2001: 11631).1 The strong linkages to the media and the political process have important implications. On the one hand, political communication is directly affected by the transformational changes of political systems. On the other hand, it is also shaped by the profound changes of the media infrastructure due to the advent of new 1 This chapter focuses on hard information indeed. Other forms of content may also be relevant for political communication (see the chapters by Moy, Johnson, and Barthel and by Holbert, Hill, and Lee). However comparative research about the implications and consequences of softer formats such as infotainment, political comedy or daily talk is still scarce and thus not a focal point of this chapter.

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information and communication technologies. For instance, the Internet has created new information geographies that may fuel up political mobilization and system transformation like in the Arab spring or change the character and the outcome of political and electoral campaigns. The changes in media and governance have opened a new era for comparative political communication research (Norris 2011a). Comparative research guides our attention to the explanatory relevance of the contextual environment for communication outcomes. It aims to understand how differences in macro-level contexts shape communication phenomena differentially (Blumler et al. 1992) and it is based on the assumption that different parameters of political and media systems differentially promote or constrain communication roles and behaviors of organizations or actors within those systems (Gurevitch and Blumler 1990). Thus, comparativists use factors at the macro-societal level as explanatory variables for differences found in lower level communication phenomena embedded within societies (Blumler et al. 1992). Against the background of essential changes in the core and the context of political communication many questions that were seemingly answered need revisiting. And the answers that were valid in the past deserve reviewing. The reconsideration accounts for the fact that the evolution of political communication in modern societies has always proceeded in distinct stages (Blumler and Kavanagh 1999). New media such as the Internet have increased the need to combine temporal with spatial comparisons in order to capture longitudinal processes of change within and across political communication systems (Blumler, McLeod, and Rosengren 1992) (see also the chapter by Schulz). In this chapter we set out to discuss the state of the art in comparative political communication research with respect to three objectives: In the first section we highlight the progress of comparative research, starting as a rather simple subdiscipline of communication that focused narrowly on country studies to a field of research which broadened its scope to a global level. Now, it aspires knowledge about social prerequisites and political consequences of communication that go beyond a single country, region or field of communication. In the second part of this chapter we dig deeper into approaches to theorize and measure political communication beyond the nation state and national publics. Thus, we propose more meaningful frameworks for comparing political communication phenomena than the seemingly outdated country category. Finally, we demonstrate the substantial progress that has been made by applying new concepts, complex designs and sophisticated measures in comparative political communication research. Applications and examples include election campaigning, the interaction between media actors and political actors, and the impact of the Internet on democracy. We conclude by summarizing core advances and identifying promising areas of future scholarship.

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2 The development of comparative studies: From case studies to large-N analyses The comparative approach in the field of political communication was initially pioneered by Jay Blumler and Michael Gurevitch (Blumler and Gurevitch 1975; Gurevitch and Blumler 2004) and has recently made significant progress by producing “a common body of knowledge, theories and concepts” (Hardy 2012: 202). Over the course of its development scholars have taken different approaches toward comparative analysis. Early attempts took the shape of edited volumes with “nation-by-chapter reporting” which lacked systematic comparative ambition. Readers were left to draw comparative conclusions themselves. The second step in the field’s evolution were two-country comparisons. Several of these pair-wise comparisons were theoretically and methodologically original and sophisticated (e.g., Ferree et al. 2002; Semetko et al. 1991). However, because of the limited ability to generalize from them, they are now increasingly being replaced mediumN and large-N studies. The development in comparative journalism research, for instance, begun with a bi-national survey of British and German journalists (Köcher 1986), then moved to a five-country study (Donsbach and Patterson 2004; Patterson 2008), followed by an 18 nation study (Hanitzsch et al. 2011) which is currently replicated with an even larger set of countries (see worldsofjournalism.org). In comparative political communication research, the formation of the European Union has triggered a substantial amount of larger-scale studies, starting with Blumler’s (1983) sevencountry study of the 1979 EU parliamentary election, followed by a 25-country study by de Vreese et al. (2006) on the 2004 EU election and ultimately leading to a 27-country comparative analysis of the 2009 EU parliamentary election by Schuck et al. (2012). Even wider in scope are transnational comparisons of international news that have a long tradition in the field, reaching from the Foreign Images Project with 29 countries (Sreberny-Mohammadi et al. 1985), to the Foreign News Study with 38 countries (Stevenson 2003), the News Around the World Project with ten countries (Shoemaker and Cohen 2006) to the on-going Foreign News on Television Study with 17 countries (Cohen forthcoming). The largest examples of largeN statistical analyses have come from Pippa Norris, with one investigating the relationship between media system variables and human development in 135 countries (Norris 2004) and another one studying the relationship between exposure to global information and people’s moral and social values in 90 countries (Norris and Inglehart 2009). However, bigger is by no means better as large-N studies often risk a loss of analytical depth – the field hence needs both extensive and intensive comparative studies.

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3 Macro-level frameworks for comparative political communication research Early political communication research treated the country as the “natural” default category of comparative analysis. This has come under criticism in the wake of growing globalization and transnationalization of politics, trade and media (Kraidy 2012). Scholars working on structural change and economic development (Panic 1997), globalization (Babones 2006), migration, citizenship and identity (Soysal 1994) consider “country” as a category not sufficient any more to account for the whole picture of the social and political reality and too compromised by the transnational flows of capital, labor and information. In our view, however, there is no need yet to drop the nation from the toolkit of comparative political communication altogether. Instead it should be transformed into a more analytic and methodological category. Particularly for media systems, the country-specific institutional arrangements still serve as powerful explanatory contexts that account for differences in the objects of analysis (see Livingstone 2012). Also, as we have argued elsewhere, depending on the research question that inspires the comparison, other spatial or social categories above and below the nation state should be included into the comparative design (Pfetsch and Esser 2008). In recent research there are four approaches to look at nations in the light of broader comparative frameworks of political communication, thereby developing more meaningful macro-units for comparative studies. The first focusses on media systems and attempts to develop categories that account for similar types of national arrangements of political communication structures. While this approach takes mainly historical and structural characteristics of press and broadcasting systems into account, the second concept of political communication systems refers to the nature of political communication as multi-level phenomenon that also includes the subjective dimension of the media and political actors. A third approach uses the concept of political information environments and compares the opportunity structures for citizens to enter the news discourse and meet their informational needs. A fourth approach centers on the political communication process and incorporates various elements of the aforementioned aspects, thus being more complementary than a fully elaborated concept by itself. We will take a closer look at all four of them.

3.1 Media systems A fruitful effort to develop a meaningful macro-unit for the comparative study of political communication has been put forward by Hallin and Mancini (2004). Based on a historically grounded institutionalist approach they develop a comparative framework that categorizes similar types of national arrangements of media

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systems. It assumes that political systems influence the news media depending on the role of the state in society, the level of consensus in the institutional design, the pattern of interest group organization, the degree of pluralism, and the structure of social organization. These political factors have a defining impact on (a) the degree and form of state intervention in the media; (b) the degree of press party parallelism, referring to the extent to which media content reflects distinct political orientations; (c) the degree of professionalization of journalism, and (d) the degree of commercialization on the media market, specifically the development of a mass-oriented press. Based on these four dimensions Hallin and Mancini developed a typology of media-politics relationship that has become a central reference point for comparative political communication research. It distinguishes three models – a North Atlantic “liberal” model, a northern European “democratic corporatist” model, and a southern European “polarized pluralist” model. The criticism that these models were too Western-centered led to a vivid debate about the reach and the cultural foundations of comparative concepts (Voltmer 2012), and ultimately to a follow-up publication by Hallin and Mancini (2012a) that examines non-Western media systems. Moreover, this recent work offers various re-conceptualizations of the original dimensions. An example are the criteria that refer to the composition of media markets. Hallin and Mancini (2012b, 2012c) now take variations in media access, media infrastructure, influx of transnational media, entertainment media and new media into account. The latter point is particularly important because in non-Western media systems the Internet is usually subject to less state control and therefore capable of broadening the political debate, mobilizing citizens and activating public spheres – thus contributing to democratization processes (see also the chapter by Wolling and Emmer).

3.2 Political communication systems The concept of the political communication system was introduced by Blumler and Gurevitch (1995) and developed further by Pfetsch (2008) and Pfetsch and Esser (2012). It conceives of political communication processes as an ordered system composed of structures and actors, and both can be related to each other and to its wider environment. At the macro-level it captures the patterns of interaction between media and politics as social systems; at the micro-level it captures the interactions between media and political actors as individuals or organizations. Comparative research in this tradition focuses on the structure of political communication systems, namely how political communication is organized across countries and on the culture of political communication, namely how political communication is engraved in the attitudes and behaviors of politicians and journalists. It also focuses on the construction and dissemination of political messages under the influence of specific structural and cultural conditions, and finally the effects

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of those messages on individuals and publics (in the short term) as well as on organizations, cultures and institutional arrangements (in the long term). It is important to recognize that political communication systems can emerge at subnational (local/metropolitan), national or supranational (European/transborder) levels, and that they integrate key insights from research on media systems and political communication processes (for details see Pfetsch and Esser 2012).

3.3 Political information environments In contrast to the previous approaches, the notion of political communication environments does not focus on systems as such but on the information available to citizens within these systems. Political information environments are defined by Esser et al. (2012) as the quantitative supply of news and public affairs content provided to a national audience by routinely available sources. Taking television sources as an example it is argued that the amount, mix and timing of public affairs programs can produce a favorable or unfavorable opportunity structure for the supply and consumption of political information. Differences in the size and number of these opportunity windows are assumed to affect the ability of audiences to access and generate social capital resources. Favorable opportunity structures are not only determined by the sheer volume of information programs but – as Esser et al. (2012) argue – also by their extensive distribution throughout diverse channels of communication. Curran et al. (2009) have shown that it matters whether a system has a public service, dual, or private broadcasting model: Public service systems give greater prominence to news, encourage higher levels of news consumption, and contribute to smaller within-country knowledge gaps. On the other hand, the supply of news is more restricted and more commercialized in countries with market-oriented private systems, such as the United States (see also Aalberg et al. 2010; Iyengar et al. 2009). Within European political information systems, it was found that strong competition, private ownership and heavy dependence on advertising are unfavorable conditions for a multifaceted news supply (Esser et al. 2012). There is evidence in the U.S. that the growing program choice introduced by new TV channels and websites has encouraged Americans to diminish their exposure to political information and turn to entertainment alternatives instead (Prior 2007). A recent comparison of eleven media systems from Europe, Asia and North and South America has added a further twist: Politically diverse information environments facilitate people’s ability to avoid cross-cutting political ideas (Goldman and Mutz 2011). This is ironic insofar as it suggests that a system with more politically pluralistic media options provokes the opposite of diversity, namely that most people gravitate toward sources they politically agree with (see also the chapter by Knobloch-Westerwick).

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3.4 Political communication processes Political information environments may become a valuable concept for comparative political communication research because they have the advantage of being less abstract, closer to actual news providers and consumers, and easier to operationalize. This latter point is dear to Norris (2009) who argues that advances in comparative political communication research will rely on easy-to-measure, clearly operationalized criteria. In her view, empirical applicability is more important than getting caught up in refining categorical typologies of systems that seemingly disregard the dynamic realities of today’s globalized, multi-channel world. Norris (2011a: 358–359) therefore advocates a procedural instead of a systemic approach and suggests that comparativists should focus on six components of the political communication process: (a) the communications infrastructure, (b) the regulatory environment, (c) the structure of media ownership, (d) the skills and capacities of the journalism profession, (e) the contents of political communications, and (f) the effects of communications. The political communication process can be seen as another framework for conceptualizing and comparing relevant units of analysis across localities. The components of this process have been selected with the availability of quantitative data and aggregated indices in mind. For instance, to crossnationally gauge the component of “communication infrastructure” Norris (2011a) proposes to use global data from ITU, World Bank and UNESCO, Reporters without Borders, Freedom House and the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX).

4 Findings of current research 4.1 Comparative campaign studies National election campaigns are probably the most popular subject in comparative political communication research. This is because they are clearly relevant to the democratic process, fulfill the important criterion of functional equivalence across systems, and are easy to manage for researchers due to their clear starting and ending point. Campaigns are prototypical events of mobilization in which national political communication traditions crystallize and come to the fore as if held under a microscope (see also the chapters by Strömbäck and Kiousis and by deVreese and Schuck). A key challenge for scholars comparing campaign styles has been to find a theoretical explanation for ostensibly similar trends in clearly dissimilar environments. An important advancement was thus to “contextualize” seemingly global trends in national campaigns. A core contribution in this regard was Swanson and Mancini’s (1996) study Politics, Media, and Modern Democracy which introduced modernization as an explanatory concept. Modernization leads to a “hybridiza-

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tion” of campaign styles whereby traditional “national” and transnationally floating “global” elements (often of U.S. origin) are mixed and adapted to local needs. Swanson and Mancini (1996) built a model on these assumptions and named it the Model of the Modern Campaign but had trouble testing it rigorously. The set of national case studies they had commissioned was not sufficiently synchronized. It lacked the equivalent use of theoretical concepts and methodological instruments in order to draw systematic and generalizable conclusions (Esser and Strömbäck 2012). The notion of the “modern” campaign was later expanded by Farrell (1996) and Norris (2002) to include a “pre-modern” and a “post-modern” stage which widened the cross-national and the cross-temporal applicability of the framework. A further expansion was to integrate “product”-oriented, “sales”-oriented, and “market”-oriented campaigns from the political marketing literature as there are obvious connections between both three-stage schemes (Farrell 2006; Lees-Marshment, Strömbäck, and Rudd 2010; Esser and Strömbäck 2012) (see also the chapter by Schulz). Interestingly, many studies comparing election communication were unable to demonstrate stark differences in campaign style (Swanson and Mancini 1996), marketing orientation (Lees-Marshment et al. 2010), the use of advertising (Kaid and Holtz-Bacha 2006) or web campaigning (Kluver et al. 2007), and consequently did not succeed at attributing differences to the impact of country-specific contextual conditions. A notable exception is the Global Political Consultants Survey by Plasser and Plasser (2002) which adopts a very sophisticated and rigorous research design. The researchers first used a common questionnaire to gather individuallevel data from campaign managers in 43 countries about their professional views and work practices. In a second step they gathered relevant contextual information about the campaign environments in these 43 countries and ran statistical regression analyses to explore causal relationships between the contextual environments and campaign managers’ actual practices. That way they were able to identify ideal opportunity structures for pre-modern, modern and postmodern campaign styles in a very convincing way. However, Plasser, and Plasser (2002) did not address online communication even though it nowadays plays an important role in theory and practice of postmodern campaigning. The thesis that the Internet has led to a push toward a postmodern era is at the heart of recent studies about e-campaigning. Ward et al. (2010) use 12 loosely synchronized case studies to examine the role of the Internet in elections from established and non-established democracies in Western Europe, northern America, Latin America and Asia between 2000 and 2005. In another relevant study Lilleker and Jackson (2011) investigated online campaigning in British, French, German and U.S. elections between 2007 and 2009. Both studies conclude that the Internet has not leveled the playing field for smaller parties or minor candidates (no “equalizing” effect) and that the Internet is still only a supplement (“add-on”) in the repertoire of mainstream parties. Large resources still matter and

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the use of the Internet rather reinforces existing hierarchies and campaign trends. Thus, on many campaign websites one-way mass communication still rules whereas interactive and participatory elements are used with caution. With the notable exception of the 2008 Obama campaign, most parties and candidates show little interest in fully involving users out of fear to lose control of the campaign’s external appearance. The most revolutionary potential of the Internet seems to lie in the area of fundraising and mobilizing loyalists (Lilleker and Jackson 2012). The research, all in all, establishes that context matters for applying web campaigning techniques: Summarizing their findings from campaigns in twelve countries, Ward et al. (2010: 268) conclude that in the United States the opportunity structures are highly favorable for “Internet impact”. The situation in other countries has been different though: national systems with reduced Internet availability, strong and centralized parties, limited campaign resources for candidates, restrictive campaign regulations, and information-rich traditional media are found to engage less in e-campaigning. From comparative research we conclude that structural filters and cultural restraints limit so-called Americanization trends, and that campaigns around the world are not necessarily converging but still follow different national logics. This is not meant to negate the considerable influence of U.S. techniques on global campaign practice but to propose hybridization as a conceptual lens through which to observe these processes (see also the chapters by Schulz and by Strömbäck and Kiousis).

4.2 Comparative studies of politician-journalist relationships The comparative study of key actors in political communication has gained pace recently, on a global as well as on a European level. One strong strand of research refers to the inquiry into journalism culture defined by journalists’ normative beliefs and professional values. This research stimulates a reflection about the meaning and consequences of journalist’s predispositions for how they perceive and report politics under the influence of different political and cultural contexts. Another trajectory is devoted to the comparative analysis of how journalists and politicians interact and how their respective attitudes shape different political communication cultures. Empirical studies on journalist’s professional roles and occupational attitudes have a long tradition. However, most studies were limited to single countries or used the Western model of journalism as a yardstick for evaluating other models, thereby revealing a distinct cultural bias in concepts and measures. Lately, however, progress has been made on several fronts. For one, a lively theoretical debate about the nature of global journalism raised awareness for the implicit national containment of journalism culture (Reese 2008) and the fact that the available concepts needed to be striped of the cultural undercurrents of Western notions

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(Hanitzsch et al. 2011). In addition, Hanitzsch (2007) developed a theoretically integrated and normatively less biased framework for the study of journalism culture that combines professional, ethical and epistemological dimensions. There have been various attempts to give the international comparative journalism research a more stable foundation also in empirical terms. A group of researchers around Thomas Hanitzsch investigated to what degree journalists around the world share a set of core beliefs about their professional roles and identities. Based on a universal theory of journalism culture the research uses abstract and functional equivalent general categories to identify the commonalities of journalism in various national and cultural settings (Hanitzsch 2007). The findings from a journalist survey in 19 nations show that detachment and non-involvement are role perceptions that journalists shared globally (Hanitzsch et al. 2011). Moreover, factuality and reliability of information and the idea of being a watchdog of government and business elites are professional values that reach beyond national idiosyncrasies. On the other hand, interventionism, power distance and objectivity are culturally driven orientations that set Western journalism cultures apart from those in transitional and non-democratic countries. It is most relevant for the analysis of political communication that patterns of journalism culture are significantly related to features of the political and economic environment. Thus, journalists around the world display a significant variation with respect to their perception of political and economic pressures. As Hanitzsch and Mellado (2011) demonstrate, journalists feel constrained in their work by political and economic powers particularly in those countries that display a weak democratic performance, low levels of press freedom and a high degree of political parallelism. In fact, the degree to which political influences constrain newsmaking is a dimension along which journalism cultures can be differentiated cross-nationally. Interestingly, however, journalists seem to push these influences from their mind during their daily work (Hanitzsch and Mellado 2011). Comparative research has also contributed to a more nuanced understanding about the spread of ethical norms and practices. The findings by Plaisance, Skewes, and Hanitzsch (2012) forcefully show that journalists’ ethical orientations are not rooted in universally internalized values but that they vary according to cultural and ideological contexts. Thus neither scholars nor politicians around the globe should expect news journalists to be guided by a universal set of ethical standards; socialization experiences simply differ too strongly in the various systems (see also the chapters by McNair and by Wahl-Jorgensen). A related strand of comparative research turns to politicians and asks them for their orientations toward the media and how they assess the media’s power to influence politics. A survey among members of parliament in Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden finds great agreement among politicians regarding the power of mass media to set the political agenda and also similar patterns of contacts with the media (van Aelst and Walgrave 2011; van Aelst, Sehata, and Van

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Dalen 2010). Long-serving prominent politicians find it easier to access the media than backbenchers and newcomers, but in general the differences among the four democratic corporatist systems are very small. The similarities in perceptions seem to be related to comparable institutional arrangements (see the chapter by van Aelst). Political communication research has become increasingly interested in investigating the relationship between political actors and media actors as well as the underlying values that guide their relationship. Comparative research allows us to see whether political communication cultures – meaning the orientations, attitudes, and norms that govern these relationships (Pfetsch 2004) – vary under differing structural conditions of media or political systems. Two aspects of the relationship between political and media actors are of special interest: first, how positive or negative the interaction is, for instance whether feelings of trust or suspicion prevail; second, how close or distant the relationship is and how this relates to larger political cultures. On both aspects comparative research has produced interesting findings. Addressing the first aspect, a comparative survey of politicians and journalists in nine European countries finds that the relationship between the groups plays out on two stages (Pfetsch, Mayerhoeffer, and Maurer 2009): Toward the outside, politicians describe their relationship with journalists as rather harmonious; on the back stage however their relationship is marked by diverging interests and conflicts. The self-image of politicians and their spokespersons on the one hand and journalists on the other are characterized by tensions resulting from conflicting objectives of their institutions of origin. These tensions occur in similar ways in all West European systems under study. However, the intensity of this pattern varies between countries with a high level of politicization of the media politics relationship (Spain, Austria, Finland) and countries with less politicization (Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland; for details see Pfetsch et al. 2009). The simultaneity of harmony and discord, of ‘love’ and ‘hate’ in the relationship between politicians and journalists seem to be a typical pattern for northern European systems (see also van Aelst and Aalberg 2009). Obviously, the informality of the relationship goes together with a deep-rooted suspicion. When looking at the attitudes of both groups we usually find that journalists are more reserved and skeptical about their interaction with politicians than the other way round. It seems that political reporters in many Western European countries have grown more cynical in the face of what they perceive as attempts by politicians to instrumentalize them. In fact, cynicism among European journalists can be traced directly to perceived political influences and negative views of spin doctors and media salacity. This was found to be most pronounced in Spain – a typical representative of polarized pluralist media system – and much less pronounced in democratic corporatist countries like Denmark and Germany (for details see van Dalen, Albaek, and de Vreese 2011).

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Addressing the second aspect of the relationship between political and media actors – namely patterns of closeness and distance – Pfetsch, Mayerhoeffer, and Moring (2013) attempted to categorize European political communication cultures accordingly and link the results to features of the political culture. Similarly to van Dalen et al. (2011), they find that national political communication cultures vary according to the perception of political pressure and commercial pressures on political communication. Thus, within the nine European countries under study, there is a clear division between southern European countries like Spain, France and Slovenia, as compared to northern countries like Denmark, Sweden and Finland and the German-speaking countries Germany, Austria and Switzerland. In the southern European group levels of political and economic stress are perceived as highest whereas in Scandinavia they are recorded as less intense. In sum, the studies on political communication culture provide valuable insight into the underlying patterns of orientations that undergird the media politics relationship (Pfetsch 2013). We may conclude from the strained media-politics relations that political communication culture in Western Europe is under stress. In addition to the results reported here, it must be noted that some of the studies suffer from shortcomings that have to do with the constraints of comparative research. The country samples are often small and skewed toward continental and northern European contexts. Thus, it is hard to link the variation to the larger configurations of media systems that are hypothesized to influence the orientations charactering particular types of political communication cultures. It is also fair to conclude that the categories developed to assess political communication in Western Europe capture only a portion of a much larger picture. For instance, research on political communication cultures in Eastern European countries reveals much higher levels of mutual mistrust and cynicism between politicians and the media than is recorded anywhere in Western Europe (Pfetsch and Voltmer 2012; Dobek-Ostrowska 2012; Varenova 2012).

4.3 Comparative studies of Internet and democracy The rapid diffusion and reach of the Internet inspired communication theorists and comparative scholars to reflect on the nature of online communication and its impact on democracy. Events like the 2008 Obama campaign and the popular uprisings and protest movements during the Arab spring have been taken as examples to demonstrate the universal impact of the Internet to enhancing participation and mobilization in established democracies like the United States and promoting pro-democracy grass-root movements in transitional societies like in the Middle East. These interpretations have inspired researchers to explore the democratic potential of the Internet and its contribution to civic norms, political participation and public debate more closely. Starting point is the normative argument that the web – through its seemingly unlimited space for information and its interactivity –

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enriches the information environment, enhances citizens’ knowledge and understanding of politics, conveys democratic values and practices, and creates new spaces for open discussion. Also, the diffusion and easy accessibility of information is expected to foster political interest, engagement and inclusion of civil society viewpoints in political debate (see also the chapters by Wolling and Emmer, by Boomgarden and by Knobloch-Westerwick). These assumptions have been translated into the comparative investigation of Internet use and citizen attitudes, engagement and knowledge in different political contexts. Early comparative analyses were limited to macro-level observations by testing the relationship between Internet penetration and the distribution of democratic orientations in society. For instance, Norris (2011b) finds in her analysis of World Value Survey data that Internet use is indeed linked to democratic aspirations and democratic satisfaction. However, this 40 nation analysis lacks insight with respect to the differential influences of political, social or economic contexts. Here the work of Groshek (2009) is more instructive. His study on the relationship between Internet diffusion and democratic indicators in 152 countries systematically accounts for political and social contexts. In fact, he finds a positive influence of the Internet only under certain conditions. In full-fletched democratic societies, Internet diffusion is significantly related to democratic indicators like participation, openness of recruiting political leaders and government control. In countries that are only partially democratic, Internet diffusion is associated with selected institutions becoming more democratic. In developing and non-democratic countries, however, the Internet did not fulfill hopes of bringing democracy to the people. Groshek (2009: 131) concludes from his comparative analysis that the Internet cannot be expected to be “a democratic silver bullet” that is effective under any circumstances. Instead “democratic effects of the Internet are unlikely to be achieved in an environment that has not already reached a certain level of democratic processes and policies” (Groshek 2009: 132). The study of the democratic potential of the Internet has also made use of statistical multi-level analysis. Thus, Nisbet and colleagues (2012) ask whether contextual macro-level factors relevant for the spread of democratic potentials of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) also moderate the relationship between individual Internet use and democratic orientations. Their comparison of 28 countries from Africa and Asia finds that Internet use is positively associated with citizens’ preferences for democratic governance. Both Internet penetration and the level of democratization moderate the relationship between individual Internet use and democratic orientations. These findings corroborate the conclusion that the Internet serves as strengthening young democracies by enhancing people’s democratic orientations (Nisbet, Stoycheff, and Pearce 2012: 261). However, the study also demonstrates nicely that the Internet itself cannot be expected to stimulate democratic transitions or to turn around citizen’s orientations in nondemocratic countries.

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5 Conclusion and directions for future research In sum, political communication research is legitimized by the link to normative requirements of democracy which eventually include free media, democratic citizenship and opinion formation. It may thus be no accident that comparative research on political communication gains pace when fundamental processes of system transformation or media change are set into motion. This is certainly true for the situation after the Cold War or during the Arab Spring movements. The political development in each case triggered more differentiated approaches to democratic media roles which also stimulated new comparative avenues for political communication research. Scholars have become sensitive to the contexts of democratic development, socio-cultural influences and economic (de)regulation and eventually drastic changes in information environments to shape citizens’, media and political roles as well as political action in movements and campaigns. Thanks to the broadening of scope but also to the availability of more encompassing data, we see comparativists reaching out for new areas beyond the ever known foci of Europe and the US. For instance, we increasingly see Eastern European countries, Asian and African regions be included in comparative studies that allow us to test a greater variety of contextual factors and, thanks to larger sample sizes, run multilevel statistical analyses. With the wider inclusion of countries and political regimes, the narrow normative focus on Western European and USAmerican countries, cultures and regime types of democracy has been fading. This implies also to acknowledge that our thinking about democracy will broaden and lead us to include new modes of communication and citizen participation, for instance with regard to the role of online communication. Current research has become more sensitive to the contextual environments in which political communication takes place. McLeod and colleagues (2002) rightly point to the fact that communication processes are particularly sensitive to spatial, temporal and cultural variables related to the actors, the media and the political system that all produce variance. Only comparative research allows us to demonstrate the context-dependency of political communication systematically. Further progress will be facilitated by creating larger data sets that include both media and political variables so that the linkage between communication and politics can be analyzed at a broader scope and with more elaborated techniques. Even though this complexity and sophistication will not immediately be achieved in all areas of political communication at once, the comparative approach is heading to a promising future.

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Section II: Situations

Jesper Strömbäck and Spiro Kiousis

6 Strategic political communication in election campaigns Abstract: This chapter reviews research on strategic political communication in election campaigns, which still is a rather fragmented field despite its long tradition. To structure this area of study, the authors propose a descriptive model integrating different types of actors, modes, goals and arenas of political campaigning and campaign communication. They describe and explain long-term changes in campaign practices and communication patterns and critically reflect on the Americanization- and modernization-thesis as the two most prominent theoretical explanations for those changes. In addition, key trends in contemporary campaign communication as well as deficits of current campaign studies are discussed. To remedy those deficiencies the authors call for more longitudinal and comparative research as well as a comprehensive theoretical framework to guide future research. Key Words: strategic communication, campaign communication, political marketing, Americanization, modernization, product-oriented parties, sales-oriented parties, market-oriented parties

1 Introduction At heart, election campaigns are nothing but political communication. If election campaigns are about organizing, communication is required between the campaign leadership and campaign volunteers, donors, activists and supporters. If election campaigns are about building alliances between groups with similar interests and goals, communication is required to build and maintain relationships and to coordinate activities. If election campaigns are about mobilizing supporters, communication is required to reach out to and help convince them to actively support the campaign. If election campaigns are about how the mass media cover politics, communication is required to build relationships with editors and journalists and to influence the news media, their agendas and how they frame issues, events and processes. If election campaigns are about voter contact, communication is required to reach out to voters through phone, outdoor activities or knocking on doors, and for the interpersonal discussion with voters. And, if election campaigns are about shaping the information environment in order to position the campaign as favorable as possible, and opponents as unfavorable as possible, all efforts at shaping the political information environment, branding and positioning requires political communication.

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From this perspective, it is only natural that the histories of political communication and election campaign research have always been closely intertwined (Blumler and McQuail 2001). Today, the number of books that deal with political communication in election campaigns is massive (see, e.g., Burton and Shea 2010; Johnson 2007, 2009; Kavanagh 1995; Lees-Marshment, Strömbäck and Rudd 2010; Maier, Strömbäck and Kaid 2011; Maarek 2011; Medvic 2011; Plasser and Plasser 2002; Trent and Friedenberg 2004; Vavreck 2009). After every election, new books are usually published that seek to describe and explain the campaigns and the campaign communication, and how these influenced the final election outcome (see, e.g., Hendricks and Kaid 2011; Kavanagh and Cowley 2010; McKinney and Banwart 2011; Sides and Vavreck 2013). Despite this, it can be argued that research on election campaign communication remains a rather fragmented field (Esser and Strömbäck 2012). There are several reasons for this. First, research in this area is carried out within several different disciplines, such as communication, political science and marketing. Within each of these disciplines there may be several different theoretical assumptions, approaches and topical foci. Second, there is a lack of broader theories that can guide and unify research on political communication in election campaigns. Third, there is a tendency to focus on political communication in single election campaigns in single countries, often providing rich descriptions of singular cases but less theory-driven research. Fourth, most research in the international literature focuses on political communication in election campaigns in the United States, a quite atypical country. Fifth and finally, there is a manifest lack of longitudinal and cross-national research on political communication in election campaigns. Taken together, all this serves to limit the comparability across time and space and to build theories that have broader applicability (see the chapters by Schulz and by Pfetsch and Esser). In addition, most research focuses on how campaigns communicate with voters, either directly or through the news media, or on the overall mode of political campaigning and communication. Other forms of communication, such as internal communication to organize volunteers, are typically neglected. Political communication in election campaigns is almost exclusively conceptualized as the strategic use of communication to reach voters directly through different forms of controlled communication or indirectly through the news media, or as different modes of communication and campaigning. Against this background, the purpose of this chapter is to review research on strategic political communication in election campaigns. Reflecting extant research, it will focus on the strategic use of political communication and modes of political campaigning and campaign communication by political parties and campaigns. Detailed discussions about how mass media cover election campaigns and on campaign and media effects on voters are discussed in detail in sections V and VII of this handbook, because still most of the research in those fields refers to election times.

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2 Towards a general model of strategic political communication in elections On a general level, strategic political communication is about organizations’ purposeful management of information and communication to reach political objectives it has set out for itself. This holds true for political parties and campaigns as well as for interest groups, governments or other organizations that are either inherently political or have political agendas. It also holds true within as well as beyond election campaigns. Different organizations want to achieve certain goals, and they use information and communication strategically to reach these goals (Manheim 2011; Strömbäck and Kiousis 2011). In the context of strategic political communication, the strategic goals of political parties and campaigns are thus crucial. Although it is often assumed that the primary goal of political parties and campaigns is “to maximize political support” (Downs 1957: 11), in most cases, parties have numerous goals, and the primary strategic goal may vary across parties. According to Strøm (1990), three different types of parties can be distinguished based on their primary goals: vote-seeking, office-seeking and policy-seeking parties. The distinguishing feature of vote-seeking parties is that they seek to maximize their share of votes. Office-seeking parties, in contrast, “seek to maximize, not their votes, but their control over political office” (Strøm 1990: 567), while the primary goal of policy-seeking parties is to maximize influence over public policy (Strøm 1990; see also Harmel and Janda 1994). Based on this distinction, vote-seeking parties can be assumed to place greater priority on election campaign communication than office- and, in particular, policy-seeking parties, as their fortunes are more directly linked to election campaigning. Another distinction is between product-oriented, sales-oriented and market-oriented parties (Henneberg 2002; Lees-Marshment 2001a, 2001b; Newman 1994; Shama 1976). Based on a merger of political science and marketing, political marketing theory holds that product-oriented parties or campaigns tend to focus on the core of the political product – the ideology and policy positions as formed through internal processes and deliberations. Such a party “argues for what it stands for and believes in. It assumes that voters will realize that its ideas are the right ones and therefore vote for it” (Lees-Marshment 2001b: 696). A product-oriented party could thus be described as policy-seeking. A sales-oriented party is similar to a product-oriented party in the sense that the ideology and policy positions are formed in internal processes. In contrast to product-oriented parties, however, it makes use of market intelligence and marketing techniques for studying and segmenting the electorate, for message design, and for the selling of the party. Sales-oriented parties thus focus much more on election campaigning and campaign communication than product-oriented parties. While both product- and sales-oriented parties can be described as policy-

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Tab. 1: Defining characteristics of product-, sales- and market-oriented parties.1 Type of party

Defining characteristic

Reaction to election defeat

Predominant party logic

Product-oriented party

Sales-oriented party

Market-oriented party

– Forms the policies in internal processes. – Argues for its ideas and policies. – Assumes that voters will realize that its ideas and policies are the best ones and therefore vote for it. – Believes voters do not realize that the party’s policies and ideas are the best ones: if the party changes, it is towards becoming ideologically purer. – Primarily policy-seeking

– Forms the policies in internal processes. – Believes in its own ideas and policies, but realizes that they have to be sold to the public. – Attempts to make people want what the party has to offer. – Attempts to make better use of marketing techniques to sell the party and its policies, and to professionalize how it plans and run its campaigns.

– Uses market intelligence to identify voter wants and needs. – Designs its policies and behavior to provide voter satisfaction. – Attempts to offer people what they already want. – Uses market intelligence to redesign the party and its policies so that it becomes better suited to the wants and needs of selected target groups. – Primarily vote- and office-seeking

– Primarily policy- and vote-seeking

seeking, sales-oriented parties are more vote-seeking than product-oriented parties. Neither party would however change the policies to appeal to voters. This is in contrast to market-oriented parties that use market intelligence not only to design the message and to develop and execute as effective campaigns as possible, but also to design the political product and policies per se. If sales-oriented parties try to make people want what it offers, market-oriented parties try to offer what people want (Lees-Marshment 2001a, 2001b). Market-oriented parties should be understood as the least policy-seeking, and the most vote- or office-seeking, party type (see Table 1). Of course, these descriptions are simplified, the party types are ideal types, and there may be differences within parties. In reality there are no clear-cut voteseeking, policy-seeking or office-seeking parties (Müller and Strøm 1999). Neither are there any clear-cut product- sales- or market-oriented parties (Lees-Marshment, Strömbäck, and Rudd 2010). To the extent that parties change policies to accommodate voters, it is mainly a matter of abandoning particular unpopular positions

1 Based on but modified from Lees-Marshment 2001a, 2001b; Strömbäck 2007a.

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rather than a wholesale accommodation. Hence, it could be described as selective market-orientation. In addition, these categories are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and parties may attempt to maximize the share of votes at the same time as they attempt to win office and maximize policy influence. Still, the discussion about party types and strategic goals suggests that there is a close linkage between political parties or campaigns as organizations, and their election campaigns and campaign communication. Important to note in this context though is that political parties or campaigns are no monoliths, but complex and multidimensional organizations. This is highlighted by Sjöblom’s theory of strategic party behavior (1968a), according to which parties act not only on an electoral arena but also on an internal and a parliamentary arena. Assuming that the primary goal is that “The party itself shall make the authoritative decisions in accordance with its evaluation system” (Sjöblom 1968a: 73), to reach this primary goal, parties need to act strategically to reach the goals on each of these arenas. On the electoral arena, the strategic goal is to maximize the share of votes; on the internal arena, to maximize internal cohesion; and on the parliamentary arena, to maximize parliamentary influence (Sjöblom 1968a, 1968b). Subsequent theorizing has suggested the addition of a media arena, where the strategic goal is to maximize positive visibility (Nord 1997). On each of these arenas, political parties and campaigns have a number of publics or stakeholders with whom they need to communicate (Sjöblom 1968a, 1968b; compare Hughes and Dann 2009; Lilleker 2005; Sellers 2010; Strömbäck 2010). On the parliamentary arena, the key stakeholders include members of the own parliamentary group as well as members of parliament from other parties. On the internal arena, the key stakeholders include elected representatives for the party, elected representatives within the party, in-house staff, hired consultants, activists and members. On the media arena, the key stakeholders include journalists, editors and owners, that is, all who might have an influence over the visibility of the party. On the electoral arena, the key stakeholders include voters at large and different target groups within the electorate. Hence, political communication and political public relations in election campaigns include several different streams of communication with different stakeholders located within different arenas, and for each group of stakeholders, the campaign management team may have different strategic purposes. Depending on the purpose of communicating with each group of stakeholders and the available communication alternatives, the most appropriate channel and mode of communication has to be selected (Strömbäck and Kiousis 2011) (see also the chapter by Kiousis and Strömbäck). Comparing different media, the mass media occupy a central position however. Not only do the mass media constitute an arena on its own; the main importance of the mass media resides in the fact that they in most cases constitute the

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main source of information and channel of communication (Plasser and Lengauer 2009; Purcell et al. 2010; Strömbäck and Kaid 2008; de Vreese 2010) (see also the chapter by Wolling and Emmer). This holds true not only with respect to the party’s campaign management team and its efforts to communicate with the electorate, but also with respect to the communication with stakeholders on the parliamentary and the internal arena. In addition, party-political actors are themselves avid media consumers and influenced by the mass media’s coverage of politics and society (van Aelst et al. 2008; Davis 2007; Kepplinger 2007). The mass media not only inform voters at large about the policy positions and behaviors of political actors, or about societal developments with political ramifications; the mass media also inform political actors about the policy stances and behaviors of other political actors, societal developments with political ramifications, and about the state of or trends with respect to public opinion (Eshbaugh-Soha 2007; Herbst 1998; Kernell 2007; Sellers 2010). The media may set not only the public, but also political agendas (Koch-Baumgarten and Voltmer 2010; Vliegenthart and Walgrave 2010; Walgrave and van Aelst 2010) (see also the by chapters Shaefer, Shenhav, and Balmas and by van Aelst). However, strategic political communication does not take place only through the mass media. In fact, the single most important development in terms of campaign communication over the last decade is that different kinds of digital media such as web pages, social media and blogs have become increasingly important (Davis 2009; Harfoush 2009; Hendricks and Denton 2010; Lilleker and Jackson 2011; Smith 2009; Sweetser 2011). Aside from mass media and digital media, direct contacts, text messages and telephone conversations may also be highly important. This holds true for the communication with target groups among the electorate (Johnson 2011) as well as in internal communication processes and in the interactions with elite groups such as journalists (van Aelst, Shehata, and van Dalen 2010). Another important aspect of election campaign communication is related to the tension between long-term strategy and planning on the one hand, and the short-term impact of real-world events, the activities of other parties, and of the media’s coverage. No matter how strategically political parties plan their campaign activities and communication, during the course of a campaign a number of unanticipated events will occur. Sometimes such events will open up new opportunities – sometimes they will pose threats. In either case, the short-term impact of unanticipated events will always create stress and pose a challenge to the strategic planning done beforehand, although successful campaign strategies should include contingency plans and be flexible. Nevertheless, the implication is that election campaign communication often might be less “strategic” than it appears. In either case, a broader understanding of strategic political communication in election campaigns requires an analysis of how the campaign management

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Fig. 1: Descriptive model for strategic political communication on multiple arenas.

teams of different types of parties may use different forms of communication to communicate with different stakeholders located within different arenas in order to reach the strategic goals of the parties and the campaigns. For example, a party may use e-mail or social media or news media to communicate with members of parliament (on the parliamentary arena), party members (on the internal arena), voters (on the electoral arena) or journalists (on the media arena). There might of course also be feedback loops, not least from the news media, which strategic campaign management needs to take into consideration (see Figure 1). Although strategic political communication in election campaigns is a broader phenomenon than political parties or campaigns using information and communication strategically to mobilize and persuade different voter groups, and political parties are complex organizations with multiple arenas and strategic goals, most research assumes that parties want to maximize their vote share and focus on the related themes of how political parties and campaigns communicate with voters, and how they organize and run their election campaigns.

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3 Modeling and explaining changing campaign practices and communication One prominent theme in research on election campaigning and campaign communication has been attempts to model changing campaign practices across time. Several authors have described a development where three phases of election campaigning can be identified. Norris (2000: 138) as well as Plasser and Plasser (2002) label the phases Premodern, Modern and Postmodern; Farrell (1996: 170) labels them Premodern, Television revolution and Telecommunications revolution, whereas Farrell and Webb (2000: 104) label them Stage 1, Stage 2 and Stage 3. Despite some differences between these typologies, the changes and trends they identify are highly similar. Table 2, with some modifications adapted from Plasser and Plasser (2002), is a good representation of the phases and trends identified by other scholars as well (Farrell 1996; Farrell and Webb 2000; Negrine 2008; Norris 2000; Strömbäck 2007) (see also the chapter by Schulz). While there appear to be some general macro trends, and different typologies suggest that election campaigns and campaign communication have changed significantly across time, it is however important to recognize that virtually all typologies of changing campaign practices are characterized by some problematic assumptions. First, it is assumed that campaign practices change in a linear fashion, as witnessed by labels such as “premodern”, “modern” and “postmodern”. Second, labels such as “premodern” and “modern” are “contemporary lenses” (Negrine 2008: 24) through which we perceive and evaluate the past as well as the present. In this respect, typologies like these will always be biased towards the present. Third, it is assumed that election campaigns do not mix characteristics from the different stages. Fourth, it is assumed that there are general characteristics of different types of election campaign practices, as if the country-specific contexts do not matter. Fifth and finally, implicitly or explicitly it is assumed that U.S. presidential election campaigning is the standard by which all kinds of election campaigning and campaign communication should be measured and evaluated (Johnson 2011; Negrine 2008) (see also the chapter by Schulz). All of these assumptions can be criticized and questioned on empirical as well as theoretical grounds. The main benefit of different typologies of changing campaign practices is thus not that they provide an accurate and generally valid description of how campaign practices change across time and what characterizes one type of campaign in comparison with another. The main benefit is rather that they provide an overview and starting point for further analyses. Also important is that they highlight the linkage between modes and media of political communication on the one hand, and campaign practices on the other. As strategic actors, political parties and campaigns continuously adapt to changes in the environments in which they are operate. They adapt to changes in societal structures, to changes in communication technologies, and to changes

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Tab. 2: Typology of changing campaign practices. Stage 1 (“Premodern”)

Stage 2 (“Modern”)

Stage 3 (“Postmodern”)

Mode of political Party-dominated communication system

Television-centered

Multiple channels and multi-media

Dominant style of political communication

Messages along party lines

Sound bites, image and impression management

Narrow-casted, targeted micro-messages

Dominant media

Partisan press, posters, newspaper adverts, radio broadcasts

Television broadcasts through main evening news

Television narrowcasting, targeted direct mail and emailcampaigns

Dominant advertising media

Print advertisements, posters, leaflets, radio speeches and mass rallies

Nationwide television advertisements, colorful posters and magazine adverts, mass direct mailings

Targeted television advertisements, e-mail campaigns and telemarketing, web-based advertisements

Campaign coordination Party leaders and leading party staff

Party campaign managers and external media, advertising and survey experts

Special party campaign units and more specialized political consultants

Dominant campaign paradigm

Party-logic

Media logic

Marketing logic

Campaign preparation

Short-term, ad-hoc

Longer-term campaign

Permanent campaign

Campaign expenditures

Low

Increasing

Spiraling up

with respect to voters’ political attitudes and behaviors. They adapt either because they feel under pressure to adapt, or because they perceive strategic advantages in adapting. Both reasons are relevant for an understanding of why and how election campaigning and campaign communication have changed over time. Turning to research trying to explain how and why election campaigning and campaign communication have changed across time, three themes stand out as particularly important: Americanization, Modernization and Professionalization (see also the chapter by Schulz). The starting point for the thesis of an Americanization of political campaigning and campaign communication is the notion that campaign practices have become more similar across countries – and that U.S. election campaigns are at the forefront of the development of new campaign practices with other countries following suit (Esser and Strömbäck 2012; Negrine 2008; Negrine and Papathanassopoulos 1996; Plasser and Plasser 2002). Every time there is a presidential election in the

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US, campaign practitioners from across the world travel to the United States to observe and learn from how presidential campaigning is run. When they return home, they bring with them new lessons that they implement in subsequent campaigns. In addition, while it used to be the case that political consultancy was mainly a U.S. phenomenon, political consultancy has become more common also in many other countries, and it has become increasingly common that American campaign consultants work abroad (Plasser and Plasser 2002; Plasser 2009). Finally, the mass media in countries across the world usually devote extensive attention to U.S. election campaigns, including innovations in campaign strategies and tactics used (Painter et al. 2011). Thus, U.S. campaign practices may diffuse through three routes: by campaign practitioners from other countries visiting and studying U.S. presidential election campaigns, by U.S. political consultants working for parties in other countries, and by international media coverage of U.S. presidential campaigns. In all three cases, election campaign practices in other countries are allegedly becoming increasingly similar to U.S. presidential election campaign practices, which is to say Americanized. While few would dispute that U.S. election campaign practices are very innovative, and that campaign practitioners and the media from across the world follow U.S. campaigns with great interest, critics of the Americanization-thesis claim that its notion of one-way diffusion and imitation is too simplified and inadequate for a full understanding of why and how campaign practices change. The main reason for this is that political campaigning and campaign communication never take place in a vacuum. Instead it is shaped by factors at the macro- as well as the meso- and the micro-levels of analysis, which vary across countries and together form the contextual conditions for election campaigning and campaign communication. Among the most important structural and semi-structural factors are the political system, the media system, the campaign rules and regulations, the political culture, and the type of parties and party system (for a recent overview, see Esser and Strömbäck 2012; see also Farrell 2000; Kaid and Holtz-Bacha 2006; Norris 2000; Plasser and Plasser 2002; Plasser 2009; Strömbäck 2010; Strömbäck and Kaid 2008) (see also the chapter Pfetsch and Esser). As an alternative explanation for growing similarities in campaign practices, modernization theory attributes the spread of modern campaign techniques to processes of change within society, and views influences from outside as a complementary factor. More specifically, modernization theory holds that macro-level changes of social structure, political structure, and media structure are caused by endogenous and exogenous factors. One of the most important endogenous factors is increasing functional differentiation within societies; another is increasing individualization (Castells 1998; Esser and Strömbäck 2012; Giddens 1984; Swanson and Mancini 1996). For example, as the media increase their independence from political parties and form a subsystem on their own, parties can no longer rely on

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loyal media to provide them with positive visibility. Instead, they have to develop their skills in news management. The reason why parties in a particular country make use of similar news management techniques as parties in the U.S is therefore not that they are imitating U.S. parties. It is instead that the need for news management, as a consequence of increasing media autonomy, has increased in that country as it had done before in the United States. Similarly, as party identification has declined and electoral volatility has increased (voter dealignment), parties worldwide have to find new ways to target key voter groups. Often these can be found in the U.S., but the main reason why it appears as if parties in different parts of the world are imitating U.S. campaign techniques is that individualization increased earlier there than in other countries. Two approaches to the apparent process of Americanization can thus be distinguished: the modernization and the diffusion approach (Negrine et al. 2007; Plasser and Plasser 2002; Swanson and Mancini 1996). According to the modernization approach, increasing use of U.S. campaign strategies and tactics is a consequence of the modernization of media systems and the relationship between parties and voters, while according to the diffusion approach, it is a consequence of transnational diffusion and implementation of U.S. campaign practices. Plasser and Plasser (2002) also argue that there are two models that may describe the diffusion of U.S. campaign practices: the adoption and the shopping model. According to the adoption model, parties around the world adopt different campaign practices that have proven successful in U.S. election campaigning. This import of successful campaign practices results in a transformation of election campaigns outside of the United States. The end result is standardization, that is, a “gradual phase-out of country-specific traditional campaign styles” and their substitution of U.S. campaign practices (Plasser and Plasser 2002: 19). According to the shopping model, political parties around the world rather study and implement selected U.S. campaign practices, depending on how well they fit within the context of the own country. The parties shop those campaign practices that work best and are most appropriate in a particular context. This leads to a process of professionalization of political campaigning outside of the United States. The end result is hybridization, that is, a path-dependent and “country-specific supplementation of traditional campaign practices with select features of the American style of campaigning” (Plasser and Plasser 2002: 19). While there is a lack of longitudinal and comparative research on the processes and diffusion of campaign practices, most analyses support the notions of modernization and hybridization in front of unidirectional diffusion and standardization (Negrine et al. 2007; Negrine 2008; Esser and Strömbäck 2012; Swanson and Mancini 1996). Research also suggests that there are substantial differences between countries in election campaigning and campaign communication. Such variations are more easily explained by modernization theory than by Americanization. Finally, modernization theory has the advantage of linking factors on the

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macro-level to adaptive behavior on the micro-level and is in that respect more ambitious (Esser and Strömbäck 2012; Plasser and Plasser 2002). The emphasis in research on election campaigning and campaign communication has subsequently shifted to the notion of professionalization (Farrell and Webb 2000; Gibson and Römmele 2001, 2009; Negrine et al. 2007; Norris 2000; Strömbäck 2009), embedded in the discussion about different stages of campaigning and campaign communication. Although often used as a rather vague catchall term (Lilleker and Negrine 2002), at least four facets and conceptualizations of campaign professionalization can be identified. First and on a very general level, campaign professionalization might be conceptualized as “an ongoing process where structures and practices are continually revised and updated in order to make them more ‘rational’ and more ‘appropriate’ for the conduct of politics” (Negrine 2008: 2). This is a “process of adaptation” to changes on the system level in the relationship between politics, media and the electorate (Holtz-Bacha 2007: 63). Second, campaign professionalization might be conceptualized as a process towards an increasing use of campaign professionals, that is, individuals with particular expertise in different aspects of campaign strategies, tactics, or communication, or as a process where more people work fulltime with campaigning and campaign communication (Negrine 2008; Negrine et al. 2007; Plasser and Plasser 2002). Here a distinction should be made between internal or external professionalization (Plasser 2009). Internal professionalization refers to a process where more people working within the parties acquire greater knowledge and expertise within the field of election campaigning, and where the size of the staff working with campaigning and communication is growing. External professionalization refers to a process where parties and candidates increasingly hire professional, external advisors and consultants with specialized expertise (Plasser 2009: 33; see also Johnson 2007; Thurber and Nelson 2000). Third and related, campaign professionalization may be conceptualized as an increasing specialization of tasks related to campaigning and campaign communication (Lilleker and Negrine 2002). Instead of being “campaign experts”, consultants or staff may increasingly be experts on, for example, opinion polls, voter segmentation or advertising. For example, the online directory of “Campaigns and Elections”, the trade magazine for political consultants, lists over 60 different categories of services offered by political consultants. Fourth, campaign professionalization may be conceptualized as increasing use of different campaign strategies and tactics associated with professional campaigning. In the party-centered theory of professionalized campaigning, for example, the dependent variable is an additive index of different campaign strategies and tactics (Gibson and Römmele 2001, 2009; Strömbäck 2009). Originally this index included the use of telemarketing and direct mail for contacting own members and outside target groups, use of computerized databases, conducting opposition research, use of public relations or media consultants, use of opinion polling, use

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of e-mail sign-up or subscription lists for regular news updates, outside campaign headquarters, and continuous campaigning (Gibson and Römmele 2001). Professionalization of political campaigning and campaign communication is thus a multifaceted process. The extent to which campaigns and campaign communication can be described as professionalized thus varies depending on how professionalization is conceptualized. While there is little doubt that political parties attempt to find better ways of planning for and running campaigns, on a general level there is less research showing that there has been an increase, for example, in the use of campaign professionals. Whether this is because there has been no unequivocal process of campaign professionalization, or because there is a manifest lack of systematic comparative and longitudinal research, is less clear, although much speaks for the latter interpretation.

4 Contemporary election campaign communication While there are differences across countries in terms of election campaigning and campaign communication, a review of the literature suggests that there are some trends that apply across a broader range of countries. They certainly not apply equally everywhere, but keeping that in mind and allowing a certain degree of simplification, ten macro trends can be identified. First, campaign communication remains heavily television-centered. For most people in most countries, television remains the most important source of information about politics (Plasser 2009; Purcell et al. 2010). The number of channels has increased in many countries, and the television audience has become more fragmented, but compared to other forms of media, television is still the most important media type. This holds particularly true for those who need to communicate with the otherwise modestly attentive and interested (see also the chapter by Wolling and Emmer). Second, election campaigns and campaign communication is heavily focused on individual candidates or party leaders at the expense of the parties. This may hold particularly true for the media coverage of election campaigns, and also for how the parties themselves campaign (Mughan 2000; Poguntke and Webb 2005). For both the parties and the media, it may be easier to communicate effectively when focusing on individual candidate and party leaders than when focusing on abstract parties, and media events such as televised debates naturally focus on the party leaders and candidates (see also the chapters by Shaefer, Shenhav, and Balmas and by Hopmann). Important to note, though, is that most research shows that voters still vote for parties rather than for individual candidates or leaders, particularly in party-centered democracies (Aarts, Blais, and Schmitt 2011). Third, the Internet has become increasingly important. This holds true for both traditional web pages (Web 1.0) and blogs and different social media such as Face-

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book and YouTube (Web 2.0). For every election cycle, more people turn to the Internet for information about politics and society, and for every election cycle, political parties and campaigns focus more on web campaigning (Hendricks and Denton 2010; Lilleker and Jackson 2011). It is however important to recognize that the Internet is a platform rather than a challenger to traditional media in terms of audience competition. This is witnessed by the fact that most of those who turn to the Internet for information, turn to the online versions of traditional media (Purcell et al. 2010; Smith 2009). In that particular respect, it is often misleading to discuss increasing usage of the Internet as posing a threat to traditional media. Fourth, an ever-expanding media environment and increasing media choice has resulted in a situation where individual preferences and motivations have a stronger impact on media use than they used to have, leading to increasing audience fragmentation (Prior 2007; Stroud 2011; Strömbäck, Djerf-Pierre, and Shehata 2012). For campaigns, this means that it has become more difficult to reach out to groups that are less interested, either in politics in general or in what particular campaigns have to say. This holds particularly true with respect to the Internet. While the Internet is an excellent medium to reach out to, mobilize and organize supporters and activists (Harfoush 2009; Levenshus 2010; Sweetser 2011), it is less efficient in terms of reaching out to new and inattentive voters (Dimitrova et al. 2011). Fifth, microtargeting has become a more important campaign strategy. The logic of microtargeting is to identify as many voter segments as possible that can be distinguished from other voter segments and that internally are as homogenous as possible. The ideal would be to tailor campaign messages to individual voters. While that is not possible, segmentation based on demographics, geography, lifestyles, attitudes and opinions, and behaviors have become increasingly common, particularly in countries that allow parties to buy and collect all kinds of individual data and store them in consumer or voter databases (Johnson 2011; Hillygus and Shields 2008; Shaw 2006; Spiller and Bergner 2011). In the United States, both parties have databases covering virtually all registered voters, and this is used to segment and microtarget voters. As concluded by Sara Taylor, strategist for President Bush in 2004, “We could identify exactly who should be mailed, on what issues, and who should be ignored completely” (quoted in Hillygus and Shields 2008: 161). Sixth and consequently, narrowcasting has become a more important campaign strategy (Hillygus and Shields 2008; Johnson 2011). This is a consequence of the expanding media environment, the increasing audience fragmentation, and the increasing sophistication in terms of identifying voter segments. The more media there are, the more individual preferences predict what type of media and media content people expose themselves to, the more homogenous audiences for different kinds of media and media content has become, and the greater the prospects are for campaigns to target specific groups with messages tailored to

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those group. All this presupposes, of course, that campaigns have reliable data. Effective microtargeting and narrowcasting thus presupposes sophisticated voter segmentation. Seventh, the need for professional campaign and communication expertise has increased. The two major reasons are that media landscapes have become more diverse and fragmented, not only in terms of audiences but also in terms of media types and media outlets (Bennett and Iyengar 2008), and that voter behavior in many countries has become more volatile and less predictable due to decreasing party identification and increasing individualization (Dalton and Wattenberg 2000). Thus, the challenges of reaching and communicating with different voter groups have increased simultaneously with a greater need to reaching out to and communicating with different voter groups. This calls for greater expertise in political campaigning and campaign communication. Eighth, there appears to be a process of increasing professionalization, defined by continuous efforts at improving the use of different campaign strategies and tactics as well as by increasing use either of internal campaign staff or outside consultants. In some countries, this is a process of increasing internal professionalization. In other countries, it is a process of increasing external professionalization (Negrine et al. 2007; Plasser 2009). However, while there is a process towards increasing professionalization, the level of professionalization still differs widely across countries (Plasser and Plasser 2002). The direction and the state of professionalization should thus not be conflated. Ninth and related, political parties have become increasingly marketing oriented, in the sense that they make increasing use of various marketing strategies and tactics to research and segment the electorate, develop and test messages, target messages to different groups, and when branding and positioning themselves as well as the opponents (Johnson 2009; Lees-Marshment 2009, 2012; Newman 1994; Spiller and Bergner 2011). Tenth, parties have become increasingly sales-oriented, but there is little evidence to suggest that parties have become increasingly market-oriented (LeesMarshment, Strömbäck, and Rudd 2010). Marketing orientation does not equal market orientation. Parties do make increasing use of marketing strategies and tactics to find ways to reach out to and persuade voters, but in most cases, the parties themselves define the ideology and the policies. While parties make use of focus groups and opinion polls to find out what voters believe and want, this is primarily used to influence what messages the parties focus on. It is seldom used as a reason to change policies (Lees-Marshment, Strömbäck, and Rudd 2010). Phrased differently, campaign communication may have become increasingly marketing and market-oriented, but in general, the parties themselves have not. Taken together, these ten macro trends and tendencies result in campaigns becoming ever more expensive. This holds particularly true in countries where televised advertising is allowed and external professionalization dominates, such

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as the United States, but the general tendency holds true everywhere. Running professionalized campaigns costs money, and as the need for running professionalized campaigns has increased due to modernization, changes in media environments and changes in voter behavior, so have the costs of campaigning. This may increase the influence of the wealthy – in particular where campaign fundraising is rather unregulated and parties and candidates depend on fundraising rather than on membership fees and state support – and exacerbate political inequalities. On a normative level, this raises troubling questions with respect to the impact of contemporary campaign trends on democracy and the key normative ideal of political equality (see Dahl 2006) (see also the chapter by Puppis).

5 Conclusion The goal of strategic political communication during election campaigns is to use information and communication as strategically and effectively as possible to reach the objectives that have been set. The strategic goals of parties and campaigns are thus imperative, which suggests that an understanding of strategic political communication during election campaigns requires an understanding of political parties and campaigns as organizations. For example, some parties are more vote-seeking, while others may be more policy-seeking. Such party characteristics will influence both the priority given to campaigning and campaign communication, and how the parties plan and run their campaigns. At the same time, campaign practices and communication are always dynamic and shaped by the contextual conditions formed by the political system, the media system, laws and regulations, the political culture, and the type of parties and party competition. What works in one context may thus not work in another context. While there are cross-national patterns in campaign practices and campaign communication, more detailed analyses usually reveals country-differences beneath the surface. Hence, while it is important to identify macro trends, it is also important not to oversimplify. The country context matters and filters the innovations and import of campaign practices. Modernization theory thus holds stronger explanatory power than the Americanization-thesis, and rather than standardization of campaign practices, research suggests hybridization. Still, this review has shown that research on election campaigning and campaign communication suffers from several deficits. Most important is the lack of longitudinal and comparative research, which partly follows from the lack of specified and standardized independent and dependent variables. Only with a comprehensive theoretical framework and clearly specified and standardized independent and dependent variables can comparative research on election campaigning and campaign communication flourish, and only then will it be possible to provide firm answers to questions about differences and similarities in election campaign-

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ing and campaign communication across time or space; their antecedents; and their consequences. One thing holds generally true though: At heart, election campaigns are nothing but political communication.

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Shaw, Daron R. 2006. The Race to 270. The Electoral College and the Campaign Strategies of 2000 and 2004. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Sides, John and Lynn Vavreck. 2013. The Gamble. Choice and Chance in the 2012 Presidential Election. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sjöblom, Gunnar. 1968a. Party Strategies in a Multiparty System. Lund: Studentlitteratur. Sjöblom, Gunnar. 1968b. The study of party propaganda. Scandinavian Political Studies 3: 15–46. Smith, Aaron. 2009. The Internet’s Role in Campaign 2008. New York: Pew Research Center. Spiller, Lisa and Jeff Bergner. 2011. Branding the Candidate. Marketing Strategies to Win Your Vote. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Stroud, Natalie Jomini. 2011. Niche News. The Politics of News Choice. New York: Oxford University Press. Strøm, Karee. 1990. A behavioral theory of competitive political parties. American Journal of Political Science 34: 565–598. Strömbäck, Jesper. 2007a. Political marketing and professionalized campaigning: A conceptual analysis. Journal of Political Marketing 6: 49–67. Strömbäck, Jesper. 2010. A framework for comparing political market-orientation. In: Jennifer Lees-Marshment, Jesper Strömbäck and Chris Rudd (eds.), Global Political Marketing, 16–33. London: Routledge. Strömbäck Jesper. 2009. Selective professionalisation of political campaigning: A test of the party-centred theory of professionalised campaigning in the context of the 2006 Swedish election. Political Studies 57: 95–116. Strömbäck, Jesper, Monika Djerf-Pierre and Adam Shehata. 2012. The dynamics of political interest and news media consumption: A longitudinal perspective. International Journal of Public Opinion Research 25: 414–435. Strömbäck, Jesper and Lynda Lee Kaid (eds.). 2008. The Handbook of Election News Coverage Around the World. New York: Routledge. Strömbäck, Jesper and Spiro Kiousis. 2011a. Political public relations. Defining and mapping an emergent field. In: Jesper Strömbäck and Spiro Kiousis (eds.), Political Public Relations. Principles and Applications, 1–32. New York: Routledge. Swanson, David L. and Paolo Mancini (eds.). 1996. Politics, Media, and Modern Democracy. An International Study of Innovations in Electoral Campaigning and Their Consequences. Westport, CT: Praeger. Sweetser, Kaye D. 2011. Digital Political Public Relations. In: Jesper Strömbäck and Spiro Kiousis (eds.), Political Public Relations. Principles and Applications, 293–313. New York: Routledge. Thurber, James A. and Candice J. Nelson (eds.). 2000. Campaign Warriors. Political Consultants in Elections. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution Press. Trent, Judith S. and Robert V. Friedenberg. 2004. Political Campaign Communication. Principles and Practices. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Vavreck, Lynn. 2009. The Message Matters. The Economy and Presidential Campaigns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Vliegenthart, Rens and Stefaan Walgrave. 2010. When media matter for politics. Partisan moderators of mass media influence on parliament in Belgium, 1993–2000. Party Politics 17: 321–342. De Vreese, Claes H. 2010. Campaign communications and media. In: Lawrence LeDuc, Richard G. Niemi and Pippa Norris (eds.), Comparing Democracies 3. Elections and Voting in the 21st Century, 118–140. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Ward, Stephen, Diana Owen, Richard Davis and David Taras (eds.). 2008. Making a Difference. A Comparative View of the Role of the Internet in Election Politics. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Walgrave, Stefaan and Peter van Aelst. 2006. The contingency of the mass media’s political agenda setting power: Toward a preliminary theory. Journal of Communication 56: 88–109.

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7 Political communication in referendums Abstract: This chapter reviews research on political communication in referendums that have become increasingly popular in democracies worldwide. The authors define key characteristics of referendums, touch upon participation in and popular support for referendums, and highlight the differences between them and presidential or parliamentary elections for political actors, the media, and citizens. Furthermore, they discuss findings regarding media effects on issue salience, issue understanding, turnout, and voting behavior. The authors argue that the potential for communication and campaign effects on citizens is generally larger in a referendum campaign than in other electoral contests. Finally, the authors call for more research into referendums that will likely become even more important in the future. Key Words: referendums, direct democracy, media effects, campaign coverage, agenda-setting, voting turnout, voting behavior

1 Introduction Referendums and citizen initiatives are an increasingly popular means of enacting or preventing legislation around the world. In this chapter we outline a number of effects that media and communication might have in referendum campaigns and we demonstrate why campaigns in referendums are important and how they matter for changes in public opinion, political participation, and voters’ choice to say Yes or No.1 In a referendum campaign, the information cues from political parties are often ambiguous. In contrast to a general election campaign where political parties provide relatively clear-cut information cues for voters, parties may be internally divided over the referendum issue, political parties from opposite sides of the ideological left-right spectrum may form unusual coalitions in referendums, and referendums may also give rise to new parties or movements and thereby reshape the party system (Hobolt 2007; LeDuc 2002; de Vreese 2006, de Vreese 2007; de Vreese and Semetko 2004a). Despite the apparent simplistic nature of a referendum vote (Yes/ in favour, or No/ against), the issue is often multi-faceted and different aspects may trigger 1 We acknowledge the difference between citizen initiatives, referendums, and other forms of direct democracy, but for reasons of parsimony speak only about referendum campaigns in this chapter. We contend that most of the dynamics and issues we address hold up in most instances of direct democracy. Part of this overview chapter relies on de Vreese (2007) and Schuck and de Vreese (2009, 2011).

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diverse perceptions of the issue among voters. The contextual situation and the framing of a referendum issue by political actors and key information sources during a campaign may therefore be unusually important to a referendum outcome. Significant swings in public opinion can occur over the course of a referendum campaign. While longer-term factors such as partisanship or ideology have been found to be important in national elections, the short-term impact of campaign strategies and tactics can make a substantial difference in determining referendum outcomes. Perceptions of the referendum question on the part of the voters, the images they hold of groups and individuals involved, the salience of political and economic issues, in essence unrelated to the referendum issue, and voters’ reactions to the discourse of the campaign can be as important to the voting decision as their opinions and beliefs on the issue itself. Contrary to regular elections, no candidates or parties appear on the ballot, thus voters must decide among alternatives that may be unfamiliar. Given these characteristics one may therefore expect a greater degree of volatility and uncertainty in voting preferences in a referendum campaign compared to a general election campaign. This attaches more importance to the campaign in referendums and assumes greater potential for campaign effects compared to regular elections (see also the chapter by Strömbäck and Kiousis). This chapter focuses on the key actors in a referendum (the political elites/parties, the media and the citizens) and is centred around different effects that the media and the campaign can have, such as electoral engagement, turnout, and vote choice. While referendums and citizen initiatives are popular and well studied at the local and regional level, relatively few campaign studies have been carried out in the context of (national) referendums. However, different forms of direct democracy are becoming increasingly common (Bowler and Donovan 1998; Butler and Ranney 1994; Hänggli and Kriesi 2010; Schuck and de Vreese 2009; Sciarini and Tresch 2011). We organize our synthesizing of extant literature focusing on campaign and communication effects according to a distinction between (a) studies of opinion formation and (b) studies of electoral behaviour. The key concepts that cross-cut this distinction, such as agenda-setting, priming, framing, actor evaluations etc., are well established in the general political communication literature (see McLeod, Kosicki, and McLeod 2009) and are addressed extensively in other chapters in this Handbook (see section VII).

2 Referendum: One term, several meanings Taking a step back, we first give an overview of the different forms of direct democracy subsumed under the term referendum. Referendums can be initiated by governments and legislators or by citizens, they can be binding or advisory. Table 1 summarizes the different types of referendums.

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Tab. 1: Referendums: A Typology. Type

Implies

Outcome

Applied in (for example)

Compulsory/ binding

Referendum held to change constitutional law (mandatory constitutional)

Binding

Australia, Denmark, Ireland, Switzerland

Rejective/ facultative

Referendum on law already passed by legislature (abrogative)

Usually binding

Austria, Denmark, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland

Initiative/ direct legislation

Referendum on a subject brought about by petition of citizens (citizen initiated)

Usually binding

Switzerland, New Zealand, United States

Advisory/ plebiscite

Referendum on a subject initiated by the government or legislature (consultative)

Non-binding France, Britain, Canada, Finland, Netherlands, Spain

Source: Adapted from Suski (1993), LeDuc (2003), and de Vreese (2007).

In the discussion of campaign dynamics, we do not distinguish between the different types of referendums. National referendums are addressed most elaborately in previous research, but the actors involved and the dynamics underlying campaigns have more similarities than differences across the different types of referendums. However, one of the key parameters for understanding the dynamics of a referendum campaign is the subject matter. In addition to the variation in type and legal framework of referendums, the subject matter varies too. LeDuc (2003: 33) introduced a useful distinction between referendums on constitutional issues, referendums on treaties and international agreements, referendums on issues of sovereignty, and referendums on a number of specific policies. The first group covers referendums on amendments to national constitutions and changes in political institutions and forms of governance. The group includes the 1992 Canadian constitutional referendum, the 1992/93 referendums in New Zealand on electoral reform, and the 1991 Swiss referendum to lower the voting age. In the second group, referendums have been held on agreements between national and supranational organizations. Denmark, for example, has held referendums to ratify the European Single Act (1986), the Maastricht Treaty (1992) (also put to a referendum vote in France 1992), the Edinburgh Treaty (1993), the Amsterdam Treaty (1998), and the Euro (2000). Other examples include the 1998 referendum on the Northern Ireland peace agreement and the wave of referendums in 2005 in the European Union on ratification of the EU Constitutional Treaty in Spain, France, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.

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The third group refers to referendums held on issues of territorial boundaries, self-determination, devolution, and federation. Examples include the 1991 Ukrainian independence referendum, the 1997 referendums to establish national Welsh and Scottish assemblies, and the 1980 and 1995 referendums on sovereignty in Quebec. The final group covers referendums on specific policy issues, including consultative votes on proposals. Examples include the Swedish (1980) and Austrian (1978) referendums on nuclear power, the 1993 Italian referendum on decriminalization of drugs and the 1983 and 2002 Irish referendums on abortion. This group also includes numerous citizen initiatives in the United States (including ones on the state level, for example in California and Oregon) and more than hundred separate issues that Swiss voters have voted on in referendums.

3 The instrument: Popular support for referendums The use of referendums has become increasingly popular in western democracies in recent years (Hobolt 2009; Scarrow 2001) and support for direct democracy among citizens is generally high (Bowler and Donovan 1998; Mendelsohn and Parkin 2001). However, previous research has yielded inconclusive results as to who is most supportive and for what reason. Referendums are typically seen as the most prominent direct democratic instrument and are believed to increase the legitimacy of political institutions and to be an instrument to create a greater sense of political efficacy (Bowler and Donovan 2002; but see Dyck and Lascher 2009) or satisfaction with democracy (Bernauer and Vatter 2012) and to engage citizens who otherwise tend to be uninvolved (Donovan, Tolbert, and Smith 2009; Fishkin 1995). Some scholars argue that the periodic use of referendums could prevent the rise of anti-democratic movements (Resnick 1997), others warn that it could open the door to populism (Dalton, Buerklin, and Drummond 2001) and foster political intolerance (Sartori 1987) because of the polarization of political discourse. In addition, the assessment of elements of direct democracy is closely related to more general normative ideas about democracy and also to certain democratic theories (see also the chapter by Kepplinger). Previous research has yielded mixed findings on whether referendums are either more embraced by those who are already more politically involved (Donovan and Karp 2006) or rather by those who feel disaffected with traditional partybased politics (Dalton, Buerklin, and Drummond 2001). First, the cognitive mobilization hypothesis claims that people with greater cognitive resources, such as education or political knowledge, are more likely to make use of the referendum opportunity since they arrive at more informed decisions and are more motivated to participate in the political process (Inglehart 1990). Thus, those citizens who are more interested in politics and more willing to participate are also seen as

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more likely to support referendums since they represent yet another opportunity for political expression. On the contrary, the political disaffection hypothesis claims the exact opposite. In this perspective, referendums are expected to be embraced especially by those citizens who feel disconnected from traditional party politics and who are at the margins of the political process (Dalton, Buerklin, and Drummond 2001; Donovan, Tolbert, and Smith 2009). For them, direct democratic means offer an alternative way of political expression, which can have a concrete and immediate impact on political processes. In this perspective the driving force behind support for direct democratic means is dissatisfaction or disillusionment with governments and the political process as a whole (Norris 1999). Thus, support for direct democracy in this perspective is not seen as primarily linked to a desire for more political participation or responsibility but rather to the dissatisfaction with traditional political representation (Hibbing and Theiss-Morse 2001). These findings are complemented by other recent research showing relative referendum skepticism among highly informed citizens (compared to less informed citizens) because of higher confidence in government and concerns for minority rights (Anderson and GoodyearGrant 2010).2 In previous research, some studies support the political disaffection hypothesis (Dalton, Buerklin, and Drummond 2001) and others support the cognitive mobilization hypothesis (Donovan and Karp 2006) while some find mixed support (Schuck and de Vreese 2011) or no support for either explanation (Craig, Kreppel, and Kane 2001). There are several obvious shortcomings in previous research which can account for these inconsistencies. First of all, most analytic models attempting to explain support for direct democracy suffer from low explanatory power, pointing to the problem of omitted variables or to the fact that there simply is not much to explain given that citizens do not hold strong attitudes on this issue, variation is low within and across countries and support is rather stable over time. Furthermore, previous research thus far has not considered countryspecific, contextual factors and their influence on attitudes towards direct democracy, i.e., their cross-level interaction with individual attitudes (see also the chapter by Pfetsch and Esser). Finally, most studies not only use different operationalizations of key independent variables, which is problematic in and by itself, but also of their dependent variable, i.e., some asking if respondents want more or less direct democracy whereas others ask for referendum support in general, only

2 Interestingly, lower educated citizens have not only been shown to be more in support of direct democracy but also of the exact opposite, so-called “stealth” democracy, a form of democracy where there is even less citizen involvement than in the representative form of today’s democracy. Rather than a desire for more direct democracy they simply want to see change compared to the current situation which they perceive as deficient. Political ideology then affects which of the two directions such lower educated citizens prefer, direct democracy (left ideological leaning) or stealth democracy (right ideological leaning) (Bengtsson and Mattila 2009).

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on specific issues, or only with regard to specific forms of direct democracy. Arguably these differences can affect findings and make it difficult to generalize and compare results across studies. Recent research has looked at how news coverage of a referendum campaign can affect individual support for referendums (Schuck and de Vreese 2011). To date, however, we still know very little about which content features in media coverage can affect how people think of direct democracy and what the underlying processes and potential mechanisms are behind such influence.

4 The referendum campaign In most research on referendums little attention has been devoted specifically to the role of the campaign. This is especially surprising given the aforementioned higher degree of electoral volatility in referendum contexts compared to general elections. Furthermore, media and communication effects are often considered to be small in real-world settings and compared to other influences, however, in referendums small shifts can make all the difference and result in opposite outcomes. Thus, considering campaign effects in referendums seems to be an especially important research topic as media and communication effects can be assumed to be more likely to occur and to have immediate consequences. In the past decade, a series of studies have emerged that have started to investigate the nature and the impact of the referendum campaign more specifically (Farrell and Schmitt-Beck 2002; Hobolt 2009; Mendelsohn and Parkin 2001; Schuck and de Vreese 2008; Sciarini and Tresch 2011; de Vreese and Semetko 2004a). In all types of referendums the campaign matters, however, the issue type a referendum is about is of particular importance. On issues of, for example, sovereignty and territorial definition and change, a referendum campaign is more likely to activate and crystallize already existing notions and opinions. In this kind of referendums, considerations pertaining to national borders, identities, and sense of belonging may be primed and play a larger role than fundamentally new considerations because the topic is not completely unfamiliar to most people. For other issues, however, like internationally focused issues involving treaties, a referendum campaign may significantly affect the definition of what the referendum is actually about. This is because international treaties are often technical texts and as such not easily accessible, which implies that summarizing and framing the referendum issue in such instances is a key component of the campaign (see also LeDuc 2002). Under such circumstances the campaign might affect voters considerably as they are confronted with an issue they are relatively unfamiliar with. In sum, the relative importance of the campaign in referendums on specific policy issues is dependent on the issue: While individual citizens may have relatively clear opinions about abortion or the use of nuclear power, their knowledge

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and awareness about tax reform, electoral reform, and international treaties may be subject to larger influences during a referendum campaign. Recent research, interestingly, has shown that even on controversial and well-known issues that have been subject to deep and lasting conflict between partisan groups of left and right political ideology in a country, political information delivered during a referendum campaign can play a crucial role in opinion formation, depending on voters’ cognitive resources, i.e. their level of political competence (Sciarini and Tresch 2011) (see also the chapter by Arendt and Matthes).

4.1 The key actors The most important categories of actors involved in a referendum campaign are a) the political elites and actors such as NGOs and interest groups, b) journalists and the media, and c) citizens and public opinion. While these actors (understood in the broadest sense of the word) may interact differently in a referendum campaign than, for example, in a general election campaign, the set of actors is the same, with the exception of issue specific organizations and issue entrepreneurs. These actors do not operate in isolation, but within the broader context of a specific referendum campaign with its own particularities (as summarized in Figure 1). The observation that specific contextual and situational factors co-determine the dynamics of referendum campaigns is a truism based on a long tradition of comparative political science research (see e.g., LeDuc, Niemi, and Norris 1996; van der Eijk and Franklin 1996) (see also the chapter by Pfetsch and Esser). For referendum campaigns, the political and electoral system, a country’s democratic tradition (including its experience with referendums), the structure of financing of political activities and the media system’s regulatory regime are of importance (see also the chapter by Puppis). Political systems in most western democracies are either two-party or multiple party systems. Compared to multiple party systems, voters in a two-party system are more likely to be accustomed to a campaign resembling the referendum campaign because electoral choice is de facto a binary decision for or against a specific candidate and/or party. Therefore campaigns are likely to matter more in multiparty systems because of the rather untypical nature of the electoral contest and choice. A second contextual factor is the electoral system, which explicates how votes are cast and seats are allocated. Across the world, multiple systems are in use (see Blais and Massicotte 1996), but in a referendum most voters are faced with an alternative situation compared to electoral contests at local, regional, national or supranational level. To citizens in both systems of plurality (first past the post) and proportional representation, a referendum campaign poses a change to wellknown electoral choice. This may affect voters’ view of the dynamics of a referendum and enhance the importance of the campaign vis-à-vis their choice to participate and how to vote.

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Fig. 1: The Dynamics of referendum campaigns (reprinted from de Vreese 2010).

An additionally important contextual factor is a democratic entity’s (for example a country’s) previous experience with referendums. In places where direct democracy is well established (e.g., Switzerland and California) or where voting in referendums is used with some regularity (e.g., Denmark), voters have a larger pool of references and experiences to rely on when forming an opinion and making a vote choice. In Denmark, for example, general attitudes towards European integration are influential to the vote choice in referendums on European Treaties. Some scholars have argued that citizens in such referendums tend to rely on proxies, most often anchored in domestic politics and satisfaction with the incumbent government (Franklin, van der Eijk, and Marsh 1995), while others have argued that attitudes towards European integration matter for vote choice (Svensson 2002). Other work has emphazised that both explanations can co-exist (de Vreese and Semetko 2004b) and others have pointed to the contingency of this relation on, for example, political elites (Hobolt 2009). This means that the campaign is part of determining exactly how important considerations about the issue at stake, such as European integration, are in comparison to considerations not directly related to the issue (see also Schuck and de Vreese 2008). The financing of political activities and the media system, including the regulatory regime, also affect the parameters of a campaign. Countries differ considerably in their restrictions with respect to the financing of political activities and the degree to which, for example, paid political advertisement is allowed (van Biezen

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2010; LeDuc, Niemi, and Norris 1996; see also Holtz-Bacha and Kaid 2006). This determines the parameters of the campaign and may be indicative of whether a premium is put on paid or unpaid campaign communications. In contexts where restrictions are minimal ads tend to play a larger role and drive up levels of expenditure involved in campaigning. In contexts with a rather restrictive regulatory order campaign expenditure tends to be lower and campaigners have to rely more on unpaid, mediated communication through for example the news media (see also the chapter by Puppis). In previous research there is an implicit understanding of the relevance of context. Most studies are single country studies and often report elaborately about the specificities of a referendum (e.g., Siune and Svensson 1993). There is relatively little work on the impact of context given the lack of comparative analyses and adequate data that would enable a better understanding of when and how contextual factors matter. For the case of Switzerland, Sciarini and Tresch (2011) provide an example, based on 25 referendum votes, that the context of the popular vote indeed matters, i.e. the size and type of conflict among the party elite and the intensity and direction of the referendum campaign. They show that the type of party-coalition pre-structures the patterns of individual vote choice and campaign effects are larger when the referendum campaign is more intense and more symmetric when its direction is balanced. Hobolt and Brouard (2011) showed for the example of the 2005 EU Constitution referenda in France and the Netherlands that the campaign played an important role in priming certain attitudes and that vote choices in both countries, in turn, were driven by specific issue concerns. They come to a similar conclusion as Sciarini and Tresch (2011) in that campaign intensity contributes to stronger campaign effects when they conclude that intense campaigns will affect which particular concerns are salient to voters. Thus, importantly, the context within which a referendum campaign is taking place conditions the potential impact of the campaign. Given that turnout rates in referendums are usually (though not always) lower when compared to national elections this has also raised concerns about the social selectivity of referendums, i.e., the question whether referendums generally favor the involved, well-educated and wealthy. If in line with the cognitive mobilization perspective those who are already more engaged in politics are the ones participating in referendums this also poses interesting questions with regard to campaign effect studies. In referendums with low levels of controversy and politicization which predominantly involve those already knowledgeable and engaged one might still expect information effects of media coverage but rather limited effects of how such information is framed regarding mobilization and changes in vote choice. In referendums that are more politicized and controversial the political disaffection perspective can be expected to prevail as the minimum threshold for disengaged citizens to also get involved is more likely to be surpassed. Regarding the role of the media in such contexts, and in line with the above considerations,

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media effects in such more contested contexts can be expected to be more likely to occur, both with regard to mobilization as well as vote choice.

4.1.1 Political elites As outlined by de Vreese (2007) political parties and candidates contesting in a referendum campaign are confronted with specific strategic choices: first, the need to raise money for the campaign and to raise the party profile in the media and in the awareness of potential voters. Contrary to domestic politics where the parties are positioned in ways fairly well known to most voters, a referendum can pose an important challenge for a party. In several referendums on European issues the traditional left-right political continuum has had little meaning because center parties tended to be pro-European integration and (semi-)extremist parties, both at the left and the right end of the continuum, tended to be European integration aversive (de Vreese 2006). Such unusual alliances can not only contribute to confusion on the side of the voter but also pose a challenge to political parties to get their message across and position themselves, often further complicated by internal disagreement and diverging voices on the referendum issue at stake. In planning a national referendum campaign, political parties therefore are faced internally with strategic choices about who will be visible in the campaign. Externally, political parties are faced with the potential strategic alliances within the Yes or No camps. These alliances involve a range of actors including employers’ organizations, labour unions, religious actors, NGOs, businesses, which makes the alliance building rather unpredictable. Moreover, these decisions may be beyond the control of the political parties or the candidates. Political parties often appoint lead campaigners, but in many cases these responsibilities become the Prime Minister’s or another incumbent’s, who mostly comes with certain connotations, positive or negative. In a country in which there is a turnout threshold that must be reached in order for the referendum result to be valid, some parties or other actors may aim strategically to mobilize while others aim simply to demobilize voters. The absence of knowledge about what opposing parties are doing is a continuing source of uncertainty. In national politics, parties are often described as “owning” certain issues, and although this may change over time there is predictability in liberals arguing for tax reduction, privatization, and deregulation, while social democrats often campaign more on welfare state values. Issue ownership in referendums, however, is by no means always clear. In a referendum campaign, parties are challenged to formulate clear campaign messages and mobilize what is often an internally divided party to stay “on message” during the campaign. A primary strategic goal is to reduce the ambiguity in cues given by a party to its voters, because voters are susceptible to consider other political options when elite cues are unclear or ambiguous (Zaller 1992; see also Saglie 1998).

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Whereas general election campaigns happen more or less on a regular basis in relatively predictable cycles, national referendums are largely unscheduled and the campaigns can run longer. LeDuc (2002) demonstrated that in referendum campaigns attitudes can be shaped by unforeseen developments or events during the campaign period. The longer the campaign, the greater the chance of unforeseen events. In a longer-term perspective, political parties are also challenged to position themselves strategically in relation to the framing of the issues related to the general thrust of a referendum. A referendum, especially in the case of a Nooutcome, is not the end of the road for the debate about policy on this and related issues. Political parties and politicians are therefore forced to consider the domestic political implications of a referendum. A referendum places a topic prominently on the political agenda and attitudes towards political leaders may be shaped more by the referendum issue than other issues during and in the aftermath of a referendum campaign. This implies that a successful campaign can bolster the popularity of political leaders while a campaign perceived to be less successful has the potential to damage the domestic political reputation of a party or politician (see also Donovan, Tolbert, and Smith 2008; de Vreese 2004). Finally, political actors have to take important strategic decisions regarding their relationships with the media before and during a referendum campaign. They face the challenge of having to choose one or more substantive issue frames to attract media attention for their own position (and/or draw media attention away from the position of their opponent); and they need to decide how much attention to pay to the issue frame of the other camp and whether to approach it offensively or defensively. In general elections, the latter decision can be more difficult, especially when there are more than two sides. Recent research from a Swiss context suggests that the input of political actors plays a decisive role in referendum campaigns and that media tend to respect frame ownership and report accordingly (Hänggli and Kriesi 2010; also see Hänggli 2012). However, media also report both camps with their adversaries’ frame too and attribute a slightly more offensive stance to them. In conclusion, a (national) referendum brings a number of possible effects for political parties and leaders. A number of the implications emerge as short-term considerations in the form of strategic choices for campaign leaders, on issue spinning, and who is to join as coalition partners in the campaign. However, a number of issues also have longer-term implications that go beyond the immediacy of the campaign. A referendum may alter the domestic political power equilibrium and it may lead to changes in the approval ratings of parties and political leaders.

4.1.2 Journalists and the media A referendum campaign challenges not only political actors but also media organizations to prepare in ways that are in many respects similar to their preparation

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for other electoral contests, but there are also a number of specific characteristics to media planning in a referendum. Prior to a general election campaign, news organizations typically prepare using background research that results in canned items for television and feature articles in the press. These preparations are made in anticipation of certain issues that are likely to appear in the campaign and when they do, background information for a story as well as potential interviewees and key facts are already on file to make it possible to report in a timely manner (de Vreese 2001). During campaigns, news programs and newspapers make use of format alterations. Newspapers typically devote specific pages or sections of the paper to follow the campaign. In television news, a frequently used ‘tool’ is the use of a political editor to chair campaign segments. In a referendum campaign news makers are forced to decide what, if any, of these instruments to use. In terms of content, election time implies considerations of balance and fairness in political reporting (Hopmann, van Aelst, and Legnante 2012; Semetko 2003; see also the chapters by Jandura and Friedrich, by Aalberg and by Hopmann). A national referendum can challenge existing conceptions of balanced news reporting (de Vreese and Semetko 2004a). While public broadcasters in Europe, for example, tend to interpret balance in the news in proportion to a party’s power in Parliament, a referendum potentially undermines this principle as other (extraparliamentary) actors join the race. Moreover, as the vote in a referendum is neither party nor candidate based, the balance issue becomes a question of hearing from the Yes and No camps. This can have the effect of a magnifying glass being placed on smaller parties or individuals on either side of the issue, thus giving disproportionally large attention to certain perspectives. Journalists are additionally challenged at the outset of a referendum campaign not least because, like the voters, all the actors involved may not be clear on the parameters of the two camps. This makes a referendum campaign potentially more unpredictable.

4.1.3 Citizens and public opinion The magnitude of overall, aggregate campaign effects is conditional upon the overall volatility present in the political system and the extent to which voting in the referendum is aligned with party politics. While voters are believed to be rational, it is often not obvious what exactly their motives are. In general elections vote choice may be influenced by habit, class tradition, religion, ideology, specific issues, and/or political personalities. All these influential factors are mediated by information sources such as television, the press, and the Internet, as well as through interpersonal discussions. Any or all of these information sources may help to either reinforce already existing views and perceptions or alter and change these (see section VII). In understanding how campaigns work, we need to consider, at the individual level, two types of campaign effects: effects of direct and personal campaign expe-

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riences and effects of indirect and mediated campaign experiences (de Vreese and Semetko 2004a). Direct and personal campaign experiences include attending rallies and the extent to which voters engage in discussions with family, friends or colleagues about politics and the issue of the referendum. Indirect and mediated experiences with politics and campaigning are the most common since only a minority of the electorate is directly involved in a campaign. The vast majority of an electorate only hears about politics and election campaigns through the media and the content forms the backdrop against which political leaders, institutions, and issues are evaluated (see also the chapters by Wolling and Emmer and by Boomgaarden). In our review of the literature on campaign and communication effects we distinguish between a) studies of opinion formation and b) studies of electoral behaviour. Studies of opinion formation during referendums show: Issue salience. A referendum campaign can affect how important the topic of the referendum is on the agenda of an electorate (de Vreese and Semetko 2004a). Such issue salience has ramifications: Hobolt (2005) showed how intense campaigns, i.e. containing a lot of political information, contribute to more issue-voting in referendums on matters of European integration. Her findings are corroborated by Wirth et al. (2010) who show that arguments in a referendum campaign flow top-down from campaign managers to the media (see also Hänggli and Kriesi 2010) and are picked up by citizens (see also Wettstein 2012) in terms of higher salience of the respective agenda that was put forward. In the US, Smith and Tolbert (2010) show that a rich information environment makes some policy issues more salient, shaping voters’ positions on broad topics such as the importance of the economy. Voters may also use campaign-specific issues as evaluative criteria, such as the issues political elites discuss in their campaigns or the issues most prevalent in media coverage (Nicholson 2005). Hobolt and Brouard (2011) look at referendum campaigns more specifically and show that the campaign plays an important role in priming certain attitudes and that vote choices, in turn, are driven by specific issue concerns. In sum, referendum campaigns can have an impact on voters both by setting the agenda as well as by priming certain attitudes which in turn can affect vote choice. Issue understanding and support. A second communication effect concerns how voters perceive the referendum issue. The way the media frame a referendum issue may be adopted by citizens who tend to interpret an issue along the lines suggested by news media frames (Siune and Svensson 1993; de Vreese and Semetko 2004b). Baden and de Vreese (2008) provide another example of how citizens make sense of what a referendum is about, depending on the way media frame the issue in the news. Exposure to referendum campaigns can moreover drive vote choices in line with which issues were prominent in the debate and became more salient on voters’ minds (Hobolt and Brouard 2011; Wirth et al. 2010). Wettstein (2012) provides an example of how news coverage of a referendum campaign can affect not only the salience of certain consideration among citizens, but also the interpretation of the issue.

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Evaluations of political leaders. A third communication effect occurring during referendum campaigns concerns changing evaluations of political leaders. As de Vreese (2004) showed, government and national political leaders were evaluated by citizens on the basis of the 2000 Danish euro referendum. This carries the important implication that the referendum campaign can have effects that reach beyond the specific issue the actual referendum is about and it adds to the importance for political elites to consider referendums and referendum campaigns to have a longer-lasting impact and spill-over effect with regard to the national political arena (see also Donovan, Tolbert, and Smith 2008). Studies of electoral behaviour in response to communication and referendum campaigns show: Turnout. As Donovan, Tolbert and Smith (2009) show, referendums have the potential to involve citizens at the periphery of the political process to go and vote. Research concerned with turnout in referendums and the role of the campaign in mobilizing the electorate, has been mainly concerned with factors such as campaign spending or relied on proxies tapping the intensity of the campaign (for an overview see Geys 2006), but has largely neglected the actual content of campaign coverage. The formula according to which more resources invested lead to more information and this would result in higher turnout seems overly simplistic as it disregards the actual content of that information as well as individual predispositions of citizens which determine how such information is processed. Furthermore, the referendum context as such plays a crucial role regarding what kind of dynamics can unfold during the campaign, i.e. the fact that in most cases a referendum proposal represents change and challenges the status quo and the result can have immediate consequences. So far, only few studies have systematically analyzed news media content throughout a referendum campaign and formally modeled its effect on turnout. De Vreese and Semetko (2002) showed how the news media’s focus on strategic reporting of the electoral race contributed to higher levels of political cynicism among voters, however, this did not affect turnout. Schuck and de Vreese (2009, 2012) showed how news supporting a referendum proposal (i.e., framed in positive terms) can be perceived as negative by opponents and mobilize these to go and vote against it out of increased risk perception. Thus, we still need to know more about how a referendum campaign can affect turnout but there is evidence that the way media portray the referendum issue carries the potential to mobilize voters and this partially due to the particular characteristics of the electoral situation (prospective change vs. status quo) which can enhance specific dynamics unique to the referendum context. Vote choice. Previous studies offer inconsistent explanations about the outcome of national referendums. Among the explanations for ‘yes’ voting in a referendum are: ideology or party support, evaluations of or feelings about political elites, government performance or government approval, economic evaluations,

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issue related contextual evaluations, political cynicism, political efficacy, political knowledge and political interest, and demographic and regional characteristics vote (see, e.g., Clarke, Kornberg, and Wearing 2000; Franklin, Marsh, and Wlezien 1994; Franklin, van der Eijk, and Michael Marsh 1995; Siune and Svensson 1993; Siune, Svensson, and Tonsgaard 1994). The importance of the information environment during the referendum campaign is usually acknowledged (Siune and Svensson 1993) but much less often empirically tested. Regarding a citizen initiative in Ontario, LeDuc (2011) analysed media coverage and concluded that the negative media portrayal of the initiative posed an “additional barrier’’ for success and likely contributed to the failure. However, there are only few systematic attempts to investigate and formally model the impact of campaign coverage on vote choice in referendums. As Hobolt and Brouard (2011) have shown media can prime attitudes in voters which then influence vote choice. More directly, de Vreese and Semetko (2004b) report significant effects of campaign coverage on vote choice in the Danish 2000 referendum on the euro and their findings are corroborated by Schuck and de Vreese (2008) who show that the tone towards the EU Constitution in Dutch media coverage did affect citizens’ vote choice. This is in line with recent other studies who show that the way a referendum proposal is framed does affect vote choice (Hobolt 2009). More specifically, Schemer, Wirth and Matthes (2012) show that media frames interact with existing value orientations in shaping voter preferences and can indeed affect voting intentions. Similarly, Sciarini, and Tresch (2011) show that the overall direction of the campaign affects the vote. Balanced campaigns resulted in strong and symmetric polarization effect, whereas one-sided campaigns results in more asymmetric patterns. Despite the importance of the campaign, however, the unpredictability of a referendum should not be exaggerated. Above and beyond the potential low citizen involvement, the presence of ambiguous elite cues, and the importance of mediated (mass) communication, the campaign is only part of the story about political engagement, electoral mobilization, evaluations of key political leaders, and vote choice. Most campaign effects are conditional. We should not expect to find large across-the-board effects. As Zaller (1992, 2002) has argued, effects of campaigns and media are not likely to be enormous, but in close electoral races they can be significant. In referendums often small shifts can make all the difference so that even small effects potentially matter even more. Or, even in races that appear foregone conclusion, the campaign can serve to further widen the gap between electoral contesters (see also section VII).

5 The future study of referendum campaigns The past decade’s increase in research looking at the contents and effects of referendum campaigns has yielded a variety of interesting findings which provided

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more insight into an exciting and thriving research field. From the perspective of political communication, a key question, also for the future, will be to specify the conditions under which referendum campaigns are just like, or (very) different from, other election campaigns. In this chapter, we highlighted some of the differences for political actors, the media, and why the potential for communication and campaign effects on citizens is generally larger in a referendum campaign than in other electoral contests. Going back to our discussion of the key actors in a referendum campaign, we propose that future research should pay attention to: The referendum: an elite instrument? The normative debate whether referendums contribute to more democratic decision-making, generally favor the welleducated and already engaged, or are prone to be governed by considerations unrelated to the issue at stake is not settled at this point. More research is needed on when and why elites call for referendum and use the instrument in cases in which this is not a constitutional requirements. Recent research in the context of the 2005 referendum on the EU constitutional treaty held in several countries suggests that such decision can be largely driven by electoral competition, i.e., parties that expected electoral gains supported and those that expected electoral losses opposed a facultative referendum (Dür and Matteo, 2011). Related to this, we also still need to learn more about the strategies and behavior of political actors in referendum campaigns, particularly their success or failure in influencing media coverage (see Hänggli 2012). Since referendums are popular among citizens they are interesting for political elites as well since calling for a referendum in itself can count on being met with some enthusiasm among the public. It is no surprise that most populist parties are in favor of referendums which feeds into concerns among critics who fear them to become a tool for majority action against unpopular minorities (Dalton, Buerklin, and Drummond 2001), which has shown indeed to be a reason why highly informed citizens are often skeptical of referendums (Anderson and GoodyearGrant 2010). Thus, elites need to know more about why citizens support or disapprove of referendums. Our current thinking about which citizens support direct democracy is primarily located in two camps, focusing on either cognitive mobilization or dissatisfaction (see above). We suggest that these perspectives should not be exclusionist. In operational terms this implies testing the impact of the different factors that represent each perspective in the same model. Conceptually, we propose that a combination of contextual and individual factors is likely to explain in greater detail why some are more fond of direct democracy than others. For example, we might find that individuals who are high on cognitive resources are particularly supportive of referendums in countries where there is more practice and experience with referendums, in other words a cross-level interaction between contextual and individual factors. Furthermore, we need to identify and test both more individual and contextual factors and we need to consider the conceptual difference between different operationalization of the dependent vari-

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able (support for direct democracy, support for referendums, support for referendums on certain issues etc.). We assume that such an endeavor can shed further light on the question which citizens are most supportive of direct democracy, which in turn can inform the more normative debate to what extent direct democracy is more of a solution or more of a dilemma with regard to the problems contemporary democracies are facing. Media coverage: absent, balanced, engaging? Up until today we have only a handful of studies that have provided systematic and comprehensive accounts of how the media deal with referendums. Some referendum issues and campaigns are of low salience and generate little or only modest attention in the news, but other issues are high salience and very visible in the news. What are the features of referendums that predict the visibility in the news, in other words: when are referendums, in the eyes of journalists and editors, important enough to put on the news agenda? A referendum campaign challenges practices and conventional wisdom in terms of balanced news reporting. A binary political choice is an anomaly in most western democracies with multiple parties and political actors contending in elections, and future research should investigate how editorial policies and practices are applied during a referendum campaign. Citizens: susceptible, apathetic, risk-averse? As in political communication research and media effects studies more generally, a key question pertains to the susceptibility of citizens to effects: when are which citizens most resistant and most susceptible to the influence of the media and the campaign? Several conditioning factors are worth investigating, ranging from the type of electoral contest (referendum vs. general election), the intensity of the campaign, and individual level differences such as political sophistication. For referendum campaign research it is also pertinent to further disentangle who is mobilized over the cause of a campaign. Given the context characteristics of a referendum, i.e., a referendum proposal usually advocating change to the status quo, we might have to rethink some of the mechanisms and dynamics we can expect in terms of media effects. Most extant research focuses on mobilizing likely proponents and likeminded people, but, as discussed above, media coverage and the campaign may in some instances very well mobilize opponents, even when the coverage seems favorable. Finally, another area for future research is to specify the conditions under which citizens are most receptive to campaign messages advocating change, i.e. when referendums campaigns can result in ‘risk seeking’ behavior of citizens voting in favor of the alternative to the status quo. Conditioning factors: Context or the individual? One of the key foci of future research on referendum campaigns and their impact we believe has to be a more thorough investigation of relevant context characteristics, such as the intensity or direction of the campaign, the degree of political competition and contestation, or the experiences with referendums in a country. There are several other relevant contextual factors to be identified which by themselves, or in interaction with

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individual characteristics, can help to explain better to what extent and under what conditions referendum campaigns can become influential (or not). Recent empirical research is developing into this direction (Hobolt 2009; Sciarini and Tresch 2011) and has yielded interesting findings. Obviously such investigations pose challenges with regard to appropriate research designs, covering multiple referendums that show sufficient variation regarding relevant context characteristics, however, we believe that it is worth the effort and we need to further disentangle the complex interactions between individual and contextual characteristics to better understand the precise role and impact of referendum campaigns. In sum, the study of referendum campaigns is a welcome feature of the political communication research agenda because much of the established relationships in the political arena are temporarily changed, opening up for an interesting laboratory for testing established political communication theories in new perspective and for developing expectations about campaign effects which take into account the specific context characteristics of the referendum vote.

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James Stanyer

8 Hypes, waves, and storms: Events and the dynamics of their coverage Abstract: This chapter examines literature on the factors which explain the different levels of attention lavished on political events by the news media. The chapter first identifies several typologies and conceptualizations of events. The author argues that the amount of media attention is not determined by the significance of an event alone but rather by an interplay of criteria both internal and external to the news media (e.g., journalistic co-orientation). Furthermore, the chapter reflects upon how the news media sometimes link similar but unrelated events creating a media-hype or news wave that sometimes has important political consequences. This amplification of coverage happens in a series of stages that are discussed in detail in the remaining part of the chapter. Key Words: media-hype, news waves, trigger events, issue-attention cycle, scandal, opinion-leading media

1 Introduction All news is dominated by events, they are “the raw materials for daily news content” (Lawrence 2000: 6), yet as a topic in their own right events and their coverage have received less attention than perhaps might have been expected in political communication research. While the news media continually process events, packaging and interpreting them, fitting them into “comprehensible categories” and narrating them in “comprehensible ways” (Schudson 2008: 88), not all events are given the same level of attention. Some events receive little if any consideration while others overshadow the news agenda for days if not weeks. We can all think of extreme examples of such events; the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York in September 2001 for instance, or other man made or natural disasters, but there are more mundane cases such as election campaigns which are a regular feature of all democracies. Work on events and the news coverage they receive points to a range of complex interrelated reasons why some events overshadow the news agenda and others do not. This chapter examines this literature synthesizing key findings to produce an insight into the factors which explain the different levels of attention lavished on events by the news media.

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2 Events and the media Some of the earliest studies of news have drawn our attention to the significance of the type of event from which news is constructed (see Boorstin 1962; Molotch and Lester 1974). Planned events and their media coverage have attracted particular scholarly attention. Boorstin writing in the 1960s bemoaned the rise of events specifically planned to gain media attention, what he called pseudo-events (1962). Pseudo-events are “arranged for the convenience of the media”, their success “measured by how widely [they] are reported” (1962: 22–23). Boorstin highlights the example of the first ever televised US presidential debates in 1960. This pseudo-event was the outcome of collaboration between the media and politicians and was widely promoted by the networks, however, according to Boorstin it reduced great national issues to trivial dimensions with most attention devoted to the event, the lighting, make-up and ground rules (1961: 51). For Boorstin such staged events increasingly dominate the media squeezing out spontaneous happenings and creating the illusion that they are all important (1962: 50). Dayan and Katz (1992) writing several decades later identify what they term media events. These are planned events which monopolize media channels attracting and enthralling a large audience. They identify different types of media event: the contest, such as the Olympics; the conquest, such as a significant achievement; and the coronation. It should be noted though that Dayan and Katz (1992) are less interested in public manipulation and more in the integrative function that these events play in society. Media events do not trivialise important national issues but hold society together allowing a dispersed citizenry to share experiences and affirm a common set of values. However, not all events that receive attention are planned, as Lawrence notes, events may not be humanly planned, not intentionally planned or not planned as news events (2000: 7). This distinction between planned and unplanned was first made by Molotch and Lester (1974). They produced an elaborate typology of events that dominate the news. Their typology included four distinct types of event: the routine event, the accidental event, the scandal and the serendipitous event. Their typology is based on two distinctions, first, is the event intentional or unintentional and second, on the promotion of the event, are those turning a “happening” into a news event the same as those who initiated the happening in the first place (1974: 106). Routine events are purposive, intentionally designed to promote information. They are planned and occur regularly with those promoting them tending to be the initiators of the events (1974: 106). Accidental events are not intentional and surface in error appearing to be unplanned and spontaneous. Those who promote them as a news event are not the same as those who initiate them. The other two types of event Molotch and Lester (1974) identify are less common. Scandals are neither routine nor an accident. They are purposive events in that the information is released with intent but their occurrence is a surprise to others. The scandal

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reveals “normally hidden features of individuals lives or institutional processes” and may be damaging in its consequences (1974: 110). The serendipitous event is accidental but is promoted by the subject of the event presumably as it might benefit them. While the distinction between planned and unplanned events is a useful one it is also important to explore the connections between events. So far we have looked at events as discrete occurrences, however, the events reported in the news are often connected. Mihelj (2008) argues that the study of media events needs to go beyond the examination of isolated happenings to look at the interconnections between events and longer term processes. Mihelj (2008) is particularly interested in “mobilization marathons”, chains of media events which play a crucial role in mobilizing audiences and maintaining the nation state, but the notion of chains of events connected to bigger processes can be seen in other contexts too. Take for example a planned event such as a general election campaign, within its temporal boundaries are a series of connected events. These nested events can be a planned pseudo-event, such as a candidate debate, but can equally be unplanned, for example, a gaffe by one of the candidates, or not humanly planned, such as a hurricane which disrupts a campaign. So instead of seeing events as standalone occurrences they may well be connected and nested within a larger planned or unplanned event. This connection between events can be seen in the unfolding of political scandals. Thompson identifies four phases in political scandals each marked by events (see Thompson 2000: 72). There is a pre-scandal phase before the scandal gains publicity. This might be a period where the initial investigations are conducted and a report produced. The initial revelations of a breach of norms or moral codes are followed by wide spread coverage. This period sees much speculation, with claims, counter claims and denials or a cover-up, the latter of which might lead to a further scandal if made public. In the third phase the scandal reaches a peak. This climax might be a trial, or a resignation or sacking, although, according to Thompson, it might well be less dramatic. The final phase is the aftermath, a period of reflection by the media and those involved, which might see the emergence of a government appointed commission of enquiry. Each investigation, report, press conference, trial, resignation, sacking, and commission of inquiry can be seen as connected events nested in the political scandal. These events can be planned such as a trial but equally can be unplanned such as a resignation. The discussion of media events, however, is not complete without some consideration of their impact. While Dayan and Katz (1992) see media events playing an important integrative function in society bringing members of society together Katz and Liebes acknowledge that one of the weak spots of this research is that it fails to take account of the disruptive potential of events (2007). Katz and Liebes argue that certain media events have the power to disrupt societies. They identify three prominent types of disruptive media event: disasters, wars and acts of terror-

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ism (Katz and Liebes 2007). They claim that in the current multi-channel media environment disruptive events are more prevalent than planned media events and that planned media events are always open to disruption (Katz and Liebes 2007). However, idea of the disruptive power of events can be seen in other contexts too. Research by Lawrence (2000) on media coverage of the police assault of an African American motorist, Rodney King, in Los Angeles found it provided opportunities for marginalised voices to speak and shape the media debate. Studies have also shown how events during a war, such as the killing of civilians, may have the potential to disrupt the definitional power of the military and government (Livingston and Bennett 2003). By their nature such happenings are unpredictable and their coverage difficult to manage. Add to this the spread of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) including the internet and the coverage of such events can be disseminated quickly and may well have a greater disruptive potential (Livingston and Bennett 2003). Implicit in these studies is the assumption that there are events “out there” waiting to be discovered and covered by the news media. However, others argue most events that find their way into the news on a daily basis are everyday occurrences constructed into events by news professionals. Fishman (1982) suggests the idea that events are out there for anybody to observe is fanciful. The world, he argues, “is not already organized into discrete events waiting to be noticed”, rather events and the “qualities associated with them are constituted in the process of being noticed” by the news media (1982: 211). Events are “interpreted phenomena, things organized in thought, talk and action” (1982: 212). In other words, Fishman and others have shifted attention away from a classification of events to the methods by which events come to be understood as newsworthy occurrences. Some authors have attempted to build this distinction into their event typologies. Kepplinger and Habermeier (1995) differentiate between genuine, mediated and staged events, to distinguish between events that emerge independent of news coverage; have been shaped by news coverage; or are organised because of news coverage. This approach acknowledges that coverage of planned events are not simply reducible to the schemes of interpretation that journalists employ (Fishman 1982) but nor are they always socially significant events out there for all to witness. While the above have focused on classifying different types of event they do not explain why events, planned or unplanned, routinely gain different amounts of attention. To understand this requires a broadening of focus to include other factors in addition to the characteristics of events. The next section explores some of the reasons put forward by a range of studies to explain the different levels of publicity events attract.

2.1 Explaining the amount of media coverage Studies of events in an attempt to explain the amount of news coverage they receive may well point to the significance of the event. The news media do not

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exist in a vacuum, events of national or international significance are clearly seen as important by the news media. It would be unimaginable for news organizations to completely ignore certain high profile events. Indeed, one important news value criteria that emerges in other studies is whether an event is a key event or not (Kepplinger and Habermeier 1995). Key events can be the mega cultural events mentioned earlier, such as a coronation or an Olympics, which receive widespread media attention (Dayan and Katz 1992), national political events, such as general elections, or they may be the unexpected spectaculars, see for example Katz and Liebes (2007) on disruptive media events such as disasters, wars or acts of terrorism. However, the attention events receive is not determined by a single factor. Studies of news organizations show that a range of media related factors may explain why some events are more newsworthy than others. News values are an important factor. Glatung and Ruge in their classic 1965 study discovered twelve news value criteria the more which a story satisfies the more likely it is to be selected as news. These included eight general factors (frequency, threshold, unambiguity, meaningfulness, consonance, unexpectedness, continuity, composition) and four culturally specific factors (reference to elite nations, elite people, extent to which an event can be personalised, and negativity) (for a synoptic account of news value research see Harcup and O’Neill 2001). Research on news values has continued to shed light on news media behaviour, for example, the study of media coverage of risk has identified certain structural biases in news values which mean certain risks are more likely to gain media attention (for a synoptic account see Hughes, Kitzinger, and Murdock 2006). The literature also shows that journalists are more likely to focus on sudden catastrophes, for example, unpredictable events that result in death and injury rather than long term cumulative processes even if more people are killed or injured. Further, common risks such as road accidents are deemed less newsworthy than unusual risks (Hughes et al. 2006) (see also the chapters by McNaier and by Wahl-Jorgensen). The newsworthiness of events is clearly a reason but it is only one and any explanation needs to take account of other factors that lead to the coverage of certain events being amplified. One such factor is the herd-like behaviour of the news media. Research shows that journalists routinely keep an eye on rival media (see Fishman 1978). This is done to provide validation for their decisions; to see what stories their rivals are covering; and to gain a sense of what their audiences are expecting (Reinemann 2004). In other words, there is a large amount of consonance amongst news outlets meaning that the same events are often covered in the same way (Noelle-Neumann and Mathes 1987). Danielian and Reese (1989) in their study of news coverage of cocaine use in the mid-1980s identified a bandwagon tendency amongst the news media. While actual cocaine use levelled off coverage surged the result of inter-media agenda setting between different news outlets (1989). In certain contexts this co-orientation might manifest itself as a media feeding frenzy (Sabato 1991). This is an intense period of time where the

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journalists act in concert and different outlets pursue the same story. In the US, one well documented feeding frenzy focused on President Bill Clinton’s extramarital affair with Monica Lewinsky in 1998. In the UK, there were frequent frenzies focused on the sexual peccadilloes of Conservative MPs and Government Ministers. The trigger for these frenzies was Prime Minister John Major’s speech to the 1993 Conservative party conference calling for a re-entrenchment of family values while many of his MPs were engaged in extramarital relationships. This prompted a feeding frenzy around the sex lives of Conservative government ministers and MPs each revelation attracting a large amount of attention in tabloid and serious media. In total between 1993 and 1997, when the Conservatives left office, the marital infidelity and sex lives of five government ministers and eight MPs was exposed (Stanyer 2013). However, Maurer (1999) shows that co-orientation may work the other way to keep such an event from becoming widespread news – a conspiracy of silence so to speak. He shows in his study of the coverage of Bill Clinton’s extramarital sex life that there was an initial reluctance amongst the established media to report the allegations of his philandering printed in a tabloid. In 1992, the confessions of his former lover, Gennifer Flowers, in the Star were initially ignored by the mainstream media covering the presidential campaign. It was not until Bill Clinton’s appearance and admission of the affair on 60 Minutes that the mainstream media began to cover the issue (Maurer 1999; see also Entman 2012). Others point to the media’s ability to boost events linking similar but unrelated events turning them into a storm, crisis or media hype. Fishman’s study of a surge in media coverage of crimes against the elderly in New York in 1976 is probably one of the first studies to examine this phenomenon. Fishman looked at news coverage in two newspapers and local television station over a six month period from October 1976 to February 1977. He found that coverage of crimes against the elderly was triggered by three unconnected incidents: the murder of two elderly sisters in their Bronx apartment; the rape of an 85 year-old women in Manhattan; and the bailing of a youth accused of mugging an elderly person for 50 dollars. These events – although unrelated in anyway – soon became a “theme”, crimes against the elderly connected by journalists. Fishman notes, that themes give news “presentational order (…) items are presented in groups organized around a theme” (1978: 534–535). The chances of an event being reported increase if it is part of a theme and in crime news, Fishman notes, an emerging trend in criminality such as crimes against elderly is a significant theme. Writing some thirty years later Vasterman (2005) observed a similar process at work in the Netherlands. He found there was an increase in coverage of random violent acts in five national daily newspapers after a town mayor had made an initial call for a minutes silence to mark the senseless murder of a young man by a group of vandals in his town. These violent acts were not connected but were all seemingly random in nature with the victim not the type of person that might be expected to be ordinarily involved in violence. The news outlets applied a “consistency rule” (Fishman 1978)

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with every incident evidence of the spread of what the media termed “senseless violence” being reported as such (Vasterman 2005: 519). There is a temporary lowering of news thresholds for any news item connected to the main event (Vasterman 2005: 514). Other studies have observed spikes in coverage around poor care for the elderly (Wien and Elmelund-Præstekær 2009). Kepplinger and Habermeier (1995) highlight the power of key events to trigger a surge in news coverage. In their study they looked at ten German newspapers’ coverage of AIDS, Traffic accidents and earthquakes four weeks before and after three “genuinely” independent key events in these areas – the revelations that actor Rock Hudson had contracted AIDS; the crash of a petrol tanker into an ice cream parlour killing four people; and an earthquake in California. Their study showed that these key events led to coverage of these areas increasing by a factor of four. They triggered a growth in the coverage of new similar and thematically related events and of similar events which had occurred previously (1995: 381). In this way they note the newspapers conveyed a false impression that the number of similar events had increased. A key event or the rush of incidents within a particular theme such as crimes against the elderly or senseless violence and the herd-like behaviour of the news media prompts a surge in coverage. In the latter, every additional instance that seems to fit the theme receives attention generating the impression that incidents are accumulating and that there is growing crisis. In this environment the news media’s role moves from one of reporting to amplifying (Vasterman 2005). This burst of attention can be intense and wall-to-wall involving all media. A group of unrelated events become evidence of a phenomenon that is covered by co-oriented news media. These surges in media coverage have been labelled media hypes (Vasterman 2005), media panics (Leach 2006), media storms (Walgrave, Boydstun, and Hardy 2011), news waves (Fishman 1978). In waves, storms, hypes etc. there is a “mismatch” between the coverage and the real world significance of the event which is not true for the coverage of key events such as wars and natural disasters (Fishman 1978; Vasterman 2005: 509) (see also the chapter by Jandura and Friedrich) In sum, the chapter so far has discussed a number of different typologies of news events and explored different possible reasons for the variation in the coverage that events receive. It looked at the role the news media play in attention surges and how they can connect and amplify events. The next section distils research on attention surges paying close attention to their anatomy.

3 An anatomy of amplification One of the key similarities between these studies is the sequential structure given to media attention surges. For example, Vasterman in writing on media hypes

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Source: Wien and Elmelund-Præstekær 2009 Fig. 1: The anatomy of media waves.

notes: “to be considered a media-hype, it seems reasonable that a news wave conforms at least to the following criteria: a key event; a consonant news wave; a sudden increase in reports on comparable cases; and a strong rise of thematically related news” (2005: 516). This sequential structure has much in common with those first proposed by studies of moral panics which identified a series of stages social problems pass through. These studies focused on the way initial problems emerge, are amplified, provoke a response from policy actors, before fading from view (Critcher 2003). Classic studies by Blumer, Downs and Spector and Kitsuse from the 1970s all identify a series of stages or phases in the definitional process (for a synoptic account see Critcher 2003). Similarly studies of political scandals, mentioned earlier, also show a sequential structure (see Thompson 2000: 72). While the labelling of each stage differs between studies, as does the number of stages, what they share can be summarized as an initial discovery stage where coverage is triggered. This is then followed by a period where coverage grows. This prompts discussion and speculation, claim and counter claim, with policy solutions sometimes posited. Finally, there is the aftermath or post-problem stage where coverage declines before disappearing altogether. Some make a distinction between an “enlarging” and “magnifying” news wave. In the former the media “widen the ground they cover by reporting all kinds of events under the umbrella of the same news theme” while in the latter, media outlets “go into one case in depth, reporting every detail” (Vasterman, 2005: 516). Vasterman notes media coverage of “new social problems” belongs to the first category and coverage of scandals to the second (2005: 516). What follows is a more detailed exploration of this sequential structure of attention surges that is also illustrated in Figure 1.

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3.1 The trigger event As noted at the start of this chapter the news media continually process events, however, some receive little if any consideration while others receive intensive coverage and overshadow the news agenda for days if not weeks. Explaining why requires a consideration both of the nature of the event itself, the selection criteria of the news media as well as a range of additional factors. The first determiner of media coverage is the event itself, in particular whether an event is seen as key or not (Kepplinger and Habermeier 1995). A key event is widely seen as significant. This significance might be manifest in the event itself due to its scale or societal importance. Dayan and Katz (1992) work on media events (mentioned earlier) highlights a range of planned events that attract wall to wall media coverage because of their national and international significance, take the Olympics for example. This shared sense of importance ensures that these planned events receive large scale media and news coverage. Of course key events are not just what Dayan and Katz describe as media events. A society wide sense of significance can extend to not humanly planned, and not intentionally planned events such as disasters, wars and acts of terrorism (Katz and Liebes 2007). Wolfsfeld and Sheafer (2006) also remind us that a news wave may also be triggered by a range of actors including: government and internal and external challengers to government who have a particular agenda to promote (2006: 335). In other words, who triggers the attention surge and their motivations is as important as the fact that there is a trigger. Their research found that a substantial number of news waves are triggered by powerful actors such as governments (2006). Those with political power may have greater abilities to trigger news waves (see also the chapter by van Aelst). However, many of the events that dominate the news are not first order magnitude events – planed or unplanned. These are more akin to what Molotch and Lester (1974) would call mere occurrences that have yet to be turned into news events. These events receive attention but news selection criteria and a range of other factors become a more important determiner of overall coverage. Research suggests that any initial event may trigger a search for similar events that may not be related but become the trigger for intensive and extensive news coverage given that certain criteria are met as described earlier. Whatever the scenario there “is a clear starting point for the news wave, an event that receives more attention than comparable events, for whatever reason” (Vasterman 2005: 516).

3.2 Increased attention The intensity and extensiveness of coverage is the result of a combination of factors. In no particular order, the first of these is the extent of co-orientation amongst news outlets meaning the same events are seen in a similar way by different outlets. If an event is seen as significant in one media outlet research suggests others

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will start covering it too (Reese and Danielian 1989). Fishman (1978), for example, observes it is often the case that coverage of the events in one outlet prompts coverage in other media outlets. Newspapers in his research monitored each other’s coverage and responded accordingly (see also Reinemann 2004). The greater the co-orientation between media outlets the bigger the news wave. In certain circumstances, as noted above, inter-media agenda setting is intense and the media pack descends into a feeding frenzy as all news outlets focus almost singularly on one story. The second factor is whether there is a supply of incidents that can be connected to the event. A rash of similar events even if unrelated may well prompt the search for more. News outlets apply a “consistency rule” with every incident evidence of the spread of that phenomenon (Fishman 1978). Every act of senseless violence or crimes against the elderly, every revelation of another politician’s extramarital affair triggers a surge of attention. Kepplinger and Habermeier (1995) demonstrate how key events can prompt a surge in coverage of similar events as journalists search for similar incidents from both the past and present. Third, is the degree to which an event generates issues that have a resonance with the public, or are deemed controversial. For example, an event labelled as a social problem is more likely to trigger increased attention and a public debate (Wien and Elmelund-Præstekær 2009). Drawing on the work of Anthony Downs Wien and Elmelund-Præstekær suggest as issues pass through the “issue attention cycle” they are prone to amplification especially when the public willingness to discuss matters is high and “politicians, experts and ordinary citizens avidly discuss it” (2009: 186). They also note that a surge can be sustained if the issues raised by the event tap into existing stereotypes and prejudices of the audience (Wien and Elmelund-Præstekær 2009: 195). Fourth, is the extent to which experts and political elites are mobilised – the greater the better (Wien and Elmelund-Præstekær 2009). A wave can be sustained by the comments of the authorities and civil society more widely. The three unrelated crimes against the elderly, highlighted above, were sustained in the initial stages at least by comments from the mayor and police (Fishman 1978). Important actors in any society have the ability to label a particular theme a social problem for instance. In the case of senseless violence in the Netherlands, Vasterman notes, various civil and political actors saw an opportunity to comment on events, there were conferences on violence and a national day against violence with various vigils all of which received additional coverage (see also the chapters by Shaefer, Shenav, and Balmas and by van Aelst). The experts and sources feed the media coverage providing more copy for journalists. In this respect it helps if the event is controversial. Wien and ElmelundPræstekær note it helps if the event is open to differing interpretations, and provides scope for journalists to pursue different frames (2009: 195). This is not to say that the public accept what the politicians and experts might say. Brookes (2000)

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observes in coverage of the mad cow disease in the UK in the 1990s that there was a good deal of scepticism shown towards the words and deeds of politicians and government scientists (2000: 207).

3.3 The decline All surges eventually decline before disappearing from the news agenda. As noted, the length of each waves varies but research suggests they last for about three weeks before fading from view (Vasterman 2005; Wien and Elmelund-Præstekær 2009). This is in part the direct result of a number of factors. It should be said there is no fixed time limit for news to stay at this stage before moving to the next. Some hypes linger longer than others before moving to the next (Wien and Elmelund-Præstekær 2009). In terms of duration some make a distinction between spike storms, those that last a short while, and wave storms, those that build and last a longer time. The former is generated by a single dramatic event, while the latter is driven by an initial event and subsequent similar events (Walgrave, Boydstun, and Hardy 2011). First, a reduction in the supply of incidents that fit within a particular theme. As Fishman observes without a supply of incidents that fit within a particular theme such surges in coverage soon decline (1978). Second, the actions of those in authority. Fishman (1978) found that the police played an important role not only in amplifying any attention surge but also ensuring an unwanted attention surge does not continue. In Wien and Elmelund-Præstekær’s study of poor care for the elderly in Denmark a consensus between key claim-makers on the best course of action to take, a realization of the complexity of the problems at hand and that easy solutions were not possible, declining public interest and a ratings driven media outlets that move on to other issues were contributory factors in the end of that particular media attention surge (Wien and Elmelund-Præstekær 2009). In the case of a political scandal the culmination could be the conclusion of a trial where the transgressor is convicted of a crime or found innocent. This disappearance may be temporary though. In the long run, research suggests news waves on the same topic reappear as new revelations emerge. As noted, wave storms unlike spike storms are driven by subsequent similar events (Walgrave, Boydstun, and Hardy 2011). Vasterman (2005) found over the period of his study (1997–2000) four surges in coverage of senseless violence each triggered by an event, and each news wave peaked after a few days of the trigger followed by a slow decline over the following weeks. Wien and Elmelund- Præstekær, (2009) when examining five Danish newspapers between 2000 and 2005 found five pronounced spikes of coverage care for the elderly. However, these subsequent waves may well be progressively smaller overtime (Fishman 1978). All wave storms come to an eventual end. Research suggests that “fatigue” seems to be reached after

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two or three waves on from the original case’ with each wave declining in intensity over time (Wien and Elmelund-Præstekær 2009: 197). Chadwick (2011) highlights the importance of the interface between old and new media in such scenarios. Research needs to take into account all aspects of the multimedia environment when examining media storms especially the Web. The Web widens the scale and scope of media storms still further, but may also speed them up. The three week time scale identified by Wien and Elmelund-Præstekær (2009) might be reduced to days or even a day. For example, in the UK, a government minister and his aide were caught by a ticket inspector traveling in a first class carriage with second class tickets. After an exchange with the inspector and claims they were unable to afford the excess fare of 160 pounds the minister and his aide finally paid-up. Nothing more would have been herd of the incident if it were not for a journalist sitting nearby who relayed the incident live on Twitter. By the time the train reached its destination there was a group of journalists waiting to quiz the minister about the event. The incident was reported on the main news outlets’ websites and in the lunch time news bulletins where it was connected with a previous incident in which another government minister had allegedly called a police officer a plebe – linked as another instance of ministerial arrogance. However, by the evening the incident had passed from the news no more than a short intense surge. It might well be that in an age of instant messaging trigger events come to public attention more quickly, rival media outlets respond in real time to events and the actions of their rivals and others claims makers. Each stage of the sequential model unfolds more quickly gathering responses as it evolves before dissipating in a day. Walgrave, Boydstun and Hardy (2011) are right when they suggest that future research on media attention surges should include all media outlets not just newspapers and TV. Without such an integrated view their multi-media characteristic cannot be fully shown.

4 Conclusion If events are the raw material of news then understanding why they receive different levels of coverage and why some are hyped is important. This brief overview has identified some key issues in the study of events and their coverage. The chapter has identified a number of typologies which have classified events in a number of ways: planned, unplanned, not humanly planned, not intentionally planned, real, pseudo, media, routine, accidental, scandal and serendipitous. As we saw though there is a significant difference of opinion between those who see events as “out there” waiting to be noticed and those who believe they are “constituted in the process of being noticed” (Fishman 1982: 211). This chapter in line with Kepplinger and Habermeier (1995) sees events as something that stand mainly, but not exclusively, outside the news media with the news media playing an important

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role in determining the level of coverage. In certain instances the news media play a key role in linking similar but unrelated events creating a storm or crisis. The research on media events and the literature on media amplification have much to offer each other. The chapter has made clear that the amount of attention an event attracts is not determined by the significance of the event alone. Coverage levels are shaped by an interplay of a number of criteria internal and external to the news media, including: news values; co-orientation of journalists; news themes; the supply of incidents; the activity of sources (see also the chapters by McNair and by Wahl-Jorgensen). The chapter also showed that the amplification of coverage happens in a series of stages. A survey of secondary sources identified three key parts: a trigger event, an initial surge of coverage before a final decline. I want to conclude by raising some of the possible consequences of media attention surges for democratic political communication. Geiss notes, for example, that a focus on one specific issue might well distract the news media from other, sometimes more important issues (2011). This notion is close to the idea of killer and victim-issues to be found in agenda-setting research (Geiss 2011). Lawrence also notes that the news media has the potential to constrain which issues are examined (2000). In other words, a media environment where hypes are continual might have a detrimental impact on the nature of information citizens receive. For example, a commercially driven media environment where news outlets are eager not to miss out on major stories might well see a greater incidents of media hypes as news outlets behave in a herd like way reacting to the coverage of their rivals not necessarily real life incidents. Of course that said, concentrated media attention on a specific event might be evidence of news outlets functioning effectively as a “burglar alarm” drawing the attention of citizens toward significant happenings which are worthy of attention (Zaller 2003). Whatever the consequences events and their relationship to attention surges deserve further scrutiny.

References Boorstin, Daniel J. 1962. The Image or What Happened to the American Dream. London: Penguin Books Brookes, Rodney. 2000. Tabloidization, media panics and mad cow disease. In: Colin Sparks and John Tulloch (eds.), Tabloid Tales: Global Debates over Media Standards, 195–209. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Chadwick, Andrew. 2011. The Hybrid Media System. Paper presented at the European Consortium for Political Research General Conference, August 25, Reykjavik, Iceland. Critcher, Chaz. 2003. Moral Panics and the Media. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. Dayan, Daniel and Elihu Katz. 1992. Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Fishman, Mark. 1978. Crime waves as ideology. Social Problems 25(5): 531–543.

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Fishman, Mark. 1982. News and nonevents: Making the visible invisible. In: Daniel A. Berkowitz (ed.), Social Meaning of News: A Text-Reader, 210–229. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Galtung, Johan and Mari Ruge. 1965. The structure of foreign news: The presentation of the Congo, Cuba, and Cyprus crises in four Norwegian newspapers. Journal of International Peace Research 1: 64–91. Geiss, Stefan. 2011. Patterns and relationships between issues: An analysis of German prestige newspapers. International Journal of Public Opinion Research 23(3): 265–286. Harcup, Tony and Deirdre O’Neill. 2001. What is news? Galtung and Ruge revisited. Journalism Studies 2(2): 261–280. Hughes, Emma, Jenny Kitzinger and Graham Murdock. 2006. The media and risk. In: Peter Taylor Gooby and Jens O. Zinn (eds.), Risk in Social Science, 250–270. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Katz, Elihu and Tamar Liebes. 2007. No more peace! How disasters, terror and war have upstaged media events. International Journal of Communication 1: 157–166. Kepplinger, Hans Mathias and Johanna Habermeier. 1995. The impact of key events on the presentation of reality. European Journal of Communication 10(4): 371–390. Kumlin, Staffan and Peter Esaiasson. 2009. Scandal fatigue? Scandal elections and satisfaction with democracy in Western Europe, 1977–2007. British Journal of Political Science 42(2): 263–282. Lawrence, Regina G. 2000. The Politics of Force: the Media and the Construction of Police Brutality. Berkley, CA: University of California Press. Livingston, Stephen and W. Lance Bennett. 2003. Gatekeeping, indexing and live-event news. Is technology altering the construction of news? Political Communication 20: 363–380. Leach, John. 2006. Media panics. In: K. Brown (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics, 607–609. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Maurer, Paul J. 1999. Media feeding frenzies: Press behavior during the two clinton scandals. Presidential Studies Quarterly 29(1): 65–79. Mihelj, Sabina. 2008. National media events: From displays of unity to enactments of division. European Journal of Cultural Studies 11(4): 471–488 Molotch, Harvey and Marilyn Lester. 1974. News as purposive behaviour: On the strategic use of routine events, accidents and scandals. American Sociological Review 39(1): 101–112. Noelle-Neumann, Elisabeth and Rainer Mathes. 1987. The event as event and the event as news: The significance of consonance for media effects research. European Journal of Communication 2(2): 391–414. Reese, Stephen D. and Lucig H. Danielian. 1989. Intermedia influence and the drug issue: Converging on cocaine. In: Pamela J. Shoemaker (ed.), Communication Campaigns About Drugs: Government, Media and the Public, 29–46. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Reinemann, Carsten. 2004. Routine reliance revisited: exploring media importance for German political journalists. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 81(4): 857–876. Sabato, Larry. 1991. Feeding Frenzy: How Attack Journalism has Transformed American Politics. New York: Free Press Schudson, Michael. 2008. Why Democracies need an Unlovable Press. Cambridge: Polity Press. Stanyer, James. 2012. Intimate Politics: Publicity, Privacy and the Personal Lives of Politicians in Media Saturated Democracies. Cambridge: Polity. Thompson, John B. 2000. Political Scandal: Power and Visibility in the Media Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Vasterman, Peter L. M. 2005. Self-reinforcing news waves, journalistic standards and the construction of social problems. European Journal of Communication, 20 (4): 508–530. Walgrave, Stefan, Amber Boydstun and Anne Hardy. 2011. Testing and Explaining the Multi-Media Character of Media Storms. A paper Delivered to the Annual Conference of the American Political Science Association. September, Seattle, WA.

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Wien, Charlotte and Christian Elmelund-Præstekær. 2009. An anatomy of media hypes: Developing a model for the dynamics and structure of intense media coverage of single issues. European Journal of Communication 29(2): 183–201. Wolfsfeld, Gadi and Tamir Sheafer. 2006. Competing actors and the construction of political news: The contest over waves in Israel. Political Communication 23: 333–354. Zaller, John. 2003. A New standard of news quality: Burglar alarms for the monitorial citizen. Political Communication 20: 109–130.

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9 Political Communication in social transformation and revolution Abstract: This chapter reviews literature on the role of individual and mass communication in social transformation and revolution. The authors argue that many functions crucial to sweeping social transformation have always been dependent upon communications. Based on a lifecycle model of social movements, the chapter reflects upon how social change advocates develop communications strategies, build movements dedicated to enacting change, promote their political program, organize action among supporters during periods of public contention, and maintain advocacy organizations during periods of retrenchment. Moreover, the authors show that new technologies have been rapidly incorporated into communications strategies by both advocates for and opponents of social transformation. However, the ultimate impact of these and future changes worldwide on advocacy for social change is unknowable but certain to be profound. Key Words: social transformation, social movements, social activism, revolution, alternative media

1 Introduction Sometimes the castles burn. Dynasties that have ruled for centuries are swept away, coalitions of power groups break down and are replaced, dedicated activists lead the charge as mass movements transform social customs and structures. In normal times, societies go about business as usual, maintaining their value systems, political and economic structures and social customs over time. At most times and in most places social transformation is the cumulative effect of many minor changes including some reversals. But not at all times. Under the right circumstances societies experience rapid and pervasive change, emerging transformed. Human agency has not always played a major role in social revolution. Natural calamity has, historically, served to fuel the rise and fall of many great civilizations (Diamond 1997). Technological progress in the pursuit of improved crop yields, better weaponry or economic advantage has led to unforeseen social revolution (Marx, Engels, and Toews 1999). For most of recorded history human action intended to bring about social revolution and transformation has been the result of struggles among powerful elites and upper class groups. Rulers seeking to expand their empires attacked surrounding societies, powerful lords revolted against kings, military leaders engineered coup d’états, religious leaders asserted

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power over secular aristocracies. With rare but notable exceptions, the mass population was a bystander rather than a significant actor in social revolution. Those without power were subject to it. Popular ignorance, isolation and disorganization coupled with elite economic and military power relegated the wider public to a minor role in determining the shape of society. The historical development of communications technology, rise of democratic political systems, and over-time expansion of popular education led, among other things, to a vast increase in popular movements and uprisings seeking social transformation. From the American Revolution in the latter 18th century to the recent “Arab Spring” popular movements have played an increasingly significant role in the transformation of societies worldwide. Communication plays a key role in all phases and dimensions of social transformation and revolution. Revolutionaries seek to disseminate their propaganda and generate support while ruling coalitions practice censorship and promote their own vision of society. The disaffected dissent from the status quo while spokespersons for powerful institutions express support. In the wake of system collapse, competing groups attempt to assert leadership and to direct the construction of a new society in line with their vision. Revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries, rulers and opposing groups recognize the importance of communications in transforming or maintaining society. All employ communications strategically to reach their goals. Though myriad examples of social transformation during ancient times demonstrate that mass media are not required, the development of printing technologies and subsequent waves of innovation in media have clearly accelerated the pace of change and increased the importance of mass movements in social revolution. Voices of support and opposition reside in all societies, though they face very different conditions. Venal, autocratic ruling blocks generate widespread disaffection even as they attempt to suppress public expression of dissent. Democratic systems allow for the expression of even radical dissent but rarely generate public support for revolutionary change. In autocratic societies elite control over communications systems assures that mainstream culture supports social institutions and structure. In democratic systems a wider range of discussion exists, but a dominant system-supportive ideology shared among members of the society guides the creation and consumption of cultural content. If all societal communications were controlled by ruling elites or tailored to fit mainstream ideology one would expect little public pressure for change. People would accept the dominant cultural justifications for the injustices, discrimination and violence in their society. No regime can exercise such complete social control nor can any ideology become so dominant as to block resistance or to blind citizens to the failures of their governments. Dissatisfaction, dissension and, ultimately, resistance typify all societies – though the intensity and nature of opposition vary by society. Communications are crucial to all forms of resistance and can determine the outcome when forces of support and opposition clash.

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2 Communications in the process of social transformation Revolutionary change is driven by a number of factors and can follow many routes. We adapt Stewart, Smith and Denton’s (1984) social movement stage model to evaluate the roles of communications in the process of social transformation. We review communications functions in (1) the development and enactment of social critique, (2) the recruitment of activists to social movements, (3) persuasion of the general public, (4) organization of resistance, (5) consolidation of change and (6) maintenance of dissent in times of retrenchment (Figure 1).

Tab. 1: Life Cycle of Social Movements. Genesis

Social Unrest

Enthusiastic Mobilization

Maintenance

Termination

Principal Actors

Intellectuals, “Prophets”

Agitators

Organizational Leaders “True Believers”

Organizational leaders (bureaucratic)

New leadership

Rhetoric

Informative; Utopian

Manifesto; Frame development; Ideology

Harsh, divisive; confrontational

Less confronta- Reorientational; Accom- tional: modating Myth-building

Means of communication

Academic and Opinion Journals, Pamphlets; Lectures; Essays

Originating conference/ convention; Interpersonal communications

Public protest; Mainstream news; WWW; Social media

Newsletters; Journals; Movement newspapers; Websites

Interpersonal; Internal communications

Target audiences

Institutional leaders; Intellectuals

Like-minded activists; Official institutions

Wider public; movement members; Activist organization leaders

Official bureaucracy; Existing organization membership; Financial supporters

Existing membership; Official bureaucracy

Challenges

Reaching a large audience; Convincing elites

Developing movement structures; Legitimacy

Overcoming official opposition and countermovements; Competing organizations

Lack of visibility; Maintaining resource base; Membership; Maintain successes

Evolution; Purge of internal opposition

Source: Stewart, Smith, and Denton (1984).

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2.1 Social critique Elite venality, intergroup conflict and social injustice provide ample fuel for dissatisfaction in any society. Though dissension provides an impetus for change, it does not produce a model to guide social transformation. Without a viable alternative vision for society revolutionaries may be unable to generate public support. Academics and public intellectuals debate over what constitutes the best political and economic structure for society and evaluate specific societies with regard to their strengths and weaknesses. Public critique of society can lead to social, economic and political improvement but threatens powerful interests. Democratic systems are relatively tolerant of public critique while autocratic societies repress open dissent. Public expression of sociopolitical resistance has its limits – calls for revolution face official repression in even the most tolerant societies. Historical evidence indicates that calls for sweeping social change often begin with debate and argumentation among scholars. Enlightenment debate over the role of the state and the rights of citizens produced theories of democracy that were instrumental in a number of subsequent social revolutions. Habermas’ (1989) review of the historical development of a “public sphere” in eighteenth century Europe demonstrates how sociopolitical conditions, intellectual forces and technology (especially in the form of the printing press) combined to produce a counterweight to official power. Coffee houses in England, salons in France and Tischgesellschaften in Germany provided spaces for intellectual argument and debate that produced ideas with real social power and influence. The public sphere rewarded reasoned argument rather than valuing expressed opinion based upon social station. Ideas generated through intellectual debate were disseminated in and further debated via publication in books, tracts and periodicals (see also the chapter by Kepplinger). Enlightenment philosophers challenged the legitimacy of rule by divine right, arguing instead that the legitimacy of the state is conferred by consent of the governed. Propaganda published to support independence from England prior to and during the American Revolution based the right to claim independence upon popular sovereignty. Enlightenment theories of democratic government guided construction of the United States’ sociopolitical system after independence was won. The French Revolution (1789–1799) drew upon Enlightenment philosophy and lessons from the American Revolution to produce a far more radical transformation of French social and political structure. Labor resistance of the nineteenth century drew upon the intellectual heritage of both democratic and Marxist theories. Liberation theology, a political ideology combining Christianity and radical economics, has provided intellectual support for resistance movements in Latin America since the 1960s. Today scholarly critique of societies is concentrated in universities, scholarly organizations and think tanks. The role of scholarly debate in scientific advancement is widely acknowledged and has generated global support for higher educa-

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tion and scholarly collaboration across borders. While elite support for critical intellectual discussion of biological or physical sciences is widespread, support for the scholarly critique of political regimes and institutions is much less so. Chomsky (1989) has argued that because they are open to dissent and vulnerable to public influence democratic regimes exercise subtler and more extensive forms of intellectual control than do autocracies. Democratic systems exercise control over scholarly critique in a number of ways, such as by providing economic support for regime-friendly research, private funding for think tanks, denying scholars from ideologically oppositional nations visas, denying radical scholars tenure, and similar methods. Autocracies ban critical discussion outright or control it by monopolizing access to critics. For example, the mediaeval court fool, whose parodic critique was considered valuable to the sovereign, was not allowed such indiscretion outside of court. Intellectual critique of society and its rulers would have little social impact if it never spread beyond these esoteric fora. Scholarly social critics and their followers publish white papers, books and academic journal articles. Their views are debated among networks of scholars, students and elites. Occasionally, public exposure can occur when a book or essay becomes popular (as, for example, American marine biologist Rachel Carson’s 1962 work, “Silent Spring”, which criticized the unregulated use of harmful pesticides or Anglo-Irish author Jonathan Swift’s 1729 satirical essay, “A Modest Proposal”, which suggested that the poverty-stricken Irish should sell their babies as food to ease their economic misfortune). More often, advocates must rise to promote social adoption of esoteric sociopolitical ideas. According to Stewart et al. (1984: 38) scholars promoting social change, “believe, often with remarkable naiveté, that appropriate institutions will act if (...) institutional leaders and followers [are made] aware of the urgent problem and its solution.” Instead, the powerful ignore or rebuff intellectuals whose views are inconvenient. In societies where open debate and critique are not allowed, dissent goes underground. Under Socialist rule Russians and Eastern Europeans developed extensive alternative media systems where critique of the regime and, at times, of the Soviet system not only survived but thrived (Downing 2011).

2.2 Recruitment to Action Someone must actively promote transformative or revolutionary ideas to the public or social critique will remain intriguing and appealing but ineffectual. Power groups and ruling coalitions may be capable of forcibly compelling the public to adopt new ideas and technologies, but advocates with limited resources must persuade elites or mass publics to do so.

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As a first step, advocates recruit and mobilize sympathetic activists to form the foundation for a movement. Recognized leading voices may call “a convention or conference of like-minded people for the purpose of framing a manifesto, proclamation, or declaration.” (Stewart et al. 1984: 40) Each social movement organization (SMO) draws upon the manifesto to construct its “frame” – a clear and simple statement detailing member beliefs about (1) the source and nature of a social problem, (2) a “proposed solution to the problem” (616), and (3) a “rationale for engaging in ameliorative collective action” (Snow 2004). Frames are the rhetorical basis for recruitment efforts, organizational propaganda efforts and public perceptions of the group. According to William Gamson (2004), for frames to be effective they must present the social conditions they want to change as not only undesirable but unjust. Frames must identify “enemies” who are the source of the problem and present the struggle for social transformation as a conflict between “us” and “them” (see also the chapters by Kiousis and Strömbäck and by Arendt and Matthes). Activists disagree, sometimes strongly, over the causes and effects of social problems including political repression, environmental devastation and religious discrimination so frames vary among SMOs. The US environmental activist group, Earth First, for example, considers violent action an acceptable form of resistance while the Izaak Walton League, an American conservationist group, finds violent tactics unacceptable. Early in their development movements turn to charismatic leaders employing dramatic, emotional and apocalyptic language and iconography to recruit and mobilize activists. Unable to provide significant material rewards, SMOs offer psychic values. Movement rhetoric often portrays activists as part of a sacred pursuit – the construction of a better society. At the extreme, terrorist organizations portray members as carrying out the work of their god and bringing about a better world. Terrorists who adopt the movement frame consider themselves justified in the killing of innocents and are willing to sacrifice their own lives in the pursuit of this sacred cause (Rowland and Theye 2008). To build their ranks, recruiters draw upon existing organizations and friendship networks likely to be sympathetic to SMO goals. For example, Black churches in the southern United States and interpersonal networks among northern students were crucial sources of recruits for civil rights work during the 1960s (McAdam 1988). To retain members and deepen their commitment, SMOs encourage the development of emotional bonds among members, create an organizational subculture, and engage in contentious politics. These strategies help to create a collective identity for the organization, a precondition for organizational effectiveness, according to Melucci, Keane, and Mier (1989). Social movement organizations provide ample opportunities for social interaction among members in order to encourage interpersonal bonds. They organize picnics, music festivals and vacation trips, and set aside time for social interaction at meetings and conventions. SMOs provide a welcoming community to members who are often rejected or marginalized in society.

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As movements grow they develop their own subculture, further strengthening member bonds and identification with their organizations. Based on the group’s continuing struggle, a mythic history develops as members recount battles won and lost, sacrifices made, movement origins, folk devils and heroes. Movement lore is recorded in songs, recounted at meetings, celebrated in written histories and on posters. Activists create their own music, art, video, and theater productions celebrating movement subculture. Members adopt iconography that expresses their identity and symbolizes their goals for the transformation of society. As an example, icons from the peace, feminist, civil rights and environmental movements are printed on tee-shirts and pants worn proudly by activists. Engaging activists in public dissent is perhaps the most effective means of strengthening their identification with the collective. Marchers facing riot police count upon each other for support, both physical and moral. As they endure hardship together, activists develop and strengthen their interpersonal bonds and their dedication to the movement and its goals. When others see them facing off against police or counter-protesters or when their pictures are distributed across the Internet protesters are publicly marked as movement members. They recognize their public identification with the group and assume the role of member in interactions with opponents or acquaintances from their non-organizational life. Movements develop internal communications (newsletters, websites, etc.) that provide a space for interpersonal communications, promote movement culture and celebrate public dissent. Though historically internal communications were cheap printed newsletters recent developments in communications technology have allowed for an explosion of online newsletters, blogs, discussion groups and websites. Internal communications maintain and extend personal networks, invent and diffuse movement subculture and celebrate public dissent, presenting it from an activist standpoint. Internet videos of protesters’ confrontations with police praise the heroism and sacrifice of the activists and attack police behavior. Personalized accounts of political demands and grievances spread easily through online coordinating platforms, such as the personal action frame for the US-based “occupy” protests (“We are the 99 %”), which was shared through Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook (Bennett and Segerberg 2012). During the 2011 revolution in Egypt, social media helped to maintain longstanding networks of labor opposition, facilitate new connections among middle-class youth and to circulate stories about regime repression and police brutality to a wider domestic and global audience (Lim 2012).

2.3 Public Persuasion Advocates who cannot compel the transformation of society must gain public support to enact their programs. Persuading the public to support sweeping social change is exceedingly difficult, however. Advocates must overcome not only oppo-

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sition from privileged and powerful elites but also ideologically-driven opposition groups and general resistance to change. General public satisfaction and consequent unwillingness to support radical change typifies democratic systems. Social transformation in democracies is accomplished through consistent pressure from dedicated SMOs generating fitful progress toward long-term goals. Feminist movements around the world, the American civil rights movement, environmentalist movements in Europe and Latin America, among others have maintained steady pressure on officials and public propaganda campaigns over long periods of time, at times resulting in significant social change without activist violence (Domhoff 2005). Advocates for social transformation may engage policy makers directly while at the same time challenging institutionalized power through public forms of dissent. Activists bring lawsuits, lobby representatives, testify at hearings held by regulatory agencies, and so on. Traditional elite groups enjoy significant advantages in most institutional arenas, so advocacy organizations with limited resources seek to gain and leverage public support. Legislatures, courts, administrative organizations and other traditional institutional power centers accommodate minor or gradual change but become hostile as advocates present increasingly radical change programs. When advocacy through institutional politics is ineffective change advocates’ only option is to seek public support. Social activists produce and disseminate their own propaganda, seek out the attention of the news media or both (Hilgartner and Bosk 1988; see also the chapter by Kiuosis and Strömbäck). Perhaps the earliest mass media propaganda campaign, Martin Luther’s challenge to papal authority in the Europe of the 16th century, led to massive changes in the power of the Christian church and the sociopolitical system of which it was an integral part. The clash of this lowly cleric and the power of the papacy would have been unnoticed even in his time but for Luther’s ability to print and disseminate large numbers of pamphlets, religious tracts, broadsheets and his famous German translation of the Bible. Luther’s attack upon church practice traveled throughout Europe, generating a mass movement. Peasants, clerics and princes learned of and then took up his cause while others opposed him and his followers, leading ultimately to years of war and social turmoil. In the absence of the printing press Luther’s conflict with Rome would have remained an esoteric debate among the clergy or a short-lived argument that Luther would certainly have lost (Eisenstein 1979). Printing vastly expanded Luther’s audience and allowed his words to go where he could not (he was excommunicated). Luther was an inspiring writer, persuading many among his mass audience. Importantly, many clerics adopted his views, wrote their own anti-papal tracts and delivered anti-papal sermons. The pope and allies throughout Europe attacked Luther and his ideas, burned the blasphemous books and punished his supporters. Unlike many prior challenges, however, Luther’s propaganda-driven challenge survived the onslaught, grew and eventu-

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ally became institutionalized in the formation of new Christian sects (Eisenstein 1979). Since Luther’s time, tremendous advances in communications technology and increasingly sophisticated propaganda techniques have been applied to campaigns both promoting and opposing revolutionary change. Mass propaganda supported socialist revolutions in Russia and China, the fascist movements in Germany and Italy during the 1930s, anti-colonial movements and insurrections in Asia, Africa and Latin America from the mid-twentieth century until today, and the eventual dismantling of the Soviet Union in the 1980s and 1990s (Taylor 2003). Where media systems are controlled by the state or narrow groups of elites, radical dissenters are denied access, prompting them to develop alternative media systems. Use of underground media systems to disseminate revolutionary propaganda has been characteristic of social movements, especially in autocratic societies (Downing 2011). These media perform a number of important functions for advocates of sweeping change or system overthrow. The increased access, lowered cost and widespread adoption of digital communications media have led to an explosion of SMO propaganda (della Porta 2011). Computer-mediated communications and personal cell phones have provided increased levels of anonymity for the propagandist, the publisher/provider of the channel and the audience member. The activist now has a greater ability to write and disseminate a range of critical content while shielding his or her own identity from official view. The Internet and other types of electronic communications are not immune from official surveillance but are much easier to use without detection than were the clandestine radio transmitters, letterpresses or poster production operations of yesteryear. Domestic voices of dissent often are supplemented by propaganda emanating from foreign countries. Many nations have funded international radio and television broadcast services aimed at promoting system ideology abroad (see also the chapter by Robinson). Recent online services have been developed to expand audience reach, especially where the government engages in extensive jamming of external broadcast signals. Though it is difficult to determine the contribution of external propaganda to internal politics, interviews with former Soviet dissidents after the fall of the Warsaw Pact indicated that Voice of America broadcasts had been effective in transmitting information to Soviet countries. Prior to transfer of Hong Kong sovereignty from England in 1997, the People’s Republic of China engaged in extensive propaganda activities within the territory. The efforts appear to have eased the transition. In addition to propagandizing from abroad, many nations support social critics within the geographic boundaries of their ideological competitors. Propaganda from hostile governments is less credible than that produced by citizens so political exiles or native critics receive economic and logistical support as part of the propaganda directed toward autocratic regimes. During World War II, Thomas Mann, a native German, produced a number of anti-Nazi

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radio programs in the U.S., which were then given to Britain and subsequently transmitted by the BBC with the hopes of gaining a German audience. With the changes in technology and active participation of many nations or groups in ideological contention, the greatest struggle in persuading the public to support sweeping social change may no longer be official repression but competition among critics for public attention. The Internet provides a vast sea of social criticism, armies of advocates and their organizations and massive numbers of individual voices within any given SMO vying for the attention of potential supporters. Propagandists now face the problem advertisers have had to deal with for decades – how to break through the clutter (see also the chapter by Wolling and Emmer). In the past, the effectiveness of movement communications was based in the quality of leaders’ rhetoric. Some of the most celebrated orators of all time were revolutionaries and leaders of social movements. Their soaring language, compelling presence and inspiring vision drew recruits into their movements and convinced these new members to sacrifice dearly – even give up their lives – for the noble cause (see also the chapter by Sheafer, Shenhav, and Balmas). Emotional appeals and extreme claims typify propaganda posters and brochures. Many of the features identified in classic propaganda analyses are applied in social movement propaganda (Lasswell 1938). Millennialism, apocalyptic claims and Manichean rhetoric are common. Heroic and mythic images, emotional language, presentations of atrocity and the widespread use of folk devils typify propaganda in support of deep social change (Lasswell 1938; Stewart, Smith, and Denton 2004). When advocates for social transformation either cannot afford the costs of mainstream media placement or must go underground to avoid censorship or repression they construct clandestine or alternative media systems. Especially in closed societies, alternative media face government harassment, repression of writers, publishers and even audiences but still survive and even thrive (Downing 2011). The technologies adopted are small-scale, easily hidden or moved, and allow for small-scale distribution. Production qualities are of less importance while economic efficiency is at a premium. Still, alternative media persist and may even thrive in the face of persecution (Curran 1979; see also the chapter by Salgado). Studies of their role in social movements and revolution indicate that alternative media serve a number of important functions. First, they provide an attenuated public sphere where advocates from within a limited ideological band debate and critique the sociopolitical status quo. Alternative media provide their audience access to voices excluded from mainstream media rather than the entire spectrum of opinion. The presumption is that audiences can access official voices elsewhere. Second, alternative media serve as a tool for recruitment to organizations engaging in social dissent. They make it possible for the curious to access varied expressions of dissent without putting themselves or the dissenters in danger. Compelling con-

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tent can lead those interested to explore further or to contact activists and become involved. Third, alternative media show advocates that others share their concerns and beliefs, providing activists with a “haven from isolation” (McLeod and Hertog 1999). A fourth function involves the discovery and legitimation of leadership. Those who speak out heroically and eloquently through the alternative media gain a following among activists. In the event of social unrest a reputation built up via a presence in alternative media can legitimate an advocate’s claims to movement leadership. Fifth, alternative media serve as a trusted source of information during disruption. Once established as a voice for dissent, alternative media become a recognized source of information for the wider public should revolution break out. Finally, alternative media help to maintain social movements during periods of harsh repression or political reversal. At times movement culture has been incorporated into mass popular culture. Labor songs, many sung by workers on picket lines or at rallies, have found a wide audience through radio broadcast and album sales. Tee-shirts with icons from environmentalist, feminist or political movement subcultures are purchased and worn by non-activists. Posters, videos and slogans are adopted by mainstream groups. Though far from indicating agreement with movement ideology or SMO membership, public adoption of movement icons and subculture may ease acceptance of advocates’ ideas and positions. Most of the time propaganda is not enough. The activist group must command attention because traditional propaganda will be ignored by large portions of the public if not the great majority. To draw the attention of large audiences, activists often must gain access to public affairs media. News coverage of movement actions can “widen the scope of conflict” (Gamson 2004) – an important if not crucial function of movement communications. Change advocates engage in traditional media relations activities, holding press conferences, providing news organizations with white papers, distributing news releases, making spokespersons available for interviews and providing story ideas for reporters. Even in open systems, however, media response to these traditional techniques is muted. Activists express frustration that reporters are not more responsive. Change advocates seeking to draw media attention “take to the streets.” Lacking extensive material resources they have little alternative (see also the chapter by Kiousis and Strömbäck). Contentious politics are the signature communications strategy of social movements (Taylor and Van Dyke 2004: 263). Contentious politics disrupt the smooth functioning of society as activists attempt to force the public to attend to injustice and question the cultural justifications for it. SMOs choose among a “repertoire” of public dissent tactics based on organizational capabilities and the perceived efficacy and appropriateness of the available options. Domhoff (2005) argues that contentious politics characterize left-oriented dissent:

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One of the distinctive features of left activists is their willingness to go to the streets to win people to their causes and create the political pressures necessary for the social changes they advocate. Studies in social psychology and sociology support this strategy by showing there has to be a non-routine dimension to any effort toward change. It doesn’t make any sense to people to say that things are terrible, but they just should vote and write letters to their elected representatives. If things are going to change, then people have to get out of their routines one way or another. There has to be social disruption. There has to be a ‘getting in the way of power’ as one author-activist puts it.

Public protest demonstrates activists’ willingness to sacrifice for a cause, indicates that a movement has mass support, energizes the activist base and provides an opportunity to promote movement ideology to passerby and large media audiences. Elites must either negotiate or face potentially significant consequences from ignoring or repressing the rebellious behavior of public opposition. Mass demonstrations present a vision of widespread opposition to the political status quo, even to the point of potential revolution. When an existing regime has repressed dissent and prevented public critique contentious politics reveals a level of resistance or opposition previously held secret. It can generate a violent crackdown, mobilize the many disaffected living under unpopular regimes, splinter or unite elites or bring about compromise and peaceful change. Contentious politics up the ante for all involved. As activists’ tactics become more militant officials turn to increasingly violent suppression of public dissent. Recent mass demonstrations in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and elsewhere demonstrated widespread disaffection when other public indicators of discontent were suppressed. In these countries the massive size of the crowds and their willingness to endure hardship conveyed deep-seated discontent and widespread opposition to the sociopolitical status quo. Dissent evolved into revolution as support grew among the public and as military forces and domestic power groups joined in the call for replacement of the existing political structure and ouster of the current regime. Even in societies where rights of petition and speech are protected, demonstrators sacrifice time and effort, and risk being pushed, beaten, pepper sprayed or arrested. In repressive societies activists potentially face long-term imprisonment, torture or death. Their conscious decision to risk (and sometimes willingly stand and accept) physical abuse conveys to bystanders, media audiences and officials that protesters are true believers, dedicated, steadfast and resilient in pursuit of their goals. Throughout history violence against the deeply faithful who willingly suffered stoning, being burned at the stake, fed to the lions or broken on the rack turned them into martyrs who inspired others to follow their path rather than be frightened by their terrible end. Witnesses need not be converted to gain sympathy for dissenters. Continued violent repression especially of peaceful protest has the potential to bring about disaffection among powerful domestic groups, notably the military, as occurred in the American civil rights movement, and the 8888 Uprising

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in Myanmar, or economic and military intervention by external forces, seen in the Libyan civil war of 2011 and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. To increase the persuasive impact of public dissent demonstrators carry signs, wear tee-shirts with slogans and illustrations, burn flags and pictures of dictators, and engage in “street theater.” Marchers draw attention by breaking social norms and engaging in sensational acts. They strip naked, display lewd or shocking signs, satirize officials, block streets, or spray paint public art or buildings. On rare occasions dissenters undertake extreme acts of sacrifice or violence. In 1963 Vietnam, Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk protesting persecution of Buddhists, lit himself on fire and died in a dramatic self-immolation. Shocking pictures of him were seen around the world. The practice was adopted by others in Vietnam and eventually spread worldwide, with over 800 and perhaps as many as 3,000 cases of self-sacrificial protest recorded between 1963 and 2002 (Biggs 2005). Though bystanders are an important target of influence, activists engage in public dissent in hopes of reaching a much wider audience via news media coverage. Strikes, demonstrations, sit-ins and marches provide dramatic appeal prized by journalists. Content analyses show that news stories about contentious politics emphasize violence, oddity, conflict and norm breaking over discussion of activists’ substantive political concerns. Journalists construct their stories around conflict and confrontation (McLeod and Hertog 1999; Wolfsfeld 1991). Violent confrontation is especially prized. Confrontations between police and demonstrators dominate television coverage of protests, especially when the conflict comes to blows. Dramatic video of demonstrators throwing rocks at police, of riot-gear clad police chasing or clubbing protesters or fights between protesters and counter-protesters is highlighted in television coverage. One study of a mass demonstration in London protesting the Vietnam War concluded that even though little actual conflict between demonstrators and police occurred, journalists were so focused on the violence that the primary news storyline was the failure of violence to appear (Murdock 1973). Local news coverage of an anarchist march in Minneapolis, Minnesota referred to spray painting of buildings as “violence” rather than “property damage,” ultimately justifying violent police reaction as an appropriate response (Hertog and McLeod 1995). When physical conflict is not available, journalists focus on shouting matches between protesters and bystanders, sharp exchanges between protesters and journalists, or even disagreements among protesters about use of certain tactics. News coverage also emphasizes sensationalism, so when activists break norms of appearance or propriety they increase their chances of gaining media coverage. Obscene language, safety pins through cheeks, purple Mohawks, flag burning, graffiti painting, and the smashing of a television set were prominent in news coverage of the Minneapolis anarchist march noted above. Although the protesters provided handouts on anarchist philosophy and short speeches explaining the reasoning behind their symbolic acts were provided during the march, these went

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unmentioned in news coverage. Female anarchists who removed their tops to protest the sale of pornography were ridiculed in coverage but their critique of pornography was ignored (Hertog and McLeod 1995). Use of eye-catching tactics, such as nudity, street theater and graffiti is common in contemporary protest, but continues to draw comment focused on the tactics rather than their symbolic meaning. Gaining coverage is not always helpful to social critics. Todd Gitlin’s (2003) analysis of the impact of news coverage on the American new-left Students for Democratic Society (SDS) during the 1960s concluded that media portrayal undermined the organization’s political effectiveness. Over time the more radical and sensational personalities in the movement drew the most media attention and their antics led to a popular image of SDS as more radical and militant than it actually was. The radicalized image undermined popular support for SDS and encouraged increasingly radical activists to join. The organization gradually came to reflect its media image, pushing it outside the bounds of acceptable dissent for the larger public and ultimately delegitimizing and undermining its effectiveness. Despite its difficulties and potential downfalls, advocates of social transformation continue to seek public affairs media coverage. News media attention can perform a number of important functions for social movements. First, regardless of whether coverage is positive or negative news stories draw public attention to the issues of interest to the movement, and attention to substance increases over time. The lengthier the disruption, the more the news focuses on the issues at stake. Early coverage of the mass protests at the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle followed the typical event-centered sensationalist pattern but as the days passed stories detailing coalition complaints against the organization were produced and aired (Drust 2010). A second benefit is that media attention encourages activists and raises their morale. Protesters feel less isolated and perceive their actions to be more efficacious as a result of media exposure. Media coverage, not unreasonably, is treated by protesters as a surrogate for public attention. Journalists’ decision to include them in news coverage confers a certain level of importance and legitimacy upon SMOs and their leaders. This means that social movement activists too experience reciprocal media effects similar to those that have been shown for established, mainstream political actors (see also the chapter by van Aelst). William Gamson (2004) has emphasized the role of mainstream news coverage of public dissent in “widening the scope of conflict.” External publics witnessing public protest, and possibly its repression, may bring political pressure to bear upon local authorities or provide revolutionaries with material support. Doug McAdam (1988) concluded that exposure to evening news coverage of the U.S. civil rights movement during the 1960s showing peaceful marchers being firehosed, attacked by riot police or set upon by police dogs led northern audiences to provide crucial support for southern Blacks. Pressure brought to bear on the Kennedy Administration forced it to provide federal troops to protect Black protest-

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ers during subsequent demonstrations. News coverage of “ethnic cleansing” during the 1990s wars between Serbs and Croats in the former nation of Yugoslavia helped to draw NATO forces into the conflict (Robinson 2000) (see also the chapter by Robinson). Frustrated in their attempts to transform society through peaceful means activists may turn to violence despite the often high price activists pay for adopting violent methods. Violence alienates many potential supporters at home and abroad, including fellow activists who are dedicated to change through nonviolent means. Neutrals support existing power holders as a means to avoid social dissolution and anarchy. A turn to violence by rebels justifies harsh reaction from police and military forces. Official reaction to killings, burnings or riots is severe even in democratic societies. Domhoff (2005) has argued that the use of violence can provide movements with minor success in the short run but ultimately alienates the larger public. As noted above, violence generates news coverage. The terrorist or violent revolutionary’s spectacular acts draw media coverage and force the public to pay attention. Terrorist bombings and beheadings convey a continuing commitment to destruction and death among a specified enemy. Terrorists demonstrate their willingness to die for the cause that implies they will never negotiate with the enemy or abandon their cause. Coupled with secrecy (often both symbolized and enacted by hiding one’s face on camera) this fanaticism constructs a terrifying enemy who will stop at nothing and show no mercy. Powerful nations, including the United States, have dedicated massive resources to dealing with terrorism compared to the limited actual damage it inflicts, demonstrating its communicative power. This success comes with a price, of course. It invites military reprisal, requires of followers a life of emotional and material sacrifice, and alienates potential allies who abhor the practice of violence against noncombatants.

2.4 Tactical Communications In the event of insurrection, rebel success may depend upon coordination among allies and supporters. Control over social communications systems has allowed ruling factions to defeat larger and potentially more powerful opposition groups by preventing them from coordinating and combining their resources. By keeping their opposition splintered, central authorities throughout history have been able to divide and conquer larger but unorganized populations. Control over media systems has provided ruling authorities with the ability to sow doubt and mistrust among opposition groups. Control over communications systems has also been used by centralized authorities to organize and lead popular actions against opponents. With the ability to distribute a uniform message while blocking competing views, autocrats

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can draw upon their support among the population while disempowering their opposition. During the Rwandan genocide of 1994 Hutu control over the state-run media system allowed the Hutu-dominated government to foment racial distrust and hatred against the Tutsi minority and to organize their mass slaughter (Des Forges 2008). In times of social turmoil, rebellious groups have turned to small-scale, noninstitutionalized media to distribute propaganda, keep abreast of fast-changing circumstances and to coordinate activities meant to challenge the status quo. The Samizdat, an underground press in the USSR depended upon hand written, typewritten and carbon copies. To disseminate Ayatollah Khomeini’s propaganda against the Shah during the Iranian Revolution of 1979 cassette tapes of the cleric speaking were smuggled into the country and passed among supporters. Shortwave radio was commonly employed by the French resistance to Nazi occupation in World War 2, and cell phones and other social media for several resistance movements in the recent “Arab Spring.” Their portability and low cost, widespread diffusion and relative insulation from censorship make these media ideal for support of resistance actions. Smart phones and other social media may be so effective in this regard that they significantly enhance the capability of resistance forces to challenge autocratic rule (Downing 2011).

2.5 Consolidation Rebel groups have ousted venal regimes or ended dynastic or autocratic rule only to find them replaced by equally venal regimes, rigid autocracies, new dynasties – or worse. Revolution or rapid social transformation leaves a fluid system in its wake. Literally anything can happen. In 1848 and 1849 over 50 European and Latin American countries were embroiled in revolution but within two years nearly all the displaced regimes were restored and the rebels killed or forced to flee (Sperber 2005). A coalition formed to remove a tyrant may dissolve upon accomplishing its goal. In the absence of a clear map for a new social order, the old tyrant may simply make way for a new one. Or a new power group, often the military, may step into the power void and construct a society changed but not in the way the rebels had intended. To guide social transformation after the existing regime has been removed social movements must have a compelling vision and operational plan that can be enacted after the existing power structure is toppled. Immediately after Adolph Hitler’s rise to power in 1930s Germany the Nazi party acted quickly to consolidate power through widespread arrests of communist party members and the prohibition of competing political groups (including the Social Democrats, the People’s Party, and others) (Tipton 2003). The Young Turk Revolution in the early 20th century was inspired by a unifying vision: a democratic multi-national state. However, the transformation of preexisting institutions proved to be more difficult

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than expected; power was eventually vested in a new elite group in an effort to maintain the fractured Empire (Ahmad 1968). Military leaders were appointed to power in Egypt following the revolution in 2011, which sparked speculation over whether the movement to end Mubarak’s regime had been co-opted by the Egyptian military as the newly instated leaders suspended the constitution and dissolved both houses of parliament. Fearing indefinite military rule, civilians once again took to the streets in protest. Electoral swings in democratic societies can be quickly reversed. Political parties driven from power in landslide elections return triumphantly mere years later, creating a “revolving door” effect. For example, David Dacko, the first President of the Central African Republic was overthrown by Jean-Bédel Bokassa only to be reinstated over a decade later. Unsuccessful in his second attempt to satisfy the people of the republic, Dacko was once again overthrown seven months after being re-elected. Any group seeking to claim leadership in post-revolutionary society will gain significant advantage by gaining control over the communications system. In times of uncertainty and danger, having the ability to provide information and define actions in ways that advance one’s interests is crucial.

2.6 Maintenance during periods of abeyance Most attempts to transform society fail. Unsuccessful movements either disappear or go into periods of “abeyance” hoping to re-emerge under more congenial conditions. Movement leaders adjust their communications strategies in order to retain members and protect hard-won political gains. During difficult times SMOs focus more of their effort on lobbying institutional power centers and reduce their emphasis on public propaganda campaigns. Advocacy organizations adopt professionalized and bureaucratic structures and procedures as they attempt to accommodate government and business bureaucracies. Rhetoric effective in generating zeal and commitment among activists is replaced by reserved policy talk. Advocacy organizations produce white papers, fund scientific studies, engage in letter-writing campaigns, and provide personnel and material support for the electoral campaigns of friendly candidates. Struggle is institutionalized. Movements adopt a more accommodating stance toward the news media. SMOs hire public relations specialists, advertising personnel and former journalists to improve the effectiveness of their media relations. Activists time news conferences according to the needs of the press, alert reporters of upcoming public actions like demonstrations or sit-ins, and produce and distribute press releases and video news releases for inclusion in the news. News coverage helps SMOs maintain a core group of dedicated members by preserving collective identity despite the decline in the organization’s political fortunes.

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Movement retrenchment and professionalization come at a cost. The heady excitement of the early years attracted the committed and self-sacrificial to the cause. Toning down the rhetoric to accommodate former “enemies” may ultimately lead militant members to lose faith in the organization and depart. Opposition groups may perceive weakness and intensify their own advocacy activities. Officials, perceiving a shift in the wind, become less willing to adopt movement views and positions. At some point the winds may once again blow in the advocate’s favor and the cycle begin again.

3 Conclusion Advocates pursuing social transformation must persuade the public to support the call for change or else fail. Many functions crucial to revolution or sweeping social transformation are dependent upon communications. Social change advocates must develop communications strategies to engage in sociopolitical debate, build movements dedicated to enacting change, promote their political program to the public, organize action among supporters and allies during periods of public contention, and maintain advocacy organizations and their accomplishments during periods of retrenchment. Though less emphasized in this essay, elite and popular opposition groups develop communications strategies to challenge advocates’ effectiveness in achieving all these goals (see also the chapter by Kiousis and Strömbäck). New technologies have been rapidly incorporated into communications strategies by both advocates for and opponents of social transformation. The continuing global diffusion of democratic institutions opens up spaces for increased social debate while rising levels of education worldwide contribute to the global stock of knowledge and potential for critical social analysis. The ultimate impact of these and future changes worldwide on advocacy for sweeping social change, and the success of such advocacy, is unknowable but certain to be profound.

References Bennett, W. Lance and Alexandra Segerberg. 2012. The logic of connective action: Digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. Information, Communication & Society 15: 739–768. Biggs, Michael. 2005. Dying without killing: Self-immolations, 1963–2002. In: Diego Gambetta (ed.), Making Sense of Suicide Missions, 173–208. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chomsky, Noam. 1989. Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies. Boston, MA: South End Press. Curran, James. 1979. Capitalism and control of the press, 1800–1975. In: James Curran, Michael Gurevitch and Janet Woollacott (eds.), Mass Communication and Society, 195–230. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

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Diamond, Jared M. 1997. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W. W. Norton. Domhoff, G. William. 2005. Social movements and strategic nonviolence. Retrieved on April 25th 2012 from: http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_nonviolence.html Downing, John D. H. 2011. Encyclopedia of Social Movement Media. Thousand Oaks, CA.: Sage. Drust, Nora Eileen. 2010. Influences of News Reporting on Global Justice Social Movement Organizations: A Case Study of Mobilization for Global Justice. Unpublished Dissertation: University of Kentucky. Lexington, KY. Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. 1979. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe. New York: Cambridge University Press. Des Forges, Alison. 2008. Call to genocide: Radio in Rwanda, 1994. In: Alison Des Forges and Allan Thompson (eds.), Media & the Rwanda Genocide, 41–54. Ottawa: International Development Research Centre. Gamson, William A. 2004. Bystanders, public opinion and the media. In: David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule and Hanspeter Kriesi (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, 242–261. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Gitlin, Todd. 2003. The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making & Unmaking of the New Left. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hertog, James K. and Douglas M. McLeod. 1995. Anarchists wreak havoc in downtown Minneapolis: A multi-level study of media coverage of radical protest. Journalism & Mass Communication Monographs 151: 1–48. Hilgartner, Stephen and Charles L. Bosk. 1988. The rise and fall of social problems: A public arenas model. Journal of Sociology 94: 53–78. Lasswell, Harold D. 1938. Propaganda Technique in the World War. New York: P. Smith. Lim, Merlyna. 2012. Clicks, cabs, and coffee houses: Social media and oppositional movements in Egypt, 2004–2011. Journal of Communication, 62: 231–248. Marx, Karl, Friedrich Engels and John Edward Toews. 1999. The Communist Manifesto with Related Documents. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s. McAdam, Doug. 1988. Freedom Summer. New York: Oxford University. McLeod, Douglas M. and James K. Hertog. 1999. Social control, social change, and the mass media’s role in the regulation of protest groups. In: David P. Demers and Kasisomayajula Viswanath (eds.), Mass Media, Social Control, and Social Change, 305–330. Ames, IA: Iowa State University. Melucci, Alberto, John Keane and Paul Mier. 1989. Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Murdock, Graham. 1973. Political deviance: The press presentation of a militant mass demonstration. In: Stanley Cohen and Jock Young (eds.), The Manufacture of News, 156–175. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. della Porta, Donatella. 2011. Communication in movement. Information, Communication & Society 14: 800–819. Robinson, Piers. 2000 The news media and intervention: Triggering the use of air power during humanitarian crises. European Journal of Communication 15: 405–414. Rowland, Robert C. and Kirsten Theye. 2008. The symbolic DNA of terrorism. Communication Monographs 75: 52–85. Snow, David A. 2004. Framing processes, ideology and discursive fields. In: David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule and Hanspeter Kriesi (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, 380–412. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Sperber, Jonathan. 2005. The European Revolutions, 1848–1851. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Stewart, Charles J., Craig A. Smith and Robert E. Denton. 1984. Persuasion and Social Movements. Prospect Heights, IL.: Waveland Press. Taylor, Philip M. 2003. Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient World to the Present Day. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Taylor, Verta and Nella Van Dyke. 2004. “Get up, stand up”: Tactical repertoires of social movements. In: David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule and Hanspeter Kriesi (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, 262–293. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Piers Robinson

10 News media, war and world politics Abstract: This chapter offers a critical introduction to research on the importance of communication processes in war and international politics. The chapter starts by outlining key theoretical political science perspectives (i.e., realism, liberalism and critical) and how these relate to questions of political communication. The remainder of the chapter sets out key debates and arguments that have dominated research on media and conflict. This is done in three stages: the first explores the elite-driven orthodoxy that has traditionally informed the understanding of wartime media-state relations; the second explores neo-pluralist accounts of mediastate relations; and the third maps out contemporary debates about the new information environment, the “war on terror” and state-led “perception management” strategies. The chapter concludes with a discussion of important issues confronting political communication scholarship on media and war. Among other things, the chapter calls for a clear normative discussion about how journalists should cover war. Key Words: war, war on terror, international relations, public diplomacy, CNNeffect, indexing hypothesis

1 Introduction Conflict defined the 20th century with the two world wars shaping the geo-political context for almost the entire century. The 21st century has seen no let up, with two major US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dominating the foreign policy agendas of Western governments and the militarized response, the so-called “war on terror”, to terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda. At the same time, the last 100 years have witnessed the rapid emergence of new forms of mass communication, including wireless radio, newsreels and cinema, mass circulation newspapers, television and the Internet. Right from the start, the power of communication in wartime was fully recognized: From the deployment of Nazi propaganda masterminded by Goebbels through to the creation of the Ministry of Information in Britain, tasked with the “maintenance of moral”, media became an integral part of national war efforts. Today, governments devote significant resources in order to shape the information environment in their favour and, in doing so, win a global battle for “hearts and minds”. This chapter offers a critical introduction to the ways in which political communication scholarship has sought to understand and explain the importance of communication processes vis-à-vis war and international politics. At the outset, it

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should be clear that not all enquiry into world politics is concerned with war and conflict, although much, perhaps the majority, is. And not all research on communication and war approaches the subject in a way that is connected with world politics. But this chapter focuses on the political communication literature about media and war and which, in doing so, has been inextricably connected with international politics. Much of the focus of this chapter, reflecting the prevalent research agendas of political communication scholars, concerns our understanding of the dynamics of news media coverage of international politics and how that matters for war and conflict. For the most part this has involved describing and explaining the dynamics of media-political relations, more rarely this has involved clear normative discussions about how journalists should cover war: Indeed, the need for better normative debate will be raised at the end of the chapter. The chapter starts by outlining key theoretical perspectives, realism, liberalism and materialism, employed in the study of International Relations (IR) and how these relate to questions of news media and political communication. This discussion will help to make sense of the remainder of the chapter that then sets out key debates and arguments that have dominated political communication research on media and conflict. This is done in three stages: the first explores the elitedriven orthodoxy that has traditionally informed our understanding of war-time media-state relations; the second explores neo-pluralist accounts of media-state relations; and the third maps out contemporary debates about the new information environment, the “war on terror” and state-led propaganda and perception management strategies. The chapter concludes with a discussion of important issues confronting political communication scholarship on media and war.

2 International politics theoretical frames: Realist, liberal and critical perspectives on news media Understanding war-time political communication requires an understanding of how and why international politics works the way that it does. However, much of the political communication scholarship in this area has an inadequate understanding of International Relations (IR) scholarship. This is a pity, because IR and political communication scholars have much to learn from each other: as this chapter will show, political communication scholarship opens up a level of analysis that relates directly to the major IR theoretical paradigms. At the same time, understanding how political communication scholarship bears upon broader IR debates provides an important way of contextualizing and broadening the reach of studies focused upon media and conflict. In addition, understanding broader IR debates over war and conflict provides important insights that scholars of political

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communication should be aware of. In the spirit of encouraging connections and dialogue between IR and political communication, this chapter takes as a starting point a discussion of IR theory. Of course, there is no academic consensus on the matter of how the world works, but there are distinct theoretical perspectives that offer different ways of understanding international political processes and which carry different assumptions about communication processes and mass media. These perspectives are realism, liberalism and critical. I shall discuss each in turn.

2.1 Realism The dominant approach to understanding international politics, realism, draws attention to the state-system as the principle means by which political power is distributed: the world is made up of states, each of which lays claim to legal sovereignty and most, if not all states, seek to protect themselves through military power (see Wohlforth 2012 for an introduction). States also assert a moral authority in that they claim to serve and protect the interests of “their” people, who in turn are bound through patriotism and national identity to their state. For realists, outcomes in international politics are, in the final analysis, determined by power, in particular military power. In what is a “nasty and brutish” world, states must work hard to protect themselves against aggressors, and officials and politicians need to ensure that the national interest, defined primarily as survival and the pursuit of power, governs foreign policy formulation. With respect to the mass media, realists have tended to downplay the significance of domestic-level variables, arguing instead that foreign policy should be, and is in fact, shaped by foreign-policy officials. From this perspective, news media are largely subservient to the substance of both foreign-policy making and international politics and serve, in the main, to reinforce the policy preferences of foreign policy officials. Criticism, when it does occur, tends to be limited to a procedural level whereby tactics may be criticised or, at the very most, questions raised about whether a war is likely to be won, although this is relatively infrequent. Rarely is there any substantive-level criticism of whether the war itself is justified. Moreover, media and public subservience to foreign policy decision makers is treated as both natural and appropriate, as is the expectation that people will be supportive of, and patriotic toward, their nation. From the realist perspective, elite control of foreignpolicy formulation and a deferential media and public are necessary to ensure sound, rational policy; public and media being likely to encourage emotional and ill thought-out policy decisions (see Holsti 1992: 442; Robinson et al. 2010: 39–40; Zandberg and Neiger 2005: 131).

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2.2 Liberalism Traditionally, liberalism has provided the major challenge to realist thinking. As a theory of international relations, liberalism focuses on the rules and norms that have evolved within the international system and the ways in which these encourage rule-governed behaviour amongst states, higher levels of co-operation and lower levels of violent conflict (see Doyle 2012 for an introduction). For liberals, world politics is more than simply the outcome of power politics; and international and global institutions, such as the United Nations or the World Trade Organisation, are important components that constrain and shape the behaviour of states. Regarding media, liberalism perceives media as having a much more positive and independent impact upon foreign-policy making and world politics. For example, the democratic peace thesis maintains that liberal democracies are unlikely to make war on each other, at least in part due to the influence of war-averse publics and independent media, both of which act as constraints on leaders of democratic countries. Other liberal scholars, such as Joseph Nye (1996), have argued that free speech and the global free flow of information (in part facilitated by news media communications), have been associated with the progressive spread of liberal values throughout the international system. Still other scholars have implicated news media as playing an integral role in pressuring government to carry out humanitarian interventions in war-torn countries such as Somalia (1991–1992), Bosnia (1992– 1995) and Kosovo (1999). As discussed later, the so-called CNN Effect thesis (Robinson 2002; Livingston 1997) argued that news media representation of suffering people can be a trigger for government to launch intervention in order to protect human rights. From the liberal perspective, media criticism along both procedural and substantive lines is likely although substantive-level criticism that brings into question either the moral probity of those pursuing a war or any underlying economic interests is unlikely. Contrasting with realism, the normative expectation regarding media is that media and public scrutiny of foreign policy can and should contribute to foreign-policy formulation (see also the chapter by van Aelst). Based upon liberal ideas around free speech, this stance also sees media independence as an important check on the power of government and the propensity of states to wage unnecessary war. As such, media are expected to remain detached and critical even during time of war (see Holsti 1992: 442; Robinson et al. 2010: 45–46; Zandberg and Neiger 2005: 131; see also the chapter by Jandura and Friedrich).

2.3 Critical approaches Although less prominent than realism and liberalism with respect to international relations scholarship, critical approaches to the study of world politics (Marxism and critical theory) have made an important contribution through exploring the ways in which political and economic power is wielded in the interests of elites

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(see Rupert 2007 for an introduction). In contrast to realism and liberalism, these critical approaches conceive of the state as a function of capitalist economic and power structures that preserve unequal and exploitative socio-economic relations between elites and non-elites. At both national and international level, corporate interests shape and influence, in fundamental ways, what states do, and how they act. With respect to news media, critical approaches accord the media a central role in the service of corporate interest through their tendency to reflect and propagate the interests of elites, whose particular world view is then transmitted to the population. In this respect, critical approaches actually share an important area of common ground with realism in that both assert the subservience of media to the state, seeing the news media as primarily a mechanism by which elite foreignpolicy making is reinforced. The difference between the two is that realism avoids the issue of the interplay between state interests and corporate interest, in effect ignoring the economic aspects of states and international politics, whilst treating elite-defined foreign-policy formulation as unproblematic: on the other hand, critical approaches unpack and bring to the forefront of analysis those economic processes ignored by realism, whilst treating their existence as fundamentally problematic and something to be challenged. From this perspective, media criticism remains only at a procedural level, perhaps questioning the win-ability of a war or the utility of various tactics, but never challenging the moral legitimacy of a war and the motivations behind it. In normative terms, given its world view, media should adopt a more radical and questioning stance, highlighting concealed economic and political interests that might be shaping policy, and constantly asking difficult and challenging questions, even when a country is at war (Robinson et al. 2010: 48–49).

3 The elite-driven orthodoxy: Media in support of the state and war In fact, consistent with both realist and critical approaches, the orthodox view amongst political communication scholars has been that news media remain largely deferential of, and supportive toward, political elites during times of war and crisis. The early groundbreaking study by Daniel Hallin, The Uncensored War (1986), to a very large extent laid the foundations for this orthodoxy. Focusing upon US media coverage of the Vietnam War, which resulted in the deaths of millions of people in South East Asia and divided US society, Hallin explored the widely held belief that US media coverage had adopted an oppositional stance toward US policy and, in doing so, contributed to the attrition of public and political support for the war. Indeed, the belief that a combination of rising US casualties, adversarial journalism and waning public support led to failure in Vietnam became known as the Vietnam Syndrome and, arguably, has dominated military

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and political mindsets ever since (see for example Braestrup 1994; Hammond 1989; Westmoreland 1989). However, based upon a detailed and systematic analysis of US newspaper and television news coverage, Hallin offered a profound challenge to the oppositional media thesis, arguing instead that US media coverage of the war was broadly supportive of it until 1968. During this phase US media operated within a “sphere of consensus” which had been defined by political agreement over the course of the war. During this period, coverage reflected well upon US forces with coverage being dominated by officially sourced stories about US soldiers and rarely showing images of any death and destruction. In 1968, however, communist forces launched the Tet Offensive which involved an uprising throughout South Vietnam. At this point, according to Hallin, critical reporting did start to emerge in mainstream US media, but this was only because elements within the Johnson administration itself had started to argue publicly over the course of the war: the scope of reporting had extended to embrace a “sphere of legitimate controversy” involving procedural media criticism pertaining primarily to whether or not the US was winning the war in South East Asia and including more images of violence and suffering. Importantly, however, US media coverage never moved beyond this point into a “sphere of deviance” whereby more substantive criticism of the legitimacy of US action in Vietnam was made; the US was always presented as morally justified in fighting the war (for a more detailed discussion see Robinson et al. 2010). Subsequent to Daniel Hallin’s study, the empirical case for media deference in wartime has been repeatedly reaffirmed across a series of academic studies and in different national contexts. For example, the Glasgow University Media Group (1985) analysed and critiqued UK media coverage of the 1982 Falklands conflict, highlighting the willing complicity of broadcasters to provide “a nightly offering of interesting, positive and heart-warming stories of achievement and collaboration born out of a sense of national purpose” (Glasgow University Media Group 1985: 173–174). With respect to the Israeli context, Tamar Liebes (1997) details how hegemony has shaped and limited journalists covering conflict in the Middle East whilst, with respect to US media and the 1991 Gulf War, the widely-cited Taken by Storm, edited by Bennett and Paletz (1994), provides extensive empirical confirmation of media deference to government. In terms of explaining this pattern of media deference, the most frequent explanation, and one that is invoked to explain both patterns of wartime and nonwartime media-state relations, relates to the close relationship between journalists and official sources: i.e., news media coverage ends up being supportive of government because journalists rely upon and defer to official sources. For example, Bennett’s widely cited and paradigmatic indexing hypothesis highlights the “symbiotic” and “transactional” relationship between journalists and official sources which is generated by the need of officials to get their message across, and the need of journalists to produce news. For Hallin (1986) deference occurs because

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of a routine of objective journalism whereby objectivity is understood as reporting the range of viewpoints across the US legislature and executive. For Wolfsfeld (1997), The Political Contest Model describes war-time media as an ideal-type example of media behaving as a “faithful servant” to the state whereby the conditions of privileged access and control of information creates a power in balance firmly in favour of the military and political officials. He draws upon the 1982 Falklands to illustrate this point, showing how journalists travelling the 8.000 miles to the warzone with the British Royal Navy were almost entirely reliant on British officials and military both for information and the capacity to communicate reports back to the UK. Of course, recent approaches to media management involving the embedding of journalists with military units, strengthens the link between journalists and official sources even further. Whilst reliance upon official sources is a convincing immediate factor that ties media reporting to official views, there are other explanations, specifically ideology, political economy and patriotism, that are rooted more deeply in underlying political and economic structures. Some of these are consistent with the critical approaches to world politics, some are consistent with realism. With respect to critical approaches, both Hallin (1986) and Herman and Chomsky (1988) argue that, during the Cold War at least, ideological imperatives structured around anticommunism meant that US journalists and US policymakers shared the same worldview. As a result, events such as the Vietnam War could only ever be interpreted as a morally justified struggle against communism, and never as a war of aggression against a majority of the Vietnamese people. Herman and Chomsky (1988), in their propaganda model, are more explicit than Hallin in terms of discussing the political economy of the US news media and the consequences of this for media coverage. For them, the size, concentration of ownership and profit orientation of mainstream US media interlinks with political elites: the end result is that media reporting tends largely to support political and economic elites.1 Regarding realism, a number of scholars identify patriotism and national identity as the key factor in shaping, through a number of mechanisms, media reporting of war (Glasgow University Media Group 1985; Bennett and Paletz 1994; Liebes 1997). For example, some of the elite-driven accounts emphasise how appeal to patriotism is a powerful rhetorical tool employed by policy makers in order to silence dissent. At the same time, as Muller’s (1973) rally round the flag thesis describes, populations tend to instinctively support their leadership at times of

1 Whilst in the past the critical political economy approach to understanding media has sometimes been dismissed as either conspiratorial or simplistic, the recent events in the UK surrounding media mogul Rupert Murdoch and Newscorp have highlighted just how closely inter-linked politicians and media conglomerates can become. For example, it has transpired that ex British Prime Minister Tony Blair is godfather to one of Murdoch’s sons whilst Andy Coulson (former editor of a Murdoch paper) was appointed (without full security clearance) as Chief of Communications for the current Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government.

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national crisis and, as Bennett and Paletz (1994: 284) argue, commercial news media are vulnerable to the concern that patriotic publics will not welcome critical coverage during war. In addition, the patriotic sentiments of journalists themselves might naturally incline them to support “their” side during a war (Liebes 1997). Of course, all of these arguments that are rooted in patriotism dovetail with realist theory, which assumes the pre-eminent importance of national identity and loyalty to the state amongst publics, a phenomenon which is also perceived as “natural” and “right”. Whilst the elite-driven perspective has traditionally dominated, it is not without its shortcomings. Specifically, and as can be seen in the preceding discussion over explaining these patterns, it is not clear which factors hold the greatest sway in terms of shaping supportive media coverage. On the one hand, the close correlation between the views of officials and news reports might be explained through some variant of the indexing hypothesis (Bennett 1990). On the other hand, broader ideological structures such as anti-communism or patriotism that are exogenous to the journalist-official relationship could conceivably be understood to be shaping the views of both journalists and policy-makers (Zaller and Chui 1999: 10). Again, it is also possible that all these factors combine in order to create a pattern of media reporting that is effectively deferential to government officials. Overall, it is unclear as to the appropriate explanatory weighting that should be accorded the factors theorised to shape coverage. Another area of debate concerns the empirical accuracy of those studies that have measured media deference to government. For example, in his 2003 Political Communication article Scott Althaus argues that scholars have under-measured press criticism by ignoring critical contributions raised by journalists, failing to distinguish adequately between procedural and substantive types of criticism and relying upon proxy data rather than analysing actual news content (see also Coe 2011). Part of the problem here is that measuring news bias is a complex, timeconsuming and challenging task, with almost infinite possibilities for researchers to miss analytically significant dimensions of news coverage (see also the chapters by Jandura and Friedrich and by Hopmann). As a result, there is still potential for debate as to how far news media actually are deferential during times of war and crisis. It is also the case that the elitedriven models do not theorise exceptions to the rule where processes of elite domination break down. These points notwithstanding, it is still the case that the majority of empirical scholarship on media and war supports the elite-driven model whilst actual challenges (e.g., Althaus 2003; Coe 2011) suggest modifications to, rather than a complete over-turning of, the elite driven paradigm. More generally, over the last 20 years, challenges have emerged to the elite-driven model surrounding the ending of the Cold War and changes to the media environment which have suggested, at least to some, that a more plural relationship between media and the state might have emerged, one that is more compatible with the liberal perspective on international politics. And it is to these that we now turn.

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4 Pluralist claims and neo-pluralist theories The final fifteen years of the 20th century brought with them dramatic shifts both in the geo-political landscape and the emergence of new communication technology. It also ushered in what was for some a new form of warfare which involved fighting humanitarian wars on behalf of oppressed and suffering people. Specifically, some scholars argue that two factors conjoined in order to enable the emergence of a more pluralist relationship between media and the state. The first concerned the passing of the Cold War bi-polar standoff which had created an ideological bond (the ideology of anti-communism discussed in the previous section) between policy-makers and journalists; freed from the strictures of this bond, journalist were freer to challenge and criticise foreign policy makers. The second factor related to the apparently pluralising consequences of developments in communication technology. The arrival of 24-hour rolling news coverage (e.g., CNN) and the associated genre of global media, coupled with portable editing and satellite communication equipment enabled real-time reporting direct from conflict zones and, in a significant way, provided journalists with the ability to bypass official sources thereby potentially confounding the continued significance of the indexing hypothesis (Bennett 1990) discussed earlier. At the heart of what became known as the CNN effect debate was an apparently new-found media power driving armed interventions during humanitarian crises in war-torn countries such as Somalia (1992–1993), Bosnia (1992–1995) and Kosovo (1999). For many scholars (e.g., Shaw 1996), these interventions were driven largely by emotive media coverage of suffering people which, in turn, created a political imperative for Western governments to intervene in order to protect basic human rights. Relating these developments back to IR theory, these developments were understood as substantive evidence for the liberal vision of international politics, a world in which, via humanitarian intervention, the international community was able and willing to act in the interests of protecting basic human rights. To the extent that some perceived humanitarian intervention to be a new form of international action, these instances of influence appeared to be substantive and not simply procedural. Also, the idea that it was media coverage driving policy decisions to intervene appeared consistent with the interest of liberal IR theorists with the role of nonstate actors. In short, foreign policy was appearing to be more than simply the outcome of state-centered power politics that realists would have us believe (see also the chapter by van Aelst). In fact, the more radical claims regarding the CNN effect were quickly brought into doubt. Starting with journalist Nik Gowing’s Harvard study (1994), the argument was put forward that media influence on policy was largely cosmetic, occasionally tactical (i.e., procedural level) but only rarely strategic (i.e., substantive level). So, according to Gowing (1994), media coverage of suffering people often triggered cosmetic policy responses, such as the high-profile airlifting of a few

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injured children out of a war zone, or tactical responses whereby limited air strikes might be used in response to an atrocity.2 Coverage rarely, however, impacted upon strategic decisions to actually intervene, or indeed withdraw, from a particular country. For other scholars, the CNN effect was similarly understood as conditional: Robinson (2002) argued that media impact was more likely when political elites were divided and unsure of policy (the condition of policy uncertainty) whilst Livingston (1997) concluded that, whilst media might have a significant influence upon relatively low-cost responses to humanitarian crises, such as food aid delivery and diplomatic responses, politically and economically high-cost operations such as armed intervention were more likely to be driven by factors other than media pressure. Finally, and drawing in part from detailed case study analysis of the 1991 NATO air war against Serbia, both Babak (2007) and Robinson (2002) argued that media was able to, amongst other factors, influence decisions to use air power but not ground troops in response to a humanitarian crisis (for the recent debate over the CNN effect see Robinson 2011). In short, the more radical claims regarding the CNN effect, which suggested a dramatically pluralised relationship between governments and media in which foreign policy was being driven by media pressure, gave way to moderate claims and a more sober analysis of the extent of media influence. At the very least, however, the CNN-effect debate was successful in highlighting the possibility that the media-state relationship was not always one of straightforward subservience. In part reflecting this direction of thinking have been a series of attempts to theorise a more pluralist, nuanced and two-way understanding of the influence between media and state, both in conditions of war and foreign policy more generally (see also the chapter by van Aelst). Attempts to theorise a more two-way understanding of media-state relations suggest varying degrees of potential media power. For example, Gadi Wolfsfeld’s (1997) political context model purports to show that, when non-elite groups were able to initiate events, control the information environment and gain the support of at least parts of a political elite, they can be tremendously successful at influencing media, generating substantive-level media criticism and substantive-level influence. By way of example, he analyses the Palestinian Intifada in 1987 when Palestinians were able to initiate the uprising, limit the control that Israel had over the movement of journalists in the occupied territories and mobilise elite support from the Israeli political left. As a result, and in the context of an armed uprising against Israel, media coverage was framed in a way that effectively promoted the cause of the Palestinians (see also the chapters by Hertog and Zuercher and by Kiousis and Strömbäck). 2 Gowing’s study is focused on the 1992–1995 war in Bosnia, and the examples he cites include the airlifting of injured children out of Sarajevo (cosmetic policy) and the use of limited airstrikes against Bosnian Serb Nationalist targets following highly publicised atrocities including the shelling of market places in Sarajevo.

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Analysing British news media coverage of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Robinson et al. (2010), through a comparative analysis of four British television news channels and seven national newspapers, find that a minority of media outlets demonstrated a significant level of independence from the UK government, even to the extent of taking a public stand against the invasion. Although there were limits to this independence, Robinson et al. (2010) argue that the system characteristics of the UK media, which include a large number of national newspapers operating in a highly competitive market, coupled with relatively high levels of journalistic professionalism within some media outlets, meant that a minority of UK media presented a more profound challenge to the UK government than predicted by the elite-driven model (see also Althaus 2003; Coe 2011; Robinson et al. 2009). The overall claim here is that under certain circumstances and in particular media outlets, journalists can adopt an independent stance and challenge political elites (see also the chapter by Jandura and Friedrich). Other neo-pluralist accounts are more circumspect regarding the degree of power that media, and non-elite groups, might be able to obtain. For example, both Entman’s (2004) cascading activation model and the policy-media interaction model (Robinson 2000) emphasise the interaction between elite-dissensus and rising levels of media independence. For Entman (2004), more critical media reporting can occur when (a) dissensus exists among officials at the top level of government, (b) mid-level officials promote challenges to existing policy, and (c) events occur that are culturally ambiguous and open to contestation. For Robinson (2000), critical media reporting is triggered when policy-makers are uncertain over policy and/or publicly arguing over policy. In these circumstances media reports that are critical of policy can provide powerful ammunition for those policy makers, and other actors, seeking a change in policy. Most recently, Baum and Groeling (2010), in their empirically rich analysis of media, public opinion and US foreign policy, argue that, in circumstances of protracted war, the combination of rising US casualties and the propensity of news media to consider elite criticism of government policy as more newsworthy than elite support, means that media pose an increasing challenge to the US government. The important feature of these three accounts is that media independence is relatively limited because elite dissent and debate is theorised as being such an important part of generating critical media coverage. As such, media power is not seen as, to any great degree, enabling nonelite influence upon media and policy; but rather as becoming an important actor in the context of elite debates over policy. As such, influence under these models is more likely to be at a more procedural-level as opposed to substantive-level (see also the chapter by van Aelst). Whether suggestive of the possibility of substantive non-elite influence over media or a media that becomes a key player in times of elite dissensus, these neopluralists accounts are important from the perspective of IR liberal theory: they dovetail with liberal arguments about the importance of non-state actors, empha-

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sise the significance of domestic-level variables and provide theoreticallygrounded evidence that foreign policy and world politics are not only the outcome of self-interested and militarised power politics. These accounts are also important because, albeit to varying degrees, none of them seek to overturn fully the elitedriven accounts described earlier. Indeed each of the accounts provides significant theoretical and empirical support for the claim that, on balance, governments and political elites possess considerable power of media when it comes to international politics. As such, what results from these accounts is a constructive and, ultimately, well-grounded research agenda that seeks to deepen our knowledge and understanding of the multiple relations between political elites, non-elites and media.

5 Contemporary issues: the new media environment, the “war on terror” and “perception management” To the extent that political communication scholarship has made progress in terms of both developing nuanced and sophisticated accounts of the dynamics between media and state, the last ten years have witnessed 1) an Internet-driven revolution that has transformed the media environment, 2) the emergence of a so-called “war on terror”, and 3) increasingly aggressive approaches to media management, all of which have focused the attention of publics, policy makers and academics. Each of these developments suggest different trends vis-à-vis media-state relations and, as we shall see, can be read as being in support of both the realist/critical elitedriven paradigms and, conversely, more radical liberal arguments over increased media-independence. I shall deal with each in turn.

5.1 Internet, global media and the media empowerment thesis For many, the proliferation of new communication technology, such as portable satellite broadcasting equipment and the emergence of digital cameras contained within mobile phones, appears to create a degree of transparency of events around the world that is unprecedented (e.g., Castells 2009; Gowing 2011; Hoskin’s and O’Loughlin 2010). Potentially, any event can be captured on “camera” and that information then passed around the world instantaneously via the internet or global media. In addition, the rise of global media, such as CNN, and now the Arab-based network Al-Jazeera, as well as the Internet, means that such images (and their story) can be communicated to the peoples of the world. Received wisdom claims that such developments have a radically pluralising effect by bringing information and news to people more quickly and, in turn, creating greater diffi-

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culty for governments in influencing (or manipulating) news agendas. The recent and ongoing controversy over the “Wikileaks” website, which has disseminated online large quantities of secret US government documents regarding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well diplomatic cables, epitomises the apparently limited capacity governments have to control information flows in the internet era. Most recently, during the so-called “Arab Spring”, social media have been implicated in the ability of people to organise and rise up against authoritarian governments throughout the Middle East (e.g., Tufekci and Wilson 2012; Gowing 2011). All of these developments offer, at first glance, evidence to suggest that pluralist claims and neo-pluralist models have greater validity now in today’s so-called “media ecology” (Cottle 2006). Naturally such developments, to the extent that they are occurring, also provide substance for liberal IR theory and the significance it attaches to communications processes. On the one hand, it is certainly the case that communication technologies such as the Internet, as well as the omnipresence of digital cameras and mobile phones, means that there is more information circling the global media sphere and, in many ways, traditional patterns of indexing (Bennett 1990), whereby journalists are heavily dependent upon official sources, seems to be a thing of the past. Moreover, there is now unprecedented potential for individuals to readily seek out alternative sources of information that present radically different viewpoints from those advocated by mainstream media and political elites. But for all the enthusiasm that many scholars show for the emancipatory potential of new communication technology, there is ample reason to be more cautious. For example, both Tumber and Webster (2006: 85) and Anderson (2009), based upon extensive interviews with journalists, highlight how new technology can curtail journalists. Anderson (2009: 417–18) writes: Although advanced technologies have liberated contemporary correspondents, they remain captive to new pressures caused by the imperatives of infotainment and the speed of technology. Instant deadlines, 24-hour news, increased syndication and editorial expectations beset the reporters in the field and affect newsgathering, quality reporting and content (…) In theory the audience receives more information but much of it is duplicated, repetitive and flawed.

At an aggregate level, also, the pluralisation of media outlets and the decline of traditional broadcast media may well have increasingly fragmented domestic and global public spheres. Rather than creating the context for greater popular engagement with global issues, conflict and foreign policy, the panopoly of contrasting voices may well have created less potential for people to mobilise opinion and exert political influence. In an era when every week brings a new conflict or crisis to the attention of audiences that are decreasing in size, and for only a brief period of time before the next ‘big story’ comes along, and where many individuals take advantage of the interactivity of new media in order to avoid hard news, it is not at all clear that “empowerment” actually is the major consequence of the new media environment (see also the chapter by Wolling and Emmer). Moving beyond a focus on the technology itself, ideological imperatives and state-driven ap-

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proaches to managing the new information environment provide further reasons to approach the new media environment from a more sober perspective (see also the chapter by Kiousis and Strömbäck).

5.2 The “war on terror” and “perception management” The events of 9/11 have undoubtedly created a significant focusing of minds amongst scholars of political communication and conflict: just as the subsequent “war on terror” has dominated policy agendas since 2001, a vast volume of research and writing has been generated that has sought to understand the relationships between terrorism and media. A substantial amount of scholarship has been devoted to “problem solving” (Cox 1981) into media and terrorism. Working in tandem with the agenda of much of the field of terrorism research, considerable scholarship has been devoted to critiquing media for providing, as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once described, the “oxygen of publicity” to groups employing violence for political ends. For example, Brigitte Nacos, in Mass Mediated Terrorism (2002) provides a compelling analysis of how media can, inadvertently, end up serving the goals of terrorists: she notes how, following the 9/11 attacks, Osama Bin Laden appeared on US television more often than President Bush. Of course, in the era of “global media” these concerns have shifted to the issue of non-Western media, such as Al Jazeera, and criticism over their decision to air recordings made by Osama Bin Laden. More recently, and in the context of the Internet era, increasing attention has been paid to the ways in which terrorist groups utilise new communication technology in order to mobilise, organise and to carry out terrorist related activities (see for example Weiman 2004). Indeed, it is precisely the diverse and non-hierarchical networks that characterise contemporary terrorism which appear to meld with the equivalent networking facilitated by the Internet. Recently, scholars have attended to the consequences of today’s “new media ecology” (Cottle 2006), characterised by the Internet, digital recording technology and multiple news outlets, and how this shapes processes of the “radicalisation” of terrorists and shapes perceptions of populations in general (Hoskins and O’Loughlin 2009: 81). More critically, however, an increasingly wide range of scholarship has adopted a critical stance toward the issue of terrorism and media. For example, researchers have explored the ways in which the issue of terrorism can become a political tool for powerful interests, how mainstream discourses shape perceptions of terrorism in a way that precludes deeper understanding of this phenomenon, and how Western involvement in terrorism has been marginalised within mainstream political and media debate. For example, the public opinion scholar John Mueller argues in Overblown (2006) that the terrorism threat following 9/11 has been grossly exaggerated, ultimately to the advantage of some US politicians who have preyed on public fears. Similarly, in Terrorism and the Politics of Fear, David

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Altheide (2006) has analysed the linkage of terrorism, victimization, crime, and social control, arguing that a new mass-mediated “politics of fear” has enabled public acceptance of increased surveillance and social control. Most critically, some scholarship has highlighted how media can become complicit in the support of Western governments engaged in both human rights abuses and activities which can be plausibly described as terrorist. For example, Bennett and Livingston (2006) have carefully documented how mainstream US media were complicit with White House objectives in describing events at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq as “abuse” rather than “torture”, despite credible evidence in support of the latter interpretation. A crucial issue raised by these critical perspectives concerns the extent to which the “war on terror” has come to function in ideological terms, structuring the mindsets and outlooks of policy makers, publics and journalists alike in ways which preclude alternative understanding of events. As documented earlier in the chapter, an ideology of anti-communism was identified in some of the elite-driven accounts as being an important factor that limited journalistic independence. Today according to some scholars (e.g., Jackson 2005), it is plausible, perhaps likely, that the “war on terror” is performing a similar function. From the perspective of critical and materialist theorists, the “war on terror” discourse simply serves to mask the underlying economic imperatives that are shaping foreign policy. For example, the 2003 invasion of Iraq was marketed to US audiences as part of the “war on terror”. Whilst the US news media uncritically reflected deeply problematic official claims about alleged Iraqi possession of weapons of mass destruction (which they never had), and connections between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda (which were not true), there was rarely any discussion of potential economic explanations of US policy rooted in oil resource interests. As Alan Greenspan (former Chief of the US Federal Reserve) recently bemoaned, “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil” (Greenspan 2007: 463). So, for critical and materialist scholars, with its pervasive discourses such as the “war on terror” effectively replacing the old anticommunism discourses, the new millennium is perhaps not so different from the Cold War. Another important dynamic that has emerged during the last 20 years concerns the increasingly sophisticated approaches employed by government in order to influence media and public perceptions (Taylor 1992). Here, the concept of soft power (Nye 2008), which refers to non-military approaches to projecting power and influence, has informed a significant industry surrounding approaches to influencing public and global perceptions. In fact, what is commonly referred to as public diplomacy has a long history. For example, Voice of America first started radio broadcasts in 1942 aimed at promoting democracy and, in 1953, the United States Information Agency was created in order to “coordinate the combat against the spread of communist ideas” (Taylor 2006: 5). Over the last 20 years, approaches

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to shaping the information environment have intensified and a variety of terms, in addition to public diplomacy, have been used to describe these activities and include perception management, public affairs, media-management, strategic communication and propaganda (see also the chapter by Kiousis and Strömbäck). Indeed, “perception management”, as one part of information warfare, has come to be seen by many in military and political circles as vital to winning wars. It was during the Falklands conflict in 1982 that the British government demonstrated the utility of placing journalists alongside combatants as a means to foster sympathetic reporting. Learning in part from the British experience, the US military adopted the pool system in the 1991 Gulf War, allowing selected journalists to accompany frontline units while others were channelled towards the memorable set-piece press briefings. It was largely the use of dramatic images of “smart” bombs and sanitised language (such as the use of the terms “collateral damage” and “surgical strikes”) during these briefings that ensured that media coverage did not relay too much of the grim reality of war. Since the 1999 Kosovo conflict, attempts to manage the information environment during wars and crises have been strengthened. Coalition military operations in Kosovo, Afghanistan and the 2003 Iraq War have been accompanied by sustained and highly organised attempts to influence media agendas by promoting coverage of some issues rather than others and by encouraging the framing of stories in ways that support the government’s cause (see also the chapters by Aalberg and by Arendt and Matthes). At least some of the impetus for these attempts during the 2001 war in Afghanistan came from the UK government’s Director of Communications and Strategy, Alistair Campbell, whose: (…) solution was to create Coalition Information Centres (CICs) in Washington, London and Islamabad that would coordinate the release of information, attempt to control the news agenda and rebut opposition claims in exactly the way that the Clinton-Blair “war room” model operated in domestic politics. (Brown 2003: 93)

Other activities inherent in the “war room” model include the co-ordinated use of press releases, news media appearances, press conferences and speeches. In strategic terms, these activities seek to encourage the development of common news media frames over time. In tactical terms, they serve to minimise coverage of damaging or hostile stories and to discredit oppositional counter-narratives. A recent example of the influence and effectiveness of propaganda activities can be seen during the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In the US, the White House Information Group was set up in August 2002 to co-ordinate a “systematic media campaign” (Bennett, Lawrence, and Livingston 2007: 18) that would reveal to the American public details of the threat posed by Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction activities. By September 2002, administration officials were publicly discussing the possibility of a nuclear attack from Iraq with the chilling soundbite “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud” used by Secretary of

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State Condoleeza Rice on CNN (Bennett, Lawrence, and Livingston 2007: 22–23). In the UK context, and at the same time as the “perception management” campaign got underway in the US, a dossier based on intelligence about Iraq was published in September 2002, written by the Joint Intelligence Committee but with substantial involvement from the Prime Minister’s office and from Alistair Campbell (Blair’s Communications Director). In what has become a controversial and frequently discredited process (Doig and Pythian 2005; Herring and Robinson 2014; Morrison 2011), the dossier created an exaggerated sense of the threat from Iraq, suggesting in particular that Iraq could fire strategic weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes of an order to do so. The news media reported its publication giving particular attention to the claim that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction could be ready “within 45 minutes of an order to use them” (Prime Minister’s Office 2002); “Brits 45 minutes from doom” was one newspapers headline. So, as much as the post 9/11 environment has been witness to the ability of media to empower non-elites and challenge political elites, it is also the case that governments have become more organised and more adept at both managing and influencing the new media environment. To the extent that power has been retained by the state, both elite-driven accounts and realist IR theory, with their assumptions about the concentration of power at the level of the state, still possess cogency.

6 Conclusion Clearly, contemporary political communication scholarship about media and war reveals a healthy diversity of opinions which, in turn, reflect divergent paradigms employed to understand international politics. Certainly there is no good reason to either accept or reject any of the various perspectives given the levels of uncertainty that inevitably surround scholarship: in a very important sense, much of our understanding and evidence is necessarily incomplete both because researchers have never been able to exhaustively research all media coverage and cases of conflict and war, and because the new media environment is changing as new forms of communication proliferate. Moreover, the contrasting claims and evidence highlighted in the discussion of the contemporary media environment should lead us away from hastily discounting any particular paradigm. Given these points, it is the neo-pluralist accounts discussed earlier that suggest the most productive way forward precisely because they have the potential to incorporate the insights provided by both elite-driven accounts and to make sense of pluralist claims. Put another way, one needs to understand that media coverage of war does indeed often reflect the viewpoints of those in government, but that there are also many circumstances in which this pattern of dominance breaks down.

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With respect to further theory development and testing five issues stand out as worthy of attention. First, greater care should be taken in differentiating between different types of armed conflict. Traditional wars of national interest (e.g., the 1991 Gulf War and the 1982 Falklands War) usually invoke high levels of both patriotism and concerted efforts by governments to manage the media environment. As such, these cases are hard ones for neo-pluralist models and, traditionally, research indicates that elite-driven models are more applicable in these circumstances. Conversely, the so-called humanitarian wars of the 1990s (and to which can possibly be added the 2011 air war that supported the overthrow of the Libyan regime) might be attended by lower levels of patriotism and so on, and perhaps be associated more closely with neo-pluralist accounts and hence slightly different media-state dynamics. Such distinction is important because much scholarship conflates the two, leading to inaccurate assessments of the balance of power between media and state. For example, studies that generalise from cases of national interest wars risk exaggerating the significance of elite-driven accounts. Conversely, those focusing only on so-called humanitarian wars might over-represent neo-pluralist accounts. Second, focus on the different stages of a conflict, and the relative applicability of elite-driven and neo-pluralist models, seems worthy of exploration. As Baum and Groeling (2010) highlight, the early, high intensity, stages of conflict are often accompanied by elite-driven media reporting: however, as those same conflicts become drawn out into a longer-term lower intensity conflict (e.g., Vietnam War, Iraq 2002–2009 and Afghanistan 2001–Present), the scope for greater elite, public and media dissent might emerge in which neo-pluralist models more accurately capture media-state dynamics. Third, as indicated in the study by Robinson et al. (2010), comparative study of different national media systems may well indicate varying levels of dependence and independence (see Hallin and Mancini 2004). An important issue here concerns the fact that most testing and development of models of media-state relations has occurred in the US context and establishing whether they can be readily applied outside that national context requires systematic analysis. At the same time comparative research in this area might also indicate the greater openness of some media systems to autonomy and dissent in time of war (for example, Goddard, Robinson, and Parry 2008; see also the chapter by Pfetsch and Esser). Fourth, and most broadly, comparative research across time would yield valuable insights into the macro-level debates over changing geopolitical circumstances and the emergence of new communication technology that so often dominate debate over news media and war. Comparison between Cold War and post-Cold War conflicts would help measure whether variations in the ideological landscape have led to a weakening of media deference, while comparing levels of media technology across conflicts would facilitate testing of the claim that new communication technology has changed levels of news media independence (see also the chapter by Schulz).

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Finally, whilst future research should continue to progress our theoretical/ explanatory purchase on matters of media and war, there also needs to be greater attention paid to the normative question of how media should report war. As noted at the start of this chapter, there exist divergent expectations over how media should report war, and most of the research discussed in this chapter rarely engages with this normative question (see also the chapters by Kepplinger and by Jandura and Friedrich). So, the question of what media should be doing remains poorly explored and an avenue for further enquiry and debate. Principally, more focused thinking is required regarding the issues inherent to both media remaining deferential to the state (as advocated by realist thinking) and media remaining independent or objective (as advocated by liberal and critical thinking). The ultimate goal of such an agenda for scholarship would be to provide a more informed and coherent picture of what standards journalists and editors might aspire to when confronting the difficult task of covering armed conflict.

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Cox, Robert. 1981. Social forces, states and world orders: beyond international relations theory. Millenium Journal of International Studies 10: 126–155. Doyle, Michael. 2008. Liberalism and foreign policy. In: Steve Smith, Amelia Hadfield and Tim Dunne (eds.), Foreign Policy: Theories, Actors and Cases, 54–77, 2nd edition. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Doig, Alan and Mark Pythian. 2005. The national interest and the politics of threat exaggeration: The Blair Government’s case for war against Iraq. The Political Quarterly 76: 68–76. Glasgow University Media Group (GUMG). 1985. War and Peace News. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Goddard, Peter, Piers Robinson and Katy Parry. 2008. Patriotism meets plurality: reporting the 2003 Iraq war in the British press. Media, War and Conflict 1: 7–27. Gowing, Nik. 2011. Time to move on: New media realities – new vulnerabilities of power. In: Special Issue ‘The CNN effect reconsidered’, edited by Piers Robinson. Media, War and Conflict 4: 13–19. Gowing, Nik. 1994. Real time television coverage of armed conflicts and diplomatic crises: Does it pressure or distort foreign policy decisions. Working paper 1994-1. Cambridge, MA: The Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, Working Paper Series. Greenspan, Alan. 2007. The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World. New York/London: Penguin. Hallin, Daniel. C. 1986. The Uncensored War: The Media and Vietnam. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hammond, William. 1989. The press in Vietnam as an agent of defeat: a critical examination. Reviews in American History 17: 312–323. Herman, Edward and Noam Chomsky. 1988. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon. Herrring, Eric and Piers Robinson. 2014. Report X marks the spot: the British government's deceptive dossier on Iraq and WMD. Political Science Quarterly (in press) Holsti, Ole R. 1992. Public opinion and foreign policy: Challenges to the AlmondLippman consensus. International Studies Quarterly 36: 439–466. Hoskins, Andrew and Ben O’Loughlin. 2010. War and Media: the Emergence of Diffuse War. Cambridge: Polity. Hoskins, Andrew and Ben O’Loughlin. 2009. Pre-mediating guilt: radicalization and mediality in British news. Critical Studies on Terrorism 2: 81–93. Jackson, Richard. 2005. Writing Terrorism. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Liebes, Tamar. 1997. Reporting the Arab-Israeli Conflict: How Hegemony Works. London: Routledge. Livingston, Steven. 1997. Clarifying the CNN effect: an examination of media effects according to type of military intervention. Research paper R-18, June. Cambridge, MA: The Joan Shorenstein Barone Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University. Morrison, John N.L. 2011. British intelligence failures in Iraq. Intelligence and National Security 26: 508–520. Mueller, John. 2006. Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry inflate National Security Threats and why we Believe Them. New York: Free Press. Mueller, John. 1973. War, Presidents and Public Opinion. New York: Wiley. Nacos, Brigitte L. 2007. Mass-Mediated Terrorism: The Central Role of the Media in Terrorism and Counterterrorism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Nye, Joseph. S. and William Owens. 1996. America’s information edge. Foreign Affairs 75: 20–36. Robinson, Piers. 2002. The CNN Effect: The Myth of News, Foreign Policy and Intervention. London/New York: Routledge.

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Section III: Political Actors

Tamir Sheafer, Shaul R. Shenhav, and Meital Balmas

11 Political actors as communicators Abstract: This chapter focuses on the challenges faced by political actors when communicating with their audiences. It is argued that communicative skills are of increasing importance due to the mediatization of politics and the increased centrality of media logic. Furthermore, the chapter reflects on the personalization of politics that is closely linked to mediatization and that has broad implications for political institutions, citizen behavior, and the role of political actors as communicators. In particular, personalization increases the importance of personal resources, the communication skills of political actors, and specifically charismatic communication and rhetorical skills. The authors discuss in detail research regarding those skills and suggest that charismatic communication and rhetorical skills should both be important in future study of political actors as communicators. Key Words: political actors, mediatization, media logic, personalization, charisma, rhetorical skills

1 Introduction This chapter takes an actor-centered point of view, focusing on the ways politicians utilize communication and on their skills and performance as communicators. Communication is utilized by political actors as a means to achieve their goals. Perhaps the two most important of those goals are reelection to office and making good public policy while in office (Fenno 1973; Mayhew 1974). Both involve a contest for political control (Wolfsfeld 1997) or over political legitimacy, which can be defined as access to limited public resources or as public acceptance of domination (Kelman 1976). We claim, therefore, that from the political actors’ point of view, their contest within the political communication arena should be seen as part of a larger contest for political control or political legitimacy (Sheafer and Tzionit 2006; Wolfsfeld 1997). Furthermore, this contest in the political communication arena may be defined as a competition for access to and domination of the political media, and legitimacy in them (Sheafer 2001). Understanding that competition for media attention is a central part of the larger contest regarding political legitimacy is important if we are to understand politicians as communicators. While politicians have always used communication to assume control and legitimacy, rapid changes in the sphere of political communication and in politics in general, have led to significant changes in the communication performance of politicians. This chapter discusses these changes, focusing on political actors’ response to challenges set by the new sphere of political com-

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munication. Given the growing importance of mediatization, we shall elaborate on two major developments fostered by this new environment. The first is what scholars usually call the personalization of politics, meaning the increasing political weight of individual actors at the expense of collective actors, such as parties and parliaments. The second involves two important communication-related resources of political communicators which we believe are crucial to the understanding of the communicational success of individual political actors: charisma and rhetoric. We believe that these two aspects shed light on political actors’ attempts to adapt to mediatization in the modern political arena, while at the same time maintaining their control in the more traditional contest over political control and political legitimacy.

2 Mediatization of politics: Political communicators and media logic The mediatization of politics means an “increasing intrusion of the media in the political process” (Mazzoleni and Schulz 1999: 248). As part of this process, the media have become increasingly independent from politics while politicians have become increasingly dependent on the media (Asp and Esaiasson 1996; Blumler and Kavangah 1999; Hjarvard 2008; Kepplinger 2002; Mazzoleni 2008; Meyer 2002; Strömbäck 2008; Strömbäck and Esser 2009; Strömbäck and van Aelst 2011) (see also the chapters by Schulz and by Pfetsch and Esser). This process has been accelerated by three factors: the growing importance of the media as the main source of information and vehicle of communication between governors and the governed (Bennett and Entman 2001; Nimmo and Combs 1983; see also the chapter by Wolling and Emmer); the growing experience of an increasing number of politicians with the media and the growing importance of professional media advisors in politics (Brint 1994; Esser, Reinemann, and Fan 2001; Kepplinger 2002; Sabato 1991; see also the chapter by Kiousis and Strömbäck). As a result of mediatization the political media have become so central to the political process that political actors have had to adapt their behavior and communication to the requirements of the media; they have had to internalize the news value known as “media logic” (Altheide and Snow 1979; Cook [1998] 2005; Ericson, Baranek, and Chan 1989; Mazzoleni 1987). The concept of media logic was defined by Strömbäck (2011: 373) as “the institutional, technological, and sociological characteristics of the news media, including their format characteristics, production and dissemination routines, norms, and needs, standards of newsworthiness, and to the formal and informal rules that govern news media” (see also Altheide and Snow 1979, 1988, 1991). It has been argued that the political

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legitimacy of politicians is increasingly affected by their ability to internalize and exploit this media logic in their communication (Cotteret 1991; Sheafer 2008). Adaptation of politicians’ communication to media logic may have several important consequences. First, it has increased the importance of communicating via the media compared with other forms of communication, since politics increasingly happens in the media and since political legitimacy is increasingly affected by media legitimacy. As Wolfsfeld (2011: 1) puts it, “if you don’t exist in the media, you don’t exist politically.” Second, mediatization has affected the content of politicians’ political communication since it has forced them to respond to mediainitiated “news” such as opinion polls, instead of proactively presenting their own agenda (Elmelund-Praestekaer, Hopmann, and Nørgaard 2011). Third, it has changed the content of the communication of political actors since media values have increasingly replaced political values. For example, the communication of political actors is now expected to be more negative and dramatic (Golding and Elliot 1979; O’Neill and Harcup 2009; Schudson 1999) as well as more episodic and personal (Strömbäck and van Aelst 2011). Fourth, mediatization has changed the length of communications, as politicians now have to mold their communication to ever shorter sound bites (Hallin 1994; Patterson 1993). Indeed, as we elaborate below, politicians who fail to speak in short sound bites find it increasingly difficult to succeed in the media (Sheafer 2001; Street 2003; Wilke and Reinemann 2001). Two main reasons for the importance of media for politicians directly related to their political goals have been suggested by previous research. First, politicians recognize the significance of news and entertainment media in their campaigns for reelection. Second, in their role as legislators, politicians increasingly recognize that media coverage has become part of the policy-making process within legislative institutions. These two factors indicate the three main audiences of politicians’ communication in the media: The first is the general public, or more targeted audiences responsible for reelecting the politicians that can generate political pressure in support of or objecting to particular policies. The second audience is political peers and the third, which we will not elaborate on in this chapter, are journalists, essential for the transmission of messages from political actors to their other audiences (see the chapters in section IV). Political actors are likely to compete for media coverage because they believe that it influences the public and is a prerequisite for reelection. For example, Cohen, Tsfati and Sheafer (2008) demonstrated that politicians’ motivation to attain media coverage is influenced by their perceptions of media influence on the public responsible for reelecting them to office: the greater the perception of media influence on the public, the greater was politicians motivation to communicate with that public via the news media (presumed media influence) (see also the chapter by Tsfati). Communication with the public via the media is important also in regard to the mobility of political opportunity in a society. Political groups mobilizing to

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bring about political change rely heavily on the media (Alimi 2003, 2007; Gamson and Wolfsfeld 1993; Wolfsfeld 2011), including social media (Bimber, Flanagin, and Stohl 2005; Bennett, Breunig, and Givens 2008; Lupia and Sin, 2003; Shirky 2011) (see also the chapter by Hertog and Zuercher). Governments and non-government organizations also attempt to communicate with international publics as part of their public diplomacy, which is defined as “efforts by the government of one nation to influence public or elite opinion in a second nation for the purpose of turning the foreign policy of the target nation to advantage” (Manheim 1994: 4; see also Davison 1974; Gilboa 2000, 2006; Kunczik 1997; Leonard 2002; Livingston 1997). Although public diplomacy is not a new phenomenon, it is well established among both scholars and practitioners that its place in current diplomacy is much more prominent than in the past (Sheafer and Shenhav 2009) (see also the chapter by Robinson). While in the past communication with peers within the same political institution was for the most part interpersonal and direct, scholars argue that legislators increasingly recognize that media coverage has become part of the policymaking process within legislative institutions (Cook 1989). The news media “act as a communicator within a policy community” (Kingdon [1984] 1995: 59) and have become a tool legislators use to influence their colleagues in the policymaking process (Cohen, Tsfati, and Sheafer 2008; Kedrowski 1996; Sellers 2000). In other words, politicians may seek news coverage because they perceive it as affecting their fellow politicians, persuading them that they are seen positively by the public and that the issues they are promoting are important to the public (see also the chapter by van Aelst).

3 Personalization in an era of mediatization: Effects on individual behavior Political personalization may be seen as a process (Brettschneider and Gabriel 2002; Kaase 1994) in which the political weight of the individual actor increases over time, while the centrality of the political group (e.g., political party) declines (Balmas et al. forthcoming; Blumler and Kavanagh 1999; Karvonen 2010; Mazzoleni and Schulz 1999; McAllister 2007; Poguntke and Webb 2005; Rahat and Sheafer 2007). In the field of political communication, research has largely concentrated on the extent to which media output is focused on politicians rather than institutions, organizations, or policies (Downy and Stanyer 2010; van Aelst, Sheafer, and Stanyer 2012) (see also the chapter by Hopmann). According to Mancini (2011), in their discursive logic, the media privilege and emphasize individual figures. The public for its part “has grown accustomed to looking directly at the candidates through the media” (Wattenberg 1995: 21). As a result, people vote to an increasing extent on the basis of their evaluations of

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individual leaders and their identification with them, and less on the basis of their evaluation of parties and their identification with them (Balmas et al. forthcoming). It is claimed that voters are unlikely to support candidates they do not know enough about from the media (Bartels 1988; Cook 1989; Just et al. 1996; Wolfsfeld 2011), and that politicians are well aware of this (Ericson, Baranek, and Chan 1989). Studies have also found that the amount and valence of candidates’ and parties’ media coverage affect their electoral success (Balmas and Sheafer 2010; Kleinnijenhuis et al. 2007; Oegema and Kleinnijenhuis 2000; Sheafer 2008; Zaller 1996) (see also the chapter by Maurer). Evidence for media personalization has been observed in many countries (Balmas et al. forthcoming), although in other countries only weak evidence for personalization was found (Bakvis and Wolinetz 2005; Wilke and Reinemann 2001; Lessinger and Holtz-Bacha 2003). Political personalization may be responsible for several changes in the communication of political actors, first and foremost since it emphasizes the centrality of political actors as individual politicians, rather than as group members. Thus political actors will construct events that include a focus on personal aspects (Strömbäck 2008). In addition, one might expect that political actors would increasingly seek ways to appear in the media. Indeed, Japanese prime ministers of recent decades, for example, were twice as likely to speak in the media compared with prime ministers of the 1970s (Krauss and Nyblade 2005). The effect of personalization on the communication of politicians has not been extensively studied to date. Three examples in the case of Israel may therefore be illuminating. First, analyzing media coverage of political parties, Shenhav and Sheafer (2008) found that the dynamic change in party coverage has gone through three main historical phases: an ideological and collective phase of an externalpartisan era; an interim phase characterized by a combination of disputes between individual politicians and between political factions and finally, the phase of personal polemics, in which political parties as communicators disappeared and the focus shifted exclusively to individual politicians who constantly attack each other in their communications. Since this dynamic is closely related to historical changes in the Israeli party system and in the political communication climate it may be that the observed change cannot be attributed to media coverage of politics alone, but also to the communication of political actors, which has itself become more person-oriented over the years. A second study from Israel looked at the discourse of self-reference such as the use of “I”. This empirical study of prime ministerial speeches over the 60 years of Israeli statehood also pointed to a clear change in the communication of political actors in the direction of increased personalization (Balmas et al. forthcoming). The third example study looked at the culture of politicians as communicators, and found that it too has changed. The study found a dramatic increase over the years in the number of interjections made by members of Knesset during prime

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ministerial speeches. Interjections are included in the discussion of acts of communication. Such heckling during debates on key issues such as peace initiatives has been identified as a discursive mechanism aimed at diverting the focus of audiences, particularly the media, from the content of prime ministers’ messages, while emphasizing the debate itself as the main scene of action (Shenhav 2008).

4 Coping with mediatization and personalization: The importance of charisma and rhetoric So far we have suggested that the importance of communication by political actors via the mass media is increasing due to processes of mediatization and personalization and have specified the main target groups of this communication. Our next task is to explore the resources that enable politicians to be successful communicators and hence to assume media and political legitimacy. As noted above, from the actors’ point of view, the best way to understand their contest in the political communication arena is to focus on their goal, which is to achieve media legitimacy. Legitimacy can be defined as public acceptance of domination and or access to limited resources. Since no political actor can achieve complete control over the political communication arena, dominating it amounts to systematically achieving more access to or coverage by the media, as well as better control over media valence (see also the chapter by Hopmann). But why are certain political actors systematically advantaged in this respect when compared to others? Which individuals are most likely to succeed in the ongoing competition for publicity? Among the most important factors that may help in this contest, those affecting media legitimacy, are political standing (van Aelst, Shehata, and van Dalen 2010; Bennett 1990; Cook 1989, 1996; Gans 1979; Graber 1993; Sheafer 2001; Shoemaker and Reese 1991; Wolfsfeld 1997), physical attractiveness (Waismel-Manor and Tsfati 2011; Tsfati, Markowitz-Elfassi, and Waismel-Manor 2010) and charismatic communication skills (Sheafer 2001, 2008; Sheafer and Wolfsfeld 2004). The construct of charismatic communication skills is more difficult to specify and measure than the other variables. For example, Mancini (2011: 54) writes that “charisma is a secret”, so that it is difficult to grasp and insert into a typology. Going back to Max Weber, the validity of one of the major claims for legitimacy is based on charisma (Eisenstadt 1968; Matheson 1987; Shils 1965; Weber 1986). Weber defines charisma as a relationship between a leader and his followers. Later on his definition was broadened by asking what it was in the political actors themselves, their skills, behavior, performance, etc., which facilitated the charismatic relationship (Eisenstadt 1968; Gardner and Avolio 1998; House and Howell 1992; House, Spangler, and Woycke 1991; Shamir, House, and Arthur 1993; Shils 1965). For example, “behavioral charisma” is “based on the actual or presumed behavior

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of the leader” (House, Spangler, and Woycke 1991: 366). Sheafer (2001) summarizes these behaviors, skills and qualities as the “charismatic communication skill” of the political communicator. Based on Shils (1965), it has been argued that the actor appearing to be endowed with charisma is in fact demonstrating a higher level of playing by the arena’s “rules of the game.” In terms of political communication, we are looking specifically for the communication and political skills and behaviors likely resulting in a politician being labeled as charismatic. These are also the skills and behaviors most likely to make the political communicator more newsworthy and to increase and maintain his media legitimacy. In developing a coherent list of skills, it is necessary to combine fields of research focusing on actors and those explaining the arena in which they operate (see Sheafer 2001 for an elaborated discussion). For example, cognitive-creative skills help the political communicator to resolve problems, analyze different situations she is faced with, and develop creative initiatives. They enable the actor to develop a sophisticated facility in rhetoric, or, in Greenstein’s (1995: 140) words, “verbal intelligence.”

4.1 The charismatic communication skills of political actors Sheafer (2001, 2008) presents five categories of charismatic communication skills: (1) political initiative and creativity; (2) communication initiative and creativity; (3) rhetorical and dramatic abilities; (4) cooperation with politicians; and (5) cooperation with journalists. Note that categories 1 and 4 are not communicative skills in a narrow sense but describe more general qualities required from political actors in the political communication arena. These charismatic communication skills are expected to affect the media legitimacy of political actors, defined above as systematically achieving more access to or coverage by the media, as well as better control over media valence. An analysis of the media legitimacy of Members of the Israeli Knesset (MKs) (Sheafer 2001; Sheafer and Wolfsfeld 2004), reveals a strong and statistically significant influence of charismatic communication skills. Additional analyses reveal a similar effect of the MKs’ charismatic communication skills on their electoral success (Sheafer 2008; Sheafer and Tzionit 2006). Similarly, Strömbäck and van Aelst (2011) argue that one of the main considerations in the selection of a party leader is the candidate’s charisma and skills in communicating with the media (see also Davis 2010, chapter 3). We argue that these findings suggest that journalists and voters alike respond significantly to the charismatic communication skills of political actors in evaluating newsworthiness (journalists) and when making political decisions (the voting public). Following Cook (1996) it appears, then, that as the processes of mediatization and personalization develop, political actors are judged to a greater extent according to their performance as communicators, and

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to a lesser extent to their performance as legislators (see also the chapter by Hopmann).

4.2 The rhetorical skills of political actors Rhetorical ability is considered to be central to both the media and electoral success of political actors in an era of mediatization and personalization. Indeed, students of media and politics pay attention to the rhetoric of policy makers (e.g., Groeling and Baum 2008; Reinemann and Maurer 2005). This interest gains strength by Maurer, Nagel and Reinemann’s (2012) study of candidates’ rhetorical effects in a televised debate during the 2005 German national elections. Using Continuous Response Measurement their study demonstrates the importance of rhetorical strategies, showing that viewers’ immediate impressions were mainly influenced by verbal communication and especially the issues discussed and the argumentative structure used. However, despite of the growing understanding of the importance of rhetorical strategies, to the best of our knowledge the rhetorical theory has been to date incorporated rather scarcely into the field of political communication and particularly in analyses of political actors as communicators. Aristotle defines rhetoric as “the power of observing the means of persuasion” (2004: 7). Over the years scholarly attention has been given to the quality of rhetoric as a strategic, goal-oriented communication (Kuypers and King 2009) and to the understanding that “[r]hetoric can enable effective communication between differently situated actors, and can both establish and maintain deliberative systems” (Dryzek 2010: 320). A fundamental principle of rhetorical theory is that rhetorical devices are always highly sensitive to the climate or contexts in which they are used. The idea that “rhetorical discourse derives its meaning from the situation in which it is created” (Farrel and Young 2009), requires communicators to pay constant attention to the specific circumstances of their message. Thus we may expect changes in public values or forums to affect the rhetorical devices used and hence the way messages are understood and interpreted, as speech made in wartime, for example will differ from a speech made in peacetime, regardless of topics or messages. Similarly, rhetorical devices used in a tête-à-tête meeting between a policy maker and a journalist will be very different from those deployed during a press conference, public statement or speech (see for example Shenhav 2005; Steiner et al. 2004). A simple and straightforward way to understand the potential implications of the new arena of political communication for the rhetoric of political actors involves the three fundamental modes of persuasion defined by Aristotle: Ethos, Pathos and Logos. These correspond with the three basic participants in any communicational act, namely the speaker (or addresser), audience (or addressee) and the speech (or message): “Of the modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken

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word there are three kinds. The first kind depends on the personal character of the speaker; the second on putting the audience into a certain frame of mind; the third on the proof, or apparent proof, provided by the words of the speech itself” (Aristotle 2004: 7). Aristotle’s synoptic discussion of the personal character of the speaker emphasizes the importance of his credibility (ethos); he relates to the audience in terms of emotion or passion (pathos) and to speech in terms of persuasive arguments and logical reasoning (logos)1 (see also se chapters in section VII). While one may expect to find all three modes of persuasion deployed in any given rhetorical piece, the hierarchy between them varies substantively so that there may be ethos-oriented, logos-oriented or pathos-oriented rhetoric. In the following we shall provide a basic assessment of the way mediatization and personalization have affected the role of the speaker and have changed the use of rhetorical devices by politicians.

4.2.1 The speaker In a situation of accelerated processes of mediatization and personalization, the resources of the individual political actor are becoming more critical for his political legitimacy and survival. In this environment the communication skills of political actors become key element for pursuing media legitimacy and political goals. As noted above, the actor’s charismatic communication skills are the resources necessary for achieving these goals. Cognitive-creative skills, for example, help the political communicator to resolve problems, analyze different situations she is faced with, and develop creative initiatives. They enable the actor to develop a sophisticated facility in rhetoric, or, in Greenstein’s (1995: 140) words, “verbal intelligence.”

4.2.2 Rhetorical devices Mediatization, as discussed above, plays an important part in the modes of persuasion chosen by communicators. The dramatic changes in the political and communication arenas, encompassed by the growing role of mediatization, place political actors in a complex rhetorical situation. On one hand, the traditional goal of striving for political control and legitimacy remains as it always was. This goal invites, at least to some extent, logos-oriented argumentation, in which the contest over opinions, ideas or interests rests upon actors’ attempts to rationally justify their approach. However in the era of mediatization, messages are subject to the mediation power of the media, and hence communicators must adopt media logic. They

1 For an understanding of pathos in terms of passion see Quintilian (2006: VI.2.8).

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must tailor their political argumentation not only in order to gain political control or legitimacy, but also in a contest for media success. This signifies a major change in political rhetoric, one implication of which is that a successful message directed to the public now demands at least two layers, one addressing traditional political aims and the second attending to media logic. The embodiment of messages in personas has become a major method of achieving this purpose. Ethos-oriented persuasion in which political actors struggle to enforce their credibility and to destroy the credibility of their opponents (Ansolabehere et al. 1997; Cohen and Davis 1991; Lau et al. 1999) dramatize the political debate. Typical trends in political debates in this context foreground actors at the expense of issues, intended to persuade the public that “I am better” rather than “this is better” (e.g., Benoit et al. 2002; Benoit and Sheafer 2006). Personalization has important rhetorical advantages since it renders speakers worthy of media coverage. Clever communicators will not completely substitute their logos for ethos, but will rather combine ethos-oriented rhetoric with logos-oriented rhetoric. In other words, they will utilize the “rhetorical capital” (Ish-Shalom 2008) of their own personas.2 The 2008 McCain-Obama Presidential debate provides a rather unsophisticated attempt by John McCain to achieve such a combination: “We’ve got to give some trust and confidence back to America. I know how to do that, my friends. And it’s my proposal, it’s not Senator Obama’s proposal, it’s not President Bush’s proposal. But I know how to get America working again, restore our economy and take care of working Americans” (Commission on Presidential Debates 2008). McCain presents his proposal with two different purposes: first, in line with the logic of personalization, he uses it to distinguish himself from other actors (i.e., Obama and Bush). Second, the substance of the proposal refers to his political plans to restore the economy and “get America working”. Thus, on the one hand McCain meets expectations of a personalized debate but on the other hand implies a logos-based deliberation regarding his political plans. Barack Obama’s closing words in answer to the same question constitute a more indirect, perhaps more sophisticated, use of ethos-oriented persuasion: “You need somebody working for you and you’ve got to have somebody in Washington who is thinking about the middle class and not just those who can afford to hire lobbyists” (Commission on Presidential Debates 2008). Obama does not only rely on his personal credibility, but actually enforces it, activating his audience by guiding their understanding that Obama is the “somebody” they need. Moreover, Obama guides his audience to identify him within a policy debate over the representation of the middle class against the power of lobbyists in Washington (see Druckman, Jacobs, and Ostermeier 2004, for a discussion regarding similar strategies). Mediatization can also affect rhetoric used in political forums, changing traditions and norms of interpersonal communication. Parliamentary discourse is a 2 Rhetorical capital is the “the aggregate persuasive resources inherent in entities” (Ish Shalom 2008: 31).

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good example of this. Although parliaments vary in their use of ethos, logos and pathos (Ilie 2004), there is greater media coverage of parliamentary discussions, and more in-depth interpretation of messages delivered during debates. In light of the episodic framing of news coverage, parliamentary speeches tend to rely on brief slogans and dramatic events such as interruptions and heckling rather than the long textual units required for in-depth logos-oriented persuasion, in order to get their message across in the media (Shenhav 2008). Pathos and ethos modes of persuasion seem less sensitive to this change. An increased use of self designating language, or the use of expressions, metaphors and slogans designed to evoke emotional reactions in the audience do not necessary require long, uninterrupted messages. In addition to traditional political forums, new media such as web-based social media and websites provide new rhetorical platforms for political communicators. At the start the new millennium, the Internet came to play a crucial role in political mobilization. US presidential campaigns provide excellent examples of the process of learning to use these new arenas, for fund raising, volunteer recruitment and the transmission of messages. The ability to embrace social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook during the Obama campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination was one of the earliest successful deployments of political discourse in this new arena (Schifferes 2008). The role of the cyberspace in promoting deliberative democracy has also attracted academic interest. Dahlberg (2001), for example, studied Internet democracy rhetoric, focusing on the deliberative model and cyberspace’s potential to foster a rational-critical discourse. Bosttdorf’s (2004) study of the Internet rhetoric of the Ku Klux Klan shows how groups may engage in community building that encourages acts of violence, while, at the same time, disavows responsibility for the consequences of their messages. When it comes to modes of persuasion in new media, political actors are potentially less constrained by the episodic qualities promoted by the mediatization of traditional media. One might think that this would lead to the evolution of in-depth, logos oriented rhetoric. However, in the web-based arenas too we see similar trends to those observed in more traditional media, such as a focus on ethos and the episodic quality of short messages. The enormously popular social network Twitter in which users update their followers with short messages limited to 140 characters including spaces, exemplifies this trend. This “twitterization” of the web based arena is probably also the result of the flood of information available in the web, all competing for the attention of web users. Thus it seems that a process of personalization and ethos-driven rhetoric are important in new, webbased, media as well as they are in traditional ones.

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4.2.3 Audiences Special attention should be given to the nature of the audience addressed by political actors when investigating the use of rhetorical devices (Gross and Dearin 2002: 31; see also Quintilian 2006: XI.1.43). The globalization of the media today (Liebes, Kampf, and Blum-Kulka 2008; Seib 2005; Shifman and Thelwall, 2009) results in the dissemination of conflicting messages via different media to different international audiences (Sheafer and Shenhav 2009). In fact “[i]t is almost impossible for a government to address public messages solely to its nation and to prevent that information from being transmitted via international media to foreign audiences” (Sheafer and Shenhav 2009: 278). In this context rhetorical skills are occasionally invested in the production of ambiguous messages, crafted to be understood differently by different audiences (Kampf 2009; see page 1978 for a similar argument in the context of elections). Similarly, messages directed to specific group via the social media are frequently more generally publicized. So, especially when it comes to sensitive messages, responsible political actors will usually assume that any message they deliver in any public media may potentially spread nationwide or even internationally. This difficulty is especially acute in high pressure contexts such as public diplomacy in the wake of warfare, when rhetoric crafted for an internal, national audience might conflate with rhetoric crafted for external audiences (Sheafer and Shenhav 2009) (see also the chapter by Robinson). All in all, the modern public sphere makes it difficult to differentiate messages as directed exclusively at different types of addressees, be it political peers, on-record journalists or intra and inter-national publics. Thus, while messages are still affected by context or genre, such as interviews, speeches or press conferences, the current globalized media have dissolved traditional boundaries between types of audience, effectively preventing the delivery of exclusive messages.

5 Conclusion In this chapter we have suggested an actor-centered perspective on the new challenges faced by political actors when communicating with their audiences. The idea behind this perspective goes in line with a well known understanding of political leadership, shared by practitioners and political advisors alike. Former presidential speechwriter James C. Humes crystallized the importance of communicational skills for political actors: “Leadership is selling. And selling is talking” (Humes 2002: IX). These skills, it is argued here, are of increasing importance due to changes occurring in the political and political communication arenas. At the core of these changes is the mediatization process in politics and the increased centrality of media logic in this process. Mediatization fosters and is closely associated with the personalization of politics, which we have focused on in this chapter.

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The personalization of politics has broad implications for many aspects of political institutions and behavior, and specifically for the role of political actors as communicators. Personalization embodies a dramatic increase in the importance of how political actors communicate with their publics, conferring upon the actors some of the roles traditionally undertaken by institutions such as parties or government ministries. Scholars mention various resources such as political standing and power and physical attractiveness that help political actors in their contest over the political communication arena. Our focus in this chapter was on another important set of personal resources, the communication skills of political actors, and specifically charismatic communication and rhetorical skills. While each constitutes a field in its own right, we suggest that charismatic communication and rhetorical skills complement each other, and are both important in future study of political actors as communicators.

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Peter Van Aelst

12 Media, political agendas and public policy Abstract: This chapter reviews research on the influence of the media on legislation and public policy. After reflecting on why politicians react to media coverage at all, the chapter mainly focusses on political agenda-setting, but also goes beyond this to come to a broader view on the role of the media in the policy process. In order to do so, the chapter takes a close look at how media define, frame and amplify issues or constrain the political agenda and how this impacts political decision making. It is argued that the media link together relevant actors including the public and make it possible that they respond to each other on a limited number of core issues. In addition, the media have the ability to force politicians to react and take a position in such a way that they can accelerate or rather decelerate the policy process. The chapter closes with a call for more studies trying to understand the complex interaction of media and political decision making. Key Words: political agenda-setting, public policy, anticipatory media effects, reciprocal effects, public opinion

1 Introduction When political communication scholars talk about “media effects” they mostly mean the influence of media coverage on the knowledge, attitudes and behaviour of ordinary citizens. The interpretation of how minimal or maximal these media effects are, is not always clear, nor is it stable over time (Bennett and Iyengar 2008), but the scientific debate is supported daily by new effect studies (see also the chapters in section VII). This is far less the case for the influence of the news media on one of its main subjects (and sources): political actors. This does not mean, however, that the power relation between media and politics has not been looked into. Much has changed since Gandy (1982: 1) complained thirty years ago that “we know next to nothing about the impact of media structures on the behaviour of major institutions in our society”. In recent decennia a wide variety of studies investigated the way media influence both the structures of political institutions and the behaviour of politicians (Voltmer and Koch-Baumgarten 2010). In this chapter we will focus less on the structural impact on institutions and rather follow an actor approach. The media can have an impact on different aspects of political elite behaviour. Most clearly the media has forced politicians adapt their communication style and tempo (Altheide and Snow 1979). For instance, over the last decennia the time allotted to politicians on television has

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been reduced sharply, forcing them to use more one-liners (Hallin 1992; Esser 2008). Related to that impact on how politicians communicate the media also influence the selection of political personnel. Politicians that are charismatic (Sheafer 2001) or better trained in dealing with the media have more career opportunities (Davis 2010) (see also the chapter by Sheafer, Shenhav and Balmas). But perhaps more important is the potential impact on the substance of politics: the issues and problems that are discussed and eventually translated in legislation and policy. This last type of influence will be the main focus of this chapter. Political agenda-setting has proven to be a successful approach in the study of the media influence on politicians and policy makers (Graber 2005). Using different methods agenda-setting scholars have accumulated evidence on when and how media coverage influences the issue priorities of political actors. However, the approach also has its limitations. Political agenda-setting is mainly concerned with the salience of issues, but tells us little on how these issues are constructed and defined. If we want a more complete picture of how media influence law making and public policy also studies on framing and frame-building should be taken into account. A second limitation is that agenda-setting focuses mainly at the beginning of the policy process, and fails to understand the role of the media in the later phases of the process. This chapter will address both limitations and suggest to distinguish between five types of media influence on politics. Before turning to an elaborate discussion of political agenda-setting we need to address two broader aspects of the relationship between media and politics. First, the reciprocity between media and political actors will be discussed. Although this chapter deals with the influence of media on politics it would be misleading to ignore that media content, in turn, is to a large extent shaped by elite communication (Bennett and Livingston 2003) (see also the chapters by Sheafer, Shenhav, and Balmas and by Kiousis and Strömbäck). Second, we will address the question why political actors react to media coverage. All too often this reaction is taken for granted and treated as a mechanical effect.

2 The reciprocal power relationship between media and politics Although most scholars acknowledge the interdependence between media and politics most research focuses one-sidedly on the influence of politics on media or on the opposite media on politics. The main difference is whether they consider the media and its coverage of politics as the dependent or the independent variable. A first stream of research focuses on the influence of the news media on the agenda, position and behaviour of political actors. The media is treated as the independent variable that might have an effect on politicians and their policies. This includes most political agenda setting studies (see further) and research on

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media framing and bias in determining the distribution of power (Entman 2007). Also research on the so called ‘CNN effect’, that focuses on the influence of media coverage on international military interventions, considers the media as a (strong) independent variable (Gilboa 2005) (see also the chapter by Robinson). This influence of the media on politics does not necessarily imply that politicians react after something appeared in the news media, but often they anticipate on how media will react and take this into account when designing policy proposals and choosing which issues to put forward (Davis 2007: 187–188; Sellers 2010: 3). This anticipatory news media effect is also in line with the mediatization thesis that states that political actors structurally adapt to the media and its logic (Strömbäck 2008) (see also the chapter by Schulz and by Shaefer, Shenhav and Balmas). A different research tradition focuses on the influence of politicians and governments in particular on the work of political journalists. Many of these studies can be related to the indexing theory or similar source theories that stress the dependence of journalists to a limited number of official elite sources (e.g., Ericson, Baranek, and Chan 1989; Bennett, Lawrence, and Livingston 2007) (see also the chapter by Robinson). Also studies on different forms of news management and spin doctoring start of from politicians’ need or desire to control the political news (see the chapter by Kiousis and Strömbäck for an extensive discussion). Finally, part of the agenda-setting studies has treated the media-agenda as the dependant variable (Reese 1991). Most of these studies have focused on how sources have tried to set the agenda in election campaigns (e.g., Semetko et al. 1991; Hopmann et al. 2010). Besides these two lines of research we can distinguish a somewhat distinct third approach, where not the media coverage of politics or its influence on different political agenda’s is central, but rather the interaction process itself. Several case studies of insiders (e.g., Crouse 1974; Rosenstiel 1993; Jones 1995) have given us a behind-the scenes view on how the bargaining process of news and information takes place. In addition political communication scholars have used surveys and in depth interviews to study the perceptions politicians and journalists have of their position towards one another (e.g., Blumler and Gurevitch 1981; Donsbach and Patterson 2004) and also the actual daily (informal) interactions between politicians and journalists (e.g., Davis 2009; Van Aelst, Shehata, and Van Dalen 2010). The differences between these three lines of research are partly artificial while no scholar really denies the reciprocity of the relation and the importance of the interaction process. Furthermore, several studies tried to build in a two dimensional measurement of influence or at least incorporated a so called “feedback” loop, for instance, Sellers’ (2010) impressive study that analyses the complete cycle of agenda-setting and strategic communication in US Congress. According to his four stage model politicians first create a message and next promote it. The crucial third step is when the message receives coverage and in the final stage the coverage feeds back to influence politicians’ political communication and policy

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debates. The four stages constitute what Sellers calls a “cycle of spin” where both journalists and politicians react to each other, but the process is initiated by the latter. Also Entman’s (2003) cascading model departs from the promotion of frames by political and bureaucratic elites but acknowledges an important feedback role of the news media (see also the chapter by de Vreese and Schuck). Although political agenda-setting studies mainly treat the news media agenda as an independent variable potentially influencing a certain political agenda, a few studies explicitly incorporated reciprocal effects. In general they agree that the influence works both ways, with some showing the dominance of the mediato-politics dynamic (Van Noije, Oegema, and Kleinnijenhuis 2008; Walgrave, Soroka, and Nuytemans 2008), while others proved that the politics-to-media effects are much stronger (Brandenburg 2002; Jones and Wolfe 2010).

3 Why do politicians react to media coverage? Most studies on media power deal with the influence of the media on a macro level (Green-Pedersen and Stubager 2010: 664), however, turning to the level of individual political actors might help to understand the mechanisms for media responsiveness. So far a comprehensive behavioral theory that explains why and when political actors react to media coverage is missing, but scholars suggested possible reasons for media responsiveness (Walgrave and Van Aelst 2006; Kepplinger 2007). Politicians might be influenced by the media as most citizens are: They learn about what is happening in the world via the news media and this might affect their attitudes and behavior. This is all the more the case since most politicians are true news “junkies” consuming news for several hours a day (Van Aelst et al. 2008). For instance, if TV shows dramatic images of deprivation in Africa politicians might be moved and willing to act. It would, however, be naïve to consider politicians as ordinary news consumers. Not only because politicians are on average higher educated, have a good understanding about how the media work and are generally skeptical to what the media report (Davis 2007). But more importantly because politicians are rational actors that pursue certain (policy) goals (see also the chapters by Strömbäck and Kiousis any by Sheafer, Shenhav and Balmas). In that respect the media are a tool that is highly politically relevant. We distinguish three strategic reasons that explain why politicians react to media coverage. Firstly, politicians closely monitor the news media, as they see it as a proxy for the public agenda or what Pritchard (1992: 105) called the media-as-surrogatefor-public-opinion function. Because public opinion data are often missing the politicians turn the media as an alternative source on what the public thinks both in terms of problems that need to be addressed and solutions that might be appropriate (Protess et al. 1991). This information is useful if politicians want to shape

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an image of being sensitive to the concerns of ordinary people. Ultimately, being responsive to public opinion is seen as crucial for reelection (Pritchard 1992; Cook 1989). But even if politicians don’t consider the media to reflect the public agenda or have superior information about public opinion it is still possible that they take the media into account because of the opposite relationship: the influence of the media on public opinion. Studies have shown that the politicians perceive a large influence of the media on the attitudes and preferences of readers and viewers (e.g., Van Aelst et al. 2008). According to Schudson (1995) the power of the mass media lies not so much in its direct influence, but in the perception of politicians that the mass media have a profound impact on the general public. Gunther and Stokes (2003) labeled this indirect effect “the influence of presumed influence”: because you perceive the media to influence the behavior of others you will react to that perception (see also Mutz 1989). As such media influence becomes a selffulfilling prophecy: because politicians believe the media matters, they act accordingly. Cohen and colleagues (2008) found empirical prove for this effect among Members of the Knesset in Israel. Their study showed that perceived media influence on the public had not only an effect on their efforts to come in the media but also on their parliamentary activities. In sum, we can conclude that politicians monitor and react to media coverage because politicians believe media and public opinion to be connected (see also the chapters by Sheafer, Shenhav, and Balmas and by Tsfati). A second and totally different reason why politicians take the media into account is because they also reflect the agenda and frames of other politicians. The policy process is a very complicated one which involves multiple actors ranging from ministers over ordinary backbenchers to special interest groups. The negotiating process takes place in parliament, its corridors and usually behind closed doors. But in the search for support a political actor might “go public” to convince his or her colleagues (Kernell 2007). By doing so the broader public becomes involved in the process, even though it is hardly the main target (Herbst 1998). Leading politicians have gone public in the past to influence other political actors. Heffernan (2006) for instance has shown that Tony Blair went public before the Iraq War, not only to influence the public but also the MPs of his own party. But also politicians from opposition parties actively use the mass media in the policy making process (Kedrowksi 1996) for example by joining forces with journalists as a means to publicly put pressure on governments. In sum, politicians and bureaucrats consume the media because it contains important (hidden) information on the agenda of other political actors (Brown 2010: 134; Sellers 2010: 8–9) (see also the chapters by Strömbäck and Kiousis and by Robinson). A third reason why politicians react to media coverage is because of the information it contains. The importance of information and information processing in the context of policy making is emphasized in the work of Jones and Baumgartner (2005). They define information processing as the “collecting, assembling, inter-

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preting, and prioritizing of signals from the environment” (2005: 7; see also Workman, Jones, and Jochim 2009). It is clear that media carry a lot of policy relevant information with them. Most political journalists move constantly between politicians of all parties and take bits of strategic information with them. But the information can be also of more substantial value. Many journalists can be considered as experts as they have specialized in certain topics and in some cases been around longer than many politicians. This does not mean, however, that the media is the main, let alone most important, source of information for politicians. Often politicians and journalists both respond to external events or exogenous streams of information (Jones and Wolfe 2010), giving the false impression that politicians react to media. Besides providing extra information the media is perhaps even more important to “reduce the overwhelming information-processing tasks confronting policymakers” (Cobb and Elder 1981: 392). Kingdon (1984) showed how members of congress dealing with an oversupply of information turn to the media to know what really matters.

4 Political agenda-setting 4.1 The origins of a popular concept Both in communication as well as in political science agenda-setting has become one of the dominating paradigms. The same concept, however, means quite different things in both domains. In communication science agenda-setting is mainly a theory about media-effects: media coverage of issues influences the issue priorities of the public, and indirectly their voting preferences. Since the study of McCombs and Shaw (1972) the popularity of the agenda-setting approach among media scholars has grown steadily and it now is one of the most-cited media-effects concepts (Dearing and Rogers 1996; Bennett and Iyengar 2008) (see also the chapter by Arendt and Matthes). In political science, the policy agenda-setting or agenda-building approach deals mainly with the limited attention of policy makers for a wide range of political issues. Building on the insights of Schattschneider (1960), Cobb and Elder (1972) were among the first who investigated why some issues managed to get attention of decision makers, while others failed. The media was seen as one of the possible factors that could influence the agenda of policy makers, but not a very important one. Gradually the media got more attention in the study of policy agendas but was seldom the main focus of attention (Kingdon 1984; Baumgartner and Jones 1993; but see Linsky 1986). A more recent stream of research has tried to combine both traditions and focused on the effect of mass media coverage on the political agenda (Rogers and Dearing 1988; Walgrave and Van Aelst 2006). For these scholars the central question is to what extent mass media coverage affects the issue priorities of politi-

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cians. Although some prefer the term policy agenda-setting (Rogers and Dearing 1988) or agenda-building (Denham 2010) we refer to this research as political agenda-setting. “Agenda-setting” is preferred over “agenda-building” because it allows political media effect studies to connect with the large political agendasetting research tradition in political science1. This does not mean that we believe that the political agenda-setting process is highly similar to the process of public agenda-setting. Although both processes deal with the relative importance or salience of issues we agree with Pritchard (1992) that the agenda of policy makers is different from the agenda of the public. The agenda of politicians is hardly ever operationalized by asking them to list the issues on top of their mind, but rather by looking at their words or deeds (see further). It is not what politicians think (cognitive) but what they do (behavior) that matters. Furthermore, using the term agenda-setting does not imply that the agenda of politicians is simply “set” by the media but rather sees the media as one potential source of influence among many others. Political agenda-setting can be considered as part of the larger policy process. This process has generally been conceptualized in terms of a sequence of different phases2: problem identification, policy formulation, policy adoption, implementation, and evaluation (Cobb and Elder 1981: 394). Agenda-setting overlaps with this first phase. Due to its ability to focus attention media influence is typically seen as high in this phase of the policy process3 (Baumgartner and Jones 1993; Esser and Pfetsch 2004: 388). This does not mean that journalists actually initiate new issues, but rather that they play a role in strengthening and structuring the initiatives taken by political actors (Reich 2006; Wolfsfeld and Sheafer 2006). Mostly this role is defined positively: issues that are high on the media agenda can obtain, in turn, a more prominent position on the political agenda. However, the media also influence the political-agenda by filtering and selecting issues that do not appear on the agenda. Or, as Van Praag and Brants (1999: 199) conclude on the basis of their campaign study: “The agenda-setting power of journalists seems to lie more in denying access and in forcing politicians to react on issues than in actually initiating them”. This effect can be labeled as “agenda-constraining” (Walgrave, Van Aelst, and Bennett 2010) and is closely related to the well-known gate1 Berkowitz (1992) tried to differentiate between agenda-setting and agenda-building as two related but different processes. We rather treat these terms as synonyms (see also McCombs 2004: 143). The reason to prefer “political” agenda-setting over “policy” agenda-setting is mainly because the later term is more narrow and focuses primarily on what governments say and do, while the first term is much broader and for instance also includes the agendas of ordinary MPs or political parties. 2 The idea that the policy process is a well structured chronological process is highly contested by public policy scholars. Among others Cobb and Elder (1981) claim that the classical idea of a policy process should be replaced by a more dynamic and flexible model (see also Kingdon 1984). 3 Esser and Pfetsch (2004: 388) add that also in the last phase of the policy process the role of the media becomes more important again.

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keeping concept (Shoemaker 1991) in communication science: only a part of the many issue messages generated by political actors passes the media gates and receives news coverage. From a policy perspective the media contribute to limit the scope of decision-making to some issues (Bachrach and Baratz 1962: 952) (see also the chapters by Stanyer, by McNaier and by Wahl-Jorgensen).

4.2 Defining and operationalizing the political agenda Agenda-setting scholars never study “the” political agenda, but rather choose to focus on one or more associated agendas (Dearing and Rogers 1996: 18). Actually, there is no such thing as the political agenda (Walgrave and Van Aelst 2006: 95). Political agenda-setting scholars have studied (a combination of) the following agendas: parliament or Congress (Trumbo 1995; Soroka 2002; Van Noije, Oegema, and Kleinnijenhuis 2008; Jones and Wolfe 2010), political parties (Kleinnijenhuis and Rietberg 1995; Brandenburg 2002; Green-Pedersen and Stubager 2010), government (Walgrave, Soroka, and Nuytemans 2008), the President (Gilberg et al. 1980; Wanta and Foote 1994; Edwards and Wood 1999), or public spending (Cook and Skogan 1991; Pritchard and Berkowitz 1993). Each political actor has its own semi-independent agenda that is composed according to its own logic and dynamic. Furthermore, most agendas can be operationalized in different ways. For instance, the agenda of a political party can be measured by coding its manifesto, an extensive document that can be considered a list of issue priorities (Walgrave and Lefevere 2010). The same party agenda, however, can also be operationalized by using a much shorter time span as Brandenburg (2002) did by using daily press releases during a British election campaign. Both ways of measuring the party agenda are valid, but not necessarily identical. Not every political agenda has the same importance and impact on actual legislation and policy. Walgrave and Van Aelst (2006) suggest that agendas can be placed on a continuum ranging from symbolic to substantial. Symbolic agendas are primarily rhetorical: they contain the words of politicians but have limited tangible political consequences. Substantial agendas on the other hand do have a direct impact on policy or legislation. In their overview of political agenda setting studies Walgrave and Van Aelst (2006) showed that all scholars who actually found strong media impact defined the political agenda symbolically such as parliamentary debates or presidential speeches (e.g., Bartels 1996; Edwards and Wood 1999). However, when more substantial political agendas like legislation and actually policy were the subject of study, researchers found much less media impact. Probably the most substantial agenda is the state’s budget or what Pritchard and Berkowitz (1993) call the “resource agenda”. The allocation of money and resources to the different issues or policy domains has the most far reaching consequen-

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ces. However, since this agenda is highly incremental and stable over time it is no surprise that hardly any media impact has been found (Pritchard and Berkowitz 1993; but see Van Belle 2003). In sum, the agenda-setting impact of the media depends to a large extent on how scholars define and operationalize the political agenda. Probably this is the most important factor that influences media impact, but certainly not the only one.

4.3 The contingency of political agenda-setting Most of the agenda-setting studies cited above rely on a time-series design testing to what extent the actual behaviour of political actors regarding specific issues is preceded in time by media coverage about the same issues. A majority of these studies have concluded that “the media matter”, but at the same time stressed the conditionality of the media’s influence on the political agenda (Van Aelst and Walgrave 2011). Besides the type of political agenda we distinguish and briefly discuss four sets of contingent factors: (1) types of issues; (2) the characteristics of the media agenda; (3) party characteristics; and (4) system level characteristics. First, the influence of the mass media varies considerable across issues. According to Soroka (2002: 16) “difference in agenda-setting dynamics are most often products of differences in the issues themselves”. Soroka has introduced a typology to distinguish between prominent (e.g., unemployment), sensational (e.g., environment) and governmental (e.g., national deficit) issue types. Media influence on public and policy agenda is most plausible for sensational issues that are in general not obtrusive (little direct experience) and that lend themselves to dramatic events. Differences in the agenda-setting impact of the media can also be related to the structure, constellation of actors and dynamics of a policy field. In addition, some policy fields are simply not newsworthy and therefore lack the basic premise for media impact (Koch-Baumgarten and Voltmer 2010). Second, we mostly talk about “the media”, but that does not mean all media outlets and types of media coverage have the same agenda-setting potential. Previous studies have shown that newspapers have a higher agenda‐setting impact but that this influence only becomes effective via TV news (e.g., Bartels 1996). Some types of coverage such as investigative journalism clearly have a higher impact on politics than routine coverage (Protess et al. 1987). Ordinary coverage can become more powerful as it is more congruent across outlets (Eilders 2000). The more harmonious or consonant the media, the more difficult it is for politicians to ignore them. Also the tone of the news is relevant: positive and negative news lead to different public and political reactions (Soroka 2006; Baumgartner and Jones 1993) (see also the chapter by Stanyer). Third, Green-Pedersen and Stubager (2010) and Vliegenthart and Walgrave (2011) found party characteristics in multi-party systems to be a third set of contin-

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gent factors. They showed that the political influence of the media depends on the parties’ position (opposition versus government) and the own issue agendas of the parties. In a recent study, Thesen (2013) has linked tone of the news and party positions showing that opposition parties mainly react to negative news as it offers them the opportunity to attack government policy, while government parties mainly use positive news to defend their policy record. A fourth and final set of contingent factors are related to the political and media system. Despite the increased attention for the contingencies of political agenda-setting we still know relatively little about how the responsiveness of politicians to the media agenda varies across countries. The literature about political agenda-setting is mostly based on single country studies and mainly comes from the United States (see Green-Pedersen and Stubager, 2010: 663). Only a few studies looked at the agenda-setting role of the media in comparative perspective. For instance, Van Noije, Oegema, and Kleinnijenhuis (2008) compared press coverage and parliamentary debates in the Netherlands and the UK while Vliegenthart and Walgrave (2011) focused on parliamentary questions and news coverage in Denmark and Belgium. Both studies stress the similarities rather than the differences between the media-politics dynamic in the two countries. However, studies that included more different countries found a larger impact of institutional settings on the agenda-setting role of the media. Van Dalen and Van Aelst (2014) compare the perceptions of political journalists on the political agenda-setting power of different actors including the mass media in eight West-European countries. The study for instance shows that Spanish journalists perceive the role of the media in the agenda-setting process as much weaker compared to other political actors. This could be related to the higher degree of political control over the media and to the degree of political concentration of power. In political systems that lack strong centralized power such as Sweden and Norway politicians are more inclined to react to the agenda of the media (see also the chapter by Pfetsch and Esser).

5 Beyond agenda-setting: Other types of media influence So far we focused on the role of the media in setting and constraining the agenda of politicians and policymakers. We acknowledge, however, that the media might have other types of influences and that the influence is not only located at the beginning of the policy process. We discuss three other ways the media potentially influence substantive politics and policy making in particular.

5.1 Framing or defining the issue Political agenda-setting scholars almost always refer to the work of Schattschneider (1960) and Kingdon (Kingdon 1984) as source of inspiration. These pioneers

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did put the importance of issue salience up front, but simultaneously stressed the importance of how these issues were discussed and interpreted. Schattschneider (1960: 73) noted that if a party wants to get in power it needs to be able to make “its definition of issues prevail”. Politics is a struggle about issues first, and a struggle of definitions afterwards. Kingdon (1984) referred to this process as “alternative specification”: narrowing the range of possible positions on an issue. This attention for issue-definition in policy making has been enriched by communication studies on framing and frame-building. Frame effect studies assume that how an issue is presented has an influence on how it is understood by people (De Vreese, Peter, and Semetko 2001). It thus concerns a type of effect that cannot be considered as the mere extension of the larger agenda-setting concept 4 (Scheufele and Tewksbury 2007). Framing has become one of the central concepts in communication science, used in a variety of contexts, but mainly as a study of media text and its effects on the public (for a recent overview see Vliegenthart and van Zoonen 2011) (see also the chapter by Arendt and Matthes). Several authors also linked framing research with the reciprocal relationship of media with politics and policy (Entman 2004; Vliegenthart and Roggeband 2007; Baumgartner, Linn, and Boydstun 2009). According to Entman (2004: 4–6) the political power of frames lies not only in its capacity to define a problem, but also in its ability to suggest a particular remedy. In that way a frame can directly promote support (or opposition) to certain policy measures or legislative initiatives. This is highly relevant as policy makers often agree on what the problem is, but far less on the adequate solution (Kingdon 1984). Focussing on foreign policy, Entman sees growing framing influence of the media. Not so much as initiators of frames, but rather in cases of political conflict by favouring one frame over another. In absence of elite disagreement political actors can still challenge or at least hinder the dominant political frame (Entman 2003). Also Baumgartner and colleagues show (2009) that how an issue is framed in the media has a potentially significant impact on public policy. Their study of the death penalty in the US proved that the shift to an “innocence frame” in the press in the late nineties contributed to the decline of death sentences. Similarly, Strünck (2010) provided support that media coverage had an impact on the politics of pension reform in Germany by framing the debate in terms of a “crisis story” (see also the chapters by Strömbäck and Kiousis and by Robinson).

5.2 Linking all actors in the process Agenda-setting and framing have focused the attention on a crucial part of the politics: selecting and defining issues. Scholars using these concepts have shown 4 Note that some scholars use the term second-level agenda-setting instead of framing. Definitions of both terms partly overlap as they are both more concerned with how issues (or other objects) are discussed (Weaver 2007).

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that the media has at least the potential to influence this process. However, scholars in public policy claim that the role of the media transcends this part of the policy process and suggest a more holistic interpretation. Cobb and Elder (1981) claim that in essence policy-making is a process of communication between compound actors. Although, not all communication goes through media channels, the mass media play a central role linking actors and information together. This insight is far from new and goes back to the work of agenda-setting forerunner Cohen (1963: 16) who stated that the media “are one of the devices that keep the separate parts of the political system in touch with each other”. Kennamer (1992) has further developed this idea of the “linkage function” of the news media. Besides linking together the main actors (leading politicians, parties, interest groups, civil servants etc.) the media also link public policy with public opinion. This is not only important as a means of information exchange, but even more in terms of defining the debate. Or as Baumgartner and Jones (1993: 107) put it: “The media help to move all disjointed actors (including the public mood) in the same direction. This explains why shifts in attention in one venue are quickly followed by others.” In sum, several authors have stressed the importance of the linkage function of the media, but without indicating how this should be operationalized and investigated. Perhaps, as Brown (2010) suggested, the language and tools of social network analysis may offer a fruitful strategy to map this type of media influence.

5.3 Accelerating the process In his in-depth study of how the US press affected policy making in the beginning of the 1980s Linsky (1986: 107–112) stressed the impact media have on the timetable of policymakers. His case studies and interviews with policy makers show that when media collectively focus on an issue they give politicians the feeling as if they have to decide, “whether or not they were ready to do so” (see also the chapter by Stanyer). Also Livingstone (1997) points to the importance of the media as an accelerator in (foreign) policy making. Mainly the omnipresence of real-time media drives politicians to take a position. Interviews with policymakers show that this limits the time for deliberation with partners and investigating the consequences of policy measures. For Linsky speeding up the process also means that issues and decisions are moved up the bureaucratic ladder. “The more intense – and the more critical – the press coverage, the higher the level of the government that deals with the issue” (Linsky 1986: 107). In terms of political agendas this means that issues move from symbolic to substantial agendas. However, several authors have also pointed to the opposite effect: media as decelerator. For instance, Wolfe (2012) shows that in the case of US law making increased media attention can at times create political friction, which slows down the law making process instead of accelerating it. In particular coverage of conflict-

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ing political positions can lead to a process of negative feedback, counter-mobilization and ultimately hinder finding compromises among political actors (KochBaumgarten and Voltmer 2010: 216). Further research is needed to better understand the conditions under which media can speed-up or rather slow-down the policy process.

6 Conclusion This chapter dealt with the influence of the media on legislation and public policy in the broad sense of the word. We focussed mainly on political agenda-setting as a central concept and a subdomain of scholars that made progress in understanding the interaction between media agendas and political agendas. We also tried to go beyond agenda-setting to come to a broader view on the role of the media in the policy process. Generally, however, we devoted most attention to the potential impact of the media in setting (new) issues on the political agenda, and in what Wolfsfeld and Sheafer (2006) call the “amplifying” of existing issues. Related to this optimistic concept the media as gatekeepers also have the ability to constrain the political agenda. As important as what issues dominate the agenda, is the way these issues are defined or framed. In particular, the power of frames goes beyond the definition phase of policy, but also suggests possible solutions for the problem raised. Next, two types of influence were discussed that mainly received attention from public policy scholars and less from communication scholars. The media link all relevant actors including the public together and make it possible that they respond to each other on a limited number of core issues. Finally, the media force politicians to react and take a position in such a way that they can accelerate or rather decelerate the policy process. This classification of types of influence is partly artificial as these different types of influence are overlapping. For instance, agenda-setting and framing are highly connected as some issues only get attention from politicians as they are framed in a particular way. Baumgartner and Jones (1993: 125) even showed that “the sudden fascination with a given issue was usually, but not always, associated with changes in how the issue was discussed”. Political agenda-setting can also be seen as part of the larger linkage function of the media: by transferring issue salience from one agenda to the other actors get connected and move in the direction of a common policy agenda. Still, we believe it is useful to distil the role of the media in different parts or functions as this is necessary to grasp the larger impact question (see also Livingstone 1997). In recent decennia political communication scholars have come closer to understand the political power of the media by using a more nuanced and modest approach. Small contributions on the conditionality and reciprocity of media influence on politics have proven to be more useful than sweeping generali-

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13 Political public relations Abstract: This chapter reflects on political public relations. It first characterizes political public relations as a central component of political communication by political actors. Moreover, the chapter argues that political public relations are not only about communication and involve a wider group of stakeholders such as lobby groups, think tanks, and party donors. The chapter then gives an overview of the literature on political public relations and defines it by suggesting a continuum of stakeholder engagement. Furthermore, several domains of political public relations are discussed in detail, i.e. news management and agenda building, issues management, event management, crisis management, assessment in political public relations, and digital communication. Finally, the authors call for a more systematic application of public relations theories and concepts that have seldom or never been applied in the context of political public relations. Key Words: political public relations, political stakeholders, news management, agenda building, issues management, event management, crisis management, digital communication

1 Introduction The significant role of public relations in the political process has been ubiquitous throughout history. From Ancient Greece and Rome to the American Revolution, scholars have documented the importance of public relations and communication in politics and democracy (Broom 2009; McKinnon, Tedesco, and Lauder 2001; Wilcox and Cameron 2007). Political public relations is practiced by a variety of political professionals, including but not limited to press secretaries, speech writers, campaign fund raisers, event managers, and political marketing and campaign consultants to name a few. Despite its pervasive impact, our theoretical and empirical understanding of political public relations has, however, lagged behind in comparison to other areas of political communication, public relations, and political science research. To remedy this, the purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of political public relations research and encourage its growth as a field of study. In comparing the concepts of political public relations and political communication, on the one hand political communication is a broader concept, highlighting “the exchange of symbols and messages between political actors and institutions, the general public, and the news media that are products of or have consequences for the political system” (McLeod, Kosicki, and McLeod 2002: 217). From that per-

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spective, political public relations constitutes one aspect of political communication. On the other hand, political public relations is not only about communication (to be discussed below), and political public relations explicitly involves a wider group of major stakeholders than usually conceptualized by political communication, such as industry lobby groups, party members or activists, issue competitors, think tanks and party donors. Another major characteristic that partly separates political public relations from political communication is that it is intentional and objectives driven. Thus, while the fields of political communication and political public relations overlap theoretically, conceptually and in practice, they do not always equal each other.

1.1 Defining Public Relations Much like existing conceptualizations of related concepts, a lack of consensus exists in the scholarly literature regarding definitions of political public relations. For example, simplistic views of political public relations may only emphasize news management and media relations as core aspects of this field. While paramount, this ignores other critical areas such as crisis communication, issues management, volunteer relations, and fundraising to name a few, and displays a superficial understanding of public relations theory. In an attempt to synthesize many of the extant perspectives, building on a solid public relations foundation, a recent book on the subject edited by the contributors of this chapter defined political public relations as “the management process by which an organization or individual actor for political purposes, through purposeful communication and action, seeks to influence and to establish, build, and maintain beneficial relationships and reputations with its key publics to help support its mission and achieve its goals” (Strömbäck and Kiousis 2011a: 8). Several qualities of this definition are noteworthy in advancing our understanding of political public relations. The first is that it emphasizes the strategic and management role of political public relations efforts and activities. That is, political public relations should not be simply relegated to a technical or tactical function within political organizations or campaigns, but rather be used to help advance the political organization’s principal mission and broad objectives. This view not only emerges from the general public relations literature on its organizational functions (Dozier and Ehling 1992; Dozier and Grunig 1992; Grunig, Grunig, and Ehling 1992), but also from the political communication literature on the role of public relations. Indeed, Kelley (1956: 211–212) argues that “to be of any value, the public relations man must sit in on all planning sessions and do his part in the selecting of issues,” and “public relations in a campaign is worthless unless the public relations man has at least a voice in selecting, determining, and projecting issues”. In fact, one of the key responsibilities of public relations is to function as a boundary-spanner representing the organization to the publics and the pub-

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lics to the organization. This holds true for political public relations as well as in other contexts, and to be effective, requires that public relations belongs to the dominant coalition within an organization. A second important characteristic of this definition is its contention that political public relations involves both communication and action. This, of course, is linked with the strategic management role mentioned above. The contribution of political public relations via communication is carried out in many forms, including press releases, media interviews, and speeches. The contributions via action also occur in many forms, such as counseling management to alter organizational policy, forming partnerships with interest groups, or holding special events. This is consistent with perspectives on public relations stressing its relationship management function (Broom, Casey, and Ritchey 2000; Ferguson 1984; Ki and Hon 2006; Ledingham 2003; Ledingham and Bruning 1998). Thus, while it can be argued that political public relations can be thought of as a type of strategic communication, it is important to underscore that political public relations is not only about communication. Also central to the definition above is that the concept of political organizations is broader than that of political parties. Political organizations certainly include political parties, but also government offices, interest groups, think tanks, non-governmental organizations, and even corporations to the extent that they attempt to influence political issues, processes, or public opinion related to political matters (Strömbäck and Kiousis 2011b). In this context, a recent analysis of political marketing and stakeholder engagement by Hughes and Dann (2009) is instructive. Following their analysis and depending on the type of organizations involved in political marketing or political public relations, at least 17 stakeholder groups can be identified: alternative political providers; electoral commissions, parliaments, government offices; industry lobby groups; issue competitors; media organizations; party donors; party members and supporters; political candidates; political opponents; private lobbyists; social pressure lobby groups; citizens and society at large; splinter interest groups; voters at election time; and voters between elections. While this may not be the definitive list – as it depends on the organization and is contextual – it demonstrates that there is a large number of organizations and groups that are relevant in the context of political public relations (see also the chapter by Hertog and Zuercher). To better understand the variety of stakeholders in political public relations, Grunig’s situational theory of publics offers a critical conceptual perspective (Grunig and Hunt 1984; Grunig 1989). The core of the theory is that by effectively anticipating the communication behavior of members in stakeholder groups, public relations professionals can segment target publics and be strategic in their choices of how to best communicate with them. The application to political public relations lies in identifying strategies for how best to communicate with and receive feedback from voters, donors, parties, activists, and other key target groups

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and stakeholders. This can be used for a variety of goals, such as voter mobilization and fund raising. Based on situational theory, stakeholder groups can be classified as nonpublics, latent publics, aware publics, and active publics (see also the chapter be Kepplinger). As a result, political public relations professionals can use this perspective as a basis to ascertain where to best allocate resources for the purposes of, for example, campaigning and governing (see also the chapters by Strömbäck and Kiousis and by de Vreese and Schuck). A related point concerning the definition of political public relations mentioned earlier is its simultaneous emphasis on its role in impacting both relationships and reputations with key publics as chief outcomes of communication activities and organizational actions. According to Bronn (2010: 309), reputation “represents the reality of the organization for the stakeholder regardless of what the organization believes about itself, chooses to communicate, or thinks it knows about what stakeholders are thinking”. Elsewhere, Carroll (2010) notes that corporate reputation consists of three major dimensions: public prominence, public esteem, and attributes associated with a company. While normally applied to studying businesses and corporations, the concept of reputation is relevant to all types of organizations and groups. In the context of political public relations, this, for instance, extends to political candidates and even foreign nations (Wang 2006). The commonly measured approval rates of presidents and prime ministers may in fact be conceptualized as measuring reputations. In comparison to reputation, organization-public relationships are seen as “the state that exists between an organization and its key publics in which the actions of one can impact the social, economic, or political well-being of the other” (Ledingham and Bruning 1998: 62). Much work in this area has focused on identifying major dimensions of relationships, including trust, satisfaction, commitment, and control mutuality (Ki and Hon 2007). Because of the long-term orientation in the relational perspective of public relations, scholars have also explicated major cultivation strategies for developing relationships, such as dialogic communication, and examined what the consequences of positive relationships are on attitudes and behaviors. Demonstrating applications to political public relations, Seltzer and Zhang (2011) found that strong relationships between voters and political parties were predictive of favorable attitudes and supportive behaviors towards parties. As noted above, the range of stakeholders central to the practice and study of political public relations is large, and there is wide variance in the level of engagement with them among political organizations. From a stakeholder perspective then, our definition stresses the role of both reputation and relationship cultivation and maintenance as central aspects to the practice of political public relations. Applying the ideas of Hutton, Goodman, Alexander, and Genest (2001) to a political context, we see political public relations as crucial to all stages of stakeholder engagement, whether it involves an adolescent first developing an allegiance to a

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Fig. 1: Degree of stakeholder engagement and appropriate conceptual framework for studying political public relations.

political party all the way to a lifelong volunteer for civic organizations aiming to recruiting new voters (Kiousis and Strömbäck 2011). Important in this context is also the multiplicity of publics that are relevant for political organizations, broadly conceived. As such, we reject views of political public relations as only focusing either on short-term or long-terms interactions between organizations and key publics, and views that reduce political public relations to media relations, news management, or voter relations. The concepts of reputation and relationship management are both paramount to capturing the short-term and long-term orientation regarding the engagement of political organizations and the multiplicity of their key publics. From this perspective, political public relations is not limited to simple information dissemination and exchange for peripherally involved publics, but it is also not relevant just solely for engagement with highly involved stakeholder groups such as major donors or special interest groups. Conceptualizing political public relations along a continuum of stakeholder engagement with reputation and relationship quality at each end can be useful tool for understanding its study and practice. Figure 1 outlines this conceptualization.

2 Domains of Political Public Relations With the definition of political public relations established, we now turn to exploring major domains of political public relations. We define domains as major areas of practice or specialties within political public relations. While it is important to recognize this is not a comprehensive list, it does offer a starting point for academic inquiry to better explore the antecedents, processes, and consequences of political public relations. As a preface, we will consider the following areas: (1) news management and agenda building, (2) issues management, (3) event management, (4) crisis management, (5) assessment in political public relations, (6) and digital communication.

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2.1 News management While we are careful to stress the larger function of public relations in politics, perhaps the most well-known domain concerning its influence is in news management and media relations. Against this backdrop, political public relations efforts focus on engaging journalists and news outlets in order to engender media coverage regarding topics of key priority to the political organizations they represent or to convey their point of view on political matters affecting their organization. In its simplest form, this may involve the dissemination of news releases or it may involve more complex activities such as holding special news conferences or producing video footage to assist journalists in developing stories. It may also involve informal communication such as during a background briefing. In a reactive situation, it may involve being available for interviews to journalists or providing them access to information they might need for stories. A chief conceptual perspective used to understand news management and media relations in political public relations is agenda-building (Tedesco 2011; Zoch and Molleda 2006). In contrast to the traditional focus of agenda-setting on associations between media coverage and public opinion, the construct of agenda-building focuses on the reciprocal influence of policymakers, news media, and public opinion in the process of salience formation and transfer. According to Cobb, Ross, and Ross (1976: 126), “the study of agenda building requires an understanding of the ways in which different subgroups in a population become aware of, and eventually participate in, political conflicts, whether the issues are initiated by groups in the general public or by political leaders”. Elsewhere, Gandy (1982) observed that scholars need to “go beyond agenda setting constructs to determine who sets the media agenda, how and for what purpose it is set, and with what impact on the distribution of power and values in society” (p. 7). Finally, Vasquez and Taylor (2001: 145) assert that “theoretically, agenda building is concerned with how publics enlarge the conflicts over issues to receive the attention and action of government decision makers” (see also the chapter by van Aelst). When applied to media relations in a political setting, agenda-building refers to the process by which sources aim to shape the agenda of “objects” covered in news media messages. When explicating the constructs of agenda-setting and agenda-building, scholars have identified two levels of relationships – object salience and attribute salience. In traditional research, issues have been used as examples of objects; however, in the abstract an object can also be a political candidate, an international organization, or a foreign nation (McCombs 2004). Exploring such theorizing empirically, prior literature has examined the linkages among public relations, news media, and public opinion in terms of object and attribute salience. In these studies, scholars have noted that news media (or public relations) emphasize certain aspects of objects while simultaneously ignoring others to help stakeholders develop an understanding about objects (Kiousis, Bantimaroudis, and Ban 1999; McCombs and Shaw 1993; Iyengar and Kinder 1987).

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Linked to framing research, the second level agenda-setting and agenda-building literature suggests that media (and organizational public relations activities) play a role in shaping public opinion by telling stakeholders “how to think about” certain objects (Carroll and McCombs 2003; Kiousis, Mitrook, Wu, and Seltzer 2006; Wanta, Golan, and Lee 2004) (see also the chapters by Maurer and by Arendt and Matthes). The two major types of attributes that have been explored in the literature are substantive and affective attributes (McCombs and Shaw 1972). Substantive attributes refer to the cognitive dimension of attribute salience based on reasoning. Issue frames or candidate image attributes are examples of the substantive attribute dimension used in prior agenda-building (agenda-setting) studies. Six substantive attributes that have been consistently examined in the literature are the conflict, human interest, problem definition, responsibility attribution, moral evaluation, and consequence assessment frames (Entman 1993; Hallahan 1999; Iyengar 1991; Price, Tewksbury, and Power 1997; Semetko and Valkenburg 2000; Shah, Domke, and Wackman 2001; de Vreese 2003, 2005). There are also affective attributes that refer to the affective dimension of salience based on emotions. The tone of messages (negative, neutral, or positive) has been primarily employed to assess the salience of affective attributes. Emotional intensity can also be part of affective attributes (Wu and Coleman 2010) (see also the chapter by Schemer). A principal strategy in agenda-building efforts involves the use of information subsidies. Zoch and Molleda (2006) submit that “public relations practitioners generate prepackaged information to promote their organizations’ viewpoints on issues, and to communicate aspects of interest within those issues, to their internal and external publics” (p. 284). According to Gandy (1982), the benefits of using information subsidies are “to reduce the prices faced by others for certain information in order to increase its consumption” (p. 12). The most common form of information subsidy is the traditional news release, but they also exist in other forms, including speeches, media kits, and ads. It is important to note that information subsidies can be employed for efforts outside of media relations, but this context has been their principal application. Recent research has stressed the need to look at multiple information subsidies within the context of agenda-building (Kiousis and Strömbäck 2010; Miller 2010). The effectiveness of media relations efforts may rest on the extent to which they reflect existing elite discourse on major topics in politics. Applying the idea of indexing theory to a political public relations setting, Lieber and Golan (2011) suggest this mechanism may explain why some media relations efforts are more successful than others with regard to impacting media salience of objects and attributes (see also the chapter by Robinson). A recent analysis of framing in political communication identified seven applications of framing to political public relations (Hallahan 2011): (1) framing of situations, (2) framing of attributes, (3) framing of risk, (4) framing of arguments supporting actions, (5) framing of issues, (6) framing of responsibility, and (7) framing

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of stories. In the first area, framing provides context to topics such as when politicians use special events to personalize important issues. According to Hallahan (2011), “attribute framing involves the use of language in the message itself” (182). The battle over labels in political rhetoric offer prime examples of this such as whether to describe the abortion issue as “pro-life” or “pro-choice.” The third use of framing draws on classic prospect theory and addresses how framing is employed in politics to create concern regarding danger and hazards. This could be accomplished, for instance, in campaign rhetoric threatening major cuts to government programs and entitlements. The fourth application of framing occurs when valence and emotion are used to highlight emphasis in messages. The fifth use of framing occurs when communicators portray topics in terms of disputes and arguments involved in a conflict. The sixth use of framing deals with assigning responsibility for political matters, whether that involves crediting a group for progress on say policy matters or whether it assigns blame to the government in power for a failing economy. The final use of framing has the most direct application to media relations in terms of storytelling. The application of framing in this context is designed to advance particular narratives that resonate among journalists and by extension news consumers (Hallahan 2011) (see also the chapter by Arendt and Matthes).

2.2 Issues management Another prominent domain of political public relations is issues management, which refers to the process by which politicians, campaigns, parties, and other political groups identify, prioritize, develop, and convey positions on key issues. A fundamental early step in effective political issues management involves formative research where groups investigate the perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors of target audiences concerning policy preferences and problems. These same approaches are also used to evaluate the success of communication efforts for issue management purposes. A variety of tools are employed to communicate positions on key issues as a part of this process, including position papers, speeches, platform statements, debates, and so forth. A vital factor impacting the issues-management process involves meaningfully classifying different types of issues. Research has offered several systems for categorizing issues. For example, the difference between obtrusive issues (those with which citizens have direct experience) and unobtrusive issues (those with which citizens have little direct experience) has proved critical with regard to media influence on public perceptions of issue importance (Zucker 1978) (see also the chapter by Arendt and Matthes). A similar dichotomy regarding the impact of concrete and abstract issues has also been found to be meaningful. Specifically, problems that are defined in concrete terms are more likely to resonate in news media and public opinion than those that are abstract (Yagade and Dozier 1990). On a related point,

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issues also evolve and shift in importance over time in society. The life cycle of an issue has crucial implications for issues management processes. Downs (1972) foundational piece identified five major stages in the typical attention cycle of an issue: (1) the pre-problem stage, (2) alarmed discovery and euphoric enthusiasm, (3) realizing the cost of significant progress, (4) gradual decline of intense public interest, and (5) the post-problem stage (see also the chapters by Stanyer and by van Aelst). While issues management is an important part of political public relations processes, most research and theorizing has been developed from the point of view of political parties and candidates. A natural extension of such work is acknowledging the influence of corporations and the business community to issues management. Heath and Waymer (2011: 142) note that “issues management was born and raised to be a political animal, to help make business management more political and less merely administrative”. Manheim’s (2011) concept of power structure analysis suggests a strategic approach for how corporations and businesses might handle the issues management process for adversarial stakeholders. According to this perspective, businesses identify key adversarial stakeholders to assess weaknesses and then compare those to organizational strengths in an effort to deploy appropriate strategies and tactics for handling controversial issues. Evidence for the heightened impact of corporate issues management in politics can be seen in the tremendous amount of resources invested in corporate lobbying. According to the OpenSecrets.org website, in the United States alone over $3.51 billion was spent on lobbying in 2010, with the majority coming from corporate interests. Lobbying involves direct appeals to policymakers by organizations, interest groups, associations, and businesses to influence regulation and law. Some of major approaches include providing financial support to political campaigns and interpersonal/small group communication activities. Within the context of issues management, we can also illustrate the influence of political public relations beyond the scope of domestic politics. Efforts of public diplomacy by foreign nations and their governments can be viewed as a part of political public relations given their objectives to engage citizens of other countries and shape policymaking. A study by Kiousis and Wu (2008) revealed the public relations efforts by foreign nations are linked to favorable outcomes in media coverage and public opinion in the United States by the reducing the impact of negative information. Of course, foreign nations are not the only groups employing political public relations in an international setting. Molleda (2011) underscores the role of transnational corporations and stresses that there must be balance among the organization’s interests, home country’s interests, and host country’s interests when attempting to influence political processes and decisions in other countries (see also the chapter by Robinson).

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2.3 Event management In addition to traditional communication activities of information dissemination and exchange, another major domain of political public relations lies in event planning, management, and execution. A range of activities and events are used to support political public relations efforts. Among the most prominent are debates, speeches, news conferences, party conventions, and town hall meetings when it comes to supporting campaigning and governance. Other types might include fund raising dinners and groundbreakings. Political debates in the United States, for example, have received extensive attention in the literature and are subject to extreme regulation and scrutiny from both the academic and professional communities. McKinney and Carlin (2004: 214) observe that “a presidential debate or debate series should be examined within the context of the overall campaign news narrative and is best viewed as an ongoing media drama performed in three acts”. They are an essential source for political learning, may have an impact on image evaluations (McKinney and Carlin 2004), and clearly falls within the domain of political public relations. The inclusion of event planning, management, and execution in political public relations is also consistent with the relationship cultivation and management approach championed by Ledingham (2011), who argues that the field involves more than just messaging. Political speeches, though clearly a communication activity, also can be viewed as events. They are used both for campaigning (e.g., in the form of stump speeches) and governance (e.g., the State of the Union). The planning and execution of speeches are complex, but offer a germane tool for reaching large groups in a mediated or unmediated setting. Research suggests that speeches can be effective for agenda-setting, increasing political knowledge, and stimulating support for a cause, policy, or candidate (Eshbaugh-Soha 2011; Kiousis and Strömbäck 2010). For example, U.S. presidential speeches have been shown to be an essential part of the public relations apparatus of the White House (Eshbaugh-Soha and Peake 2011; Kernell 2007). Organizationally, the infrastructure for presidential public relations activities in the United States is quite intricate and includes the Office of Communication, Press Office, and the Office of Public Liaison.

2.4 Crisis management Beyond event management, another primary area of political public relations is crisis communication and management. While all types of organizations and groups face crises, the management of this process within the realm of political public relations is somewhat unique. Among the ways it differs are in terms of crisis managers, crisis types, crisis communication constraints, and definitions of success (Coombs 2011). The locus of management of crises in political public rela-

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tions falls into four broad groups: politicians, bureaucrats, elected agencies, and bureaucratic agencies. Thus, the variation of responsibility can shift from the individual to organizational level. In addition, differences arise as to whether the individual or agency is appointed or elected. Perhaps the most important difference with respect to crisis management and crisis communication in politics and the corporate sector is that in politics, many crises are actively sponsored or even manufactured by political opponents. While crises in the corporate sector occur and may have their origins outside as well as within the organization, in politics, both competitors and the media have an active interest in sponsoring frames that suggest that a political organization or its representatives is facing major problems and that these constitute a crisis or even a scandal (see also the chapter by Stanyer). This may hold particularly true for incumbent governments and during election campaigns, because of the increased scrutiny governments are facing and that all political actors face in the run-up to elections. In contrast, most businesses are not continuously in the public eye, their competitors are seldom actively trying to bring them down outside of the realm of the commercial marketplace, and the threshold for what is perceived of and treated as a crisis or scandal in the media is significantly higher. Another important difference in crisis communication in the corporate and political spheres is that fiscal forces are less influential with regard to political crises. This may influence crisis response strategies, and for example lead to a greater use of an apology response when communicating with affected citizens and stakeholders. In terms of defining successful crisis management, political public relations effectiveness would be measured by the extent to which the four groups of crisis managers mentioned above are able to retain their positions either through reappointment or reelections. This contrasts with the definition of crisis management success in the corporate sector being measured through financial indicators. The timing of how imminent job stability may decline is thought to have a direct impact on the speed of response during a political crisis. In brief, politicians and bureaucrats are more likely to issue quick responses for crises during election years or at points when reappointment decisions are made (Coombs 2011).

2.5 Evaluation management Another important topic of significant interest in the general public relations literature, and consequently in the domain of political public relations, concerns evaluation and assessment. In brief, such work concentrates on how public relations activities contribute to advancing the overall mission of an organization. When applied to political public relations, the question of effectiveness becomes more complicated because effectiveness needs to be thought of beyond the organizational level to also include normative implications. In particular, organizational

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effectiveness of political public relations efforts can be viewed as strategic while those at the societal and political system level can be thought of as normative. A tendency in early public relations research and practice for measuring effectiveness was simply in terms of message outputs resulting in media coverage and publicity (Hon 1998). Both scholars and professionals have recognized that this approach is problematic because it does not measure effectiveness in terms of outcomes for stakeholders and therefore keeps public relations at a tactical level. In a political public relations context, movement to the strategic level in terms of assessment can be conceptualized as winning an election, getting a piece of legislation passed, recruiting volunteers for a political movement, preventing regulation, and so forth. Assessment at the normative level is distinctive because of implications for democracy and political participation, since political public relations strategies and tactics that might be effective at the organizational level might simultaneously have negative normative consequences on the societal level. Normative questions related to democracy or society, as a whole, may not be as critical for other arenas of public relations. Some examples of assessment at the normative level include impacts on voter turnout levels, the range of opinions expressed in the marketplace of ideas, and providing access to different constituencies as a part of the political process. It is significant that most research considering evaluation in political public relations is focused on the strategic level. As such, an opportunity for future research at the normative level is needed to build this area of political public relations scholarship (see also the chapters by Kepplinger and by Jandura and Friedrich).

2.6 Digital communication A key area of both general and political public relations theory and practice is related to different channels of communication, such as radio, television and newspapers, free as opposed to paid communication, or mass-targeted as opposed to micro-targeted channels of communication. Perhaps particularly important and an emerging domain of political public relations involves digital communication for efforts such as fund-raising, recruiting volunteers, and connecting with voters. Digital communication activities have quickly become a central area of focus for public relations professionals because of their conversational and dialogic nature (Hendricks and Denton 2010). Contemporary political public relations research has underscored the need to better understand the role of digital communications and social media, such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, as well as mobile communications such as text messages. The use of these campaign communications has risen dramatically in recent elections across the world (Woolley, Limperos, and Oliver 2010). Unlike traditional strategies and tactics, these are heralded as innovative because of their potential to promote dialogue and conversation, thereby lead-

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ing to enhanced relationships between organizations and their major constituencies (Levenshus 2010; Reber and Kim 2006) (see also the chapters by Pfetsch and Esser and by Wolling and Emmer). Illustrating this, Sweetser’s (2011) analysis of digital communication in political public relations outlines a framework for understanding the role of online messages by considering their uses by politicians/campaigns, voters/constituencies, and elected/appointed officials. This encompasses their influence for both campaigning and governing. In highlighting their noteworthy qualities, she writes that “the personal, interactive, and instant elements of digital communication make it a unique medium through which to communicate. Underlying each approach is the goal of the campaign to strengthen the relationship with target publics” (Sweetser 2011: 296). Citizen use of digital communication tools can vary from sending emails to local politicians regarding a neighborhood concern to viewing archived speeches on YouTube during political campaigns. From a political public relations standpoint, perhaps the most crucial factor to recognize concerning digital communication is the great power citizens and constituencies have to voice their perceptions and mobilize themselves when compared to traditional communication channels. Social media, for example, have been successfully used to stimulate offline social movements and even contribute to regime change in governments, as illustrated by the “Arab Spring” in the Middle East in 2011 (Howard and Hussain, 2011) (see also the chapter by Hertog and Zuercher). Less pervasive though has been the use of technology to directly involve citizens in the policymaking process as might be conceptualized by models of direct democracy (see also the chapter by Jandura and Friedrich). Logistical and security constraints have likely contributed to the lack of growth in this area. Nonetheless, the use of digital communication tools by politicians to support governance can be used as a strategy to prompt citizen and external group interest on particular issues when direct communication and negotiations among politicians and parties may not be working. For example, the Obama administration has used targeted emails to registered users from his 2008 campaign as a means to generate public and external pressure on Congress to support his priorities (Waite 2010). The strategy of “going public” is not new for the White House, but the channels through which it occurs are new and demonstrate the value of understanding political public relations impact (Kernell 1997).

3 Conclusions and the future In summary, the brief overview of literature on political public relations in this chapter suggests that it is a noteworthy topic meriting scholarly attention for theoretical development and empirical testing. Unlike many other areas of inquiry, it

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draws on a rich interdisciplinary foundation from fields such as public relations, political science, political marketing, and political communication. While not an exhaustive list, this chapter examined major domains such as news management and agenda building, issues management, event management, crisis communication, assessment in political public relations, and digital communication. As a conceptual tool for exploring these and other domains of political public relations, we suggest the continuum of stakeholder engagement explicated earlier holds great potential. To review, when stakeholder engagement in political public relations is low, then reputation quality offers a germane conceptual framework for studying the interactions between political organizations and their stakeholders. Conversely, when stakeholder engagement is high, relationship quality is more appropriate. The most important shortcoming within the field of political public relations research is that most public relations theories and concepts have seldom or never been applied in the context of political public relations. To do so, and extend political public relations to domains seldom investigated, should be the most important priorities in future research on political public relations. Not only would it increase our understanding of political public relations per se; it would also test the validity of public relations theories beyond traditional contexts. For example, rather limited attention has been given to the role of non-profit organizations, activism, government communication, and fundraising in political public relations. Although left out from this chapter for reasons of space, we believe these are fruitful arenas for future scholarship. We also believe that theories such as, for example, excellence theory, contingency theory, situational theory, and relationship management theory have much more to offer in the context of political public relations, and needs to be explored and tested in political contexts (Strömbäck, Mitrook, and Kiousis 2010). In conclusion, it is hoped that this chapter can serve as a springboard for future research on the emerging area of political public relations research. The expansion of knowledge awaits.

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Section IV: Mass Media and Journalism

Susana Salgado

14 The media of political communication Abstract: This chapter reflects on the various types of media to be found in political communication and their technical, institutional, and content characteristics. It starts by discussing media expansion and fragmentation as two key developments of the media system in many countries across the globe. It then uses some of the most common dichotomies of media types to analyse their diversity and differences, focussing on comparisons of offline vs. online media, opinion-leading vs. following media, alternative vs. mainstream media, and public service vs. private/commercial media. In addition, the characteristics of mediated and non-mediated forms of political communication as well as the patterns of their interaction are discussed. Finally, the chapter argues that the recent developments of the media system are a major challenge to traditional journalism and that what is needed is a new kind of mediator more concerned with interpreting and evaluating the information available. Key Words: mass media, social media, individual media, online media, offline media, mainstream media, alternative media, public service media, commercial media, opinion-leading media, journalistic genres, media expansion, fragmentation

1 Introduction In a time when even terrorism is considered a form of political communication, it is almost commonplace to say that we cannot fully understand politics without studying how political actors communicate, how they choose between different media channels, and how the media reflect and transform political messages and images. If political systems shape media environments through policies and decisions on several levels (see also the chapter by Puppis), media structure and media channels also deeply influence political communication processes (see also the chapter by Pfetsch and Esser): Structural conditions of a media system can support or hamper the free flow of political information (McQuail 1992). Contexts of election campaigning are strongly determined by the structure of the media (Norris 2002). And Cook (1998), Sparrow (1999), Mazzoleni (2008), Norris (2002) and others have posited that the media play a more autonomous role today than in the past, not merely reflecting but also shaping politics (see also the chapters by Schulz, by van Aelst and by McNair). Mazzoleni (2008) sums up what several scholars think about the role of the media in society and politics: “The media have become indispensable actors within

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the political domain. They have gained a central position in most political routines, such as election campaigns, government communication, public diplomacy and image building, and national and international celebrations.” This influence is described as the ‘mediatization’ process (see also Schulz 2004; Strömbäck 2008) but, as Mazzoleni and Schulz (1999) explain, despite being increasingly dependent on and shaped by mass media, political institutions still remain in control of political processes and functions (see also the chapters by Schulz and by van Aelst). The media have substantially changed the way politicians communicate. Because of media, politicians must tailor their messages and activities to the news media workways in order to get exposure and visibility (Blumler and Gurevitch 1995) (see the chapter by Sheafer, Shenhav and Balmas). They must create newsworthy events (Mazzoleni and Schulz 1999) and simplify their messages (Cotteret 1991) (see the chapter by Kiousis and Strömbäck). The media transformed not only the way political leaders and parties address citizens and structure campaigns, but also the nature and organization of social and political movements. As Atkinson (2009) notes: Once centralized or defined by singular personalities, movements for change now tend to function as networks, and to be decentralized and less hierarchical due to the proliferation of media production devices and the Internet (see the chapter by Hertog and Zuercher). Against this backdrop, the purpose of this chapter is to analyze the various types of communication channels important to political actors and citizens in current political communication. To know about the characteristics of different kinds of communication channels is not only important to political actors but also a standard procedure of political communication research because the specific features of objects only become apparent in comparing them with others. For example, different channels of political communication may impose different rules on communicators, have different effects and therefore may be used to reach different objectives. Thus, studying them and their differences allows us to better understand processes of political communication and the decisions of the actors involved. However, before taking a closer look at the different kinds of channels it is important to take a look at the overall development of the media and communication landscape in countries across the globe.

2 Media expansion and fragmentation The diversity found today in media systems reflects a growing complexity and some dualities. Developments in technology enabled different information and communication formats, but also multimedia strategies and cross-media use, which is particularly significant considering the mobile data services scope. Mainstream mass media are investing in online and mobile platforms and developing new types of programme formats to engage audiences. However, as Gurevitch,

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Coleman, and Blumler explain, there is a paradox in recent media trends: “the increasing incorporation of ‘the public’ into media productions, such as phoneins, studio debates, online forums and reality TV, while citizens are left feeling more excluded than ever from influence over the media, government, or public affairs in general” (2009: 177). Even so, some authors try to find connections between cross-media users’ options, contexts, communications and social network attributes and choices in civic engagement and political participation (Shah, McLeod, and Yoon 2001) (see also the chapter by McNair). Professionalization of political communication also reflects the growing complexity of media systems. Decentralization in content production, with more communication channels, more actors conveying publicly their views and the more recent possibility of interactivity, also stresses the need for a high degree of professionalization in political communication as a means to deal with all the intricacies of current media environments. The political communication consultant’s role is, among other things, to advise how media can be used in different situations (election campaigns, implementation of policies, crisis situations, etc.) and how media can be used to achieve certain predetermined objectives (see the chapters by Shaefer, Shenhav, and Balmas and by Kiousis and Strömbäck). A first duality is illustrated through a simultaneous tendency toward both media concentration and fragmentation. In Dynamics of Media Politics, Siune and Truetzschler (1992) identified the main trends in media landscape all over Western Europe. They cite privatization, internationalization, commercialization and concentration. However, “while mainstream corporate and state media are growing in power and reach, they are increasingly contested by a wide range of alternative media” (Couldry and Curran 2003). By making means of communication more accessible, the Internet promoted a significant development of alternative media and increased the number of individuals who have their own means of expression. Consequently, these new genres and modes of communication are redefining people’s engagement with the media: media audiences and consumers can now be media users, participants and content producers. As de Jong, Shaw and Stammers note, “mainstream media and their sources frame the news agenda, structure the debate and create what we perceive as the reality in which we live. In this sense, news media play a hegemonic role in our society – their perceptions and interpretations of the world become common sense” (2005: 6). However, new media and new actors are challenging this hegemonic role. At first glance, the possibilities created by new actors seem to answer some of the oldest concerns scholars and critics have expressed regarding the free flow of different opinions and ideas in the media. Sussman (1979), for instance, saw the growing power of mass media as a threat to free societies due to massness and to the possibility of government control of news, its content and timing. According to Sussman, technological innovations in this period were accompanied by significant threats to the ‘fair and free use of mass media’, because the more

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massive the communication systems become, the smaller the number of communicators who control what larger numbers of receivers see or hear. More people have now tools to participate, produce and disseminate contents to broader audiences, and as Hindman notes “rarely has the phrase the marketplace of ideas been so literal as with blogs” (2009: 128). But, as he acknowledges, there is a difference between speaking and being heard (2009: 16) and there is evidence that the number of content producers who are actually heard is still small. In this perspective, the same people/groups that controlled news flows before maintain much of their power and now have expanded this influence to new information channels. Two factors are particularly noteworthy in this context as having contributed to the media abundance scenario. On the one hand, the rapid development of new information and communication technologies has been influencing political communication to different degrees across countries, but its growing adoption by all political actors is now clear (see the chapters by Pfetsch and Esser and by Wolling and Emmer). On the other hand, democratization of education in the twentieth century has also contributed deeply to the development of this new media environment. It is not enough to have the technology available; it is also important to know how to use it and to understand at least the basics of politics and policy issues. Education is even more important if we consider that, with the Internet and the online tools of communication, this new media environment gives each user the possibility of becoming also a producer/disseminator of content and ideas. Basic education increased in part because levels of media exposure have increased immensely. According to some authors, this tendency has contributed to higher levels of political sophistication and to a cognitive mobilization process (Dalton 1984; Dalton and Wattenberg 2000; Inglehart 1990; and for a more empirical approach in several countries Albright 2009). Cognitive mobilization holds that as information costs decline, people will less likely follow others’ opinions and behaviours without questioning, and will examine political proposals and messages more thoughtfully and rationally. This thesis ultimately provides an explanation of partisan dealignment and the decline of political parties as the most important mediators between citizens and political elites. At the same time, party systems are also affected by higher levels of fragmentation (Dalton and Wattenberg 2000), and in some cases by the rise of new parties, as well as new issues in party politics (for right wing and populist parties see for instance Rydgren 2005; Bartlet, Birdwell, and Littler 2011; Boomgaarden and Vliegenthart 2006).

3 Types of media channels Contemporary political communication entails an immense array of choices of communication channels or media in a general sense. On a first level of differentia-

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tion it makes sense to differentiate between mass media, social media and individual media. ‘Mass media’ commonly means “all media distributed to a large mass of people.” However, the term “tends to suggest a particular understanding of how media production works, what the media are like themselves and how they are consumed” (Abercrombie and Longhurst 2007; for an elaborate discussion of the concept see Potter 2013). ‘Social media’ are media designed for social interaction and include different online tools that enable people to communicate with each other easily through the Internet. Technology has boosted ‘individual media’ too, and although most of the examples of ‘individual media’ also seek to induce some kind of social interaction, this type of media may be described as primarily used to communicate and express the views of individuals. However, political communication actors (both politicians and citizens in general) have at their disposal various types of media to convey their messages and the variety is not just between mass, social and individual media. In political communication research other types of media channels are often distinguished based on, for example, their technical, institutional, or content characteristics, on their effects or societal power. Some of the most common dichotomies in the field will be used in the following to analyze the diversity and differences of political communication media. In that, the next pages will focus on comparing offline and online media, opinion-leading and following media, alternative and mainstream media, public service and private/commercial media. In addition, the characteristics of mediated and non-mediated forms of political communication as well as the patterns of their interaction will be discussed.

3.1 Offline vs. online media The diffusion of the Internet has sparked both hopes and fears regarding its influence on politics. The notions of ‘direct democracy’ and ‘marketplace of ideas’, where all citizens have the opportunity to share ideas and proposals and influence politics and policies, as supported by works such as Poster’s (2011) CyberDemocracy, Barber’s (2003) Strong Democracy, or Grossman’s (1995) Electronic Republic, may no longer be a distant reality, whereas technological development has made them possible. This process has led to further research with such foci: ‘Does technology promote activism and political participation?’, ‘How can different media influence our understanding of politics?’, ‘How have technical advances in media and communication altered the processes of decision-making and policy-making?’ Another important and growing area of investigation is the study of the use of digital strategies in political campaigns and of how established political actors are adjusting their communication strategies to new technologies. Ever since the 2008 Obama campaign, this line of research has been one of the most vibrant, and it is possible to find studies about the use of the Internet, including websites, blogs and social media in electoral campaigns all over the globe. The events that

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led to the “Arab Spring” boosted interest in understanding the influence of the Internet, particularly through social networking websites, in protests and its potential to cause political change. E-government, the Internet effect in movements for social change, their strategies, management and communication channels, and the influence of technology in development are some other subjects that have made this field of research one of the most dynamic (see also the chapter by Hertog and Zuercher). It is important to bear in mind that accessing or using different types of media requires different strategies, tools and skills, especially if we consider the new information and communication technologies. At the citizens’ level, if new information technologies bring hope to democracy because everyone has – at least in theory – the possibility of participating in debates and influencing political choices, technology demands specific knowledge of how to use it. This is why some authors point out the growing differences between groups of citizens and even between countries resulting from unequal access to and use of technology (digital divide and global digital divide). These concepts are directly related to the “knowledge gap hypothesis” that Tichenor, Donohue, and Olien (1970) formulated in the 1970s. According to this concept, mass media information increases the knowledge gap between the higher and the lower status segments instead of decreasing it, because the first group tends to acquire, use and benefit from the information at a faster rate. For this reason, “the ability to produce, distribute and share information is as important as access to information and technology” (Mansell and Wehn 1998: 100) (see the chapter by Arendt and Matthes). The differences that still persist in terms of technology access and use, and the challenge in motivating disinterested citizens led some authors to describe the democratic potential of the Internet with the expression “politics as usual” stressing that power structures are kept intact (Bimber and Davis 2003; Davis 1999; Margolis and Moreno-Riaño 2009; Margolis and Resnick 2000; Wilhelm 2000). Consistent with this view, Hindman (2009) explains how hierarchies of traditional media are reproduced online through patterns of hyperlinks, web traffic and search engine usage. Hindman, Tsioutsiouliklis, and Johnson (2003) show that there is a googlearchy which means that “new media, like the old, still display extraordinary concentration of attention on a few sources of political information” (2003: 30). Despite this difference between the number of content producers and recipients, the Internet has lowered the costs to users of accessing many kinds of political information (Hindman, Tsioutsiouliklis, and Johnson 2003). It is increasingly accepted that with the Internet access to information and knowledge in general, including on political issues, has been progressively democratized. Today is not only easier as it is faster to gain access to more plural information. This democratization has not been as fast and as global as desired, but it is a fact that more people can now access more information more easily. It is also a fact that, more

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and more information and knowledge about politics, political actors and policies is not necessarily mediated through mainstream media’s journalists (see the chapter by McNair). Technology has also boosted alternative media initiatives, for example by providing an incentive for citizens to become mediators of specific events or ideas, sending videos, photos, etc. to mainstream news media (citizen journalism). Websites, emails, file sharing systems, open-source software, mobile phones, digital video and photo cameras, blogs, social media, all contribute to increased diversity and plurality in the media environment, allowing excluded actors to gain voice and visibility in the public sphere. It is also easier for citizens with similar objectives to build and sustain networks and communities of interest, which in turn can facilitate the organization of forms of collective political participation and protest (Atton 2002; Bennett 2003; Castells 2009; Coyer, Dowmunt, and Fountain 2007) (see also the chapter by Hertog and Zuercher). We will take a closer look at the notion of alternative and mainstream media in the following section.

3.2 Alternative vs. mainstream media A different but equally topical debate in political communication reflects another duality of our contemporary societies. On one hand, several authors refer to political disinterestness of citizens, which they see as demonstrated, for instance, through levels of abstention in elections. Some critics argue that citizens prefer to consume and to be entertained than to get engaged in political issues and causes (Eliasoph 1998). But, on the other hand, technology and transnational protest are motivating new social and political movements, citizen networks, voluntary associations, campaigns and demonstrations. “The contradictions, conflicts and crises spawned by today’s interconnected, globalizing late modernity can also summon into being new social movements, coalitions of opposition and voices of dissent” (Cottle and Lester 2011: 3). These ‘voices of dissent’ advocate for global or local policies, have their own means of communication and sometimes exert influence over both mainstream media and politics. Sandoval and Fuchs (2010) emphasise the unequal structure of contemporary society by signaling the sometimes overly optimistic use of expressions such as ‘civil media’, ‘community media’, ‘alternative media’, ‘grassroots media’, and ‘participatory media’. All these expressions have implicit in them the democratic effects of citizen participation in the public sphere through the media. The ideas of fostering citizen participation in media production and of bottom-up media production (where every recipient can also become a producer) have been central in many scholarly debates, including in several approaches of alternative media (see also the chapters by Kepplinger and by Jandura and Friedrich). “As a concept, alternative media has been problematic to conceptualize because of its complex nature” (Atkinson 2005: 78) and the result of this com-

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plexity is that there are almost as many different definitions of ‘alternative media’ as authors writing about it. Thus Sandoval and Fuchs (2010) argue that a theoretical conceptualization of the term alternative media is urgently needed. Participatory modes of production and management are, for some, a central defining characteristic of alternative media, while others see non-commercial sources as fundamental when defining this type of media. Still others argue that opposition to mainstream politics and culture is the most important distinctive feature. And as Downing pointed out: “Does the term alternative media exclusively refer to politically progressive, left-wing media that aim at challenging capitalism and corporate (media) power, or does the term also include conservative, right-wing, and repressive media?” (2001: 88). Downing (1984, 2001) prefers the terms ‘radical media’ or ‘radical alternative media’, because “everything, at same point, is alternative to something else” (2001: ix), but what he means is similar to other conceptual proposals of alternative media: “generally small-scale and in many different forms, that express an alternative vision to hegemonic policies, priorities, and perspectives” (2001: v). Downing believes these media are the “chief bearers of democratic communication structures, more than mainstream media, despite their meager resources and the fact that they are flawed, varied, and not always oppositional” (2001: 43). Dowmunt and Coyer propose an inclusive conceptualization: “media forms that are on a smaller scale, more accessible and participatory, and less constrained by bureaucracy or commercial interests than the mainstream media and often in some way in explicit opposition to them” (2007: 1). While Downing, and Dowmunt and Coyer don’t see the opposition to mainstream media as the central characteristic when defining alternative media, other authors conversely point to it as the most essential feature. Couldry and Curran define alternative media as “media production that challenges, at least implicitly, actual concentrations of media power, whatever form those concentrations may take in different locations” (2003: 7). Similarly, Atton uses the term ‘alternative media’ to mean “a range of media projects, interventions and networks that work against, or seek to develop different forms of, the dominant, expected (and broadly accepted) ways of ‘doing media’” (2004: ix). In the same line of thought, but explicitly including the new information and communication technologies, Lievrouw believes that “alternative/activist new media employ or modify the communication artifacts, practices, and social arrangements of new information and communication technologies to challenge or alter dominant, expected, or accepted ways of doing society, culture, and politics” (2001: 19). In addition to their oppositional nature, Atkinson (2005, 2009) also considers non-commercial production as an important aspect of alternative media. To Atkinson, “alternative media are any media that are produced by non-commercial sources and attempt to transform existing social roles and routines by critiquing and challenging power structures” (2005: 78).

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It is important to take into account that a polarized definition of mainstream vs. alternative media may not contemplate the complexity of relations and the possible complementarities between these different types of media. Furthermore, media projects that appear to be oppositional from one point of view may be seen differently from another perspective. Al Jazeera’s news coverage of events can be seen as alternative to the Western media representation of the Muslim world, but at the same time Al Jazeera is also one of the few global commercial suppliers of television news footage. And this complexity increases deeply with the Internet and with the convergences that are now possible, including between offline and online environments. To allow a more global perspective of the interactions between different types of media, actors, and strategies, and to identify these movable boundaries, Atton (2002b, 2004) suggests a “hegemonic approach” to move away from binary approaches and to explore the relations between alternative (he sometimes uses the term ‘radical’) and mainstream media. Dowmunt and Coyer propose to look at these boundaries as an issue of power and hegemony by identifying “who, in what context, has the power to define a media agenda, and who are excluded in that context” (2007: 5) (see also the chapter by Hopmann). Downing et al. also acknowledge these difficulties, especially given the range of actors, issues, and interests involved: “context and consequences must be our primary guides in defining radical alternative media. The edges are almost always blurred” (2001: x). Finally, Sandoval and Fuchs suggest the term ‘critical media’ to stress the primary function this type of media has, which they see as critical content. They recognise the positive effects of participation but “doubt that alternative media can effectively challenge corporate media power and dominant discourse by simply realizing participatory production processes” (2010: 142). In this way, and according to them, the minimum requirement for speaking of an alternative medium is critical content. “This means that also commercial and non-participatory media (or professionally organized) can be understood as alternative as long they produce and distribute critical media content” (2010: 146). Alternative media have a basic function acknowledged, directly or indirectly, by all scholars despite the differences in conceptualization, which is to enable the communication of points of view, opinions or information that are absent, censored, distorted or framed differently, or dismissed in mainstream media. As Sandoval and Fuchs put it: “Critical content shows suppressed possibilities of existence, antagonisms of reality, potentials for change, questions domination, expresses the standpoints of oppressed and dominated groups and individuals” (2010: 148). Groups or individuals with diverse interests and agendas can, through alternative media, present their alternative or marginal views to a wider public, gaining voice and visibility. In some cases, depending on the communication strategies implemented, and whether as a primary objective or as a by-product of other prac-

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tices, such media can deeply impact on mainstream media agendas and contents. Important examples can include, for instance, community radio stations and online newspapers in Africa, which have made possible new channels of democratic expression (e.g., Salgado 2012; Salgado fortcoming); anti-globalization websites, which have been essential tools to organize demonstrations, but also to provide voice to activists and explain their arguments (see, e.g., van Aelst and Walgrave 2002); Facebook and Twitter posts during the Arab revolutions provided an actual alternative to the state media censored and biased coverage of events, through personal testimonies, videos and photos, and allowed users to know what was happening when other information was simply blocked by official authorities (e.g., Allagui and Kuebler 2011). These are examples of how citizens and divergent points of view found expression in alternative media, whether those were mass, social, or individual media (see also the chapter by Hertog and Zuercher). To provide a definition of mainstream media is less problematic. This expression usually refers to the mass media of television, radio, and newspapers that are privately or state owned and controlled. These media outlets can have commercial or public service orientations, but in the mainstream media perspective people are mainly viewed as ‘audiences’.

3.3 Opinion-leading vs. following media The difference between opinion-leading an following media is another dichotomy frequently used to describe different kinds of media and explain processes within the media system. Important concepts related to these issues are consonance (Noelle-Neumann and Mathes 1987), which very simply means similar content in all media, or similar tendencies in reporting by different media, and the opinionleading role of certain media. Halloran, Elliot and Murdock (1970) showed that the concept of opinion-leaders could also be applied in the media system and not only to media recipients. As Noelle-Neuman and Mathes explain, “media opinionleaders are those media with high prestige which are used by other journalists as a source of information and as a frame of reference” (1987: 402). Opinion-leading media have a trend-setting function and their influence goes far beyond their audience, including sometimes the whole media system. Consonance of media reporting is attributed to the existence of opinion-leaders and followers in the media system, and to consensus among journalists on the news value of events/issues. Similar newsmaking processes lead to similar interpretations of reality. Finally, consonance can be established at three different levels: agenda-setting (importance of issues and problems); focusing (definition of issues and problems); and evaluating (creation of a climate of opinion). The distinction between opinion-leading and following media is important to understand the diffusion of topics and arguments within a media system and – more specifically – how news waves or media hypes develop (see also the chapter

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by Stanyer). Therefore, the notion of opinion-leading and following media is central to any political communication strategy. The opinion-leading media set the agenda and provide the first interpretation of an event/issue/idea, thus determining the shape of subsequent coverage. In this way, a topic published/broadcast in these media has more visibility and its coverage – including its interpretation – is, in fact, amplified. Creating a specific climate of opinion the media may influence a particular outcome. In the Portuguese context, Salgado (2010) explained how an opinion-leading newspaper (Expresso) contributed to the construction of a winning presidential campaign. Even if there is competition between media outlets, plurality may not be assured in the media system when most media present and evaluate an issue similarly. And considering that following media act as multipliers, few citizens will not be exposed to that particular selection and evaluation of information. Against this background the existence of alternative media options in a media system gains special relevance (see also the chapter by Jandura and Friedrich).

3.4 Public service vs. private/commercial media Collin notes that there is scant consensus on the meaning of public service. “Understandings of the term public service broadcasting have been shaped by the memory and past experience of the services that have gone under that name. In Western Europe quite different institutional forms, where broadcasting is closely associated with the state, (and used as an instrument of state power), to highly regionalised and pluralistic systems, are all known as public service” (2004: 37). However, despite its various forms, it is possible to identify common guidelines usually associated with a public service orientation. Media outlets should follow orientations that take into account the entire public (including minorities) and promote diversity, but also national identity and a sense of community. In terms of news supply, objectives are commonly related to providing transparent, balanced and equitable information; and giving voice to different groups and opinions in society, thus promoting citizenship, development and knowledge. Profit should not be their main concern, as it is in the case of commercial media (see also the chapters by Puppis and by Jandura and Friedrich). As McQuail explains, “commercial forms are more likely to follow the logic of the market, especially audience demand and economic pressures” (1992: 107), while “in the public service variant, the raison d’être is to deliver communication benefits which are thought to be ‘in the public interest’, usually including an adequate and diverse supply of information, access for minorities and provision of various cultural services” (1992: 105). Commercial media are not primarily concerned with social values and public interest, their immediate goal is to increase audience ratings and advertising revenues.

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These commercial pressures are continuing and also affect public service media. In some cases, these pressures have distorted the social functions and des-characterized them to a point where no substantial differences can be found (contents, formats, management) between commercial and public service orientation media outlets. However, sometimes, it is still possible to find alternative programming or alternative sources in these media, especially in state-owned public service orientation media. For more detailed approaches of public service and commercial media debates see, e.g., Blumber 1992; Collins 1998, 2004; McQuail 1992; McQuail and Siune 1998; Shaughnessy and Cobo 1990; Siune and Truetzschler 1992).

4 Mediated vs. non mediated forms of political communication Diversity as an actual characteristic of media systems does not only mean that more views and contents are available in the public sphere, but also that political information is ‘packaged’ in various ways by the different media channels. Most studies conclude that news media (national TV and newspapers) are very important, oftentimes dominant channels in political communication strategies and in political processes in general. Television is still the most influential medium in most countries and coverage through news reports, debates or interviews has the potential to reach larger audiences, which are also more diverse. Consequently this exposure gives more visibility to candidates, policy proposals, ideas and events (Salgado 2007). However, there are other media channels influencing political processes and the fast development in communications technology is stimulating the use of new communication channels by different political actors (see also the chapters by Kiousis and Strömbäck and by Wolling and Emmer). Generally, political communication can be called non-mediated by journalists if politicians choose and control the communication channel and communicate their messages and images directly to citizens. If financial resources are needed to use these communication channels, for example to buy airtime, they are often referred to as paid media (e.g., advertisements, TV spots). On the other hand, political communication can be called indirect if it is mediated through journalists in news media outlets. Although these free media can be used without financial resources, politicians have limited if any control of the final message. Interviews, talk shows, TV debates and live coverage of events (or statements) are middle way situations. They are mediated in the sense that they are transmitted by media organizations on the one hand but at the same time they allow politicians some degree of control over their message, even if a journalist is present. The case of online spaces within newspapers or television channels’ websites where politicians respond to citizens’ questions is similar: Political message is mediated through

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journalists but politicians are given some ‘room for manoeuvre’. Some characteristics of mediated and non-mediated political communication are explored in more detail next (see also the chapter by Wolling and Emmer for the perspective of the audience in this respect).

4.1 Mediated channels of political communication Although political actors’ control over messages is generally lower in mediated communication, there are indeed differences between various formats and journalistic genres regarding the exact degree of political vs. journalistic control. Some formats are more controlled by journalists (they select, rearrange, frame, evaluate political information, and in some cases provide interpretation and opinion) and others give more freedom and possibilities to politicians. Examples of the first type include news stories and journalistic reports, or journalistic commentaries, while in interviews or in the case of live coverage of events, politicians have more control over their message, i.e. the content that is transmitted to the public. These last two genres represent, to politicians, a possibility to transmit their message in mainstream news media with minimum intervention by journalists, addressing citizens almost directly (Salgado 2007, 2010). By contrast, analysis and contextualization articles, where higher levels of journalistic interpretation are present, as well as editorials or opinion articles, constitute fine examples of extensive journalistic control over political messages. In these cases, political messages are not only interpreted, but this happens through the lense of journalists (for a more detailed debate on interpretive journalism see Salgado and Strömbäck 2012). Television (or radio) debates usually are in between these two types of genres. They represent opportunities for politicians to speak directly to audiences without their message being transformed by journalists, especially in the case of live coverage of debates. However, control is not total, because very often the issues debated and the questions posed are defined by journalists. Plus, one politician’s message is always analyzed in comparison to his/her opponent’s message and how journalists, and ultimately audiences, perceive the message may be largely influenced by the interaction between participants in the debate (for an analysis on how debates are perceived see, for example, Patterson et al. 1992; Reinemann and Maurer 2005). Thus, although politicians’ messages and images are always shaped in relation to their opponents’ messages and images in the case of direct disputes between politicians, this influence is greater and self-evident in debates. It is important to stress, though, that journalistic interpretation and control over political messages is even exercised just by the selection of formats (journalistic genres) in which information is presented because the journalistic genre selection introduces additional information on how to perceive a determined reality. In the case of electoral campaigns, for instance, it is one possible way of communicating indirectly the major importance of some candidates – translated, for example,

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into more interviews and live coverage of their statements and campaign initiatives – when compared with their opponents. This is also reflected in the discussion about the authenticity of political coverage (see the chapter by Hopmann) and is all the more important because it contributes also to shaping candidates’ image, including their suitability for office and possibilities of election. In other words, the journalistic interpretation of the campaign is conveyed indirectly, deliberately or not, to voters, who may be influenced by that it in their voting decision. It is difficult to isolate the effect of this element in particular, among the many other possible influences in voting behaviour. However, it is relatively easy to acknowledge that when journalists contribute to building specific images of candidates, some associated with victory, others with defeat, they are simultaneously influencing how voters see each candidate (Salgado 2010) (see also the chapters in Section VII).

4.2 Non-mediated channels of political communication Political communication actors have the possibility to communicate without the mediation of journalists as well. Channels that are directly controlled by politicians include, but are not limited to, outdoors, posters, murals, graffiti, political ads, manifestos, pamphlets, political parties’ newspapers, free broadcasting air time, electoral or government programs, phone calls and SMS, and some online vehicles, such as Youtube, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, websites, emails and blogs. Through this diverse range of media, politicians can communicate directly, without journalistic mediation, which also means more control of the political message content and format. However, in terms of convincing citizens/voters, these media may present some efficacy problems. Political information published or broadcast through mainstream news media is usually seen as more effective, because it has a larger audience, and also because the journalistic process of verifying information and sources differentiates – to the viewers’ eyes – what is information from what is simply propaganda, functioning as a kind of ‘quality control’ and conveying more legitimacy on political information (are political proposals feasible? Are the announced measures being applied and is the outcome the expected?, etc.) (Salgado 2007). The current decline of trust in journalists is a different issue that requires proper attention elsewhere. Measuring the efficacy of posters, for instance, is a difficult task. It is possible to evaluate the degree of concordance or understanding of different people, but assessing its impact on electoral behavior or on political mobilization is very hard to do. This difficulty is also present in most of the other direct communication media. These forms of communication are, most of the time, analogous to propaganda, even in the case of digital media where more interaction with citizens is possible. And public reaction against explicit forms of propaganda is well docu-

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mented in research (Cull, Culbert, and Welch 2003). To Sfez (1993) “propaganda is a pathological aspect of political communication.” He agrees with the definition provided by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis: “propaganda is the expression of opinion or actions performed deliberately by individuals or groups to influence the opinion or the action of others aiming at a predetermined objective and through psychological manipulation.” (1993: 1336; translated from French by the author).

4.3 Interaction of mediated and non-mediated channels Political actors have, thus, several different possibilities to communicate their messages and images. They can communicate through channels prepared directly by them, non-mediated through journalists, and usually associated with political propaganda, or indirectly, in mainstream news media, through journalists, who transform speeches, statements and events into news stories. Although separate, these two alternatives are complementary and should be included in any political communication strategy: It is not uncommon to see mainstream media publishing or broadcasting news stories on the launch of a campaign website or on a political leader’s statement on Facebook, for example. Journalists actively look for political information in party websites, politicians’ blogs, etc., and cite these sources, and very often political parties and candidates employ cross-media strategies and inform journalists on the content of their programmes (or other campaign materials) to induce coverage. In some cases, by disseminating these political contents, journalists merely fulfil the role of amplifiers of the politicians’ messages. Another interesting aspect of this complementarity of media is the interaction between blogs and mainstream news media. In some cases, bloggers can influence the mainstream media agenda-setting process. If blogs highlight an issue which has been up until that point disregarded by the mainstream media, they can promote journalistic coverage and push that issue into public debate. Farrell and Drezner explain why blogs have political consequences given the relatively low number of blog readers in the overall population: “There is strong evidence that media elites – editors, publishers, reporters, and columnists – consume political blogs” (2008: 23). As a consequence, the authors argue, “if the mainstream media construct focal points through which political actors must operate, the blogosphere has the capacity to construct focal points through which the media operates” (2008: 25). According to them, different reasons explain the links between mediasphere and blogosphere: Material incentives (the need to expand free content as a way to maintain web traffic); personal network ties (some bloggers are journalists too); expertise (blogs can be sources of local or specialized knowledge for relevant issues or current event stories); speed (the rapidity of bloggers’ interactions affects political communication in the mainstream media through agenda setting and framing) (see also the chapter by Stanyer).

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If in democratic settings, blogs and mainstream media are essentially intertwined (Davis 2008), in contexts of limited freedom of expression blogs can actually constitute an alternative to state controlled mainstream media, providing information and opinion that is usually censored. This is the case of some African countries (Salgado 2009, 2012) and Iran for instance. “Weblogistan” (the Iranian blogosphere) has become a distinct public space where Iranians can express themselves without the supervision of editors and publication regulations (Rahimi 2008: 48) (see also the chapter by Hertog and Zuercher).

5 Conclusion The Internet has contributed to expanding both the scope of media channels and the political information sources and this is provoking important readjustments in political and media spheres. Political actors have to adjust to a new, more demanding and more adversarial, media environment if they want to be successful in transmitting their messages and obtaining results. But journalists and other media professionals also have to reinvent their professional practices. They are now competing with various other types of media channels for the attention of a fragmented audience and in a context where people can more easily access information from multiple sources. Some critics believe this is an opportunity for journalists to redefine their work and their role in political communication processes. To deal with the volume of information available and with new forms of political communication (mediated or not) what is needed is a new kind of mediator more concerned with interpreting and evaluating the information available.

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Eliasoph, Nina. 1998. Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Esser, Frank, Jesper Strömbäck and Claes de Vreese. 2012. Reviewing key concepts in research on political news journalism: Conceptualizations, and propositions for future research. Journalism 13(2): 139–143. Farrell, Henry and Daniel Drezner. 2008. The power and politics of blogs. Public Choice 134: 15– 30. Grossman, Lawrence K. 1995. The Electronic Republic Reshaping Democracy in the Information Age. New York: Viking/Penguin Books. Gurevitch, Michael, Stephen Coleman and Jay Blumler. 2009. Political communication – old and new media relationships. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 625: 164–181. Halloran, James D., Philip Elliot and Graham Murdock. 1970. Demonstrations and Communication: A Case Study. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Hindman, Matthew, Kostas Tsioutsiouliklis and Judy Johnson. 2003. “Googlearchy”: How a few heavily-linked sites dominate politics on the web. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL. Hindman, Matthew. 2009. The Myth of Digital Democracy. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Inglehart, Ronald. 1990. Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Lievrouw, Leah. 2001. Alternative and Activist New Media. Cambridge: Polity Press. Mansell, Robin and Uta When. 1998. Knowledge Societies: Information Technology for Sustainable Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Margolis, Michael and Gerson Moreno-Riaño. 2009. The Prospect of Internet Democracy. Surrey: Ashgate. Margolis, Michael and David Resnick. 2000. Politics as Usual: The “Cyberspace Revolution”. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Mazzoleni, Gianpietro and Winfried Schulz. 1999. “Mediatization” of politics: A challenge for democracy? Political Communication 16(3): 247–262. Mazzoleni, Gianpietro. 2008. Mediatization of politics. In: Wolfgang Donsbach (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Communication. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Retrieved on October 1st 2011 from: http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9781405131995_chunk_ g978140513199518_ss62-1 McQuail, Denis. 1992. Media Performance: Mass Communication and the Public Interest. London: Sage. McQuail, Denis and Karen Siune (eds.). 1998. Media Policy: Convergence, Concentration & Commerce. London: Sage. Noelle-Neumann, Elisabeth and Rainer Mathes. 1987. “The event as event” and the “event as news”: The significance of “consonance” for media effects research. European Journal of Communication 2: 391–414. Norris, Pippa. 2002. Social Capital and the News Media. Harvard International Journal of Press/ Politics 7(3): 3–8. Patterson, Miles L., Mary E. Churchill, Gary K. Burger and Jack L. Powell. 1992. Verbal and nonverbal modality effects on impressions of political candidates: Analysis from the 1984 Presidential Debates. Communication Monographs 59(3): 231–242. Poster, Mark. 2001. CyberDemocracy: Internet as a Public Sphere? In: Mark Poster (ed.), What’s the matter with the Internet, 171–188. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Potter, William J. 2013. Synthesizing a working definition of “Mass” Media. Review of Communication Research 1: 1–30.

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Rahimi, Babak. 2008. The politics of the internet in Iran. In: Mehdi Semati (ed.) Media, Culture and Society in Iran. Living with Globalization and the Islamic State, 37–56. Oxford/New York: Routledge. Reinemann, Carsten and Marcus Maurer. 2005. Unifying or polarizing? Short-term effects and post-debate consequences of different rhetorical strategies in televised political debates. Journal of Communication 55: 775–794. Rydgren, Jens. 2005. Is extreme right-wing populism contagious? Explaining the emergence of a new party family. European Journal of Political Research 44(3): 413–437. Salgado, Susana. 2007. Os Veículos da Mensagem Política. Estudo de uma Campanha Eleitoral nos Media [The Vehicles of Political Message: Studying an Electoral Campaign in the Media]. Lisbon: Livros Horizonte. Salgado, Susana. 2009. Politics, citizenship and the news media in Angola and Mozambique. In: Akis Kalaitzidis (ed.) Global Politics in the Dawn of the 21st Century, 305–316. Athens: Atiner. Salgado, Susana. 2010. Os Candidatos Presidenciais: Construção de Imagens e Discursos nos Media [Portuguese Presidential Candidates: Construction of Images and Discourses in the Media]. Coimbra: Minerva Coimbra. Salgado, Susana. 2012. The Web in African countries. Exploring the possible influences of the Internet in the democratization processes. Information, Communication & Society 15: 1373– 1389. Salgado, Susana and Jesper Strömbäck. 2012. Interpretive journalism: A review of concepts, operationalizations and key findings. Journalism 13(2): 144–161. Salgado, Susana. Forthcoming. The Internet and Democracy Building in Lusophone African Countries. Surrey: Ashgate. Sandoval, Marisol and Christian Fuchs. 2010. Towards a critical theory of alternative media. Telematics and Informatics 27: 141–150. Schulz, Winfried. 2004. Reconstructing mediatization as an analytical concept. European Journal of Communication 19(1): 87–101. Sfez, Luden. 1993. Dictionnaire Critique de la Communication. Paris: PUF. Shah, Dhavan, Jack McLeod and So-Hyang Yoon. 2001. Communication, context and community. An exploration of print, broadcast, and internet influences. Communication Research 28(4): 464–506. Shaughnessy, Haydn and Fuente Cobo. 1990. The Cultural Obligations of Broadcasting. Manchester: European Institute for the Media. Siune, Karen and Wolfgang Truetzschler (eds.). 1992. Dynamics of Media Politics: Broadcasts and Electronic Media in Western Europe. London: Sage. Sparrow, Bartholomew. 1999. Uncertain Guardians: The News Media as a Political Institution. Baltimore, ML: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Strömbäck, Jesper. 2008. Four phases of mediatization: An analysis of the mediatization of politics. The International Journal of Press/Politics 13: 228–246. Sussman, Leonard R. 1979. Mass media: Opportunities and threats. Annals of the American Academy 442: 77–83. Tichenor, Phillip J., George A. Donohue and Clarice N. Olien. 1970. Mass media flow and differential growth in knowledge. Public Opinion Quarterly 34: 159–170. Wilhelm, Anthony G. 2000. Democracy in the Digital Age: Challenges to Political Life in Cyberspace. London/New York: Routledge.

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15 The media as political actors Abstract: This chapter provides a history of the media as political actors and identifies key principles that have shaped their role in both democratic and authoritarian polities (i.e., information, interpretation, participation, critical scrutiny). In addition, the chapter explores recent trends impacting on the performance of that role, such as the emergence of the Internet and, as a consequence of that process, a globalized public sphere of transnational news media outlets. It is argued that to make the Internet truly valuable as a political resource, democratic societies continue to require the work of skilled, professional journalists and their sense making, interpretative functions. Because of that journalists and their organizations remain crucial to the translation of content into meaningful messages. Key Words: political journalism, history of journalism, information, interpretation, participation, critical scrutiny, Internet, globalized public sphere

1 Introduction This chapter provides a history of the media as political actors, and identifies the key principles which have shaped the performance of their role in both democratic and authoritarian polities. Then it explores recent trends impacting on the performance of that role, such as the emergence of the Internet and, as a consequence of that process, a globalized public sphere of transnational news media outlets. It is a positive story, in so far as democratic politics can be shown to be on the ascendant globally. Freedom House research shows that more than two thirds of the world’s population now live in societies classified as democratic.1 When we recall that less than a century ago women did not have the right to vote, and that black people were denied citizenship rights as recently as the 1960s in the United States, the 1970s in Australia, and the 1990s in South Africa, it is beyond dispute that huge progress has been made in the establishment of democratic political structures. In 2011 and 2012 many of the countries of the Middle East and Asia were engulfed in bitter and often bloody struggles for democratic reform, which continued as this essay went to press. The media have often played an important and constructive role in those processes, giving expression and publicity to the voices of pro-democracy reformers (see also the chapter by Hertog and Zuercher). In the established liberal capitalist societies, on the other hand, there have been many criticisms expressed by politi-

1 See Freedom In The World, at http://www.freedomhouse.org/reports.

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cians, scholars and journalists alike about the media’s negative contribution to democracy. In June 2007, just before he left office, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair described the political media as “a feral beast”, with a tendency to seek to tear the careers and reputations of politicians apart.2 In his memoirs and those of his colleagues in government the role of the political media figured large, and often in a critical context (Blair 2010; Campbell 2007; Mandelson 2010). In Australia, former cabinet minister Lindsay Tanner has written critically of the “sideshow” politics in which he argues the media in his country have been complicit (2011). Contemporary politics takes place within an environment of expanded media and accelerated news cycles, in which publics have access to more information, and more opportunities to participate in the public sphere, than ever before in human history. And yet, there is pervasive pessimism about the value of the media as a democratic resource. This pessimism is reflected in concerns about the crisis of public communication expressed in the 1990s by scholars such as Blumler and Gurevitch (1995), and by journalists such as James Fallows who coined the term “hyperadversarialism” to describe the relationship between politics and the media in the United States (1996). John Steel writes of the “democratic deficit” which many perceive to be a consequence of these and other transformations in the political communication environment, and “widespread disillusionment of traditional politics among the public” (2012: 51). Even as the media have expanded dramatically in recent times with the growth of digital and online platforms, providing as they do so enhanced opportunities for public participation, concerns about the functionality of the politics-media relationship have risen on the public agenda. Media and political science scholarship has been highly critical of the media-politics interaction since at least the 1990s, and continues to be pessimistic (Aalberg and Curran 2011; Davis 2010). Inside and out of the academy, there is a perceived crisis of confidence and trust in the public sphere and the political process, and concern for the quality of governance as nation states face major and increasingly complex policy challenges. This essay will consider both positive and negative appraisals of the developing role of the media as political actors, and the direction of trends in the relationship as we see them in a variety of political structures (see also the chapters by Shaefer, Shenhav and Balmas, by van Aelst and by Jandura and Friedrich).

2 The media as political actors To describe media organisations and practitioners as political “actors” is to suggest that they have the capacity not merely to observe and report on political processes 2 For the full text of the speech, delivered on June 12th 2007 at the Reuters building in London, see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/6744581.stm.

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(see next section), but also to shape and influence those processes. Through at least some of the various forms of political media content which fill the public sphere, media actors aspire to persuade audiences, readers and users that their interpretation of events is correct, and that the latter should behave accordingly. For example, a privately-owned newspaper will tend to have a particular ideological slant, or editorial bias, through which political events and debates will be interpreted and discussed, often in declamatory terms. A press editorial (or op-ed) often explicitly calls for a collective response, such as “Vote for this candidate or party, and not the other”; “That leader should resign, and another take over”. The newspaper in this case (representing the views of its staff and owners) is an active participant in the political process, and not merely the detached observer. The rise of the blogosphere and online media has intensified this aspect of the political media’s role, with the great majority being private, opinionated, highly ideological voices. To act politically in this way has been a feature of the media in liberal capitalism for four centuries – is indeed a characteristic of media in a democracy – with only the public service media organisations required to maintain political neutrality in their coverage (see also the chapters by Puppis and by Jandura and Friedrich). The effectiveness of the media as political actors depends on the size of audience for a particular outlet, and the trust accorded that outlet as a source of analysis and opinion. As the 2012 Leveson inquiry into the media-political relationship in the UK showed, big selling newspapers such as the Sun exerted significant influence on political parties and even governments throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, because politicians perceived that editors and proprietors could influence their readers. Whether such influence has been real or imagined remains an unresolved research question for media scholars, but even the perception of influence, or the potential for influence, has real effects on the behavior of politicians and parties (see also the chapter by van Aelst).

3 Key Normative Principles The role of the media as political actors is determined, first, by the nature of the political environment within which they operate (see also the chapter by Puppis and Esser and Pfetsch). These can be categorised on a spectrum stretching from authoritarian structures at one extreme, to democratic structures at the other, with variations in between. Iran, for example, has regular elections – one hallmark of democratic government – but a very limited degree of media and intellectual freedom, in which dissent from the ruling theocracy can mean exile, imprisonment or death. The South East Asian state of Singapore has a democratic constitution modeled on the Westminster parliament, but is ranked only “partly free” by the Freedom House organization. Post-Soviet Russia has elections, but as the 2012 re-elec-

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tion of Vladimir Putin to the Russian presidency showed, a deeply flawed polity. There is no “pure” democracy, then, or absolute authoritarianism beyond some very extreme, totalitarian regimes such as the system of dynastic rule which exists in North Korea – merely approximations to one or the other. Most countries in the world today veer toward the democratic, we can assert with confidence, but display constraints on their democratic functioning which are the consequence of various limiting factors. These are the subjects of regular debate within the public spheres of these countries, and the media themselves may often be argued to contribute to the democratic deficit, as in the case of the phone-hacking scandal which engulfed News International in the United Kingdom in 2011 (McKnight 2012). Before exploring those issues in depth, however, let’s consider the history of the politics-media relationship (see also the chapter by Schulz).

3.1 Information In the early period of the media’s involvement in the political process – which we can date from Johann Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1440, and the subsequent evolution of the mechanical means of reproduction of texts (Eisenstein 1983) – the societies within which they operated were authoritarian in character. Early modern Europe was governed by feudal political structures within which the power of the monarch, or Pope was absolute, because divinely ordained. The role of the media in medieval and early modern Europe was simply to provide information, or “intelligence” to feudal rulers (the name Intelligencer was used by several early newspapers). The information function of the media, expressed through the cultural form we now know as journalism, was at the core of their role in early modern Europe. Economic information about the price of goods and services was key to the functioning of markets. Military information was essential for the management of war, conflict and empire-building. The first newspapers, or “newsbooks”, provided this information in commodity form. They, and the people who wrote for them, the early correspondents (so called because their news often took the form of letters), did not dare to criticize power, or to facilitate debate on the performance of feudal governments. Indeed, it hardly occurred to them as a possibility, given the social codes and conventions of medieval times, when lords and masters exercised Godgiven powers of life and death over their subjects. The information these early media provided had a straightforward use value based on their contribution to the management of power by the absolute rulers of the day. They were principally agents of environmental monitoring and surveillance.

3.2 Interpretation The emergence of a recognizably modern role for the media in politics paralleled the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and can be seen as a precondition for

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the full realization of that process. As Habermas examined at length in his key 1969 work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, the rise of mercantile capitalism in Europe required a movement sway from authoritarian control of political expression towards enhanced freedom for the emerging bourgeoisie (English translation 1989). John Milton’s pamphlet of 1645, Aeropagitica, set out an intellectual rationale for freedom of thought and expression, based on the societal value of allowing rational argument to prevail in public debates about the conduct of policy, the economy and society in general (McNair 2009). Milton’s work coincided with the onset of the English civil war and its culmination in the “Glorious Revolution”, and the emergence of what Habermas called the public sphere – that communicative zone of a society where information, ideas and opinions circulate freely among interested political actors. Milton articulated a growing need – economic at core, since capitalism and free enterprise also required a level of freedom of political discourse and action which feudalism denied – of those actors to have their views articulated in public, discussed and acted upon (Eriksen and Weigard 2003; McNair 2011). Similar trends were occurring across Europe, in the coffee houses of Berlin, Paris, Vienna. Freedom of the press was, in this sense, a cultural prerequisite of bourgeois political ascendancy and the establishment of democracy across the continent, and thereafter in the rest of the world. In the course of the American Revolution and the development of the constitution of the United States, as Paul Starr’s history makes clear, freedom of the press was a key principle (2004) (see also the chapters by Kepplinger and by Hertog and Zuercher). The media’s role in this regard was, in addition to informing about events, to analyse, interpret and comment upon them. In this period, too, the advance of scientific knowledge was accelerating, and societies were rapidly becoming more complex and challenging from the management perspective. The journalistic media’s function of making sense of complex reality, even more central today, begins to take on urgency at this time. The interpretative function of the political media was expressed in various forms of essay and opinion journalism, or editorial, intended to provide not merely reportage of but commentary on significant events, processes and issues. As democratic institutions were established and consolidated, the importance of the information and interpretation functions of the media was embedded in normative liberal theory. For democracy to be meaningful, citizens (as the peoples of Europe and America were becoming) had to be informed, not just about the facts of a particular issue, but the variety of meanings and interpretations which attached to them. The contemporary concept of deliberative democracy embodies this role, in so far as it assumes that effective democracy must be based on the informed deliberations of those who take part in it (see also the chapters by Kepplinger and by Jandura and Friedrich).

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3.3 Participation The English Revolution involved two distinct political factions – the Royalists, or cavaliers, organized around King Charles; and the Roundheads, or pro-democracy reformers. As they reported the increasingly bloody conflict between the competing lobbies over the future direction of the country, the media in Britain began also to take sides and to participate in the struggle for or against democracy. They became partisan, or participants in the action, in addition to observers of it. Journalists and titles aligned themselves to one side or the other, and used their journalism to intervene actively. The participation of media organisations and individual journalists in politics remains a central feature of political media in the twenty-first century. Thus, in every liberal democratic society one finds a range of editorial viewpoints, usually encompassing right, left and centre of the ideological spectrum (although these terms have become somewhat problematic following the end of the cold war and the collapse of state socialism in Europe). The articulation of editorial opinions by private media organisations is regarded as legitimate and necessary in democracies, providing that there is sufficient diversity of opinion, or pluralism, to ensure an appropriate level of balance in the public sphere. Where there is a preponderance of right-wing or socially conservative views in the political media, for example, one often finds public expression of concern about the capacity of the media to adequately service the democratic process. To counter these concerns, most democratic societies impose ownership restrictions on journalistic media, with the intention of ensuring that no individual or corporation can establish a monopoly of opinion (see also the chapters by Puppis, by Jandura and Friedrich and by Hopmann). Recent controversies around the activities of News Corp media outlets in the UK and Australia have been based on the perception that Rupert Murdoch’s company, and his particularly ideological approach to media control (McKnight 2012) have wielded excessive political influence over a period of decades. This influence arose, it is argued by his critics, not only because of his large share of newspaper circulation in both countries (30 % in the UK; 70 % in Australia – to which can be added major TV news interests), but because of his close personal relationship with successive prime ministers and members of the political elite. As of this writing, News Corp continued to be the subject of intense public scrutiny of its journalistic standards and political influence. Public service media, which exist in many if not all democratic societies, are nearly always required to avoid political partisanship and intervention, restricting their role to that of critical scrutiny of politics as a whole (see below). The BBC and other public service media are prevented by law from editorializing in a party political context. This constraint reflects the perception that these electronic media have been so much more influential and visible in their societies than the many private media organisations with which they coexist, that it is necessary to ensure

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their political neutrality; their allegiance to democratic structures as a whole, rather than to any particular viewpoint within them. As the media environment has fragmented in recent times (see below) this rationale has weakened, and there has been pressure in some countries to permit public service journalism to express opinions with greater force and directness than has been the case traditionally. Such calls have been resisted, however, not least by politicians who understand that it is in everyone’s interest to have at least one source of information and analysis in the public sphere which can be relied upon to be neutral, objective and impartial with respect to political debate (see also the chapters by Salgado and by Jandura and Friedrich).

3.4 Critical scrutiny The scrutiny directed towards News Corp in several countries since the phonehacking scandal broke in 2011 reminds us that it is, of course, the media which are supposed to be the main vehicles for scrutiny of political power in a democracy. As democratic institutions developed from the time of the English Revolution (followed by the French and American revolutions in the next century), political philosophers such as Edmund Burke elaborated the notion of journalism as the Fourth Estate, or watchdog. The experience of feudalism taught the architects of the pioneering democracies that political power could not be left to its own devices, but had always to be subject to independent, critical scrutiny by recognized opposition forces, scholars and academic and other contributors to public sphere debates, and also by journalists. Power corrupts, it was understood, and the powerful needed to be monitored. In recognition of this need, the media had to be adversarial with respect to power, subjecting political and governmental action to rigorous examination and challenge. Habermas also identifies critical scrutiny, or publicity, as key to the media’s political role in a democracy, tying it to the notion of representation. The media in a democracy, he argued, represent the people before power, subjecting the latter to scrutiny on behalf of the people, ensuring that the powerful are aware of and listen to the views of those who elect them. This role grew up alongside those of partisanship (see above) and interpretation, in that journalists who analysed government and politics also developed a culture of critiquing and recommending change in the way things were run, enlisting their readers and audiences in support. This aspect of the media’s political role has been criticized by many commentators, as suggested in the introduction above. Blair’s speech on the “feral beasts” of political journalism was a reference to the view of many politicians, journalists and political media scholars, that legitimate critical scrutiny and adversarialism had over time evolved into a tendency towards what James Fallows called hyperadversarialism, reflected in increasing negativity and scandalization of political news.

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Journalists and media organisations have become gladiatorial in their political coverage, goes the argument, seeking confrontation for its own sake rather than pursuing genuine transgression on the part of politicians. Added to that is the heightened speed and intensity of the news cycle, which places politicians constantly on the defensive, and in reactive mode (see also the chapters by Stanyer, by van Aelst and by Hopmann). As Blair put it in his final public speech as prime minister in 2007: When I fought the 1997 election – just ten years ago – we took an issue a day. In 2005, we had to have one for the morning, another for the afternoon and by the evening the agenda had already moved on. You have to respond to stories also in real time. Frequently the problem is as much assembling the facts as giving them. Make a mistake and you quickly transfer from drama into crisis.

One could cite any number of examples of this phenomenon, and I will refer to just one – Barack Obama’s 2011 release of his birth certificate to prove that he was indeed born in the USA, and thus constitutionally entitled to be president. Despite the absurdity of the “Birthers” claims as to his place of birth, the nature of the hyperactive media environment within which they circulated required the President of the United States to intervene personally in an effort to push the news agenda back to what he regarded as more important issues. In his June 2007 speech Blair explained what he meant by referring to the political media as “a feral beast”. First, scandal or controversy beats ordinary reporting hands down. News is rarely news unless it generates heat as much as or more than light. Second, attacking motive is far more potent than attacking judgment. It is not enough for someone to make an error. It has to be venal. Conspiratorial. Third, the fear of missing out means today’s media, more than ever before, hunts in a pack. In these modes it is like a feral beast, tearing people and reputations to bits. But no one dares miss out.

Gordon Brown, Blair’s successor as Prime Minister, saw his unhappy premiership dominated by a succession of scandals and exposes. In the course of these his privacy was repeatedly violated. In one TV interview he was asked to respond to rumours that he was on anti-depressive drugs. Comments he made in an unguarded moment about an elector during the 2010 campaign were picked up by a Sky News microphone and broadcast to the world within minutes. Anecdotes and stories about him bullying Downing Street staff became commonplace. Regardless of the merits of Brown’s policies in office (and many of his difficulties with the media were self-inflicted), these examples illustrate the phenomenon Blair addressed in 2007 – of the media behaving like a pack of wild animals towards leadership – harrying and wounding it, then moving in for the kill (see also the chapter by Stanyer). Blair resigned as Prime Minister in 2007, before the exposure by the Telegraph newspaper of the UK MPs’ expenses “scandal”, but this story, which rumbled on

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for many months and transformed political culture in the UK, exemplifies the issues addressed by Blair in these quotes. In many cases, the exposure of the MPs expense claims provoked justified public outrage, as citizens learnt that thousands of pounds had been spent on home furnishings, or subscriptions to pay TV, or elaborate ornaments for MPs’ gardens. On the other hand, at times it seemed that a media witch hunt had been unleashed, in which any expenses by MPs, such as the costs of a second home in the city of London for MPs whose constituencies were far away and who could not therefore commute daily to their place of work, were framed as illegitimate. The feral beast of political journalism, in some cases, failed to distinguish between legitimate critical scrutiny of expense claims and the unreasonable savaging of honest MPs’ reputations. April 2011 saw the publication in Australia of a book about political culture by a former Labor Party minister, Lindsay Tanner. Tanner described the way in which the media environment shapes leadership strategy, and in terms which have broad international relevance. He talked about the politicians’ “primary currency of looking like you’re doing something”, and called the unit of this currency the “announceable” (see also the chapter by van Aelst). To maintain an appearance of activity and to feed the ravenous media, governments feel obliged to serve up a stream of announceables. The policy merit of these announcements is largely irrelevant, as long as they’re directed at tackling a perceived problem that attracts media coverage (…) the purpose of an announceable is to send a message, not to solve a problem (2011: 87).

The balance to be struck between legitimate adversarialism, therefore, and ferocious hyperadversarialism has been and remains a source of tension in the mediapolitics relationship. Media organisations pursue and harry political actors; political actors respond by turning to the communication professionals – the spin doctors, media advisers and consultants who play an increasingly strategic role in the political communication process (see also the chapter Kiousis and Strömbäck). And where politicians attack journalists for their perceived hostility and lack of respect for the democratic process, journalists attack the politicians’ growing reliance on public relations and spin, and attribute to this trend their own more confrontational and “hyper” adversarial styles. This, they argue, is their democratic duty as representatives of the public before power.

4 Recent developments 4.1 From representation to access To represent the public in the public sphere was to act as their champion, and to provide them with a platform for their own expressions of view. Thus, readers’ letters became a feature of media in democratic societies, and remain so today. In

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the digital era, of course, opportunities for readers, audiences and users to be represented and participate in the public sphere have expanded dramatically, as therefore have the channels for critical scrutiny and commentary to be exercised. But even in the era of the blogosphere and user generated content, media organisations remain central to the articulation of public opinion (see also the chapters by Hertog and Zuercher and by Wolling and Emmer). In addition to readers’ letters and the various forms of online feedback which citizens can contribute to the contemporary public sphere, broadcast organisations have developed new forms of direct access to TV and radio platforms, or mediated access (McNair, Hibberd, and Schlesinger 2003). The principle that citizens should have access to their politicians – for example in town hall meetings at election time – is a familiar one which predates the age of electronic media. But in the late twentieth century various media formats were developed to permit members of the public to engage with politicians directly, often live, and to mass audiences of millions of other citizens. Talkback radio in Australia and “shock jocks” in the US (Turner 2009); live public participation debate shows such as Question Time in the United Kingdom (and its equivalents in many other countries) require politicians to submit to direct scrutiny of a kind not experienced by previous generations. Questions are formulated and delivered by ordinary members of the public, who also make comments on the answers they receive. On talk back radio politicians must listen respectfully to the often angry views of listeners. Tony Blair pioneered in the UK the increasing visibility of political leaders, up to the most senior executive level, on live TV and radio formats. Blair participated in several editions of a format called Ask The Prime Minister, broadcast on primetime commercial TV, which required him to stand before a live audience and answer any questions they wished to put. Most questioners were polite and respectful in their questioning; some were angry; a few were downright insulting, in one case referring to Blair as George Bush’s “poodle” for his enthusiastic participation in the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Different countries vary in the degree of access they provide their citizens to political elites, and also in the degree of criticism they encourage. French politicians traditionally enjoyed a deferential political media which kept secret, for example, the private life of Francois Mitterand up to his death, when it was revealed that he had a long term mistress and a grown up daughter from the relationship. Nikolas Sarkozy was the first French politician to find the details of his private life and relationships covered by journalists in real time, and as president married to celebrity Carla Bruni, he permitted a much more transparent political coverage than any of his predecessors. Sarkozy, in this sense, can be regarded as France’s first “media president”. In Italy, similarly, journalistic deference and respect for authority characterized coverage of leaders, including Silvio Berlusconi, until the number and gravity of scandals around him and his circle became impossible to ignore by the Italian media.

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Thus, the pace of change in this dimension of democratic political culture has varied. But this culture of enhanced access to and public participation in mediated political debate, and the expectation that political leaders are accountable to their voters through contemporary communication channels, is a global phenomenon, further fuelled by the emergence of the Internet.

4.2 From passive audience to user-generated content The emergence of the Internet as a mass communication platform since the mid1990s amounts, many would argue, to the most important development in media and culture since the invention of print itself, more than six centuries before. Not only has it dissolved traditional boundaries of time and space which separated the publics of nation states, and severely undermined the capacity of those states, whether democratic or authoritarian in character, to control and police information within their borders; it has enabled the populations of those states to engage in public debate with unprecedented ease. The 2000s saw the rise of what some called “citizen journalism”, although this was a misnomer because not all who engaged in political debate through the Internet were citizens. Many were the subjects of authoritarian states, who found in the Internet new modes of channeling political communication from the sites of pro-democracy protests, or the civil war zones of Libya and Syria as decades-old dictatorships came under attack. Neither was it all journalism, if journalism can be defined as a type of professional communication practice. Photographs, video, blogs and posts on social networking sites – these were the modes in which amateur communicators utilized emerging digital technologies to inject content into the public domain. The rise of user generated content – a more accurate and generalizable term for this phenomenon – has accompanied recent and ongoing pro-democracy movements in Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. In the wake of the “Arab spring” movements in particular, there has been a global debate about the relationship between digitalization, user generated content and democratization (see also the chapter by Hertog and Zuercher and by Wolling and Emmer). In the advanced capitalist world the emergence of Wikileaks from 2006 provided a dramatic demonstration of the capacity of the Internet to evade censorship and disrupt political authority with new forms of critical scrutiny. Australian-born Julian Assange’s mission to make power more transparent and accountable through the unauthorised “dumping” of vast quantities of classified or confidential information on such matters as war fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, diplomatic processes amongst the world’s states, intelligence data on leaders such as Mohammad Gaddhafi and Silvio Berlusconi, made just as much trouble for the US and other western governments as did those who uploaded mobile phone footage of the murder of Neda Soltan in Tehran during the 2009 pro-democracy protests. The unparalleled opportunities for uncensored, unauthorised communication –

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through blogs, social networking sites, the use of smart, mobile devices – in this way provoked crises of political credibility for governments across the world. They also changed the structure of the public sphere, fragmenting and globalizing it, ushering in an era of “communication or cultural chaos” (McNair 2006).

4.3 From national to global public sphere In Habermas’ classic formulation the political public sphere was conceived as an elite space of educated, wealthy, mainly male participants who accessed political knowledge from narrowly defined news formats and outlets (broadsheet newspapers, “serious” TV news and current affairs, periodicals). More recently, as democratic societies have experienced major transformation of their social and cultural patterns (the establishment of women’s rights, for example, and the promotion of multiculturalism) scholars have adopted a more inclusive, arguably more democratic model of a niched, or segmented public sphere servicing multiple publics, comprising “straight” news and journalism but also formats which combine elements of journalism with entertainment, and which relate to the popular as well as elite sectors of the media market, such as talkback radio, or daytime TV talk shows (Higgins 2008; McNair 2000). A typical edition of Question Time in the UK, for example, or Q&A in Australia, in its efforts to represent the demographic profiles of those respective countries, will include men and women, politicians and entertainers, a variety of ethnicities, in the makeup of its panel. Alongside the technologically-driven expansion of the political media system, and the new forms of public participation in political debate these transformations allow, scholars have described the rise of a “postmodern” public sphere (Brants and Voltmer 2011). Here, issues such as the lifestyle and personality of celebrities, including politicians, traditionally regarded as trivial “soft news” and indicators of “personalization” in the democratic context, can become the opportunity for discussion and debate of “serious” issues such as ethics (Hartley 1996; Lumby 1999) (see also the chapter by Hopmann). At the same time, alongside the apparent rejection of traditional news formats by younger citizens (Harrington 2005) entertainment media such as satirical TV shows have been seen to play an increasingly important role in informing citizens about politics, and also in scrutinizing political activity in new ways that may be beneficial for democracy (Baym 2010). These hybrid media forms are argued to be playing an ever more central role in political discourse on a global level (Baym 2007) (see also the chapters by Moy, Johnson, and Bartel and by Holbert, Hill, and Lee). The extension of the public sphere as an analytical concept, to include popular as well as elite, and entertainment as well as information formats, has occurred alongside its technology-driven expansion as a communicative space. The rise of 24-hour news on TV and radio, followed by the explosion of the Internet, has dramatically increased the quantity of political information available to the public

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(Bruns 2008; Cushion and Lewis 2012). The public sphere has also been globalized, as news and other information outlets cross boundaries of time and space. The viewer of TV news can watch the overthrow of corrupt elites in the Arab world, live as it happens, by a combination of Twitter and YouTube uploads, 24-hour news presence and always-on TV news at home. The impact of such spectacle on audiences outside the country in question is as uncertain as the relationship with the protesters inside (see above). All one can say is that the public sphere has been globalized to an unprecedented extent, and that this trend can reasonably be hypothesized to contribute to a globalization of democracy itself. In a kind of demonstration effect, the dissemination of images of democratic protest heightens the visibility of democratic principles across a variety of political cultures, and may be argued to generate collective empathy and even material support for the protests. Would the NATO intervention in Libya which contributed to the downfall of Mohammad Gadhaffi have occurred without pictures of the atrocities being committed by his supporters? From another perspective, would President Bush have been required in 2004 to apologise to the Arab people as a whole, on live transnational TV, for the crimes committed by US troops in Abu Ghraib, had pictures of the offending behaviours not been uploaded and distributed to the world? It seems unlikely (McNair 2006) (see also the chapters by Robinson and by Hertog and Zuercher).

5 The political role of media in the digital age: Challenges and constraints The media, then, have played a key role in the conduct of democratic politics ever since the bourgeois revolutions of the seventeenth century, and the central role of the media in the construction of an informed citizenry and deliberative democracy is widely accepted in the political science and media studies literature (Aalberg and Curran 2011; Davis 2010; Louw 2010). The emergence of the Internet has generated new forms of political media, and of political participation, in both democratic and authoritarian societies. The processes of governance and public administration have become more transparent as a result, and political elites more accountable. On the other hand, there has been criticism in both academic and journalistic circles of the quality of the information explosion caused by the Internet. As we have seen, politicians bemoan the accelerated intensity of the globalized public sphere, and the constraints this places on their capacity to govern effectively. As citizens of complex societies facing formidable challenges such as climate change and the increased threat of global pandemics, we have a clear interest in good governance, and should take seriously the arguments of such as Blair and Tanner quoted above. Not all denunciation of the “feral beast” of contemporary political

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journalism is motivated by politicians’ self-interest in avoiding scrutiny (see also the chapter by Jandura and Friedrich). A further criticism is that the massively expanded quantity of information in circulation around the globalized public sphere is equaled only by its poor quality as a democratic resource. Much of what appears on the Internet is incoherent noise, or raw, unprocessed data. Again, one can have sympathy with this view, while welcoming the democratizing potential of digital technologies. The fact that many speak does not mean that the quality of deliberative democracy is better. To make the Internet truly valuable as a political resource, democratic societies continue to require the work of skilled, professional journalists and their sense making, interpretative functions. They can sift and sort the communication noise which surrounds citizens in the twenty-first century, and which is beyond any individual’s capacity to absorb and process. Members of the public can, through user generated content, contribute to the political communication process to an unprecedented degree, but journalists remains crucial to the translation of that content into meaningful messages.

References Aalberg, Toril and James Curran (eds.). 2011. How Media Inform Democracy: A Comparative Approach. London: Routledge. Baym, Geoffrey. 2007. Crafting new communicative models in the televisual sphere: Political interviews on The Daily Show. The Communication Review 10: 93–115. Baym, Geoffrey. 2010. From Cronkite to Colbert: The Evolution of Broadcast News. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Blair, Tony. 2010. A Journey. London: HarperCollins. Blumler, Jay and Michael Gurevitch. 1995. The Crisis of Political Communication. London: Routledge. Brants, Kees and Katrin Voltmer. 2011. Political Communication in Post-Modern Democracy. London: Sage. Bruns, Axel. 2008. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang. Campbell, Alastair. 2007. The Blair Years. London: Hutchinson. Cushion, Stephen and Justin Lewis (eds.). 2010. The Rise of 24-Hour News Television: Global Perspectives. New York: Peter Lang. Davis, Aeron. 2010. Political Communication and Social Theory. London: Routledge. Eriksen, Erik and Jarle Weigard. 2003. Understanding Habermas. London: Continuum. Eisensten, Elizabeth. 1983. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fallows, James. 1996. Breaking the News. New York: Pantheon Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. London: Polity Press. Harrington, Stephen. 2005. The ‘Democracy of Conversation’: The Panel and the public sphere. Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy 116: 75–87. Hartley, John. 1996. Popular Reality. London: Arnold.

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Higgins, Michael. 2008. Media and Their Publics. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Louw, Eric. 2010. The Media and the Political Process. London: Sage. Lumby, Catharine. 1999. Gotcha: Life in a Tabloid World. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. McKnight, David. 2012. Rupert Murdoch: An Investigation of Political Power. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. McNair, Brian. 2000. Journalism and Democracy: An Evaluation of the Political Public Sphere. London: Routledge. McNair, Brian. 2006. Cultural Chaos: Journalism, News and Power in a Globalised World. London: Routledge. McNair, Brian. 2009. News & Journalism in the UK. London: Routledge. McNair, Brian. 2011. An Introduction to Political Communication. London: Routledge. McNair, Brian, Matthew Hibberd and Philip Schlesinger. 2003. Mediated Access: Broadcasting and Democratic Participation in the Age of Mediated Politics. Luton: University of Luton Press. Mandelson, Peter. 2010. The Third Man: Life at the Heart of New Labour. London: HarperCollins. Starr, Paul. 2004. The Creation of the Media. New York: Basic Books. Steel, John. 2012. Journalism and Free Speech. London: Routledge. Tanner, Lindsay. 2011. Sideshow: Dumbing Down Democracy. Melbourne: Scribe. Tiffen, Rod. 1989. News and Power. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Turner, Graeme. 1996. Post-journalism: News and current affairs programming from the late 80s to the present. Media International Australia 82: 78–91. Turner, Graeme. 2009. Politics, radio and journalism in Australia: The influence of talkback. Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism 10: 411–430. Young, Sally (ed.). 2007. Government Communication in Australia. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Young, Sally. 2011. How Australia Decides: Election Reporting and the Media. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.

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16 The production of political coverage: The push and pull of power, routines and constraints Abstract: This chapter discusses the journalistic practices shaping the reporting of politics. It understands political journalism as a subspace within the journalistic field that interacts intensively with the political field, because this theoretical approach highlights the power relations and world views produced by the insider culture of journalists and political actors. Moreover, the chapter suggests that this insider culture affords political journalists privileged access to information, but may also hamper their autonomy and the transparency of their actions. Further, the chapter argues that the routines and constraints of news production only strengthen this reliance on authoritative sources. Technological change and commercial pressures, however, may represent a challenge to this relationship and the practices which govern it. The chapter closes with a call for studies on political journalism in non-Western contexts, on non-elite, local media and for more comparative research efforts in order to broaden the rather partial and limited picture of political journalism we have so far. Key Words: political journalism, journalistic field, autonomy of journalism, news values, news routines, opinion-leading media

1 Introduction This chapter discusses the journalistic practices surrounding the reporting of politics. It makes the argument that the practices of political reporting are underpinned by a key paradox: On the one hand, journalists are supposed to be in an adversarial relationship to concentrations of power, acting as advocates of the public (Higgins 2008). They are central to the media’s role as a watchdog on government, holding it accountable for its actions through constant scrutiny, and providing citizens with the information that they need to make political decisions. The editorial processes involved in the production of political news have profound consequences for what information is available to audiences: The gatekeeping, news selection and agenda-setting work of journalism determine the universe of available political information, including what news events are covered and which individuals are given a voice, and which remain invisible to the public. On the other hand, political journalists are also frequently understood as being part of an “insider” political elite, complicit and intricately intertwined with political power

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(e.g., McNair 2011). This privileged insider status, in turn, comes to shape the priorities of news production, alongside more subtle institutional constraints such as production routines and the spatial and temporal organization of news-gathering. The relationship between political actors and journalists has been raised as an issue of concern in relation to debates over the health of democracy and citizenship. This discussion has become particularly heated over the past few decades as scholars and observers have grappled with evidence of declining voter engagement and political participation, and an increase in political disenchantment and cynicism. There is by now a fairly long-standing and well-established set of arguments suggesting, as Fallows (1998) memorably put it, that audiences “believe that the news media have become too arrogant, cynical, scandal-minded and destructive” (p. 3) in their coverage of politics. This, in turn, is alleged to generate a “spiral of cynicism” among citizens (Capella and Jamieson 1992). Such arguments are often associated with a “media malaise” thesis, which suggests that the media are responsible for public disengagement or malaise because of their negative and cynical coverage of politics (see also the chapters by Hopmann and by Maurer). The evidence for this thesis is, however, debatable, as scholars who have studied the phenomenon have been frequently found more robust support for the alternative hypothesis that the consumption of political news may actually be mobilizing, rather than alienating audiences. Along those lines, there is evidence for “causal and reciprocal relationships between political interest and attention to political news, and between political interest and exposure to some, but not all, news media” (Strömbäck and Shehata 2010: 575; see also Newton 2005; Norris 2000). Among the writers who have provided the most careful analyses of the structural causes of public disenchantment with politics – and the place of journalism within them – are Jay Blumler, Michael Gurevitch and Stephen Coleman, who have examined what they see as “a crisis of public communication that is sapping the vitality of democratic political culture” (Blumler and Coleman 2010: 140; see also Blumler and Gurevitch 1995). Among other things, the crisis is evidenced in the decline in voting and other forms of political activism, and an increase in voter cynicism. To Blumler and Coleman (2010), there are a series of underlying causes for this crisis, including the increasingly adversarial nature of political reporting, the emphasis on politics as a game, the competitive nature of journalism and politics, the burgeoning of political news and information sources, and the emergence of a “post-deferential” culture in which politicians are forced to compete for attention with popular culture (see also the chapters by Stanyer, by Aalberg and by Hopmann). These trends, they suggest, have alarming consequences for processes of political representation and citizenship: Political representation has come to be an act of ventriloquism in which the public is left feeling like inanimate dummies, spoken for and sometimes spoken to, but rarely spoken with.

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The demos have become outsiders, some gaping at the political show through the prism of an increasingly cynical media that appears to be run by a clique of entrenched insiders, others firmly turning their backs on it in varying degrees of distaste (Blumler and Coleman 2010: 142).

Clearly, then, in their views and those of other observers, the production of political news – and the relationships between political actors, journalists and citizens which inform it – has profound consequences for democracy. Related arguments focus on examining the conditions for news production, making the case that there is a crisis in political journalism arising from organizational constraints which limit the ability of reporters to fulfill their role in democracy. This crisis leads “towards a more conformist, less critical reporting environment which is increasingly likely to prove supportive of incumbent governments” (e.g., Barnett and Gaber 2001: 2) (see also the chapter by Stanyer). The chapter will explore some of these constraints in more detail as central to understanding the production of political news. Sociologically, political news production is a broad church, encompassing many kinds of professional practice, as well as complex internal and external relations. The category of the “political journalist” could be understood to entail anything from parliamentary correspondents to celebrity news anchors, local council reporters, political bloggers, and news agency stringers. These professional roles cover over a variety of specific work practices, positions in the newsroom hierarchy, and specialized skills. Here, although the chapter briefly considers a broader array of professional practices, the main focus is primarily on the production of political content at the national level – in large part because this is by far the area treated in most detail by scholarly research. Nonetheless, there is evidence to suggest the salient impact of an increasing global public sphere (e.g., Volkmer 1999) on news production practices, including the emergence of 24-hour news broadcasters with a global reach (Cushion and Lewis 2010), alongside the continuing importance of international news agencies and foreign correspondents (Hannerz 2004; Paterson 2011) and local news (Franklin 2006). These developments, while only mentioned in passing here, are part of the broader landscape which informs the production of political news. The chapter opens by considering the distinctive characteristics of political reporting as a professional field, and considers the journalistic practices of political reporting, and the institutional constraints which shape them, including temporal and spatial constraints of news production. The chapter finally considers how new media technologies, including the rise of social media, are creating new challenges and opportunities for journalists. While many of these trends shape journalism as a whole, they have had a particularly significant impact on the professional practices of political journalism and raise fundamental questions about both its form and viability.

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2 Political reporting as a professional field Political reporters are in constant contact with powerful political actors. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu introduced the idea of viewing social practices through the lens of distinctive and increasingly specialized and autonomous “fields.” In drawing on such terminology, Bourdieu called attention to the analytical usefulness of examining spheres of action with their own internal hierarchies, power relations, forms of tacit assumptions, and internally relevant markers of achievement and distinction; or what he referred to as forms of capital (e.g., Bourdieu 1984; Bourdieu 2005; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992; see also Benson and Neveu 2005). Though fields have increasing degrees of autonomy, they also interact in significant and determining ways with other fields. The journalistic field is widely “seen as part of the field of power; that is, it tends to engage with first and foremost those agents who possess high volumes of capital” (Benson and Neveu 2005: 5). In this context, interactions between the journalistic and political field are particularly relevant, and Bourdieu has written about this relationship suggesting, in language echoing that of scholars of mediatization, that the journalistic field is both increasingly influencing, and influenced by, the political field (Bourdieu 2005: 41). To Champagne (2005) the journalistic field is caught between the fields of politics and the market, weakening the autonomy of its enterprise. Marchetti (2005) traced the increasingly specialized subspaces within the journalistic field as a whole, demonstrating that we need a more differentiated analysis of these subspaces because of the radically diverse backgrounds, experiences and practices of actors within them. Further, such an analysis also needs to consider the interactions of the logics of each subfield with external logics, such as the logics of particular media outlets or types of media, the journalistic field as a whole as well as that of broader mediatized social spaces (including that of politics) (Marchetti 2005: 79) (see also the chapters by Pfetsch and Esser and by van Alest). The notion of field theory, as advanced by Bourdieu and his followers, is an indispensable resource for understanding the sociological world inhabited by political journalists – or what other authors in the book refer to as “political communication cultures” (see for example the chapter by Pfetsch and Esser). It is particularly useful in highlighting the push and pull of autonomy and interrelations with other fields but also picks up on structural causes for the close relationship between political and journalistic actors, and signals the need for a differentiated analysis of journalistic subfields. As research on political correspondents over the past four decades has demonstrated, they constitute an elite political grouping; better educated and compensated, and more senior than the broader journalistic field (e.g., Tunstall 1970; Hess 1986; Wahl-Jorgensen 2009). Moreover, research has highlighted, in line with the observations of Bourdieu and his followers, that not only do political journalists constitute an elite within

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the broader journalistic profession; they are also closely linked with the politicians that they report on and are supposed to scrutinize through their reporting. Political journalists and politicians interact in the same narrow professional and social circles (see Marchetti 2005). What King and Schudson (1995) wrote about Washington politics is probably true of the ways in which politicians and journalists interact in legislatures around the world: “The inhabitants of the world of Washington politics, naturally enough, talk more to one another than to other people, but there is the danger that this practice can become self-enclosed” (p. 150). The terminology that has arisen around this phenomenon reflects the insularity of such environments: In the US, observers refer to goings on “Inside the Beltway” (around Washington D.C.), whereas the phrase, “The Westminster bubble” is used in the UK (e.g., Wring 2005) to describe the self-contained universe of journalists and political actors who interact in the hallowed corridors of Parliament (see also the chapter by van Aelst). King and Schudson (1995) examined the prevailing journalistic narrative which described former US President Ronald Reagan as a highly popular political leader, on account of his unsurpassed communication skills, captured in the widely circulating moniker, “The Great Communicator.” King and Schudson challenged this account on the basis of opinion poll data, arguing that compared “to his elected predecessors, Reagan had the lowest average approval rating for the first two years of his administration – precisely the years his legend as the Great Communicator grew” (King and Schudson 1995: 134). They documented that political journalism has tended to be a largely oral culture, relying far more on face-to-face conversations than on evidence from documents and public opinion polls, leaving both journalists and politicians vulnerable to drawing conclusions that may resonate within their insider universe, but have little relevance to the prevailing public mood. In line with this observation, evidence suggests that, like other journalistic subcultures, political reporting has historically conducted its business at some remove from its audiences and publics, making assumptions about its views and desires which are based on common-sense understandings circulating within the newsroom, rather than systematic data (Herbst 1998; Lewis, Inthorn, and WahlJorgensen 2005). This, however, may be changing at a time where new technologies are enabling increasing audience quantification (e.g., Anderson 2011) and hence a far more acute and constantly updated awareness of audience behavior and preferences. Nonetheless, these long-standing trends point to a certain insularity in the culture of political journalists – something which scholars have analysed in terms of practices of “pack journalism” and “journalistic coorientation” (see also the chapter by Stanyer). In the UK, the so-called lobby journalists have traditionally constituted a particularly elite group among political journalists – a small group of reporters (less than 200) from national and international news organizations who enjoy privileged access to the heart of British political power. The lobby was instituted in

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1884, and the term refers to a physical location, as the status of being a lobby reporter provides access to the entrance to the House of Commons (Tunstall 1970: 3), where journalists can engage in informal interactions with politicians and their aides. But it also brings with it a broader set of privileges. Lobby correspondents have historically been granted access to documents prior to their broader dissemination, and have also been given twice-daily briefings by the Prime Minister’s staff (e.g., Barnett and Gaber 2001; Tunstall 1970). Though there is evidence that the power of the lobby is declining in the age of digital information and the rise of 24hour news (e.g., Barnett and Gaber 2001; Gaber 2011), the broader sociological reality of a privileged insider group of political journalists remains salient. As a lobby correspondent for the US news agency, Dow Jones, described his experience in looking from the outside in: I’d say that working in the lobby has been the most peculiar experience I’ve had in journalism so far (…) to a large extent the lobby and the structure of the lobby reflect in a sense the structure and the atmosphere of Parliament itself. It’s an extremely clubby institution (…) to a large extent it serves the status quo in whatever form you want to interpret that. (…) the lobby itself has its own hierarchy where the political editors of certain British newspapers are at the top of that hierarchy (Barnett and Gaber 2001: 40).

This journalist’s observation neatly encapsulates the distinctive power relations and hierarchies within this (very privileged) subspace of opinion-leading media within the journalistic field. These, in turn, are predicated on particular forms of cultural capital, and the fact that, like other fields, actors operating within it have a clear interest preserving the status quo (see also the chapters by Stanyer and by Salgado). At the same time, it also highlights how intricately intertwined the subspace of lobby reporters is with the political subspace of Parliament. These distinctive features are deliberately built into the processes of lobby journalism. The 1956 version of the Lobby rules, a document written to introduce new reporters into the venerable institution, opened with the following admonition: The technique of Lobby journalism can be fully acquired only by experience. It is a technique which brings the journalist into close daily touch with Ministers and Members of Parliament of all parties, and imposes upon him a very high standard of responsibility and discretion in making use of the special facilities given him for writing about political affairs (Tunstall 1970: 124).

Indeed, scholars and observers who have written on national political reporting frequently refer to the insular world formed by the close relationship between journalists and politicians. As Stephen Hess put it, “The echo chamber of this world gives a special resonance, like the corridors in a hospital or penal institution” (Hess 1981: 118). Hess’s description calls to mind Michel Foucault’s work on clinics and prisons (e.g., 1991, 1994), which demonstrates that such institutions generate their own distinctive disciplining logics which might, however, expand their influence to the population in general, as in the development of the “medical

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gaze” or the broader self-policing discipline arising from the invention of the prison. This suggests, in turn, that we should understand not just the disciplining consequences of the political echo chamber but also its broader consequences for society as a whole. There are clearly pragmatic reasons for the close relationship between politicians and journalists, as their informal, everyday face-to-face contacts facilitate the production of political news and, along those lines, for the dissemination of politicians’ messages. As such, the relationship is symbiotic; one which is based on a mutually beneficial arrangement. One of the key distinctive features of the relationship between political journalists and their political sources is the convention of allowing sources to speak “off the record,” attributed only as “sources close the White House” or “a Number 10 source,” to mention just a few examples of the nomenclature used to conceal the identity of sources. To the British political journalist and observer Michael Cockerell and his colleagues, in speaking about the role of the Lobby, these non-attribution rules “has turned the Lobby into the Prime Minister’s most useful tool for the political management of the news” (Cockerell, Hennessy, and Walker 1984: 33). It would, however, be misleading to suggest that these rules merely serve the interests of political actors. In fact, political journalists also view them as a key tool of their trade, because it allows them to publish information of a potentially sensitive nature which may otherwise remain out of the public domain. As such, both political journalists and their sources have a significant investment in maintaining the attribution rules, despite the fact that they go against increasingly voluble calls for transparency. This investment in the attribution rules was poignantly demonstrated in a study of the institutional setup of the politician/journalist relationship in the immediate aftermath of the establishment of the Scottish Parliament (Schlesinger, Miller, and Dinan 2001). In their study, based on ethnographic work and interviews with politicians and journalists engaged in the process of establishing the rules of conduct in the newly devolved Scottish Parliament, Philip Schlesinger and his colleagues found that there was great reluctance to move away from off-the-record briefings in favor of greater transparency. Journalists complained that doing so would compromise their relationships with sources and hence their access to information. As one political reporter told the authors, in justifying pressure from journalists to maintain the practice of off-the-record briefings: Openness and transparency is judged on the degree of information about what reaches the public sphere (…) and if that takes some element of off the record and ‘senior sources’ or whatever, then that is a service to the end of openness and transparency. Transparency of the actual process of government rather than the transparency of the process by which you get it (Schlesinger, Miller, and Dinan 2001: 101).

Such an understanding of transparency is clearly self-serving and fails to address the criticisms occasioned by the appearance of a secretive and intransparent rela-

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tionship between journalists and politicians. Nonetheless, this understanding also represents a time-honored view that the ends of transparency justify murkier means. Attribution rules are just one area, albeit a particularly poignant one, which reveals the precarious nature of political journalists’ information-gathering practices, and the ways in which it is heavily predicated on forms of secrecy which cement the insider status of political journalists, while raising questions about their autonomy (see also Tunstall 1970: 17). Certainly, the close relationship between political and journalistic elites has significant consequences for transparency and editorial independence. Outside of the well-trodden Anglo-American contexts, there are significant variations in the specific terms and nature of this relationship. Daniel Hallin and Paolo Mancini (2004) have suggested that media systems can be distinguished according to a series of features, including the extent to which journalists are instrumentalized. They define instrumentalization as “control of the media by outside actors – parties, politicians, social groups or movements, or economic actors seeking political influence – who use them to intervene in the world of politics” (p. 36). Hallin and Mancini (2004) argued that instrumentalization, alongside the pressures of commercialization, tends to be a threat to journalistic professionalism. Their analysis suggests that what they refer to as Mediterranean or Polarized Pluralist media systems – characterizing countries including France, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain – are marked by weaker professionalization and varying degrees of instrumentalization (Hallin and Mancini 2004: 67). Other scholars working in non-Western context have examined sustained and institutionalized practices of patronage, including bribes and the selective awarding of official advertising contracts (Hasty 2005; Macias Gonzalez 2012; Wahl-Jorgensen and Cole 2008). These practices share a relatively formalized and often widely known process for cementing journalistpolitician relations which translates into, for the journalists, favorable access to information and, for the politicians, favorable coverage, but at the same time threatens the autonomy of political journalists. Ethnographic and interview-based studies of the production of political content have tended to echo the idea that while the structurally, socially and physically close relationship between journalists and politicians generates opportunities for the dissemination of information, they may also compromise the independence of journalists and hence their ability to act as watchdogs on concentrations of power. Barnett and Gaber’s (2001) interview-based book on Westminster political correspondents chart four particular sources of pressure on political journalists which are, they suggest, having an adverse impact on the quality of journalistic work. First of all, they suggest that there has been a shift in the working relationship between political journalists and their sources as a result of the professionalization of political communication (e.g., Negrine et al. 2007) which has meant that spin doctors are now increasingly responsible for the communication of political

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messages. The exercise of tight control by increasingly savvy media advisers means, according to Barnett and Gaber (2001: 4–5), that it is becoming exceedingly difficult for political journalists to retain a critical distance (see also the chapter by Kiousis and Strömbäck). Secondly, they suggest that media ownership has an impact on media coverage, as powerful media moguls such as Rupert Murdoch take an active role in shaping political coverage and seeking to influence policymaking processes (Barnett and Gaber 2001: 5–6). Third and fourth, they trace an increasingly competitive, financially challenging and diversified media environment and changes in the working conditions of journalists, including the emergence of new technologies, the increasing requirement for multiskilling and shifting and increasingly casualized employment conditions in the media industry (Barnett and Gaber 2001: 7–8). The latter trends have only accelerated in recent years and are, as this chapter later discusses in more detail, reshaping the journalism profession as a whole (e.g., Mitchelstein and Boczkowski 2009). Another trend which has elevated the centrality of transparency in discussions over government communications is the rise of public relations as an industry which seeks to influence policy-making and media coverage behind the scenes (e.g., Davis 2002; Davies 2009; Franklin 2004; Schlesinger, Miller, and Dinan 2001). The growth and burgeoning sophistication of the PR industry, combined with the decline in the financial and human resources of media organizations, has meant that the vested (and usually corporate) interests represented by lobbyists are coming to be seen as the invisible center of the political communications process. As Davis (2002) has documented, the public relations industry is becoming more adept than ever at drawing on or even creating experts, institutions and statistics supporting their interested efforts at manufacturing “real news” (p. 172–173) (see the chapter by Kiousis and Strömbäck).

3 Newsroom procedures, routines and constraints The documentation of institutional constraints and their impact on the production of political content has been a long-standing theme in scholarship on political journalism. Jeremy Tunstall’s 1970 book, The Westminster Lobby Correspondents, examined the working conditions of British parliamentary correspondents, suggesting that their work is constrained by commercial pressures, news values and a lack of transparency and cooperation with journalists representing other specialisms. Michael Tracey’s (1978) book, The Production of Political Television, based in large part on ethnographic work and interviews with producers of political programmers on UK terrestrial television, and informed by a political economy approach, concluded that political television cannot straightforwardly be seen to play a fourth estate role: “[Rather] than serving the ‘electorate’ or the ‘people’ as an information-starved collective entity, and therefore acting out a role in a system

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of political communication, such television serves particular institutional and political interests” (Tracey 1978: 248). More specifically, Tracey’s study demonstrated that any individual ideologies of political journalists played a limited role in shaping content given the fact that political journalists, as consummate professionals, were strictly bound and inhibited by institutional ground rules, “by the concern of the organizational hierarchy with that adherence and by the routinized mechanics of programme making” (Tracey 1978: 250). Yet these very same rules – designed to ensure impartiality and editorial independence – meant that journalists were forced to rely primarily on sources within the government party, and these sources, in turn, were able to impose their own interpretation on news events (Tracey 1978: 250). As Brian McNair (2011) noted, the ways in which the doctrine of impartiality is typically practiced “works to contain political debate within a more or less tightly drawn consensus, which admits only an established political class and often marginalises or excludes others” (57–58) (see also the chapters by Jandura and Friedrich and by Hopmann). This pattern has been discussed in a different context in McNair’s chapter in this volume, where a more detailed discussion suggested that political news tends to privilege authoritative sources. Indeed, broader studies of sourcing patterns reveal that the most powerful – and, in particular, political elites – are privileged in reporting, and that this means that their frames and interpretations will overwhelmingly be the dominant ones. For example, in their classic study of the public debate over mugging in the UK, Stuart Hall and his colleagues (1978) demonstrated that government sources were able to serve as the “primary definers” who settled the interpretative framework for stories which all other sources as well as journalists – “secondary definers” – were forced to follow. In the context of political coverage, resource-rich sources are able to determine what counts as rationality in any given case, whereas resource-poorer groups are forced to rely on spectacular strategies and tactics (e.g., Davis 2002; DeLuca and Peeples 2001) (see also the chapters by Stanyer and by Hertog and Zuercher). One of the recurring questions preoccupying those studying political reporting has been its ability to influence policy-making and its contribution to agendasetting (see also the chapter by van Aelst), or to determining what issues the public thinks are important (see also the chapter by Arendt and Matthes). A closely related area is that of news values research, which has focused on the criteria by which journalists and their news organizations decide which news events to cover, and which to ignore. This area of research was pioneered by Johan Galtung and Mari Ruge, who took up the apparently simple question of how events become news (Galtung and Ruge 1965: 65). They outlined a set of “news values” informing journalists’ selection of stories and angles. Among these, they highlighted reference to elite people (such as politicians), and suggested that events which are culturally meaningful, already in the news, and unfold within the publication

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cycle of a news medium are more likely to attract coverage. Subsequent scholarly analyses have built on these findings. Among them, Schulz’s (1982) work proposed six dimensions of news selections, including “status (elite nation, elite institution, elite person), valence (aggression, controversy, values, success); relevance (consequence, concern); identification (proximity, ethnocentrism, personalization, emotions); consonance (theme, stereotype, predictability); and dynamics (timeliness, uncertainty, unexpectedness)” (summarized in O’Neill and Harcup 2009: 165). Political news – especially at the national level – fits particularly well with such criteria, as a high-status form of news often predicated on controversy and conflict, featuring a high degree of relevance and identification as well as predictability. There is some agreement that news values form part of a tacit knowledge which is “passed down to new generations of journalists through a process of training and socialization” (Harrison 2006: 153; Harcup and O’Neill 2001); an unspoken set of rules which are learned on the job and become central to journalists’ ways of life. Nonetheless, Peter Golding and Philip Elliott (1999), in their ground-breaking study, Making the News, originally published in 1979, took a critical view of the news values literature. To them, the approach is guilty of embracing the mythology of journalism, celebrating the novelty, excitement and creativity of covering unknown and breaking news stories: “[N]ews production is rarely the active application of decisions of rejection or promotion to highly varied and extensive material. On the contrary, it is for the most part the passive exercise of routine and highly regulated procedures in the task of selecting from already limited supplies of information” (p. 118). They argued that decisions about news selection derive from assumptions on the basis of three principal concerns. While the first of these relates to the importance of the story to the audience, the second and third factors purely pertain to the ways in which the story fits the practical concerns of the news organization: First, accessibility is understood in terms of two factors, prominence and ease of capture. Prominence refers to the extent to which the event is “known to the organization” while ease of capture reflects “how available to journalists is the event, is it physically accessible, manageable technically, in a form amenable to journalism, is it ready-prepared for easy coverage, will it require great resources to obtain”. Secondly, fit reflects whether the item is “consonant with the pragmatics of production routines, is it commensurate with technical and organizational possibilities, is it homologous with the exigencies and constraints in programme making and the limitations of the medium? Does it make sense in terms of what is already known about the subject?” (Golding and Elliott 1999: 119). Editorial decisions do not merely reflect the significance of the event, but are also based on a consideration of limited resources, in the context of a highly routinized news production process (e.g., Kepplinger and Ehmig 2006). In political reporting, the routinization of news production maps neatly onto the highly predictable and routinized schedule of political events, where much of what happens

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on a typical day is pre-scheduled, from briefings and press conference to major announcements and speeches, thus allowing for the careful editorial advance planning which is part and parcel of the temporal structure of news production (Golding and Elliott 1999). Indeed, much journalistic work focuses on careful temporal planning designed to limit the uncertainty of producing news. It could be argued that journalism is often marked by a “stop-watch culture” where what is valued is not so much creativity, but efficiency and the ability to produce news on a tight schedule (Schlesinger 1987). Ekström (2002) commented that journalistic “knowledge production is steered by the demands of predictability and control over the ingredients of a programme that has a predetermined format, that will be ready at a given point in time and that recurs with a certain regularity (often daily)” (p. 269). This is no less true of political journalism, where the pressures of deadlines – only strengthened in recent years by the emergence of constantly updated online news and the rise of 24-hour news – enforce the long-documented immediacyorientation of journalism and militate against contextual stories in an area of “disposable news” (Lewis 2010) where the “need for speed” (Juntunen 2010) dictates the terms of political news production. Changing temporal patterns of news production, in turn, have been alleged to profoundly affect the foreign policy-making process through the so-called “CNN effect,” as governments are increasingly pushed for immediate and forceful reactions to unfolding news events (e.g., Livingstone 1997) (see also the chapter by Robinson). Ultimately the most significant consequence of the spatial and temporal organization of news production is that it reinforces practices underwritten by the “insider culture” of political reporting. First of all, deadline pressures mean that journalists lean heavily on a limited number of easy-to-reach authoritative sources. In the case of political reporting, this means relying on known political actors and media professionals, rather than seeking out those who operate outside the corridors of power. Secondly, the spatial organization of news gathering into a process of beat reporting concentrates resources in specific locations that are likely to generate news stories and sources who are at the center of these stories – such as the seat of government (e.g., Kavanagh 2011; see also Hess 1981). At the same time, this organizational model is also likely to leave alternative or oppositional viewpoints unexplored and outside of reach. Gaye Tuchman (1978: 21–25) thus developed the metaphor of the “news net” to describe how the system of beat reporting catches the “big fish” – or the sources who have privileged access due to location and status – but lets the tales of less privileged people and groups slip through the holes. Adding to the tight temporal constraints on journalism, other institutional factors also shape political news production. In particular, critics have been alert to the consequences of commercial pressures, which are shaping the nature of news production across the board (commercialization). First of all, as discussed above,

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the downturn in the fortunes of the newspaper industry has resulted in a significant decline in the financial and human resources of many long-standing news organizations at all levels. Secondly, the commercial pressures on news are also alleged to shape the nature of political news, resulting in “dumbing down,” “tabloidization” and an increasing focus on scandal and sleaze in political reporting as well as in broader journalistic fields (see also the chapters by Schulz, by Stanyer and by Hopmann). Among the main proponents of these arguments is Bob Franklin (e.g., 1997, 2004, 2005), who has criticized the “McDonaldization” of journalism, or what he sees as the increasing dominance of entertaining, pleasing and easily digestible form of soft news which is, however, insufficiently substantial to provide citizens with the information that they need in a democratic society. In the political arena, such criticisms have often been associated with observations around an alleged “personalization” of politics, or the increasing focus on the personal lives of political figures, to the detriment of an emphasis on issues of policy and substance (e.g., Kleis Nielsen 2012; Langer 2012) (see also the chapters by Aalberg and by Hopmann). This alleged tendency has not necessarily been conclusively demonstrated in empirical research, but the heated academic debates over its existence dramatize a set of broader anxieties over the tension between “style” and “substance” in political coverage, and also over the shift towards a more entertainment-orientated political culture documented elsewhere in this book. Other observers, however, suggest that perceived shifts in the focus of political reporting towards “softer,” more emotionalized and entertaining styles, formats and content may be engaging audiences. For example, the rise of political entertainment formats, or what is often described as the “new political journalism” challenges the conventional “seriousness” of political reporting and also appear to be energizing new audiences, particularly among younger demographics (see also the chapters by Moy, Johnson, and Barthel and by Holbert, Hill, and Lee). Further, the media’s focus on political scandal has, according to some observers, been seen as both an inevitable consequence of a changing media environment and as potential benefit for democracy in its heightened scrutiny of the actions of political leaders (Thompson 1995, 2000, 2005). As Thompson (2005) described the process: “Political leaders today are more visible to more people and more closely scrutinized than they ever were in the past, and at the same time, they are more exposed to the risk that their actions and utterances (…) may be disclosed in ways that conflict with the images they wish to project” (p. 42). To Thompson (1995, 2005), the development that he characterizes as the “transformation of visibility” generates new risks but also new opportunities for politicians and audiences. On the one hand, it makes politicians more vulnerable to the exposure of any skeletons in their closets. On the other hand, it provides them with a far ranger set of opportunities for communicating with their publics (see also the chapter by Shaefer, Shenhav, and Balmas). Nonetheless, in an age of mediatization these forms of communication take place according to a “media

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logic,” which means that political leaders are compelled to tell their story by drawing on media-friendly strategies, which involve, among other things, simplification, stereotypization, polarization and personalization of the message, and an emphasis on horserace elements of the political game (e.g., Altheide and Snow 1979; (Strömbäck 2008; see also the chapters by Schulz and by van Aelst). Certainly there is evidence to support the idea that political reporting is increasingly focused on the process of politics rather than on substance or policy (Louw 2010), due in large part to processes of mediatization described in this chapter and elsewhere (see also the chapter by Aalberg). Political reporters are both subjects to these changes and complicit with them; as this chapter has demonstrated, they are deeply embedded in their corner of the journalistic field but also interact in complex and mutually determining ways with the political field.

4 Looking to the future: Emerging trends in the reporting of politics Overall, these developments suggest that political journalism remains a dynamic and contested area, and one that is currently undergoing profound transformations in terms of both practices and formats. In particular, technological change is having a profound impact on the working routines of political journalists, who now have an unprecedented array of information sources at their disposal, but also face new challenges and pressures. For example, as Ivor Gaber (2011) documented, the working days of journalists covering elections has changed profoundly alongside the rise of the “digital campaign”. This term covers over journalists’ increasing use of new media technologies, particularly social media such as Twitter, to keep abreast of campaign developments. Along those lines, Gaber (2011) distinguished between the conventional or “analogue” mode of campaign reporting and the emerging “digital” campaign practices (see also the chapter by Strömbäck and Kiousis). The traditional analogue campaign day consisted of a series of face-to-face encounters between journalists and politicians on the campaign trail – involving pseudo-events (Boorstin 1961) such as the morning news conference, the rally, and politicians’ carefully stage-managed “walkabouts” and encounters with citizens in shops, factories, restaurants and streets. By contrast, today’s political reporter is much more likely to follow the campaign in a second-hand fashion; following live television and radio coverage, Twitter feeds, and online news updates, and continually posting their own updates, but spending less time “on the ground” in campaigns. This has a number of potential implications for the nature of campaign reporting and its role in democracy. Most importantly, perhaps, has been the decline of the press conference, a traditional campaign fixture. As political blogger Mark Pack put it:

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This election continued, and accelerated, the death of the morning press conference cycle. They were never perfect means of politicians and journalists interacting, but they did give journalists the chance to pin politicians down when there was bad news in the air. Without the fixed rendezvous in the diary, it is easier for politicians to dodge journalists and in the end that's bad for politics as it relies on robust, but fair coverage with journalists asking questions directly of the main players (Pack, cited in Gaber 2011).

In other words, the traditional watchdog role of political journalism may be increasingly difficult to fulfill under conditions where journalists’ opportunities for face-to-face interactions with, and questioning of, politicians are circumscribed by technological change and changing news cycles. The emergence of the digital campaign is, of course, part of a larger trend whereby new media technologies are shifting the nature of political news production away from the insular relationships between journalists and politicians encapsulated by the “Inside the Beltway” and “Westminster Bubble” cultures. Along those lines, many scholars and other observers have placed great store in the emergence of citizen journalism and the increasing proliferation of user-generated content, which has promised profound transformations by empowering “The People Formerly Known as the Audience.” If, as Ian Hargreaves (1999) suggested, “in a democracy, everyone is a journalist,” (p. 4) the ease of producing journalistic content has brought this utopian aspiration closer to reality by democratizing the production of news content, turning consumers into “prosumers” (Bruns 2008). Certainly, the ease of producing, publishing and sharing information through venues like blogs and social media has meant that it has become easier than ever for “ordinary” people to voice their concerns and tell their stories (Stanyer 2009), and for audiences to access a broader and more global set of voices and viewpoints (McNair 2009). Among other things, social media such as Twitter and Facebook have been seen to play a key enabling role in the “Arab Spring” revolutions of 2011 (e.g., Cottle 2011). Nonetheless, as discussions over developments ranging from Wikileaks to user-generated content have demonstrated, journalists continue to proclaim the importance of their professional status and skill, and this is also true in the realm of political journalism where reporters, editors and pundits have rushed to the defense of their profession (e.g., Cassidy 2012). These defensive moves reveal much about the journalism profession’s need to justify its existence at a time of profound challenges which appear to shake the profession at its core and undermine its legitimacy. At the same time, they also point to the fact that political journalists do possess specialist knowledge and skills which they bring to bear on a rapidly changing communication environment.

5 Conclusion This chapter has explored key dynamics around the production of political content. It has argued for the analytical usefulness of an understanding of political

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journalism as a subspace within the journalistic field, and one which interacts in significant ways with the political field. By looking at the production of political content through such a lens, we can better understand the power relations and world views produced by the insider culture of journalists and political actors, and its consequences for democracy. Concretely, the chapter has suggested that this insider culture affords political journalists privileged access to information, but also may hamper their autonomy and the transparency of their actions, and compel them to take for granted the interpretations and world views of political actors. Further, the chapter has suggested that the routines and constraints of news production only strengthen this reliance on the views and interpretations of authoritative sources. Nonetheless, technological change may represent a challenge to this insular relationship and the practices which govern it. Here, it is worth noting that much of the research on the production of political content is focused on the work of political journalists working at elite, urban and national news organizations in Western liberal democracies, particularly the US and the UK. This bias is not unique to work on political journalism, but rather reflects a broader tendency in journalism scholarship whereby the field of study has been inescapably entwined with the power relations shaping the practice that is studied (Wahl-Jorgensen 2009). This is an important scholarly blind spot for several reasons. First of all, it is a significant omission because local media are far more numerous than national ones, widely read and trusted in their communities, and employ the vast majority of the journalistic workforce (Franklin 2006). More urgently, the pressures that are affecting the elite news organizations that remain the focus of the vast majority of scholarly work are felt far more fiercely, and with devastating consequences, in local and regional media. As local reporters struggle to cover local politics with increasingly scarce resources, the quality of political information available at the local level is suffering immeasurably (Franklin 2006). Similarly, the focus on the Anglo-American context severely restricts our understanding of the diversity of journalism cultures, and the recent turn to cross-country comparative research is therefore essential to a better appreciation of the complexities of the field (see also the chapter by Pfetsch and Esser). The very partial and limited picture offered in this chapter can only scratch at the surface of the complexity of relations between journalists and political actors; a relationship which may shape democracy more than any other.

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Carsten Reinemann and Philip Baugut

17 Political journalists as communicators. The impact of individual characteristics on their work Abstract: This chapter reviews research on the impact of political journalists’ individual characteristics on their news making and coverage. From a theoretical perspective, the authors discuss the impact of individual characteristics vis-à-vis news organizations (newsroom control) and conditions of the media system, nation, and culture. From a methodological perspective, various approaches to empirically investigate individual influences are critically reflected. Moreover, the chapter identifies several conditions under which individual qualities and preferences may be more or less likely to play a part in news making and reviews existing empirical findings. For most non-professional individual characteristics, no significant impact could be shown by prior research. In contrast to that, there indeed is evidence that political attitudes and issue positions affect news decisions. However, the few relevant studies suffer from the fact that they typically do not consider the potential impact of newsroom control and the congruence or incongruence of individual attitudes and editorial lines. Against this backdrop, perspectives for future research are discussed in the final part of the chapter. Key Words: political journalism, news decisions, two component-model of news decisions, news factors, professional and non-professional characteristics, demographics, political attitudes, journalism ethics

1 Introduction The part played by journalists in political communication has for long been a focus of political communication research. Two of the key questions in this area of study have been in how far journalists as a group represent society and whether their individual characteristics influence their working practices and reporting. Even the first scholars scientifically investigating journalism were concerned with these questions (e.g., Prutz 1846; see also Lippmann and Merz 1920). And as the impact of country characteristics, organizational factors, working routines, and other contextual factors is discussed in more detail elsewhere in this volume (see the chapters by Stanyer, by McNair and by Wahl-Jorgensen), we will focus on this issue in this chapter: We will critically summarize assumptions and evidence regarding individual-level influences in political journalism and identify both deficits of extant and perspectives for future research.

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In order to do so, we will first address some conceptual and methodological issues: We will shortly reflect on what political journalism is and what is actually meant by “individual” characteristics of journalists; we will have a look at the role individual characteristics play in theoretical models of influences in journalism; we will discuss whether individual characteristics can rather be regarded the cause or the result of working in journalism or a specific news organization; and we will take a look at how individual characteristics and their impact on journalistic work have been empirically investigated up to now. Second, we will give an overview about some characteristics that are usually considered “individual” and potentially influencing journalistic work. More concretely, we will describe what we know about political journalists’ demographic characteristics, political attitudes, role concepts and ethical standards. Moreover, we will discuss the crucial question whether individual characteristics actually do have an impact on work-related attitudes, working patterns and coverage of political journalists. We will close the chapter by summarizing our findings and by developing some perspectives for future research.

2 Conceptualizing and measuring factors influencing political journalists 2.1 Theoretical issues What are political journalists? The International Encyclopedia of Communication defines political journalists are those “who report on political affairs or work on the political desk” (Hanitzsch 2008). This means that political journalists are people that work for a media organization as reporter, editor or in another role in fullor part-time (which makes them journalists) and who cover actors, events and processes that are related to the formation of collectively binding decisions or the allocation of values in societies (which relates them to politics, policies, and polity). Remarkably, not all journalists reporting on political affairs at the local, regional, national or international level are actually part of a politics department. For example, in Germany almost half of the journalists reporting about political issues on a regular basis are assigned to general news (18 %), economics (11 %), society/social issues and other editorial departments (Lünenberg and Berghofer 2010: 19). This means that a lot of journalists reporting politics are not fully specialized on the issue and tend to have politics just as another issue they work on. Several models have been proposed that conceptualize the different factors shaping the work and products of journalists in general. Although differing in detail, these models mostly distinguish various levels or spheres of influence and they regularly include characteristics of culture and/or nations, the political and/ or media systems as a whole, the respective media organizations and/or journalis-

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tic working routines, and individual journalists. For example, in his rather early model, Donsbach (1987) proposes a subject, a professional, an institutional and a societal sphere (for a short recent description see Hanitzsch and Donsbach 2012). Shoemaker and Vos (2009) distinguish an individual, a routine, an organizational, a social institution and a social system level of analysis. The factors can also be allocated to the classical levels of analysis used across social science, i.e., the micro-level of individuals, the meso-level of organizations and the macro-level of society, nation, culture, or media system (see below). Past research has described these levels and factors, investigated their relationships, and tried to identify those levels or single factors most influential for journalistic work. Some authors, however, have pointed to the fact that news decisions and news coverage cannot be fully explained only on the basis of these various factors and levels. Instead, they argue that these factors do only shape the way journalists see the world and the weight that they give to certain aspects of reality, i.e., these factors determine the criteria of news making and news selection (component 1). But besides these media-internal factors, the actual news flow of events and topics which are characterized by certain qualities have to be taken into account. These more or less objective characteristics of events and topics have classically been labeled news factors (component 2) (see also the chapters by Stanyer and by WahlJorgensen). What news items are selected and how coverage looks in a certain country, in a certain type of medium or in an individual news outlet then depends upon the specific interaction of the two components. This interaction is described in the two component-model of news making that integrates event-centered (news value theory) and journalism-centered explanations of news-making (news bias, gatekeeping theory, news framing) (Kepplinger 1998; Kepplinger and Ehmig 2006). The basic idea of the model is that the criteria of news making serve as weighting factors for the objective event characteristics a story contains. And as these criteria may differ across individual journalists, media organizations or nations a story may get published in one but not in another media outlet or nation. For example, the news factor “prominence” typically gets a higher weight in a tabloid paper’s decision than in a broadsheet’s. And the factor “negativity” may get a higher weight in a commercial broadcaster’s newsroom than at a public broadcasting company. For the key question of this article this means that the potential impact of individual characteristics is not only restricted by factors of the organizations and national cultures a journalist is part of, but also by the course of events (Figure 1). What research clearly has shown is that contexts beyond the individual do in fact limit the impact of individual characteristics on both professional orientations and news content to a very large extent. This is true, for example, for macro-level characteristics like national journalism cultures (Hanitzsch and Donsbach 2012), media regulation (see the chapter by Puppis), and organizational structures that also vary systematically vary across nations. Traditionally, Anglo-Saxon news-

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Fig. 1: An integrative two component-model of news decisions. Based on Kepplinger 1998 and Kepplinger and Ehmig 2006.

rooms are characterized by the division of labor between news gatherers and news processors and strong editorial control. In contrast to that, the traditional European newsroom is characterized by journalists having a broader job profile and by a stronger differentiation in departments along the beats. Although newsroom organization seems to become more similar internationally (e.g., Meier 2007; Huang et al. 2004), differences of newsroom cultures still are apparent. For example, US-journalists perceive a much higher degree of organizational influence than their colleagues in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland where many newsrooms still are organized differently (Hanitzsch and Mellado 2011: 414). This also points to the important fact that news decisions more often than not are a collective process within a group of journalists. Several studies show that journalists consider their colleagues and superiors as a major influence on their work (e.g., Weischenberg, Malik, and Scholl 2006: 148). Furthermore, organizational influences refer to constraints of the superior media organization. Different media organizations often do have differing political, economic or public-value oriented goals, and their degree of editorial control and the division of labor may vary in addition to cross-national differences. Especially commercial pressures on political news production can intrude into newsrooms and shape organizational rules and practices. Individual proprietors or shareholders can affect political coverage not only by determining editorial resources, they can also stamp the political line or even “use their economic power as an ideological weapon” (McNair 2000: 49). And as editorial policies are often implemented via professional socialization and social control, the influence of superior media organizations is sometimes unapparent, even for media companies like Murdoch’s News Corporation that seem to have distinct political preferences. However, politically motivated influences on editorial work can also be found in the public broadcasting sector. This is even true for the BBC that is often presented as a model for

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autonomy (e.g., Barnett and Gaber 2001: 74). From a historical point of view, however, in many countries like Britain there has been a transition from old-style politically motivated ‘press lords’ to primarily commercially motivated ‘entrepreneurial editors’ (Tunstall 1996: 79–81). Meanwhile, commercial pressures tend to overlap political preferences of news organizations. This seems to agree with the interpretation of political journalism history as an escape from a situation of journalists as political supporters (Neveu 2002: 24).

2.2 Methodological issues Political bias in media coverage has been investigated in numerous studies and several approaches have been developed to detect it. For example, media bias has been studied by comparing news coverage with external data, by comparing different media outlets, or by input-output-analysis of actual coverage and the information available to journalists (Hopmann, van Aelst, and Legnante 2012) (see also the chapters by Jandura and Friedrich and by Hopmann). Also, researchers have begun to disentangle the effects of factors on different levels of analysis by taking seriously the multi-level structure of influences in journalism, sometimes by using formal multi-level modeling. A case in point are internationally comparative studies, in which, for example, role concepts, perceptions of influences or trust in political institutions are explained by characteristics of nations, media systems, organizations and/or individual variables (e.g., Hanitzsch and Berganza 2012; Maurer 2011). However, integrative studies directly linking characteristics of journalists with their news decisions or actual media content still are very rare. One of the reasons for this may be that it is rather complicated to gather the data necessary for this kind of analysis, because what is needed is (a) individual level data of journalists’ characteristics, (b) news material on which news decisions were or have to be made, (c) actual coverage that is the result of news decisions and (d) data on other factors that need to be controlled, for example, on the organizational or national level. Because these kinds of data are hard to gather all at once in a real-worldenvironment of a newsroom, scholars have developed several approaches as approximations to an ideal design (Donsbach and Rentsch 2011): Aggregate data studies correlate characteristics of media content and characteristics of journalists in a given national or geographical unit. For example, van Dalen, Albaek, and de Vreese (2012) surveyed political journalists and analyzed political coverage in four European countries in order to find out whether crossnational differences in content reflect cross-national differences in role perceptions. The problem with such studies is that the journalists surveyed not necessarily are the ones that actually decided about the content analyzed. This brings with it the danger of an ecological fallacy. Furthermore, as long as characteristics of the organization etc. are not controlled for, the possibility remains that individual

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characteristics may partly or fully be mediated by higher-level factors. Therefore, aggregate data studies cannot convincingly prove a causal relationship on the individual level. Group data studies correlate characteristics of journalists of specific media outlets with the content published in these media outlets. For example, Flegel and Chaffee (1971) correlated opinions of 23 newspaper reporters on several issues with the tone of the coverage on those issues in their respective media. Although these studies get closer to the relationship between individual predispositions and news decisions, they, too, are not able to prove a causal link between the two because they cannot rule out the possibility that it is not the individual attitudes of journalists that is decisive for the editorial slant of coverage but the editorial policy of the publisher, editor in chief or media organization as a whole. This can only be done in individual data studies. Here, researchers administer quasi-experiments on news decisions in which they also measure journalists’ individual positions towards issues or their general political attitudes. For example, Patterson and Donsbach (1996) in their comparative study asked journalists to make different kinds of decisions on news items that had a specific political slant. In the same survey, journalists were asked how they positioned themselves on a left-right scale of political attitudes (for a similar design see Kepplinger, Brosius, and Staab 1991). Individual data studies are the only ones that are able to show causal effects of journalists’ individual characteristics on news decisions and also to estimate the size of those effects. However, they also have a major problem: external validity. Because they are not conducted in a real-world environment, processes of newsroom control or effects of editorial lines and orders of chief editors are not reflected in the results. Therefore, while these studies impressively show that there are indeed effects of individual characteristics on individual news decisions when decisions are fully individually made, they have to be complemented by studies of real news content. Along these lines, in a recent study Engelmann (2010) tried to solve some of the problems of this kind of research. In her experimental study, journalists first had to decide which of two presented news items would be “more likely to be published by your news department”. Then journalists were asked to select several statements and sources among several presented. In addition, journalists were asked several questions regarding both personal and characteristics of their newsroom. By this procedure she was able to get closer to everyday news work and to include both individual and organizational level factors in an experimental design (Engelmann 2010). But there is another problem that would even remain in individual level studies including actual decisions and news coverage as well as controlling for editorial lines or other organizational influences: In cases in which individual level attitudes are consistent with editorial policy, effects of the two cannot be disentangled because statistical analyses presuppose that variables are sufficiently inde-

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pendent. This means that we would not be able to tell whether a biased news decision by a conservative republican journalist at Fox was the result of his personal attitudes or of the organization’s editorial policy.

3 Conceptualizing and measuring the impact of individual characteristics 3.1 A model of the impact of individual characteristics As mentioned before, the interest of political communication research in the individual characteristics of journalists is based on the assumption that these possibly have an influence upon their work and reporting. Interestingly, journalists themselves across the globe overwhelmingly agree that their personal believes should not influence their reporting and that they should be impartial (Hanitzsch et al. 2011, 2012). However, despite the obvious importance of contextual factors, Shoemaker and Vos (2009: 33) conclude: “That individuals influence gatekeeping decisions is obvious.” But this statement must not be misunderstood. It is one thing to be aware of the fact that it is humans, who have to individually process, interpret and decide about the publication of incoming news (although algorithms have taken over at least part of the job). It is a completely different matter, though, to argue that personal, individual qualities are a decisive factor in news-making in the sense that a) news decisions of individual journalists with different personal characteristics systematically differ from another or b) that differences in news decisions can at least partly be traced back to personal qualities and not to, for example, organizational or cultural factors. This would mean that the impact of personal characteristics persists even if other factors are controlled for (for a detailed discussion of psychological processes in gatekeeping see, for example, Donsbach 2004 and Shoemaker and Vos 2009: 33–42). But before discussing their impact, we have to define what “individual” characteristics really are. The answer is not as easy as it may seem, because the fact that personal characteristics are measured on the individual level by asking survey questions does not make them individual per se. For example, role perceptions and ethical considerations may be a result of newsroom socialization and therefore be shared by all journalists of a specific news outlet or type of medium (e.g., tabloid vs. quality press). Moreover, as research has shown, role perceptions may also be shared by journalists of the same country establishing a certain news culture. In the same line of thinking Weaver (2009: 306) assumes that role perceptions influence the kind of reporting more at the organizational level than at the individual level of isolated individuals. For example, editorial offices comprised of journalists who prefer the adversarial role may indeed produce adversarial media content.

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Therefore, even when characteristics are measured at the individual level it still remains both a theoretical and an empirical question whether they really have an individual character in the sense that they are sufficiently different between individual journalists working for the same media organization. That is why we propose to conceptually distinguish individual characteristics according to the degree they are affected by superior organizational influences. This means considering in how far the characteristics are related to a journalist’s professional behavior. Characteristics that generally have been regarded as individual and that have attracted scholarly attention in the past (for an overview see Shoemaker and Vos 2009) can be differentiated as follows: While age, gender, ethnicity, family background, sexual orientation, personality, education, political values and attitudes can be regarded as completely or mostly independent from superior organizational influences (i.e., non-professional characteristics), the opposite seems to be true for characteristics like role conceptions and ethical standards (i.e., professional characteristics). The relevance of non-professional characteristics like political values should not be underestimated, as they potentially affect professional characteristics like role perceptions (e.g., Baugut and Scherr 2013). However, not all of these characteristics have been investigated with respect to political journalists. We therefore focus on four kinds of characteristics most relevant and mostly investigated for political journalists in the following: demographics and political attitudes as non-professional characteristics, role conceptions and ethical standards as professional characteristics. But how can individual characteristics become influential at all? Generally, news decisions are influenced by factors at the macro-, the meso- and the microlevel. This means that individual journalists (micro-level) are usually part of news organizations (meso-level) that are themselves influenced by the context of the media system and country they operate in (macro-level) (Figure 2). Given this, individual characteristics may directly and indirectly influence news-making both short-term and in the long run: (1) Non-professional characteristics like family background, education, personality, priorities in life and resulting job preferences in adolescence are likely to directly impact the decision to become a journalist, what kind of medium he or she works for, or what issues he or she is interested in. (2) Non-professional characteristics may also play a role in how far academic studies, on the job training and newsroom socialization are successful in shaping an individual’s role perceptions and ethical standards. For example, in order to avoid cognitive dissonance, journalists for whom ethical considerations are an integral part of their identity will not likely accept an offer by a tabloid newspaper, and US journalists with a firm liberal political position may not be likely to work for Fox news. On the other hand, other journalists may be more flexible or better able to keep apart personal identity and professional roles. This means that for some journalists the congruence between personal identity and professional role may be bigger than for others.

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Fig. 2: A model of the impact of non-professional and professional individual characteristics of journalists on news-making.

(3) Individual position and journalistic role (e.g. reporter vs. editor vs. columnist) in the newsroom are also likely to impact the degree to which personal characteristics can be reflected in journalistic decisions. The higher the position, the higher is individual autonomy. This means that superior editors’ individual priorities have a better chance to be reflected in news decisions. The lower the position, the more are journalists depending on judgment and instructions by their superior editors. Similar differences should also appear, for example, between reporters and columnists. (4) Stronger or weaker newsroom control within a media organization are likely to be an important surrounding condition for the degree to which individual preferences and characteristics play a role in news decisions. For example, a strict editorial line of a newspaper or rules for securing balance in a Public Service Broadcaster’s coverage surely limit the impact of personal political attitudes. Interestingly, it is newsroom control that often is not taken into account in experimental studies of the impact of political attitudes. (5) The impact of individual predispositions and preferences might also differ with respect to different aspects or phases of news decisions. In her experimental study, Engelmann (2010) distinguishes between primary and secondary news decisions. Primary news decisions are about covering an issue or event at all. In these kinds of decisions, she argues, media organization represented by superiors and colleagues, editorial lines and resources of time and money are decisive. Secondary news decisions are about how to cover an event, e.g., to decide about which sources or statements to include in a report. In these kinds of decisions, she proposes, individual positions may be more relevant (Engelmann 2010). (6) Finally, the size and importance of a news story to be decided about may impact the degree to which individual characteristics affect news decisions. Decisions about major headline stories or the news organization’s position in a major conflict are likely to be either made by superior editors or collectively in discussions between several journalists, for example, in editorial meetings (Figure 2).

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3.2 Findings on the impact of professional and nonprofessional characteristics 3.2.1 Demographics 3.2.1.1 Age The age of political journalists may matter for at least two reasons. First of all, age usually is a proxy for working experience which likely changes a journalist’s perspective on the profession and himself, on his motivation and way of decisionmaking. Second, age is an indicator for belonging to a certain generation. Because different generations of journalists may have experienced different kinds of formative political events shaping their political attitudes and journalistic role perceptions, they may also differ significantly in their outlooks (Lang et al. 1993). In addition, professional socialization of journalists may happen under differing surrounding conditions within the media system (e.g., varying degree of commercial pressure, dominant role conceptions). For example, younger generations of political journalists at least in some countries are said to emphasize impartiality more than the older group that is often characterized by a more loyal ideological outlook (Baugut and Grundler 2009: 196; Josephi 2009: 52). Thus, younger generations might contribute to the trend towards media-dealignment, a decline of press-party parallelism, as well as to the rise of a stronger across-the-board negative portrayal of politics combined with a tendency towards media populism. How can political journalists be characterized with respect to their age? With an average age of about 40 years, journalism in general tends to be a young person’s occupation in all over the world (Weaver and Willnat 2012: 530). This may partly be traced back to a permanent transformation of journalism, moreover to the blurred boundaries between journalism and public relations. After having gained experience in journalism a changeover to a field with better paid jobs and more job security appears to be attractive. Political journalists, however, seem to be more senior than their colleagues (van Dalen and van Aelst 2012; Weaver and Willnat 2012: 530). One reason for this may by that professional experience is a prerequisite for trustful source-relations on the prestigious political beat. But the average age of political journalists also differs from country to country. For example, Danish political journalists are younger than the German, because in Denmark the political beat often is just a steppingstone in the journalistic career, while being a political journalist in Germany is more prestigious (van Dalen and van Aelst 2012: 517; Lünenborg and Berghofer 2012: 516). However, to the best of our knowledge no studies have been published to date that show that age in itself has a direct impact on news-making.

3.2.1.2 Gender Although the number of women in journalism has been increasing all over the world, it continues to be a predominantly male profession. Among political jour-

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nalists in particular, the male dominance seems to be even stronger (van Dalen 2012; van Dalen and van Aelst 2012: 517; Weaver and Willnat 2012: 516). While in the younger age groups the gender gap is smaller, women remain underrepresented in leading positions of news organizations (Fröhlich 2007). An increasing number of female journalists especially in leading positions might change the newsroom culture by modifying hierarchical organizational structures that limit the impact of individual characteristics on news content (Mullins 2007: 154). One can argue if or in how far political journalism is a masculine domain mainly due to its themes and style (van Zoonen 1998: 127). But although some scholars claim that women have their own practices of journalism (e.g., Chambers, Steiner, and Fleming 2004), there seems to be no empirical evidence that men and women really differ in any meaningful ways in their professional role perceptions (Hanitzsch and Hanusch 2012) or the way they decide about political news. Whether this is the result of women adopting norms of the traditionally male-dominated journalism culture in newsroom socialization (Cassidy 2008) remains an open question.

3.2.1.3 Education Journalists enter their jobs from a high diversity of educational backgrounds (Deuze 2006: 22; Fröhlich and Holtz-Bacha 2003). Today, a vast majority of journalists across the globe holds a four-year college-degree, but most did not graduate from specialized journalism programs (Weaver and Willnat 2012: 530). For example – and maybe not surprisingly –, graduates among political journalists in Germany mainly come from political science (Lünenborg and Berghofer 2010: 15). Given that political journalists are confronted with an increasing complexity of law-making and societal problems the trend toward a more academic education mostly is welcomed by political communication scholars. However, the downside of this trend may be that journalism more and more becomes an elite-profession in danger of getting out of touch with everyday lives of ordinary citizens not so well-off or academically educated (Weaver et al. 2007). As a consequence, journalists might be less interested in giving ordinary people a voice and in being an advocate for the disadvantaged in society. But, as of today, there seems to be no evidence that individual education leads to a specific kind of bias which brings about a systematic neglect of problems of, for example, the underprivileged, the unemployed, or the poor.

3.2.2 Political attitudes Among all the individual characteristics of political journalists, their political attitudes, ideological standpoints or issue positions surely have sparked most contro-

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versy both in public and in academia. The notions that individual journalists on average are not positioned in the very center of the political spectrum and as a group do not reflect the distribution of political attitudes in the general public has often been used to explain or assume an according bias in news coverage. In fact, most studies do suggest that journalists show a moderate preference for left and liberal attitudes (D’Alessio and Allen 2000: 134; van Dalen 2012; van Dalen and van Aelst 2012 Donsbach and Patterson 2004; Hersckovitz 2005). Political journalists in particular are often said to be more left-wing in their political leaning than the journalists in other beats. That may be explained by a distinct motivation to change society (e.g., Hopmann, Elmelund-Praestekaer, and Levinsen 2010). However, empirical findings rather show that a left political leaning is even smaller among political journalists than among the journalistic population at large (van Dalen 2012). As a leftish political leaning of political journalists is nevertheless unquestionable, it is important to note that they locate the media they work for at a moderate right position (van Dalen 2012; van Dalen and van Aelst 2012) and that they often work for media organizations that do not have the same political orientation than they have personally (e.g., Reinemann 2003). Critics who neglect the influence of media owners and organizational constraints on political coverage tend to use journalists’ attitudes for an argument to accuse it of being too leftish or liberal (e.g., Levite, 1996). Vice versa, those who regard media owners and publishers as naturally preferring and successfully implementing conservative viewpoints fear partisan biased news coverage as well (e.g., Lee and Solomon 1990). Studies of media content in countries across the globe do indeed show that there are enormous ideological biases of specific media outlets, but that a “unilateral, monolithic bias” (D’Alessio and Allen 2000: 134) in one direction or the other is rather unlikely in established democracies with a diversity of political viewpoints in the wider population. But the interesting question here is not so much the political bias of certain media outlets because this is a characteristic at the organizational level. The crucial question here is whether individual political attitudes affect individual news decisions beyond the impact of media organizations. In fact, there are at least some studies that do show that individual political leanings affect news-making. The earliest relevant study seems to be an experiment by Kerrick, Anderson, and Swales (1964). However, they did not use journalists but students of communications as their subjects. In a quasi-experimental study by Kepplinger, Brosius, and Staab (1991), journalists had to judge the newsworthiness of short news items about a controversial political issue. The authors found a moderate but significant impact of journalists’ individual positions: Journalists favored news items that in their view supported the political solution they also preferred individually. In their comparative study, Patterson and Donsbach (1996) used a similar design. Here, journalists had to rate the newsworthiness of events that were framed in a way that favored a specific partisan view. Although

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the effects also were rather moderate, individual political attitudes significantly affected news decisions in all countries included (Germany, Italy, Sweden, UK, US), however to a different degree. The more recent experimental study by Engelmann (2010) also finds that individual issue positions are influential. In her study, both the perception of which issue would be covered in their news organization and the decision which sources journalists would cite were biased by individual issue positions. Another kind of political attitude that may be relevant is journalists’ attitude towards politicians’ work. Especially the discussion on hyperadversarialism (Fallows 1996) raises the question of whether journalists have cynical attitudes towards politics. However, comparative research on the attitudes of political journalists in Western Europe suggests only a moderate level of political cynicism (van Dalen, Albaek, and de Vreese 2011). It is higher when journalists feel inhibited in their work and when they believe that politicians seek media attention instead of concentrating on their political work. The quite low level of cynicism among British parliamentary journalists appears to be surprising because hyperadversarialism is predominantly discussed in an Anglo-American context (van Dalen, Albaek, and de Vreese 2011). It seems possible that (the in Britain distinctive) close informal relationships between politicians and journalists reduce cynicism, because the actors use them for the explanation of constraints that affect their work. This may reduce conflicts in consequence of an actor-observer-bias (Jones and Nisbett 1971). But we still lack evidence that such individual attitudes do in fact influence newsmaking and actual media coverage. Finally, political orientations also can be regarded as a perceptual set influencing how journalists see their working conditions (Baugut and Scherr 2013). Especially economic influences restricting journalists’ autonomy may be perceived more intensively by left than by right journalists, as from a leftish point of view, the intrusion of economic imperatives in society is basically assessed more critically (Lukes 2003).

3.2.3 Role perceptions The relevance of role perceptions, too, stems from their potential effects on news coverage and news cultures (van Dalen, Albaek, and de Vreese 2012; Patterson and Donsbach 1996). The concept of role perception or role conception (Vos 2005: 19) helps to understand the perspective of journalists on their work and their function for society. From a sociological point of view, journalists’ role perceptions refer to the “generalized expectations which journalists believe exist in society and among different stakeholders, which they see as normatively acceptable, and which influence their behavior on the job” (Donsbach 2008: 2605). Thus, role conceptions seem to be closer to actual news-making than demographic characteris-

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tics of journalists – which is why we distinguish between professional and nonprofessional characteristics. The large body of literature concerning journalistic role models can be reduced to several quite similar typologies that either emphasize normative expectations or deal with contributions to the political system. The indicators referring to these dimensions often are very much based on the ideas of a liberal model of the public sphere that also guide media regulation and notions of media quality in many countries (see also the chapters by Puppis and by Jandura and Friedrich). For example, studies often ask whether journalists rather want to be critics of politics or passive disseminators of information. This question refers to dimensions like “active vs. passive” or “adversarial vs. deferential” (van Dalen 2012; Donsbach and Patterson 2004; Janowitz 1975; Johnstone, Slawski, and Bowman 1976). Moreover, role models differ according to how far journalists want to take sides, which may also mean that they express the political line of the medium they work for. This refers to the distinction between “impartial-neutral” vs. “partisan” journalism (e.g., van Dalen 2012; Donsbach and Patterson 2004) (see also the chapters by Jandura and Friedrich and by Hopmann). More recent concepts, however, have added other dimensions (e.g., Donsbach 2008). For example, Hanitzsch (2007: 372) suggests a three-dimensional approach. In his concept, interventionism describes the continuum between socially committed and detached and refers to the extent to which journalism is politically motivated. Power distance describes a dimension between a watchdog-role and defensive, loyal journalists that act as an extended arm of authorities. This dimension reflects journalists’ political autonomy that needs to achieve a minimum to legitimate the term ‘journalism’. Finally, journalists’ market orientation is constructed as an opposite to journalists taking care for public interest and political participation (Hanitzsch 2007). This dimension seems to become more and more important for the study of political journalists, because they seem to be increasingly confronted with the problem of bringing economic and political imperatives in line. However, although market orientation is on the rise in journalism across the globe, there still seems to be a strong preference for non-revenue goals in political journalism, at least in western countries – and at least judging from what journalists themselves regard as the norm that should guide their behaviors (van Dalen and van Aelst 2012; Weaver and Willnat 2012: 537). In fact, comparative research has identified both commonalities and differences in role perceptions of political journalists in different countries. Obviously, the country-level remains important with national differences going back to factors like the political system, the degree of press freedom and professionalism in journalism, institutional resources for media, cultural contexts etc. (Donsbach and Klett 1993; Deuze 2002; Hanitzsch et al. 2011, 2012). Nevertheless, explanations still pose a challenge, as the variance actually explained by political, economic, media systems, and cultural differences is restricted (e.g., Weaver 1998; Patterson

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and Donsbach 1996; Hanitzsch 2011). For example, Hallin and Mancini’s (2004) media systems approach was only partly able to explain the similarities and differences between the role conceptions of European political journalists in a study by van Dalen and van Aelst (2012). Indeed, journalists in countries representing the democratic corporatist model (Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Germany) were quite similar to their colleagues in the UK, representing the liberal model, and Spain, which is attached to the polarized pluralist model. This not only draws attention to a possible assimilation of journalists’ role perceptions across countries but also to the fact that comparative research into political journalism tends not to investigate within-country differences between news organizations that may have a considerable size (Hanitzsch and Donsbach 2012; but see Esser 2008). Moreover, role perceptions are an example for professional characteristics influenced by non-professional characteristics: Findings suggest that psychological variables like a persons’ extraversion as well as career values like salary or job autonomy shape role perceptions (Dillon 1990; Henningham 1997). Moreover, research on the American Journalist suggests that the more liberal the journalist, the more likely he or she is to embrace values that refer to an interpretative, adversarial and populist mobilization function (Weaver et al. 2007: 149). In contrast to role perceptions themselves and their explanation by other factors, their actual impact on political news coverage is relatively unexplored both national and cross-national (for an exception see van Dalen, Albaek, and de Vreese 2012; see also Mellado and van Dalen 2013). Due to the possible impact of several other factors the importance of individual role perceptions and roles in the newsroom for news coverage remains an issue of debate (van Dalen, Albaek, and de Vreese 2012). However, concerning distinct individual characteristics of roles and content, there is evidence for the existence of such a relationship. For example, findings suggest that journalists who prefer a participant and interpretative role indeed produce more interpretative and investigative news content (Culbertson 1983; Starck and Soloski 1977). Furthermore, a cross-national study exploring political journalists’ role perceptions and news coverage in Denmark, Germany, the UK and Spain finds that British journalists do not only stand out as most entertainment oriented in their role conceptions, but also in the content they produce (van Dalen, Albaek, and de Vreese 2012). This may be traced back to the competitive British media system that underlines that “role conceptions form a vital link between media systems and news content” (van Dalen, Albaek, and de Vreese 2012: 15). Future research, however, will have to take influencing factors like organizational constraints of news production into account.

3.2.4 Journalism ethics Besides demographics, role perceptions, and political attitudes ethical orientations, too, can be taken into account as individual characteristics. In contrast to

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demographics and most political attitudes, ethical considerations can be regarded to be primarily the result of professional socialization – although fundamental ethical principles acquired in childhood, youth and adolescents may also play a part. While ethics is a central task for the profession of journalism in general, political journalists are especially expected to act ethically. This is a consequence of their impact on the public sphere (e.g., Neveu 2002: 23). Correspondingly, the main historical ethical approaches have dealt with the relation between politics and media in general (e.g., Siebert and Peterson and Schramm 1963) (see also the chapters by Kepplinger and by Jandura and Friedrich). Later, ethical debates centered on whether journalists should adhere to the liberal model of the public sphere and be detached, objective observers and disseminators of information, or whether they should follow the social responsibility approach and be more active and interpretative in their work. Even more recently, this discussion was overlapped by the discussion about universal ethical standards (e.g., Ward 2010; Rao and Lee 2005; Zhong and Newhagen 2009). In times of technologically enabled globalization of media and cultural tensions this is not only an empirical but also a normative question. While some authors demand journalism ethics to become more cosmopolitan in theory and practice (Christians 2008), scholars in critical theories of media see the danger of western dominated standards that do not take into account differing political structures and cultural contexts (e.g., Wasserman and Rao 2008). Considering both positions means to aim for a “theory of universals that avoids both (a) an ethical imperialism that imposes principles on cultures without regard for differences and (b) an extreme relativism that rejects global media ethics as impossible and undesirable” (Ward 2010: 66). While this remains a challenge, empirical comparative research asking for journalists’ attitudes or assessing journalistic codes of ethics suggests a broad intercultural consensus on ethical standards (Hafez 2002; Latila 1995; Rao and Lee 2005; Zhong and Newhagen 2009). The consented principles (like truthfulness and clarity of information, attention to standards of gathering and presenting information, respect for the integrity of sources etc.), however, develop their relevance in a specific context only. Therefore, comparative research focuses on general ethical ideologies and dilemmas that journalists are confronted with. The Worlds of Journalism Study does so by referring to Forsyth’s (1980; 1981) two basic dimensions relativism and idealism. While the first deals with the meaning of values regardless of situation and context, the latter refers to the consequences in the responses to ethical dilemmas. Findings suggest a relatively broad consensus that ethical principles should be followed by all journalists. Especially western journalism cultures show low relativism by refusing the context-boundedness of ethical principles (Plaisance, Skewes, and Hanitzsch 2012). In non-western countries, especially in China and Russia, journalists are more open to situational ethical practices (Hanitzsch et al.

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2012: 486). Workers in western countries to a lesser extent support the idea that journalists should be allowed to formulate their own individual codes of conduct. Besides the degree of press freedom, private ownership seems to be a positive determining factor in the adherence of relativistic attitudes (Plaisance, Skewes, and Hanitzsch 2012). Regarding political journalists as especially confronted with information gathering that includes attempts of deception and information withholding by sources, it is remarkable that relativism is positively associated with the time devoted to information gathering (Plaisance, Skewes, and Hanitzsch 2012). Thus, being relativistic in their ethical orientations appears as a characteristic of political reporters (see also the chapters by McNair and by Wahl-Jorgensen). Relativism can also be shown by political journalists who act with heed to the consequences of their action and refuse an absolute obligation to values like truth. For example, being relativistic can mean not to publish secret documents because this could endanger a nation’s security interests (see also the chapter by Robinson). The differentiation between an ethics of responsibility and an ethics of ultimate ends goes back to Max Weber (1926) and describes a dilemma political journalists are often confronted with. On the one hand, journalists that act according to the ethics of responsibility might become partisan players in the political game. On the other hand, journalists that act according to the ethics of ultimate ends might cause serious consequences that cannot justify their orientation to an absolute value. Findings suggest that journalists tend to make value-based decisions when deciding whether to print a story or not (e.g., Kepplinger and Knirsch 2001). Concerning idealism findings are inconsistent. In most of the countries a majority of journalists agree that there are situations in which harm is justifiable if it results in a story that will produce a greater good (Plaisance, Skewes, and Hanitzsch 2012). While this mirrors low idealism, another finding shows high idealism: In most of the countries journalists generally avoid questionable methods of reporting, even if it means not getting the story. This view is stronger among journalists in democratic countries than among those in developmental and transitional environments. In summation, these findings show rudiments of a common ethical ideology and therefore professionalism in journalism around the world. While this seems to support the ideal of universal ethical standards, there is evidence that the degree of press freedom and private ownership have significant impact on journalists’ degrees of idealistic and relativistic thinking (Plaisance, Skewes, and Hanitzsch 2012). Thus, country-level and organizational-level rather than individuallevel variables seem to matter. The major influence of the national context is as well underlined by former comparative studies, even when journalists are asked for their behavior in specific ethical situations (Berkowitz, Yehiel, and Singer 2004; Weaver 1998). The context-boundedness of ethical orientations points to locate ethical responsibility for political coverage at different levels. This does not mean to neglect journalists’ personal responsibility, but to consider the media organiza-

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tions and the needs of their audiences as well as the supremacy of systemic influences. Besides asking for general ethical orientations, surveys of journalists also deal with their acceptability of specific reporting methods (Weaver and Willnat 2012). There again are large differences for methods like paying for secret information, badgering or harassing news sources, and undercover reporting (Weaver and Willnat 2012: 541; Weaver 1998: 470). This is even true for countries in Western Europe. The explanation of differences seems to be difficult. Concerning badgering or harassing news sources the percentage of journalists saying this practice may be justified in Britain is about five times higher than in Germany. This may be traced back to the strongly competitive newsgathering environment in the UK that leads to blurred ethical constraints (Henningham and Delano 1998: 157). Against this backdrop, it seems remarkable that the practice of source confidentiality, particularly relevant for political journalists, receives a high level of agreement across countries (Weaver 1998: 470). This suggests a near-universal professional norm. However, there seem to be conditions under which the norm of confidentiality is not obeyed. Especially a restrictive information policy, a perceived low public interest in politics, and a competitive media environment of journalists attempting to gain exclusive information (“scoops”) appear to be promoting leaks (Barnett and Gaber 2001: 93).

4 Conclusions and perspectives for future research This chapter has reviewed theoretical and empirical research on the potential impact of individual characteristics of journalists on news making and political coverage. We distinguished between professional and non-professional individual characteristics and argued that they are just one factor potentially influencing journalists’ news making. The impact of individual characteristics is alleviated first of all by the context of the news organization that exercises newsroom control on the basis of its specific organizational objectives. It is further weakened by the surrounding conditions of the media system, nation, and culture news organizations are a part of. We identified several conditions under which individual characteristics my nevertheless directly or indirectly play a part in news making. For example, we pointed to the fact that non-professional characteristics may affect the decision to become a journalist or which news organization to work for. Moreover, the individual position in the newsroom, the degree of editorial control in a news outlet, the importance of an issue, and the kind of news decision (primary or secondary) may play a role. Finally, we reviewed empirical research showing that there is indeed evidence for an impact of individual political attitudes and issue positions on news decisions. For most other non-professional individual characteristics, no significant impact on political news making has been shown.

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However, the few remarkable quasi-experimental studies directly linking individual characteristics and individual news decisions are not without problems. They typically suffer from the fact that they do not consider the potential impact of newsroom control and the congruence or incongruence of individual attitudes and editorial lines. This clearly limits their external validity. Against this backdrop, future research on the impact of individual characteristics of political journalists should address several issues that have not received the attention they deserve: (1) More studies are needed that investigate how personality and attitudes influence the decisions to become a political journalist, the perceptions of newsroom practices, and the relations between individual characteristics of news decisions (for an example see Baugut and Scherr 2013). (2) More studies are needed on the interplay and possible conflicts between individual preferences, editorial lines and organizational objectives. In times of increasing competition and commercial pressures it may well be that individual characteristics are less likely to play a role in news decisions. (3) More studies are needed that in more detailed ways investigate the conditions under which short-term influences of individual characteristics are more or less likely. This may be, for example, conditions of the news organization, the story or the type of decision made. (4) Methodologically, linking individual characteristics, individual news making and the possible impact of the organizational and national/cultural level is the major future challenge. This may call for a merger of multi-level modeling and quasi-experiments embedded in surveys of journalists. We end this chapter with a word of caution: The fact that evidence for a biasing impact of individual characteristics of journalists seems to be rather limited does not mean that political news coverage is unbiased. In fact, political communication research has piled up lots of evidence for political bias in individual news outlets or across the media system as a whole. But oftentimes, it seems that it is not individual journalists that can be blamed for this bias but rather the media system as a whole or individual news organizations with their economic or political interests that often are primarily decided upon by proprietors and superior editors.

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Section V: Media Messages

Olaf Jandura and Katja Friedrich

18 The quality of political media coverage Abstract: Research on media quality is mostly based on a liberal understanding of the public sphere. However, this normative standard is seldom made explicit and barely questioned. In addition, the focus on the liberal model as all-encompassing normative benchmark for media quality becomes questionable in the light of content diversification and audience fragmentation. Against this backdrop, this chapter discusses three models of the public sphere and the criteria by which the quality of political media coverage can be empirically investigated on their basis. The analysis shows that the indicators commonly used in media performance research provide a good foundation for evaluating the quality of political media content. The authors argue, however, that the indicators have to be interpreted differently in the light of the diverging normative models, and that they should be complemented by model-specific indicators. In addition, the models should not be understood as alternatives but rather as complementing each other. Key Words: media expansion, fragmentation, media quality, democratic theory, public sphere, liberal model, deliberative model, participatory model

1 Media quality: Clarifying the concept Media quality is an inherently relational concept with a normative basis. Rosengren, Carlson, and Tågerud (1996: 39) define quality as the “relation between a characteristic and a set of values.” According to this definition, criteria for media quality are based on normative assumptions, and empirical media performance assessment depends on the underlying premises that define media quality. In order to judge what kind of coverage is “better”, scholars need to reflect upon these underlying normative standards. However, the academic debate often neglects the fact that quality criteria are inextricably linked to these normative benchmarks. Indicators like diversity, balance or neutral coverage are no means to themselves but only make sense when justified by normatively set goals of media performance – such as enabling citizens to make informed decisions or resembling the marketplace of ideas with all its relevant societal voices. Hence, every debate on media quality should also be a reflection upon the normative grounds our understanding of media performance is based on (see also the chapter by Kepplinger and the other chapters in this section). Summarizing the literature on media quality, an overarching preference for one normative benchmark emerges: Most conclusions drawn from empirical research are implicitly based on a liberal view of the public sphere. In this perspec-

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tive, the mass media should provide high-quality political information, constitute a rational public discourse and help citizens to come to well-informed political opinions. Media performance, then, is assessed against these ideal goals. These are the same goals that underlie media legislation and formal codifications of press freedom in many Western societies (see also the chapter by Puppis). As legitimate as these normative goals are, they do not fully mirror the social reality of today’s media systems and media use any more. On the one hand, content diversification in media systems throughout the last decades has created high-choice media environments. This development questions the normative assumption that political media content reaches most citizens at least occasionally and therefore is the basis for the formation of political opinions across all segments of society. On the other hand, the ongoing trend of audience fragmentation challenges the idea of one mass audience, whose members get in touch with high-quality political media content on a regular basis. Audience fragmentation leads to multiple audiences, whose members choose amongst a wide array of media content and can – and in fact do – explicitly avoid or search for political information, according to their individual preferences (e.g., Donsbach and Mothes 2012: 14). Against this backdrop, we do not argue to abandon the dominant liberal normative benchmark of most empirical media performance research. However, we will outline in this chapter to what extent quality criteria depend on their normative benchmark. In the following, three models1 of the public sphere – the liberal, the discursive and the participatory2 – and their implications for empirical research will be discussed. In addition, we will compare the quality criteria deduced from the various models and argue that they should not be regarded as alternatives but rather as complementing each other.

2 Political media quality in the liberal model of the public sphere Much research on political media quality rests on the ideal of the public sphere as outlined by liberal political theory. This emphasis can be explained by the fact 1 Models of the public sphere represent different normative traditions in democratic theory (e.g., Martinsen 2009; Strömbäck 2005; Ferree, Gamson, Gerhard, and Rucht 2002). They should be regarded as ideal concepts that subsume various writings according to central normative criteria they share. Such categorizations cannot mirror all theoretical approaches in every detail, as Ferree et al. point out (2002: 289); the ideas of some theorists might even overlap traditions or shift in their emphases over time. Nonetheless, such thinking patterns pose helpful organizing tools, even if they reduce the complexity of individual approaches. 2 Ferree et al. (2002) distinguish a fourth tradition with roots in critical theory, labeled the constructionist approach. Given that this view also puts a strong emphasis on participation of underprivileged, discriminated citizens and seeks to empower socially marginalized groups, we incorporate this tradition in the participatory model of the public sphere.

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that this normative ideal also underlies media legislation and formal codifications of press freedom in many Western societies. In liberal theory, the public sphere resembles the main arena for the collective decision-making process. It is a marketplace of ideas, where rational arguments shall be discussed and individual interests will be aggregated. In this sphere, the media play a central role: They build the bridge between politicians and the electorate, especially in modern mass societies where direct communication between representatives and citizens is limited to few occasions (e.g., Ferree et al. 2002: 291).

2.1 Norms of the liberal standard of political media quality The most important norms underlying the liberal model of the public sphere are the representation, the inclusion and the expertise norm. The representation norm determines the goals of political media coverage: First, the media should inform political representatives about current issues of societal concern and their voters’ interests (bottom-up-flow of communication). Second, the media should constantly update the electorate on their representatives’ political actions and decisions (topdown-flow of communication). This dual role of the media explains why advocates of the liberal tradition ascribe so much importance to the quality of political journalism and media coverage and put quality journalism at the center of their research (Schatz and Schulz 1992: 693): Only high-quality news is expected to make political decisions transparent and to enable citizens to come to wellinformed opinions. The inclusion norm reflects the elitist perspective of the liberal model: Even though political action needs to be legitimized by the electorate, theorists do not call for ordinary citizens to be actively engaged in public discourse on a daily basis. Rather than active participation in political discourse, the liberal model limits participation to voting in elections (e.g., Schumpeter 1975). This standard does by no means exclude ordinary citizens from public debate, but assigns them a more or less passive role: Throughout the legislative period, the electorate is included in the public sphere only as audience. Inclusion in the liberal model carries two connotations: On the one hand, inclusion of the electorate should be secured via elected representatives; on the other hand, citizens should have guaranteed access to media in order to follow the public debate (e.g., Gerhards and Neidhardt 1991). Moreover, the elitist view of the public sphere is shaped by the expertise norm (Strömbäck 2005: 339). According to this requirement, only speakers with good knowledge should participate in public debates in order to guarantee their rationality – for example functional elites, experts and professionalized interest groups. Ordinary citizens should only contribute to public discourse if they act as experts. The expertise standard does not only shape the structure of the speakers publicly heard, it also implies the ideal of a certain style of public debate. According to the

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Fig. 1: Media quality criteria according to the liberal model of the public sphere. Revised illustration based on Schatz and Schulz (1992).

liberal model, public speakers shall refrain from emotional and polemic contributions or personal attacks, but keep the discourse purely on the ground of rational arguments and reasoning. In this view, the style of public debate is coined by detachment and civility (Kuklinski, Riggle, and Ottati 1991) (Figure 1).

2.2 Indicators of political media quality in the liberal model What kind of indicators derive from the liberal principles for political media quality? The literature lists three main criteria: diversity, relevance and professionalism (e.g. Schatz and Schulz 1992: 693 ff.). They, again, are operationalized by more specific indicators (Figure 1). Diversity. This criterion derives from the liberal norms of representation and inclusion. Inclusion calls for an all-encompassing coverage of democratic representatives, whereas representation implies that all relevant societal voices ought to be represented in the media. Diversity translates these norms into terms of structural and content diversity. Research on structural diversity looks at the variety of formats and genres in media coverage (such as news, documentaries or political talk shows). Research on content diversity looks at the range of issues, speakers and opinions. Researchers analyze the number of topics, political actors or other sources in news stories or the variety of different views included in editorial pieces (e.g., Kepplinger 1995: 48; Hagen 1995: 127). Relevance. This criterion can also be traced back to the notion of representation. As such, it complements the implementation of representation, as relevance tries to capture the importance of certain pieces of information to the audience.

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Whereas diversity calls for a variety of speakers and positions, relevance limits this variety to the significant issues and actors only. Westerstahl (1983: 416) distinguishes between internal and external relevance. Studies that focus on internal relevance analyze how complex and complete media coverage on a certain topic is. News coverage with a one-sided biased presentation is regarded of low quality, as recipients will not be able to come to well-informed conclusions based on a full picture of the relevant facts (Hagen 1995: 73). Studies on external relevance take into account what else is on the news map when judging political coverage (McQuail 1992: 198). For its measurement Schatz and Schulz (1992: 696) borrow from news values theory and measure relevance of an issue by the importance attributed to it in comparison to other topics. In order to measure the importance of a topic researchers often combine quantitative criteria, such as the likelihood of the occurrence of an event or the number of people affected by it. A qualitative approach uses criteria like the intensity of effects, prominence, voluntariness, closeness and sustainability or irreversibility of an event (Schatz and Schulz: 696 ff.; McQuail 1992: 198). Yet another way to measure external relevance is to compare media coverage with expert judgments, asking experts to evaluate which information might be vital for people in order to come to well-informed, rational conclusions (Rothman and Lichter 1982) (see also the chapter by Hopmann). Professionalism. This criterion is operationalized on two dimensions: content and style. Regarding the content dimension, scholars distinguish analytical and descriptive quality/objectivity. However, research focuses almost exclusively on descriptive quality/objectivity. As for the content dimension, the claim for professionalism is based first on the notion of representation, which implies the requirement of objectivity. The same criterion can be deduced from expertise, as this norm calls for a factual and rational discourse. Against this background, the media are supposed to inform the public in an objective and unbiased manner (Ferree et al. 2002: 291). This, however, can only be put into practice if based on a wide, objective and balanced coverage (McQuail 1992: 144). As Figure 1 illustrates, objectivity is operationalized by indicators for factuality and impartiality. Looking at factuality, the basic prerequisite for objective news coverage is that all presented facts are true (accuracy), that the information being covered is up to date (topicality), and that all aspects of an issue are incorporated (completeness). Although these criteria may not be too controversial, they are hard to test. Two approaches can be found in the literature: The first way is to compare political coverage with external data – e.g. findings from observations (Lang and Lang 1953), expert opinions (Schönbach 2008), or statistical evidence (Funkhouser 1973). The second way is to compare different media outlets with each other. Here, the assumption is that the less media outlets differ in their coverage, the less likely it will be that they are wrong (Hagen 1995: 110). However, when professional coorientation (Donsbach 2004) plays a part, this argument is disputable (see also the chapters by Stanyer, by Salgado and by Wahl-Jorgensen).

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Looking at impartiality, this indicator is operationalized by two subsequent measures, balance and neutrality/fairness. Balance, which is also linked to diversity, refers to an adequate presentation of different opinions, people and topics (Hagen 1995: 120; McQuail 1992: 202). It can be evaluated on several levels – within a single news film or article, within a program, a certain media type or even between media genres (McQuail 1992: 224). In political contexts, a rather common indicator for balance is proportionality. It is usually assessed by comparing the amount of coverage political actors receive to the current majority situation in parliament (e.g., Jandura 2011: 192; McQuail 1992: 201) or to the prevalence of certain views within the general public (Rosengren 1979). However, proportionality might actually run counter to the plea for diversity: As much as there is a point for putting an emphasis on the views of the major political parties or the majority of the population, it also means that minority views become less visible. Proportionality thus interferes with the protection of minorities, which is both an important element of democracy and a key factor for the ability of citizens to make up their minds. In addition, the non-coverage of minority views may also have an impact on perceptions of the climate of opinion (Noelle-Neumann 1984) (see also the chapters by Hopmann and by Arendt and Matthes). The second indicator for impartiality is neutral/fair coverage, i.e. that media content should be free from any kind of bias. There are several ways to identify one-sided coverage. Some studies look at how often and how favorable different media outlets present a certain party or politician (Kepplinger and Roessing 2005: 98). Synchronization studies investigate similarities between hard news items and editorials; a journalistic practice that gives the audience a misleading picture of the political situation. Three ways of synchronization have been identified: (a) Topic synchronization refers to coverage which is more favorable towards topics that make the preferential candidate look good, (b) protagonist synchronization in terms of the concept of opportune witnesses (Hagen 1993), and (c) assessment synchronization (Jandura and Großmann 2003; Eilders 2002: 307). Researchers usually interpret such forms of biased coverage as a breach of the principle of equal opportunities (e.g., Eilders 2002: 307). Another approach to measure impartiality can be found in the concept of press-party parallelism (Seymour-Ure 1974; van Kempen 2007). Whereas synchronization describes implicit bias in news coverage, press-party parallelism is a form of explicit partisanship: The editorial line of a paper – measured by the tone in political editorials or endorsements – is linked to the positions of prominent parties. In case of multi-party systems, such journalistic practice leads to heterogeneous media content (see also the chapter by Hopmann). Style dimension. Requirements for professionalism on the style dimension are detachment and civility. They derive from the liberal notion of expertise: Not only should public speakers refrain from emotional and polemic statements – journalists should adhere to these principles, too. This includes an impartial selection

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and presentation of topics and opinions, the use of factual language as well as fair and unemotional analyses (Kepplinger 1989). Detachment is an additional indicator for neutrality, as media content is only neutral if presented in an accurate and restrained language and if it is not based on emotions (Schatz and Schulz 1992: 704; McQuail 1992: 233). Hence, when judging from a liberal perspective, all kind of emotionalizing coverage impedes high quality reporting and thus puts the democratic well-functioning of the media at risk.

3 Challenges to the liberal model and alternative concepts Whilst the expectations towards the media and their duty to generate a general public and enable rational public discourse do not seem to have changed since the 1960s, fundamental shifts in the media sector challenge the liberal ideal of the public sphere. These changes can be summarized by the terms content diversification and audience fragmentation (Webster and Ksiazek 2012). Since the late 1970s, technological, economic, and regulatory developments have provoked an explosive growth in the number of media outlets in Europe and elsewhere across the globe. What looks as a positive development at first glance because recipients are provided with a more comprehensive and richer media environment, in fact challenges the liberal ideal. In low-choice media environments, even politically uninterested individuals can hardly avoid the mainstream news media and therefore become exposed to political news at least from time to time (“inadvertent audience”). Given today’s high-choice media environments and individualized media consumption, however, the mass audience dissolves into multiple audiences, whose members are unlikely to consume a common diet of news, leaving particular groups uninformed about issues of societal relevance (e.g., Hollander 2008; Prior 2007; Tewksbury, Hals, and Bibart 2008). At the same time, more and more specialized news outlets emerge, especially on the Internet, which offer extensive information and allow recipients to interact with other audience members, activists and politicians (e.g., Della Porta and Diani 2006). Audience members of such specialized political media content share a high degree of political sophistication and participation. Between these two extreme segments a growing gap emerges that is not adequately represented in the liberal holistic concept of one public sphere. Given the trends of content diversification and audience fragmentation, an increasing number of scholars rethinks the dominant conception of the public sphere as one integrative entity and acknowledges that high-choice media environments, individualized media consumption and fragmented audiences require to speak of multiple spheres (e.g., Downey and Fenton 2003; Gitlin 1998; Fraser 1992). These co-existing

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public spheres are based on different normative standards, address varying audiences and follow diverging discourse logics (Örnebring and Jönsson 2004) – and they challenge the mainstream normative standard of media quality as defined by the liberal conception of the public sphere. It is easy to see that content diversification and audience fragmentation have serious implications for the measurement of media quality. If the liberal model of the public sphere can neither adequately describe the process of information gathering by politically inattentive citizens, nor bridge the gap between them and the politically involved by one holistic public sphere, then quality indicators deduced from the liberal standard can neither be transferred one-to-one to specialized news outlets and political discussion platforms, nor to political entertainment formats or tabloid news, which are more tailored to politically inattentive recipients. Hence, content diversification and audience fragmentation call for a diversification of the normative standards that define media quality. In order to assess the implications these changes have, we will in the following discuss two alternative normative concepts of what constitutes a “good” public sphere and which standards the media should meet in order to contribute to a functioning democracy: the discursive and the participatory model. The discursive approach is the model of choice to analyze the political quality of highly specialized news outlets and discussion formats, whereas the participatory model allows for a more accurate conception of political media quality in entertainment content, which might look a-political at first glance. Given these normative models, alternative indicators will be discussed by which political media quality can be measured.

4 Political media quality in the discursive model of the public sphere The discursive tradition draws quite a demanding picture of a “good” public sphere, where aspects of power and social inequality shall be left aside and public reasoning ought to be rational, guided by mutual respect and the will to reach a consensus (e.g., Elster 1998: 8). It is the most ambitious of the three models – no wonder it calls for the most demanding criteria to judge the quality of political coverage.

4.1 Norms of the discursive standard of political media quality Hugely influenced by Habermas’ (1989) concept of deliberation, the public sphere is seen as an arena for rational debates between members of an enlightened public, the institutionalized platform of discursive interaction. The deliberative ideal leads to different role conceptions for speakers and citizens: Participation is not

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Fig. 2: Media quality criteria according to the discursive model of the public sphere.

primarily understood as voting, not even as self-government. Discursive theorists take deliberation as the utmost goal of public participation (Dryzek 2000: 1). The picture of the electorate drawn in this perspective is one of politically interested and involved citizens, who organize themselves in civic groups in order to participate in public reasoning. For civic society to be incorporated in public discourse, the discursive tradition enlarges the political process by putting emphasis not so much on public debate at the center of the political system (as does the liberal tradition), but on discourse among civil society activists, such as grassroots organizations, citizens’ initiatives or NGOs. Hence, inclusion in the discursive tradition means actively incorporating civil society in media discourse. Other than the liberal model, which holds both top-down and bottom-up communication as important functions to be achieved by the media, the deliberative conception puts its emphasis on bottom-up-communication. Even though the elitist debate is acknowledged (e.g. Habermas 2006), the discursive model calls for a politicization of the pre-political domain in which civil society activists voice their concerns and discuss political issues at eye level with other speakers of the public sphere (see also the chapter by Kepplinger). Other than the liberal model, which puts representation at the core of democracy, deliberative thinking focuses on accountability (e.g., Thompson 2008: 498; Chambers 2003: 308). This norm derives directly from the notion of deliberation, as it emphasizes the justification of claims on the basis of arguments as well as the importance of giving reason and evaluating competing positions on rational grounds (Habermas 2006: 413). Another difference to the liberal model lies in the idea of what motivates speakers to participate in public reasoning: Whereas the liberal model puts forward individual needs and vested interests as driving forces for political participation, the deliberative conception emphasizes the belief that democracy is based on worthwhile social goals (the “common good”) that cannot be achieved through individual action alone (Curran 2005: 138).

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Contrary to the liberal model, which strives for an eventual closure of debate in form of majority positions, the discursive tradition also builds upon the conciliation norm: The overall goal of public discourse is to promote social consent on controversial issues (Dryzek 2000: 8). This ideal implies a certain style of debate: Public speakers ought to be guided by mutual respect, and their contributions should foster dialogue amongst participants (Thompson 2008: 498) (Figure 2).

4.2 Indicators of political media quality in the discoursive model When looking at the criteria for media quality in the discursive tradition, the relevant literature is not as consistent as in the liberal tradition. A wide range of indicators is developed and tested in multiple discourse settings, such as parliamentary debates (e.g., Steenbergen, Bächtinger, Spörndli, and Steiner 2003), online forums (e.g., Moy and Gastil 2006), news coverage (e.g., Marcinkowski and Donk 2012; Gerhards 1997) and talk shows (e.g., Hamo 2006), to mention just a few. In the following, we will concentrate on the main deliberative norms – inclusion, accountability and conciliation – and subsequent measures, even though this catalogue cannot account for all indicators and discourse settings being researched (Figure 2). From the first important discursive norm, inclusion, two indicators can be deduced: diversity and balance. Diversity is conceptualized as pluralism of speakers. This criterion shall not be understood in terms of representation of relevant voices and groups, as in the liberal model, but rather in the sense that the media should assist social groups to constitute themselves and clarify their objectives via debate. Gerhards (1997) proposes to measure inclusion via the proportion of civil society activists versus representatives of the elite. The quality of political coverage, then, depends on the dominance of speakers representing civil society. Inclusion bears several more implications for media quality: Political coverage should secure access to public debate for both civil society activists and socially disadvantaged citizens, who actively want to engage in the political process. This notion of diversity can be measured via the type of speakers (officials, civil activists and ordinary citizens) and corresponds with the balance criterion, which posits that no speaker or group should dominate public debate, because domination would impede the dialogic nature of the discourse (Thompson 2008: 509). In this sense, the liberal and the discursive criterion of diversity carry the same notion. They differ, however, in their understandings of who should be heard in public. Another approach to translate inclusion into a quality measure is the extent to which journalists frame politics as open for everyone (Strömbäck 2005: 340). If coverage frames politics as exclusive discourse amongst the elite, discursive quality is regarded as being low. The second discursive norm, accountability, aims at publicly articulating, explaining and justifying political positions (Delli Carpini 2004: 317). Therefore,

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some theorists also speak of justification (e.g., Steenbergen et al. 2003): The better speakers explain and justify their claims, the higher the discursive quality of political coverage. This norm has quite challenging implications for the measurement of media quality. The proposals how to operationalize accountability are manifold and can be subsumed under analytic quality. Whereas earlier works only measure whether public claims are justified or not (e.g. Gerhards 1997), scholars have developed more sophisticated indicators to tap analytic quality since then. The Discourse Quality Index (Steenbergen et al. 2003) operationalizes analytical quality in parliamentary debates by the level of justification, which measures how tight premises and conclusions are connected. For this, quality measures must include whether political claims a) identify reasons, b) offer conclusions or solutions, and c) link reasons and conclusions. If speakers fail to give reasons or solutions or fail to link them, discourse quality is regarded as being low. In a similar vein, Delli Carpini (2004: 317) argues that discursive quality of media content can be measured via the identification of possible solutions, and the evaluative criteria by which speakers or journalists come to prefer a certain solution or conclusion for a problem. These indicators are quite similar to the indicators of the framing concept, as defined by Entman (1993), who distinguishes four frame elements: Problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation and treatment recommendation (a solution) (see also the chapters by Aalberg and by Arendt and Matthes). The third normative benchmark, conciliation, can be translated into two indicators, namely dialogue and a civilized form of communication. Dialogue comprises of two subsequent measures: Mutual respect and responsiveness. Steenbergen et al. (2003: 26) introduce three measures for mutual respect – a) respect towards groups, b) respect for demands under discussion, and c) respect towards counterarguments. Whereas the first indicator taps empathy towards social groups to be supported, the other two indicators operationalize the dialogic character, as quality depends on direct references to alternative claims and positive acknowledgments of other speakers’ contributions. And finally, responsiveness exceeds the call for mutual respect and acknowledgement of divergent positions, as it asks of public speakers to always respond to the arguments of others. Further on, a civilized form of communication is as important as the content of political debate in the discursive conception. The conciliation norm demands of public speakers to adhere to civility and detachment in their communication (Gutmann and Thompson 1996: 79). Civility means that speakers – and journalists – refrain from defamations or personal attacks that have no connection to the issue of debate. Further on, civility mirrors the ideal that public speakers should not participate in public debate for purely selfish reasons, but to strive for social consent. These requirements can be measured via the degree of constructive versus destructive discussion, as well as direct or indirect attacks against the political opponent in press releases, campaign advertising or media coverage (e.g. Jamieson 1992). Detachment, on the other hand, demands of speakers to suppress any kind

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of emotion and focus purely on facts and justifications instead. As a consequence of the conciliation norm, entertaining media content is regarded critically, because rhetorical and stylistic strategies (e.g. personalization, simplification, dramatization, polarization) are thought to promote “civic privatism and a mood of antipolitics” (Habermas 2006: 422). In this regard, the representative liberal and the discursive tradition are quite close to each other. Both highlight the necessity of reasoning on the basis of rational arguments (detachment), a civilized tone in public debate and condemn personal attacks on other speakers (see also the chapters by Moy, Johnson, and Barthel and by Holbert, Hill, and Lee). Finally, the question remains to which type of media content these quality indicators apply. The discursive conception puts all kinds of conversational media outlets and formats at the center, such as interviews, talk shows, online newsgroups and social network platforms, as well as civic media and grassroots journalism (Dahlberg 2007). Beyond these aspects, however, discursive theorists are not always clear about which political media content shall be put at the center of deliberative reasoning. Habermas speaks of specialized mediated arenas, where civic activists can discuss their opinions in “networks of wild flows of messages” (2006: 415) across different media outlets and formats. In his eyes, this flow of messages comes from news, reports, commentaries, talk shows as well as from shows and movies with informative, polemical, educational, or entertaining content (Habermas 2006). This rather unspecific conceptualization of popular inclusion makes its measurement difficult; hence only few indicators can be identified in the literature. One approach would be structural diversity, i.e. to measure the different genres of political communication in the media.

5 Political media quality in the participatory model of the public sphere Like the discursive model, the participatory tradition is not as coherent as the liberal conception of the public sphere. Nonetheless, central normative standards can be outlined that most theorists share. The participatory model of the public sphere is strongly influenced by Cultural Studies, Critical Theory, Feminist Studies and theories of social conflict. These roots might explain the overall critical tone underlying many writings. The public sphere in this tradition has to be read as a critical counterweight to the established arena dominated by powerful elites (e.g., Fraser 1992). Civic participation is the utmost goal for participatory theorists, as they locate self-governance at the core of democracy (Barber 1984: 151). This ideal enlarges the speakers’ spectrum: Not political representatives and the powerful elites, but ordinary citizens as the ones being (potentially) affected by political decisions should be heard in public. In this regard, the participation ideal demands of the media to open up public space for ordinary citizens and establish

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public arenas in which their needs and opinions are the primary focus and an anti-elitist discourse appeals to these audiences (Örnebring and Jönsson 2004: 293).

5.1 Norms of the participatory standard of political media quality The ideal of civic participation explains why popular inclusion is such a central norm in this tradition. Other than the liberal model, which posits both top-down and bottom-up communication as important goals to be secured by the media, the participatory ideal focuses solely on the bottom-up-perspective. The media should be responsive to the demands of civil society, voice the needs of disadvantaged citizens and thereby maintain pressure on the political system (Curran 2005: 138). Alternative public spheres are the space where social inequality and its political consequences can be made public – a function mainstream journalism with its focus on elitist politics normally fails to achieve (Ferree et al. 2002: 297) (see also the chapters by Salgado and by Hertog and Zuercher). Further on, the empowerment norm emphasizes the media’s function to reach the politically inattentive, awaken their political interest and encourage them to voice their needs and opinions publicly (e.g., Carey 1987). The media in the participatory perspective ought to offer arenas in which citizens can outline problems of social relevance that ought to be addressed by the political system or speak of everyday life in their role as those (potentially) affected by political decisions (Friedrich and Jandura 2012). As such, the participatory model calls for a politicization of the pre-political sphere and acknowledges everyday life as a political domain. This has implications for the question to which type of political media content participatory quality criteria apply. The range of media outlets is wide, including popular entertainment formats, grassroots journalism, blogs, online dis-

Fig. 3: Media quality criteria according to the participatory model of the public sphere.

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cussion platforms or talk shows. At first glance, the participatory tradition seems to share the focus on these outlets with the discursive tradition. However, the concepts differ fundamentally in regard to the quality criteria being deduced from their normative bases (Figure 3).

5.2 Indicators of political media quality in the participatory model Inferring criteria from the participatory model is more delicate than from the other models, as there is little empirical research on media quality from a participatory perspective, giving theoretical claims little back-up by empirical evidence. The following catalogue of quality measures is therefore to be seen as work in progress (see Figure 3). More research on effects is necessary to determine if and how these criteria may contribute to motivation, knowledge and participation of ordinary and socially disadvantaged citizens. At first glance, the discursive and the participatory perspective seem to share some normative standards, which in turn would speak for comparable quality criteria. Both models emphasize inclusion in form of civic participation as central standard for a “good” public sphere. However, they differ in regard to the civil speakers who should be granted access to public arenas, and how speakers should communicate in public (discourse style). The participatory as well as the discursive model refer to the inclusion norm, because both traditions emphasize the bottomup-perspective and incorporate speakers from civil society. At a closer look, however, the discursive tradition includes primarily organized civil society activists and allows the elite to access civic arenas (Habermas 2006). In contrast to this, participatory writings put ordinary citizens and socially disadvantaged groups at the center of public debate. The notion of this norm is rather one of popular inclusion (e.g., Young 1993; Fraser 1992). Citizens do not have to be formally organized in order to gain access to the public sphere. Some theorists even deny elitist actors access to these alternative arenas – a strategy intended to secure counter publics free of established relations of power. The quality criteria deriving from the participatory notion of popular inclusion differ from the liberal and discursive measures. In the participatory sense, inclusion is not exerted by diversity and balance of all socially relevant positions within one medium outlet (internal diversity). Rather, it is implied by external diversity via additional, alternative media outlets, which give a voice to citizens who normally find it difficult to gain access to the mainstream media. Civic media as arenas for counter publics must prioritize the cultivation and formulation of particular group values (Curran 2005: 137). In the participatory ideal, then, there is no need to include perspectives outside of the group (Rohlinger 2007: 128). Deducing quality criteria from the empowerment ideal is also quite delicate, as the literature offers discrepant positions. Most writers agree that the norm implies an active role conception, by which journalists shall act as advocates of citizens

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and social groups, who are not able (or have not yet discovered their power) to participate actively in public debate. With this norm, the participatory model demands no less of the media than to help transforming individuals into engaged citizens (Dahlgren 2006; Carey 1987). For these reasons, civic journalism and other participatory media outlets do not have to adhere to the impartiality norm in the same way as the mainstream media in the liberal model (Curran 2005: 140). However, some theorists warn to overestimate the emancipatory power of entertainment media and claim that mainstream journalism with its higher quality standards nonetheless plays an important role in informing the politically inattentive and motivating them to participate in politics (e.g., Curran 2005; Graber 2003). The quality criterion that backs up such a position would again be diversity. Whereas there is broad agreement that the liberal and deliberate quality criteria impartiality, civility and detachment should be rejected, participatory writers disagree on which indicators measure the quality of political media content in terms of its emancipatory potential. Many participatory theorists view a broad range of communication styles – including emotional, biased and in some accounts even polemic speech – as appropriate forms of communication, as long as they help the media to win the politically inattentive for participation and contribute to their empowerment (Örnebring and Jönsson 2004; Ferree et al. 2002: 298; Kennedy 1998). More cautious suggestions include criteria such as conversational responsiveness, juxtaposing oppositional norms and offering different experiences and values (Curran 2005: 135). Only few publications include suggestions how to measure these indicators, however. Whereas conversational responsiveness is close to the discursive quality criterion dialogue, the other two more cautious indicators juxtaposing oppositional norms and different experiences and values point into the direction of diversity. However, no suggestions how to operationalize these aspects can be found in the participatory literature. For emotionalization and personalization, measures can at least be borrowed from political communication research. Emotionalizing media content is either measured as global characteristic or via various single items that tap stylistic strategies such as cinematography, visualization of emotions, degree of polarization, journalistic judgments, pleas for action or forms of audience address (e.g., Wegener 1999). Personalization, on the other hand, can be scaled on three dimensions (Raupp and Hoffmann 2006): As a) a strong focus of coverage on political actors instead on issues, as b) entanglement of political positions or decisions with certain politicians, or as c) the degree to which journalists reduce elections to a game competition between political candidates (see also the chapters by Sheafer, Shenhav and Balmas, by Aalberg and by Hopmann). These indicators can also be seen as measures for simplification, a third criterion to be found in empirical research on political media quality. A fourth indicator for empowerment is negativism. Negative political coverage, in this vein, is seen as a form of criticizing the elites and the powerful. As such,

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it is an additional indicator for the journalistic role conception in participatory writings and complements the explicit rejection of the impartiality norm. Negativism can be measured with several categories, as it shows in the valence of an event just as well as in explicit judgements and in the presentation of conflicts and possible outcomes (e.g., Donsbach and Jandura 1999) (see also the chapter by Hopmann). A fifth indicator on the stylistic dimension is exemplification: In order to transform the politically disengaged into active citizens, political decisions should be presented in a simple and demonstrative way. One common journalistic technique to simplify complex issues is to illustrate their impact on the daily lives of citizens (exemplars). Studies on exemplification analyze whether the message in question is communicated abstractly, by referring to statistics, or by the use of typical examples, i.e. people who were affected by certain actions or decisions (e.g., Brosius 2003).

6 Conclusion: Audience-centered quality measures for political media coverage Summarizing the above discussion of the three normative models and its’ subsequent quality criteria, both similarities and differences in the understanding of political media quality and its empirical measurement become visible. As Table 1 illustrates, the discursive and the liberal model share the most quality criteria. Both catalogues include diversity, a civilized form of communication, and detachment as important criteria of media performance. Some differences, however, lie in the connotations of these criteria. The criterion of external diversity illustrates the varying connotations between the models quite well: By incorporating civil society activists into the concept of the public sphere, external diversity in the discursive sense stands for an extension of political debate. In contrast to the liberal model, it does include the idea of interaction between speakers of the center of the political system and civil society activists. However, politically inattentive citizens are faded out. Against this, the participatory notion of external diversity is seen to secure extended social representation by incorporating these citizens. But the public spheres for elitist and ordinary speakers remain strictly separated, with little potential of interaction between both groups. A second difference between the models can be found in the standards applied to the dialogic structure and intellectual analysis in political coverage. In this regard the discursive conception is more demanding than the liberal model. With the conciliation norm, discursive theorists stress that mutual respect does not only imply tolerance, but the will to interact with advocates of divergent positions and to search for a common ground – in other words: to foster true dialogue (e.g. Thompson 2008). In the liberal conception, speakers only have to respect each other, but not necessarily acknowledge other contributions to public debate. More-

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Tab. 1: Media quality criteria according to the different models of the public sphere. Liberal quality standard

Discursive quality standard

Participatory quality standard

Diversity

– structural diversity – content diversity

– structural diversity – content diversity

– content diversity (external pluralism)

Style

professionalism – objectivity – civility

civilized form

empowering form – explicit rejection of objectivity, civility and detachment – emotionalization, personalization, simplification, negativism, exemplification

Deliberative quality

–

– dialogue

– conversational responsiveness

News selection quality

relevance

–

–

Analytic quality

–

– frame elements – linkage of elements – reflection of evaluative criteria

–

over, even though researchers in the liberal tradition name analytical quality as an indicator, it is barely operationalized and measured. In contrast, the discursive tradition offers a more elaborated operational definition of analytic quality. From these two catalogues, the participatory quality criteria differ quite substantially. Not only does the participatory idea of media quality explicitly reject central professional norms of mainstream journalism, such as objectivity, civility and detachment. Especially the participatory indicators on the stylistic dimension demonstrate the difference between the participatory model on the one hand, and the liberal and discursive ideal on the other: Whereas a high degree of emotionalization, personalization, simplification, negativism and exemplification is interpreted as low quality of political media content in the liberal and discursive model, the participatory view is rather positive – even though it remains open to what extent such journalistic strategies really motivate and empower politically inattentive recipients. Further differences can be found between the discursive and the participatory model: In the discursive tradition, a civilized and rational form of debate is an important goal, whereas aspects of power and social status should be left aside. In contrast, the participatory model regards rhetorical style as deeply intertwined with social status and power (Ferree et al. 2002: 298) (Table 1).

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What conclusions can be drawn from the discussion of the different normative benchmarks for media quality? When assessing the quality of political media content, it is vital to have a clear picture of the normative benchmark empirical analyses are based on. In order to judge what kind of coverage is “better”, more “sophisticated” or allows recipients to be well informed, scholars need to reflect upon the underlying normative ideal of the public sphere that defines these qualities. Among the three models of the public sphere discussed in this article, the liberal tradition is the dominant standard by which scholars assess the quality of media performance. But this research practice needs to be reconsidered. Various scholars have outlined the conceptual difficulties of applying one standard of excellence to all news markets (e.g., Rohlinger 2007; Curran 2005; Strömbäck 2005; McNair 2003; Zaller 2003). Content diversification and audience fragmentation challenge such an approach even further. When these changes in media systems and media use are taken seriously, the liberal model of the public sphere cannot be used anymore as a holistic, all-encompassing benchmark for performance analysis across different types of political media content. The consequence of these macrotrends is to acknowledge that there is not one, but multiple public spheres (e.g., Gitlin 1998; Fraser 1992), and that these different spheres imply not one set of criteria for political media quality, but multiple, audience-related sets, which can be applied to different media sectors and political media content. Whereas the literature presents the three models discussed here quite often to be mutually exclusive, we suggest another approach, in which the different normative standards complement each other. Following Curran’s (2005) idea of various sectors in a democratic media system, we propose that these sectors have different functions, which consequently call for diverging kinds of political debate and journalistic styles. Even though Curran’s model accounts only for television, the idea of a core sector summoning the classical outlets of information journalism, which is surrounded by peripheral media sectors with different democratic purposes, can be transferred to the media in general and combined with the normative standards for media quality: (1) Liberal media quality standard: At the center of media quality research remain the mainstream news media with television news, broadsheet papers or online outlets that serve the traditional journalistic purpose of information and analysis. Quality of political media content is gauged against the information function of the media as described in the liberal model, as the representation principle demands both a well-informed electorate and political representatives to be in tune with the opinions across society. For the assessment of media quality in this media sector, the liberal model of the public sphere is the central normative standard, with the subsequent performance criteria diversity, relevance and professionalism. (2) Discursive media quality standard: The discursive model posits an ambitious benchmark for political media coverage, with especially high demands for the

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style of public discourse. Media quality is based on the goal of deliberation, with far-reaching consequences for journalism and political media outlets. The quality depends not only on the intellectual level of debate, true dialogue and mutual respect, but also on the will of public speakers to strive for conciliation. Such a demanding benchmark narrows the spectrum of media outlets this standard can be applied to. The discursive model focuses on specialized political media outlets. It is also applicable to online media outlets, such as discussion forums, blogs, e-democracy initiatives and all other forms of grassroots journalism. The discursive quality of such media content can be assessed by the criteria diversity, analytical quality, dialogue and a civilized form of communication. (3) Participatory media quality standard: The importance of popular inclusion explains why the participatory model of the public sphere is at first glance directed at a-political media formats and outlets, such as infotainment programs, personality talk shows, reality shows or tabloids. Following the participatory concept, media quality is a truly audience-related concept. Whether political media content is of high quality can only be determined in relation to the responses of the audience. This, however, changes the nature of empirical quality research: Content research should then ideally be accompanied by studies on effects, or at least refer to earlier research. The indicators for media performance discussed above therefore resemble only a preliminary catalogue, consisting of diversity, emotionalization, personalization, simplification, negativism and exemplification. Curran’s idea of a core sector and complementing sectors, for which different functions – and consequently different media quality standards – apply, allows to take trends like individualized media consumption and audience fragmentation into account when evaluating political media quality. Audience-centered concepts of media quality bear in mind that different audiences have different needs. Mass media meet these needs when offering political information in multiple ways that attract the attention of different societal groups, so that they can engage in public debate. Political representation needs such a public space – not a fragmented one.

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Toril Aalberg

19 Issues, events and frames in political media coverage Abstract: This chapter discusses research on different kinds of media frames in political coverage which have been shown to significantly affect how politics is perceived and understood by citizens. After defining issue/policy substance, strategic game, thematic, and episodic framing as key features of the portrayal of politics in today’s media coverage, the chapter discusses various reasons why these frames are so commonly used in journalism. After that, the chapter reviews empirical research on the development of the presence of the different frames across time. Furthermore, differences between countries and news organizations are discussed. The author argues that although research shows that the various frames are indeed an important ingredient of political coverage, general conclusions are hampered by differences in operationalizations and the lack of comparative research efforts. The author therefore calls for more standardized investigations and truly comparative studies on this important topic. Key Words: issue and policy substance framing, strategic game framing, thematic framing, episodic framing, horse race coverage, opinion polls

1 Introduction In principle, one should expect that it is the major political issues and events occurring in the world at large, that also encounter in the coverage of political affairs. This “mirror image” definition of news and current affairs coverage stipulates close correspondence between the state of the real world and the content of media coverage. But the expectation that media coverage mirrors real world political events is unrealistic on a variety of grounds. One important reason is the well-known asymmetry between so-called newsworthiness and the normal course of events (Galtung and Ruge 1965). Basically events are judged newsworthy only when they deviate from anticipated outcomes and fulfill certain other news values. Negative events for instance, indicate a deviation from normalcy and thus always tend to attract greater coverage. Politicians who behave as law-abiding citizens attract little attention while the few who break the law elicit volumes of coverage. Practical considerations also make it impossible to cover events at every remote location, and many issues do not manifest themselves in the form of observable concrete events. In some policy areas indicators of “reality” are also simply unavailable, like the “level of threat” to national security (Iyengar and

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McGrady 2007; Rosengren 1979). The mirror image definition is also unrealistic because the practice of journalism rests on fallible and culturally determined judgments. It is physically impossible to cover all of the thousands of potentially important events and issues that occur on a daily bases, and editors therefore act as “gatekeepers” when they select witch events and issues to cover (White 1950). These judgements of newsworthiness are not only influenced by cultural, but also by organizational and individual factors. For example, what is newsworthy for a public broadcaster may not be newsworthy for a tabloid newspaper (see also the chapters by Pfetsch and Esser, by McNair and by Wahl-Jorgensen). Explaining the content of political media coverage, what is ignored, what is reported and how, is therefore very much an exercise in understanding the professional values of journalists and the organizational procedures of media organizations. One of the key reasons for showing an interest in how politics are covered in the news is that different types of frames are said to affect viewers’ attribution of responsibility as well as the public’s political engagement. While some frames portray issues as the creations of societal and/or governmental forces, others leave an impression of individual responsibility, or even portray politics as a question of what best serves the self-interest of politicians (Cappella and Jamieson 1997; Iyengar 1991). In this chapter we will not, however, focus on framing effects (but see the chapter by Arendt and Matthes). Rather, we will take a closer look at the central theories that explain why some issues, events and frames dominate political media coverage at the expense of others. We shall also review some of the most important debates and findings in this area of research.

2 Conceptual foundations The concept of framing has been one of the most fertile areas in recent research in journalism and mass communication. While some scholars argue that frames refer to principles of selection and emphasis (Gitlin 1980), others argue that frames also define problems, make moral judgments and suggest remedies (Entman 1993). Matthes (2009) thus find that there is a wide variety of definitions, approaches and types of framing devices applied in the framing literature. He also stresses that frames have been conceptualized at various levels of abstraction. For instance, Semetko and Valkenburg (2000) made a distinction between issue-specific and generic frames. While issue-specific frames apply only to certain issues, like global warming or immigration, generic frames typically describe structural aspects and features of news that can apply across different topics or issues (Matthes 2009: 360). In this chapter we will focus on the generic frames that may be applied across political events and issues, while more issue specific frames will be ignored. For a further discussion of the distinction between issue-specific and generic frames see Semetko and Valkenburg (2000), de Vreese (2005) or Matthes (2009).

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News coverage of political issues and events comes in at least four distinct genres of presentation according to how they are framed. What is often called a thematic news frame places the public issue in a general context and usually takes the form of an in-depth “background” report (Iyengar 1991). Typically, this type of news media coverage does not only take longer to prepare, but for broadcast media there often is no airtime available to present thematic background on all issues deemed newsworthy. An example of a thematic framing would be a story about foreign aid that addresses the historical context, the factors that contributed to the current situation and so on. The other genre of presentation is referred to as episodic news frames. This approach depicts issues in terms of individual instances or specific events. Media coverage of mass protest movements that focuses more closely on specific acts of protest rather than on the issues that gave rise to the protests is one example of episodic framing. Another typical example is when the media report about terrorist acts without providing information about their underlying historical, economic or social antecedents. Episodic coverage of politics also typically features dramatic visual footage and pictures, while thematic reports tend to be more sedate. While the thematic and episodic news frames are structural and inherent to the conventions of most types of journalism, there is another set of generic frames that more specifically concentrates on coverage of politics in general and election campaigns in particular. Research on how the media cover politics often contrast a media focus on issues and policy substance with the framing of politics as a strategic game. Broadly defined, the framing of politics as a strategic game is characterized by a focus on questions related to who is winning and losing, the performances of politicians and parties, and on campaign strategies and tactics. This framing is often contrasted with a focus on political substance and issues. The “issue” frame would thus focus on real-life conditions with relevance for issue positions, while the strategic game frame would present stories related to politics as a game, with focus on contest and strategies, rather than on issue positions per se. An example of an issue frame would be a news story on how the social democrats would want to raise pensions because they believe that the elderly deserve a higher degree of financial security. A classical game frame example would be a story on how the Social Democrats are losing ground in the latest polls. In practice, few news reports are exclusively episodic or thematic, issue or game oriented. Even the most detailed, close up look at a particular poor person, or individual immigrant, invariably includes lead in remarks by either the anchorperson or the reporter on the scope of poverty or immigration. A debate about social welfare programs might include a brief scene of individuals who are likely to be affected by changes in the program. Similarly a news story may report that the President has announced tax cuts, in an effort to win more support among the middle class. For most stories however, one frame or the other clearly predominates (Strömbäck and Aalberg 2008). In empirical research, which frame predomi-

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Fig. 1: Political coverage classified according to four main types of generic frames.

nates is often decided based on headlines, ingress, dominant visuals or even word counts. For an overview of the four main generic frames see Figure 1. Few scholars would dispute that the media have a strong tendency to frame politics in an episodic way or focus on politics as a strategic game. Most scholars also draw on the same theoretical foundations when they explain the popularity and the effects of these frames. Still, beyond that, a consensus on the level, the degree or even the content of these frames is often absent. One major explanation behind this lack of consensus is an unclear conceptualization in much of previous research (Aalberg, Strömbäck, and de Vreese 2012). In the literature focusing on episodic versus thematic frames for instance, there has been a discussion on whether or not to include mixed categories (Barnes et al. 2008; Iyengar 1991; Jha 2007; Strömbäck and Dimitrova 2006). Others have looked at how episodic news stories (specific events or particular cases) may be related to different types of responsibility (Semetko and Valkenburg 2000). It is however, within the studies focusing on strategic game frames, that the variety of conceptualizations has been most extensive. A review of that literature reveals a certain development in the terminology. What was called horse race news became part of the game frame which was later discussed as part of the strategy frame. The initial literature, however, did not use the term “strategic game frame”. Jamieson (1992: 165–167) discusses a “strategy schema” where journalists focus on who wins and how, and candidates are seen as performers in a game or in a war. Patterson (1993: 57–58), on the other hand, talks about a “game schema” of political reporting, structured around the notion that politics is a strategic game in which candidates compete for advantage. A few years later Cappella and Jamieson (1997: 33) call it a “strategy frame” that emphasizes who is ahead and behind and the strategies and tactics of campaigning necessary to position a candidate to get ahead or stay ahead. Although they use somewhat different terms, “strategy schema”, ”game schema” and “strategy frame” are however used as interchangeable. This is also the dominant interpretation, and typically scholars only separate between a “strategic game frame” and a “policy

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Tab. 1: Two main dimensions of the strategic game frame. Game frame

Strategy frame

Opinion polls Election outcomes Winners and losers Language of sports and war

Campaign strategies and tactics Motives and instrumental actions Personality and style Metacoverage

Source: Aalberg, Strömbäck, and de Vreese (2012: 167).

or issue frame” (Lawrence 2000). Recently, however, some scholars have argued that there is a conceptual difference between a game frame and a strategy frame (Binderkrantz and Green-Pedersen 2009; de Vreese 2005b; de Vreese and Semetko 2002; Valentino, Beckmann, and Buhr 2001). A focus on political processes in news stories, they argue, can mean different things and have different effects on the public. In the literature, a number of sub-frames have been suggested and used in studies of strategic game frames. The most commonly used of these sub frames may be classified according to two main dimensions, based on their resemblance with the “game frame” or the “strategy frame” respectively (Aalberg, Strömbäck, and de Vreese 2012). In Table 1 the most commonly used frames and terms are mapped according to their resemblance with the game frame and the strategy frame respectively. In its pure form, the game frame is dedicated to what is often labeled horse race journalism. This type of news coverage has a strong focus on winners and losers and is typically related to opinion polls and election outcomes. Quite often these news stories also involve a language of war or games to describe the campaign. One of the reasons why the game frame may be different from the strategy frame is that it offers a more indirect form of strategic information. This content may either supplant substantive information or simply draw attention away from issues and towards the political drama. Here evidence based on experiments suggests that polls and war language do not increase respondents’ focus on strategy, although it does reduce voters’ focus on issues (Valentino, Beckmann, and Buhr 2001). The mostly cited element of the strategic frame involves the journalistic focus on a candidate’s or a party’s motives for taking a particular policy stand. Stories containing this element directly imply that political actors primarily are interested in garnering votes, rather than pursuing solutions for important social problems. Therefore, these elements, including personality and style, motives and instrumental actions, are at the core of the strategy frame (Valentino, Beckmann, and Buhr 2001). Some also stress that internal or external conflicts and relations is an important part of the strategy frame (Binderkrantz and Green-Pedersen 2009). Finally, the concept of metacoverage may also be linked to the strategy frame. Metacover-

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age refers to news stories where the media provide self-referential reflections on the relationship between professional political strategists and political journalism (Esser, Reinemann, and Fan 2001). As pointed out by de Vreese and Elenbaas (2008), the term meta-coverage is however a broad term that comprises several media-related themes.

3 Theoretical explanations Features related to the political system and the news industry are often used to explain why politics often is covered in an episodic manner or with a focus on the strategic game, but the attractiveness of these frames is also related to their newsworthiness. At the most basic level it fits many of the key news values that have been prevalent in the news business for decades (Galtung and Ruge 1965). For instance, framing politics as a strategic game reflects journalism’s enduring focus on drama, conflict and negativity, and typically involves elite individuals or political groups. But it also reflects journalists’ tendency to “personalize” the news (van Aelst, Sheafer, and Stanyer 2012; but see also the chapter by Hopmann). Thus, a focus on episodic events and the strategic game provides reporters with the currency and novelty they need for their daily news material (Skewes 2007). Analysis of policy visions and issues may on the other hand appear stale and repetitive. The use of episodic and strategic game framing may vary across time and space, and it is a widespread belief that the use of episodic and game oriented frames have increased rapidly over the years. In Out of Order, Patterson (1993) showed how American campaign news have shifted away from its traditional descriptive and issue oriented mode to a more interpretive and game oriented approach. The argument goes that back in the 1960s, the US news media typically reported on the events of the day by devoting a significant amount of time towards the candidates’ speeches and policy positions, while newer political journalism focuses less on political messages and more on the candidates’ motives and tactics. According to Patterson and other accounts, the strategic game frame now dominates at least US mainstream political news coverage (Capella and Jamieson 1997; Fallows 1997; Farnsworth and Lichter 2011; Jamieson 1992). Patterson (1993) and Fallows (1997) link the rise of the strategic game frame to changes in the political system and the news business. Modern styles of campaigning rely on increasingly sophisticated strategies to manage their political platforms and images. As strategic political communication has become more professionalized, news journalists see it as their job to uncover the strategies. This is also an important defense mechanism against continually being influenced by parties, candidates, and their spin doctors, since most journalists want to protect

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their autonomy and avoid being accused of taking sides politically. By focusing on strategic aspects of the political game, political reporters maintain an apparent stance of both independence and objectivity. Zaller (2001: 248) consequently suggests a “rule of product substitution”, according to which “the harder presidential campaigns try to control what journalists report about their candidate, the harder journalists try to report something else instead”. The framing of politics as a strategic game may thus be one of the most important means by which journalists attempt to achieve control over the news. A notion that is also prominent in the concept of meta-coverage (Esser et al. 2001). Meanwhile the rise of television, new technology and commercialism may also have increased the focus on politics as a strategic game as well as the use of episodic frames (Andersen and Thorson 1989; Iyengar 1991). Not only do the episodic news and strategic game frame allow journalists to more easily produce stories on deadline, this approach also demands fewer resources than research into the substance of complex public policy debates (Fallows 1997). Sources outside of the media organizations have also understood this, and increasingly try to get their message across by designing and holding events that the news media will cover. Boorstin (1971) called these occasions pseudo-events (see also the chapter by Kiousis and Strömbäck). The proliferation of polling also allows news media to cover the state of the horse race quickly and efficiently, and news organizations have consequently become among the most important commissioners in the polling business (Brettschneider 1997; Sonck and Loosveldt 2008). Moreover, an additional bonus is that a poll provides the news story with a scientific touch and a sense of objectivity compared to a story relying only on the journalists’ observations or references of political messages (Lavrakas and Traugott 2000). Finally, a focus on celebrity candidates, their backgrounds, or their successes or failures appears to draw larger audiences (Iyengar, Norpoth, and Hahn 2004). Although scholars have theorized much about the general increase and popularity of the episodic and the strategic game frame, there has not been much focus on why journalists might emphasize these frames in some news contexts and not in others. Iyengar (1991) shows that the episodic framing predominated media coverage of crime, poverty and terrorism, while racial inequality and unemployment were more dominated by thematic frames. However, he only provides brief hints at potentials factors explaining why different topics are treated differently, including the salience of national legislation and the importance of macro-economic indicators. A waste majority of research related to political media coverage, both in the US and elsewhere, has focused on election campaign periods, and most of these studies have documented the predominance of the strategic game frame. However, the game frame is also relevant for non-election periods. Lawrence (2000) for instance, suggests that news organizations’ likelihood to produce strategic game

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framed news over substantive issue framed news is context dependent, depending on, for instance, the policy phase. The strategic game frame, Lawrence (2000) argues, is less likely to be applied in the implementation phase of policy-making. Context is, however, not only a question of policy phase. Equally important is the geographical context. Several US scholars (Fallows 1997; Lawrence 2000; Patterson 1993) argue that the game frame dynamics are most likely to originate from Washington and occur on a national level, as opposed to a more regional or local level. Similarly, Barnes et al. (2008) find that national US newspapers applied a thematic frame on stories related Hurricane Katrina, while local newspapers were more likely to use episodic frames and present problems from an individual’s or victim’s perspective. These US scholars have, perhaps naturally, only focused on US politics. But the political communication culture may also differ on a crossnational dimension (see also the chapter by Pfetsch and Esser). The tendency to frame politics as a strategic game or in an episodic manner occurs in virtually all countries (Strömbäck and Kaid 2008). Nevertheless, it is often assumed that episodic frames and game frames are particularly dominant in commercial US news coverage (Binderkrantz and Green-Pedersen 2009; Iyengar and McGrady 2007; Papacharissi and Oliveira 2008; Patterson 2000; Strömbäck and Dimitrova 2006). In countries with different political structures and media systems, such as proportional multiparty systems and news markets that are less commercial and more regulated by the state, issue frames are assumed to be more common. The most important antecedent of the framing of politics as a strategic game, established thus far, appears to be the degree of commercialism which can differ on both the national and the organizational level (Strömbäck and van Aelst 2010). The extent of episodic and strategic game framing may therefore vary not only over time, but also across topics, countries, and types of media outlets. In the next section we will take a closer look at the prominence of the various frames in political coverage.

4 Frames in political news Although most scholars who investigate episodic or strategic game frames make references to the same scholarly work, how this framing has been operationalized in their quantitative content analyses differ significantly. While some scholars investigate the frames on a dominant frame-basis, there are also numerous examples, particularly when it comes to the strategy game frame, which investigates frames on a present-absent basis. Despite the variety of operationalizations, virtually all studies find that the episodic frames, and the framing of politics as a strategic game, is highly common. There is however some mixed evidence with respect to trends and patterns across time and countries.

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4.1 Developments over time Beginning with studies that investigated the framing on a dominant frame basis, Patterson (1993: 73–74), using a random sample of New York Times front-page stories on elections, found that the share of news stories in which the game frame was dominant increased from less than 50 percent in 1960 to more than 80 percent in 1992. Binderkrantz and Green-Pederson (2009: 177–180), distinguishing between five frames in their study of Danish public service news between 1983 and 2005, came to the conclusion that the “policy frame” was dominant in non-election periods. In election periods the most common of the frames related to politics as a strategic game was the “electoral frame”. Also based on a dominant frame approach, Aalberg and Brekken (2007: 188) showed how the use of a strategic game frame changed considerably even within election campaigns, from 57 percent three weeks before Election Day to 72 percent one week before the Norwegian general election. When it comes to episodic frames, there are few studies that systematically have investigated empirically the use of this frame over time. Studying media coverage of social protest in the 1967 and 1999 Jha (2007) did not find that the use of episodic frames had increased, rather most coverage was episodic at both time periods. Aalberg and Brekken (2007) found however, as with the strategic game frame, that there was a major increase in episodic framing as Election Day got closer. Three weeks before the Norwegian election approximately 60 percent of newspaper coverage was episodic, while 80 percent of stories had such an episodic frame in the final week before the general election. Turning to studies that investigate framing on the basis of “topics”, Benoit, Stein and Hansen (2005) investigated New York Times’ election news coverage between 1952 and 2000. They found that “horse race” accounted for, on average, 40 percent of the news stories, but with no linear increase over time. In terms of “type of horse race coverage”, they showed that the most common ones were “strategy”, “events”, and “polls”. Just, Crigler and Buhr (1999: 33) also find that “campaign messages exceed policy messages” in all investigated media, but particularly in local television news. Similarly, Jamieson (1996: 16) concluded that “strategy or ‘horse race’ coverage remains the prevailing press structure” in both print and broadcast US media between 1960 and 1992, although she did not find a linear trend across time (see also the chapter by Hopmann). With respect to studies that investigate different frames on an absent-present basis, there is a wide variety of frames being used, making comparisons across studies even more complicated. Some key results are nevertheless worth highlighting: Sheafer, Weimann, and Tsfati (2008: 211–212) found that Israeli newspapers applied the game frame more often than the issue frame in all elections between 1949–2003, while Israeli television news did so in all elections but one between 1992 and 2006. Esser and Hemmer (2008: 297) similarly showed that “strategic framing” was dominant on German television news in all elections between 1994

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and 2005. Farnsworth and Lichter (2011: 45) concluded that stories focused on the horse race outnumbered stories focused on issues on US television news in all elections between 1988 and 2008, with the exception of 2004. In none of these studies, however, a linear trend across time was apparent.

4.2 Differences across countries and news organizations While most studies are focused on a singular country, there are some comparative studies investigating the framing of politics on a dominant frame basis. Strömbäck and Dimitrova (2006: 140) found that the game frame was significantly more common in US (67 percent) than in Swedish (50 percent) newspapers. They also showed that the share of episodic frames was somewhat higher in US than in Swedish news, but these differences were not statistically significant. In other comparisons, Strömbäck and colleagues found that the game frame was dominant in between 53 to 66 percent of Belgian, British, Norwegian and Spanish news stories (Strömbäck and Aalberg 2008; Strömbäck and Aelst 2010; Strömbäck and Luengo 2008; Strömbäck and Shehata 2007). Taken together, these studies suggest that this frame is highly present across countries, even if there are some important differences. Other studies generally confirm that frames related to strategic game or episodic news are highly common in different settings. De Vreese and Semetko (2002) find that in terms of topic in the different medias’ coverage of the Danish referendum about the Euro, between 25 and 69 percent of the Danish media was dominated by “strategy”. The most consistently and commonly found indicator was “use of war, games, and sports language”. Kerbel, Apee and Ross (2000: 17) show that “horse race/strategy” was the most commonly used primary and secondary frame reference in US television news, while Strömbäck and Dimitrova (2006) conclude that the “horse race” and the “political strategy” frames were more common in both Sweden and the US than the “news management” and the “politicians as individuals” frames. Both frames were, however, more common in the US than in the Swedish news coverage. In a comparison of Swedish and Norwegian election news, Strömbäck and Aalberg (2008) found that the most present frame in Sweden was the “horse race” frame, while in Norway, the most present was the “governing” frame, indicating that the specific context of an election also matters for which type of strategic game frame is applied the most. The use of episodic news frames also seems to vary significantly across different types of news media organizations. Semetko and Valkenburg (2000) confirmed that Dutch television news were predominatly episodic (92 percent), but stress that a minority of the Dutch newspaper articles applied such an episodic news frame (32 percent). Similarly, studying general news substance across six countries, Brekken, Thorbjørnsrud and Aalberg (2012) show how thematic frames are mostly used in news presented by public service broadcasters, while episodic frames are most

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common in news bulletins presented by private TV-channels. Brekken et al. also reveal significant differences between various types of newspapers, where episodic frames typically are more widespread in tabloid and regional newspapers than in newspapers that are classified as national, “quality” or elite newspapers. The same pattern is also found by Strömbäck and van Aelst (2010) in their study of election coverage in Sweden and Belgium. The commercial broadcasters applied a game frame on the news more often (51 and 63 percent respectably) than the public service broadcasters (30 and 31 percent). Similarly the game frame was more common in tabloid newspapers than in quality newspapers. Looking finally at studies investigating metacoverage, that is news stories where the media provide self-referential reflections, Esser and D'Angelo (2006) found that different topics related to electioneering, campaigning, public opinion – that is, the political game – were more common than topics related to policies and issues, and that the share of stories with metacoverage was highest in the US (41 percent), followed by Germany (38 percent) and Britain (15 percent). Esser and D’Angelo explain how these cross-national differences may be caused by mediarelated structural innovations that journalists consider newsworthy. For instance, TV-debates trigger many self-congratulating and self-observing stories.

5 Conclusions and future perspectives The episodic and strategic game frame is one of the most important concepts in research on how the media cover politics in general, and during election campaigns in particular. One of the most important reasons to care about how issues and events are framed has to do with the assumed effects of these frames. It is supposed that episodic news lead citizens to think that it is the individual rather than politicians or society as a whole who is responsible both for causing and curing various problems (Iyengar 1991). It is assumed that horse race news, focused on opinion polls and interpreted as a game of who is winning and losing, is distracting citizens from the substance of politics (Patterson 1993). It is also assumed that strategy framing, by portraying politics with a focus on politicians’ self-interest, depresses knowledge gains about policies and substance, increases political cynicism, and depresses political engagement (Cappella and Jamieson 1997). It is assumed that meta news framing, focusing on the role of the media in politics and on how politicians try to influence the media, reflects badly on public perceptions of politics, the media, and communication professionals (de Vreese and Elenbaas 2010). The extant literature shares common ground in this conclusion, but the pervasiveness of frames and their sub-elements as well as the effects is disputed, while different operationalizations have made it very difficult to draw firm, general conclusions. This is clearly a problem, as it has hampered research cumulativity.

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Most research on issues, events and frames in political coverage to date is based on single country studies, and while there are some comparative studies, most include only a few countries at the time. While research shows that episodic, game and strategy frames are important features of news around the world, the level of such framing and the conditions under which they most likely occur remain to be comprehensively investigated. For such research to be comparable across studies it is important that future research uses a set of standardized variables and coding instructions (Aalberg, Strömbäck, and de Vreese 2012).

References Aalberg, Toril and Tove Brekken. 2007. Når spill og enkelt episoder blir viktigst [When the game and single episodes become most important]. In: Anders Todal Jenssen and Toril Aalberg (eds.), Den medialiserte politikken [The Mediatized Politics], 177–196. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Aalberg, Toril, Jesper Strömbäck and Claes H. de Vreese. 2012. The framing of politics as strategy and game: A review of concepts, operationalizations and key findings. Journalism 13(2): 162–178. Andersen, Kristi and Stuart J. Thorson. 1989. Public discourse or strategic game? Changes in our conception of elections. Studies in American Political Development 3: 262–278. Barnes, Michael D., Carl L. Hanson, Len M. B. Novilla, Aaron I. Meacham, Emily McIntyre and Brittany C. Erickson. 2008. Analysis of media agenda setting during and after Hurricane Katrina: Implications for emergency preparedness, disaster response, and disaster policy. American Journal of Public Health 98(4): 604–610. Benoit, William L., Kevin A. Stein, and Glenn J. Hansen. 2005. New York Times coverage of presidential campaigns. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 82(2): 356–376. Binderkrantz, Anne S. and Christoffer Green-Pedersen. 2009. Policy or processes in focus? International Journal of Press/Politics 14(2): 166–185. Boorstin, Daniel J. 1971. From news-gathering to news-making: A flood of pseudo-events. In: Wilbur Schramm and Donald F Roberts (eds.), The Process and Effects of Mass Communication, 116–150. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Brekken, Tove, Kjersti Thorbjørnsrud and Toril Aalberg. 2012. News substance: The relative importance of soft and de-contextualised news. In: Toril Aalberg and James Curran (eds.), How Media Inform Democracy. A Comparative Approach, 64–78. New York: Routledge. Brettschneider, Frank. 1997. The press and the polls in Germany, 1980–1994 – Poll coverage as an essential part of election campaign reporting. International Journal of Public Opinion Research 9(3): 248–265. Capella, Joseph N. and Kathleen Hall Jamieson. 1997. Spiral of Cynicism. The Press and the Public Good. New York: Oxford University Press. Entman, Robert. 1993. Framing: Towards clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journal of Communication 43: 51–58. Esser, Frank and Katharina Hemmer. 2008. Characteristics and dynamics of election news coverage in Germany. In: Jesper Strömbäck and Lynda L. Kaid (eds.), The Handbook of Election News Coverage Around the World, 289–307. New York: Routledge. Esser, Frank and Paul D'Angelo. 2006. Framing the press and publicity process in US, British, and German general election campaigns – A comparative study of metacoverage. International Journal of Press/Politics 11(3): 44–66.

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Fallows, James. 1997. Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy. New York: Vintage. Farnsworth, Stephen J. and S. Robert Lichter. 2011. The Nightly News Nightmare: Media Coverage of U.S. Presidential Elections, 1988–2008. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Galtung, Johan and Mari Holmboe Ruge. 1965. The structure of foreign news. The presentation of the Congo, Cuba and Cyprus Crises in 4 Norwegian newspapers. Journal of Peace Research 2(1): 64–91. Gitlin, Todd. 1980. The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Iyengar, Shanto. 1991. Is Anyone Responsible? How Television Frames Political Issues. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Iyengar, Shanto and Jennifer A. McGrady. 2007. Media Politics. A Citizen’s Guide. New York: Norton. Iyengar, Shanto, Helmut Norpoth and Kyu S. Hahn. 2004. Consumer demand for election news: The horserace sells. Journal of Politics 66(1): 157–175. Jamieson, Kathleen Hall. 1992. Dirty Politics: Deception, Distraction, and Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press. Jha, Sonora. 2007. Exploring internet influence on the coverage of social protest: Content analysis comparing protest coverage in 1967 and 1999. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 84: 41–57. Just, Marion, Ann N. Crigler and Tami Buhr. 1999. Voice, substance, and cynicism in presidential campaign media. Political Communication 16(1): 25–44. Lavrakas, Paul J. and Michael W. Traugott. 2000. Why election polls are important to a democracy: An American perspective. In: Paul J. Lavrakas and Michael W. Traugott (eds.), Election Polls, the News Media, and Democracy, 3–22. New York: Chatham House. Lawrence, Regina G. 2000. Game-framing the issues: Tracking the strategy frame in public policy news. Political Communication 17(2): 93–114. Matthes, Jörg. 2009. What’s in a frame? A content analysis of media framing studies in the world’s leading communication journals, 1990–2005. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 86(2): 349–367. Papacharissi, Zizi and Maria D. Oliveira. 2008. News frames terrorism: A comparative analysis of frames employed in terrorism coverage in US and UK newspapers. International Journal of Press/Politics 13(1): 52–74. Patterson, Thomas E. 2000. The United States: News in a free-market society. In: Richard Gunther and Anthony Mughan (eds.), Democracy and the Media. A Comparative Perspective, 241–265. New York: Cambridge University Press. Patterson, Thomas E. 1993. Out of Order. New York: Vintage. Rosengren, Karl E. 1979. Bias in news: Methods and concepts. Studies of Broadcasting 15(1): 31– 45. Semetko, Holli A. and Patti M. Valkenburg. 2000. Framing European politics: A content analysis of press and television news. Journal of Communication 50: 93–109. Sheafer, Tamir, Gabriel Weimann and Yariv Tsfati. 2008. Campaigns in the Holy Land: The content and effects of election news coverage in Israel. In: Jesper Strömbäck and Lynda L. Kaid (eds.), The Handbook of Election News Coverage Around the World, 209–225. New York: Routledge. Sonck, Nathalie and Geert Loosveldt. 2008. Making news based on public opinion polls. The Flemish case. European Journal of Communication 23(4): 490–500. Strömbäck, Jesper and Toril Aalberg. 2008. Election news coverage in democratic corporatist countries: A comparative study of Sweden and Norway. Scandinavian Political Studies 31: 91–106.

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Strömbäck, Jesper and Peter van Aelst. 2010. Exploring some antecedents of the media’s framing of election news: A comparison of Swedish and Belgian election news. International Journal of Press/Politics 15: 41–59. Strömbäck, Jesper and Daniela V. Dimitrova. 2006. Political and media systems matter. A comparison of election news coverage in Sweden and the United States. International Journal of Press/Politics 11: 131–147. Strömbäck, Jesper and Lynda L. Kaid. 2008. The Handbook of Election News Coverage around the World. New York: Routledge. Strömbäck, Jesper and Oscar Luengo. 2008. Polarized pluralist and democratic corporatist models. A comparison of election news coverage in Spain and Sweden. The International Communication Gazette 70(6): 547–562. Strömbäck, Jesper and Adam Shehata. 2007. Structural biases in British and Swedish election news coverage. Journalism Studies 8: 798–812. de Vreese, Claes H. 2005. News framing: Theory and typology. Information Design Journal 13(1): 51–62. de Vreese, Claes H. and Matthijs Elenbaas. 2010. Political publicity and spin. In: Kees Brants and Kathrin Voltmer (eds.), Political Communication in Postmodern Democracy, 75–91. Basingstoke: Palgrave. White, David M. 1950. The gatekeeper: A case study in the selection of news. Journalism Quarterly 27: 383–396. Zaller, John. 2001. The rule of product substitution in presidential campaign news. In: Elihu Katz and Yael Warshel (eds.), Election Studies. What's their Use?, 247–270. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

David Nicolas Hopmann

20 Politicians, parties and political candidates in the news media Abstract: This chapter reviews the literature on the visibility of politicians, parties and political candidates in the news media and the way they are presented in political coverage. Starting with the question who is covered (visibility), the following sections provide an overview of different aspects of how actors are covered, focusing on authenticity, negativity, and personalization. Furthermore, studies analyzing the composition of the news media’s issue agenda are discussed. While the review shows a predominance of high-ranked political actors, a shrinking of sound-bites, and a substantial overlap between the issue agenda of the media and politicians or parties, no overarching trend toward more negativity, personalization, and process news can be found in the literature. Several reasons for these findings as well as the impact of contextual factors and differences between media outlets are discussed. Key Words: visibility of political actors, authenticity, negativity, personalization, individualization, process news, issue agendas

1 Introduction Politicians, parties and other actors who have a political agenda – such as NGOs – are highly concerned with whether they are covered by the news media, and how. Therefore, they employ PR-strategists and so-called spin-doctors, they stage special media events (such as press conferences), they publish material directly addressed at journalists (such as press releases), they write letters-to-the-editor, they choose mediagenic spokespersons to let them represent their cause, they impose rules on journalists how to cover them (such as balance rules), they may even interfere directly with the work of journalists – or, if they have the necessary funds, establish their own media outlets. All these activities are aimed at generating and shaping the news media coverage they receive. Politicians, parties and other actors know why they are so concerned with media coverage. For decades, the classic media such as television and newspapers have been the main source for political information across Western countries. Though new social media such as Facebook or Twitter repeatedly are hyped as a new important source for political information, the shares of citizens reporting exposure to political information through social media remain at low levels (Bakker and de Vreese 2011; Elmelund-Præstekær and Hopmann 2013). Next to interpersonal political communication newspaper and television coverage remain the sour-

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ces most often used by the general public for political information (see also the chapter by Emmer and Woling). Moreover, despite an ongoing scientific debate on the contingencies of media effects – when will who be affected by what for how long time (see e.g., Neuman and Guggenheim 2008) – there is little doubt that media coverage has effects on political knowledge, attitudes and behaviour (see e.g., Iyengar et al. 2010; Sparks 2010) (see also the chapters in section VII). Hence, analysing which actors are covered in the media is important for the understanding of political knowledge, attitudes and behaviour. It is also important for our aims at understanding the production of news content as different patterns of content may shed light on the processes behind the production of news (Shoemaker and Reese 1996). There is more to news coverage than who is covered, obviously. It is also important to understand how actors are covered and whose issue agenda is covered. First, while political actors in general prefer to be covered than not, not all types of coverage are equally desirable. Politicians and other actors may be portrayed in many different ways. Second, as much as political actors may be interested in being covered, they also have an interest in influencing the overall issue agenda covered by the news. Studies on agenda-setting tell us that issues receiving much media attention subsequently are deemed more important by the general public than those issues not covered by the news media (McCombs and Shaw 1972; Trenaman and McQuail 1961). Moreover, the so-called issue-ownership tells us that the perceived importance of policy issues also influences the political preferences of the electorate (Petrocik 1996). This chapter is organized as follows. First, an overview of research on the visibility of political actors such as politicians, candidates and NGOs is presented. The second part provides an overview of different aspects of how actors are covered in the news, focusing on the concepts authenticity, negativity, and personalization. Subsequently, studies analysing the composition of the news media’s issue agenda are presented in part three. While a detailed discussion of the antecedents of media coverage is beyond the scope of this article (see also the chapters in section IV), short references to possible causal mechanisms will be provided throughout the first parts of the chapter. In addition, all three sections will primarily refer to longitudinal and comparative empirical studies. The reader should also note that the overviews will reflect the fact that most media content studies focus on national election campaigns. In the concluding part of this chapter, the findings and their implications will be discussed.

2 Who is covered in the news Broadly speaking, studies on the visibility of political actors in the news can be organized into two categories. In the first category, we find studies dealing with

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the type of actors or sources visible in the news. The studies grouped in the second category look, more narrowly, at the attention devoted to politicians asking which politicians are covered. We will take a closer look at both categories in turn.

2.1 Type of actors In the words of Ericson (1998: 85), the “main task [of journalists] is to quote sources’ accounts of events, behaviors, and documents that are not made visible otherwise”. Who are these sources quoted in the news? Though there are some methodological differences across studies exactly how the appearance of sources in the news was measured, the overall picture is clear. Across time, space and media types, empirical studies have found that the most frequently appearing sources in the news are politicians and representatives of governmental organizations. These studies cover diverse cases such as Denmark (Hopmann and Shehata 2011), France (Benson and Hallin 2007), Indonesia, Japan, Korea and Malaysia (Kim and Weaver 2003; Young Chul and Gwangho 2002), the United States and Sweden (Bennett 1990; Benson and Hallin 2007; Dimitrova and Strömbäck 2009; Shehata and Hopmann 2012), Thailand (Kim and Weaver 2003) or the entire European Union (Strömbäck et al. 2013). Importantly, the latter study also documents that the specific composition within the category of politicians, government officials and the like varies substantially across countries. In any case, however, other types of sources such as non-governmental organizations or unaffiliated citizens trail far behind in terms of their proportional visibility relative to political actors. Nongovernmental organizations rarely make up more than 5–10 percent of the actors appearing in the news (see also the chapter by Jandura and Friedrich). Why is the news virtually everywhere dominated by political actors? Ericson (1998) argues that the choice of sources is guided by the constraints under which journalists work. They rarely have time to verify information provided by sources themselves. Therefore, journalists turn to sources deemed credible which, in practical terms, implies turning to sources representing organizations deemed credible. Hence, “news represents political power as residing in formal institutions, such as electoral politics, legislatures, and law enforcement agencies” (Ericson 1998: 86; see also Cook 2005). Though Bennett (1990) focusses on the viewpoints covered in the news, rather than the actors expressing them, his reasoning is fairly similar. News coverage is the result of a “social practice” of indexing “the range of voices and viewpoints (...) according to the range of views expressed in mainstream government debate about a given topic” (Bennett 1990: 106). In order for non-official voices to get covered, they have to bring forward arguments “already emerging in official circles”. Having noted this dominance of elite sources in the news, one has to make a distinction between routine news and event-driven news. Exceptional events leading to extensive media coverage may in fact imply that more otherwise marginal-

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ized voices are covered (Lawrence 2000; Sheafer and Wolfsfeld 2009; Shehata 2007; see also the chapter by Stanyer). Such events include accidents or staged events of a scale that they become “a problem for the relatively powerful” (Molotch and Lester 1974: 108). In short, across the board, politicians and other representatives of governmental institutions are the by far most often covered actors in the news and this dominance is only challenged in case of exceptional events.

2.2 The politicians who are covered A second strand of literature focuses more explicitly on the types of politicians covered by the news (an extended presentation of the following balance discussion can be found in Hopmann, van Alest, and Legnante 2012b). This literature includes “horizontal” comparisons, i.e., whether certain parties are favoured, and “vertical” comparisons, i.e. whether the political rank correlates with the frequency of visibility. Often, these two perspectives go hand-in-hand. Across countries, government members, incumbent parties and other high-ranked politicians are the most covered actors in the news, in particular the head of government, as studies from Austria (Lengauer 2006), Belgium (Walgrave and de Swert 2005), Germany (Schönbach and Semetko 2000), Ireland (Brandenburg 2005), the Netherlands (van Praag and van der Eijk 1998), the UK (Brandenburg 2006) or the US (Kuklinski and Sigelman 1992; Sellers and Schaffner 2007) have shown. This advantage in terms of visibility has often been referred to as an “incumbency bonus”. In the words of Kuklinski and Sigelman (1992), the bonus is a “paradox of objectivity”; by reflecting the political reality the media inevitably favour the dominating political faction (see also the chapter by Jandura and Friedrich). Of course, there are exceptions as for example documented for the press coverage of the 2002 Irish elections (Brandenburg 2005). In addition, there are exceptions which can be understood as results of event-driven news coverage. To mention two examples, the Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn (van Praag and Brants 2005) and the Danish party New Alliance (Albæk, Hopmann, and de Vreese 2010) were new actors on the political scene receiving an exceptional support in opinion polls indicating that they would be able to severely challenge the established powerstructure. They both attraced extra-ordinary media coverage. In those cases where journalists are free to let their news production be guided by professional standards it appears to be the case that the extent of the incumbency bonus is linked to the political system. A consequence is that more hierarchical political systems imply a greater focus on the head of government vis-a-vis other politicians from their own and the oppositional camp. For example, in a comparison between the Netherlands and Germany, Schoenbach and colleagues (2001) find that the German news coverage more so than the Dutch focused on the head of government and other party leaders reflecting the more hierarchical political system in Germany. Similarly, van Dalen (2012) showed that the more powerful

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Danish parliament received more news attention than the German, British and Spanish parliaments. Analyses of news coverage in other countries seem to confirm that the relative differences in visibility between different types of politicians are reflecting the structure or current state of the political system (Albæk, Hopmann, and de Vreese 2010; de Swert and Walgrave 2002). Hence, it is not surprising that news coverage of elections for the European Parliament clearly reflects the second-order character of these elections; across countries the coverage is dominated by national political actors, not European actors (de Vreese et al. 2006). In sum, on the one hand one could argue that the choice of which type of politicians is granted access to the news coverage is based on an “indexing” of political power within a given political system. On the other hand, the news values of conflict and journalists’ desire to mark their independence vis-a-vis the political system (see below) influences the attention for different actors in the news. According to Althaus (2003) journalists include less powerful actors in the news in order to create conflict. Applying this principle van Dalen (2012) showed that stories about government include more oppositional voices in pragmatic journalistic cultures than in sacerdotal journalistic cultures. The political system also appears to have consequences for the visibility of non-political actors such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and ordinary citizens. Following Sheafer and Wolfsfeld (2009: 149), in a more diverse political system with more political parties spanning over a wide range of policy stances “the news media [will be] more open to a variety of dissenting voices, including those coming from extraparliamentary actors”. Comparing news coverage in the US and Israel clearly supports this claim. A similar result was documented by a comparison between the US and France (Benson and Hallin 2007), though comparisons between the US and Sweden yield mixed results (Dimitrova and Strömbäck 2009; Shehata and Hopmann 2012). The US appears also to be an exceptional case on another account. Unlike most political systems in the Western world, the US political system is a presidential system with two major parties only. Accordingly, the focus in much research has been on investigating how the presidential candidates from these two major parties are covered in the news (e.g., D’Alessio and Allen 2000; Farnsworth and Lichter 2008). Studies on the two major candidates for the position as the head of government (president, prime minister etc.) have also been conducted for other political systems, such as Germany (Schulz and Zeh 2003; Wilke and Reinemann 2006), Israel (Sheafer and Weimann 2005) or Spain (Semetko and Canel 1997). The major difference in studies originating from the US is the mostly unsaid and implicit benchmark that there ought to be a balanced coverage between the two candidates ignoring factors that plausibly may lead to an imbalanced coverage, e.g. incumbency or a decisive gap in the polls (for a discussion on balance definitions, see Hopmann, van Aelst, and Legnante 2012a) (see also the chapter by Jandura and Friedrich).

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3 How political actors are covered in the news Gaining access to news coverage is the first step only. The next important step is how actors are covered. Three important discussions on the type of news coverage will be presented in this section. First, the authenticity of news coverage, i.e., whether actors covered in the news are allowed to speak for themselves (television, radio) or quoted verbatim (press). Second, the favourability of news coverage will be discussed, i.e., whether the tone of news coverage is negative towards the actors covered in the news. Third, and finally, a review of the research on the presumed personalization of political news coverage will be presented.

3.1 Authenticity Appearing in news coverage does not necessarily imply having a voice in news coverage. In particular with respect to television news coverage of political actors, previous research has studied to which extent actors are allowed to speak for themselves, that is, how “authentic” the news coverage of political actors is (e.g., Donsbach and Jandura 2003). Two indicators are central to this debate. On the one hand, students of news coverage have studied the length of sound-bites. In his study on US presidential elections, Hallin (1992) has shown how the average sound-bite length has decreased from 43 seconds in 1968 to 9 seconds in 1988. This development may be explained by three different causes. First, journalists have improved their skills as television reporters which is another way of stating that they have become better at using the technological possibilities television as a medium offers. Second, over the years, political actors have increased their efforts at shaping their news coverage. As a response, journalists struggle for greater autonomy vis-a-vis political actors and their spin-doctors. Third, increased commercial competition asks journalists to yield to a more dramatic, entertaining style of news journalism. In any case, a follow-up study showed that the average length decreased even further to 7 seconds in the 2004 presidential election (Bucy and Grabe 2007). Similar downward trends have been reported for “text-bites” in the US press (Patterson 1993: 76). Is this trend unique for the US case? Longitudinal studies from the UK and Germany indicate a similar, but less dramatic picture of decreasing sound-bite length (Deacon, Wring, and Golding 2006; Donsbach and Büttner 2005; Schulz and Zeh 2005) and text-bite length in the German press (Reinemann and Wilke 2007). Yet, as the case of 2005 British election shows, changes in the average length of sound-bites is not necessarily uni-directional. Results indicate a longer average length than in previous elections (Deacon, Wring, and Golding 2006; Esser 2008). Moreover, comparative studies also indicate difference across countries. Sound-bites tend to be the shortest in the US (Donsbach and Jandura 2003; Esser 2008; Strömbäck and Dimitrova 2011). A recent study on the 2009 European elec-

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tions revealed an average sound-bite length of 16 seconds, substantially higher than reported for recent elections in the US (Strömbäck et al. 2011). How can such differences across countries be explained? Comparing the average sound-bite length with the news management efforts by politicians, Esser (2008: 417) finds that “[t]he more tightly scripted [campaigns are], the more stations compress the candidates’ on-air statements”. Hence, shortening the speaking time given to politicians is a way for journalists to “fight back” and regain control over the news content. In addition, a systematic comparison between election and routine times by van Aelst and de Swert (2009) reveals no systematic differences in sound-bite length between these two periods. In short, despite signs of convergence these findings indicate prevailing differences in national news cultures shaped by a multitude of factors such as the role played by public service television, legal frameworks, commercialization or the political system (Blumler and Gurevitch 2001; Esser 2008). When discussing the authenticity of political actors appearing in the news another important aspect of television news coverage are so-called “image-bites”, in particular “lip-flaps”. Image-bites are clips showing a political actor without his or her own voice heard but the reporter’s voice is heard from the off. Across countries politicians appear to be shown with image-bites somewhat more often than with sound-bites while the usage of image-bites appears to be fairly stable in the past years (Bucy and Grabe 2007; Esser 2008). Lip-flaps are a specific category of such image-bites showing a political actor up-front in speaking-mode without hearing his or her voice. Such image-bites are characterized as a particularly “unflattering”, “anticandidate” coverage of political actors (Bucy and Grabe 2007; Esser 2008). These lip-flaps are more common in the US than in Europe (Esser 2008: 421; Strömbäck and Dimitrova 2011: 40), which is another sign of US political journalists being more interventionist than their European colleagues.

3.2 Negativity The media can present political actors in an unfavourable manner in different ways, not only by using lip-flaps. Another important discussion is the negativity of news coverage, i.e. how favourable the news is for political actors. As Lengauer and colleagues discuss (2012), conceptually one can distinguish between two sources of negative news coverage. First, journalists may, for different reasons, decide to cover political actors in a negative fashion. Second, journalists may cover negative news coming from outside sources, e.g. news coverage of attacks from one political actor on another or reporting on scandals. However, Lengauer and colleagues (2012) also point out that it is a virtually insurmountable task in a content analysis of news coverage to tear these two sources of negativity apart. Even if a critique is uttered by an external source, it is still the journalists who decide whether to include this critical statement in the news reporting. Hence, in the

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following the focus will be on two questions: how negative is political news in general; and, is negativity in the news increasing. For news coverage in the US, it has been documented that the proportion of negative news on presidential candidates rose from less than one third in 1960 to about two thirds in 2000; the proportion of negative news on Congress appears to be even higher (Patterson 2000). Is the US trend an outlier compared to other democracies? To the extent results from other countries can be compared – given the differences in methodological approaches – they appear mixed. On the one hand, longitudinal studies on political news coverage in the German press (Reinemann and Wilke 2007; Semetko and Schoenbach 2003) and Israeli television news (Sheafer, Weimann, and Tsfati 2008) show a similar trend toward increasing negativity in the news. Moreover, in a study comparing news coverage in Austria, Germany, Italy and the US, Plasser and colleagues (2009) find no major differences in the extent of negativity across countries and public service or commercial broadcasters; in all cases the news coverage is more negative than positive. Yet, on the other hand, other studies cannot confirm this picture. Analysing television news coverage of the five Danish national elections in the period 1994– 2007, Albæk and colleagues (2010) find that the news tends to be slightly more often negative than positive toward political actors without any major difference between news broadcasters and virtually no trend over the years. While negativity has increased in the Israeli press in the past decades, it has been at a higher level with respect to Likud (Mapai) in the 1950s and 1960s (Sheafer, Weimann, and Tsfati 2008). In a longitudinal study on German television news, Donsbach and Büttner (2005) do not find an increase of negative coverage, rather to the contrary. Also with respect to the amount of negativity in press, one cannot conclude that news coverage is overwhelmingly negative. For example, the tone in both broadcasting and press coverage of the 2005 British general elections has been – relatively seen – negative with respect to the incumbent Labour Party, in particular in the press, but on average news coverage of political actors appears not to be overly negative (Deacon, Wring, and Golding 2006). The mixed picture on negativity in the news is confirmed by a comparison of the news coverage of election campaigns for the European Parliament across all member states; the tabloid press was the most negative compared to the mixed broadsheet press and television news. Moreover, most news on the European elections was in fact neutral (de Vreese et al. 2006). Finally, in his comparative study on the use of negative imagebites in France, Germany, the UK and the US, Esser (2008) finds no major differences across countries with the exception of one specific commercial broadcaster in Germany (RTL). Overall, the use of negative image-bites is not dominating the news.

3.3 Personalization Though numerous studies in research fields such as journalism studies or voting behaviour discuss a process of personalization of politics, it is far from clear

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exactly what is meant by a personalization of politics. With respect to news coverage, van Aelst and colleagues (2012) offer a distinction between two main concepts of personalization: individualization and privatization (see also Adam and Maier 2010; Rahat and Sheafer 2007). The former refers to a process of increasing attention to individual political actors rather than political parties or governmental institutions. This dimension both includes an increasing focus on political versus institutional actors and an increasing focus on political leaders, sometimes labelled a presidentialization of politics. The second process of personalization, privatization, refers to a process of increasing attention to the “human side” of politicians. This dimension includes both an increasing focus on the private lives of politicians, e.g. their family life, as well as an increasing focus on non-political personal traits of politicians, e.g., their morality. A comprehensive review of the numerous studies on personalization across countries and time is beyond the scope of this chapter (see Adam and Maier 2010; van Aelst, Sheafer, and Stanyer 2012; Karvonen 2010). Sufficient to say that the empirical evidence concerning both assumed trends, an increasing individualization and an increasing privatization, are mixed or negative. In fact, not even the most recent reviews on the current state of research reach a common conclusion. Adam and Maier (2010: 231–232) conclude that there is no evidence of a “stronger focus on non-political evaluation criteria” but that there is “relatively clear evidence of a movement from parties and issues to people”, i.e., an increasing individualization. Yet, van Aelst and colleagues (2012) are more hesitant emphasizing that “the empirical evidence across western democracies is mixed, and often studies within the same country present contradictory conclusions”. To mention one example indicating an increasing personalization in media content, in their longitudinal analysis of German press coverage of chancellor candidates 1949–2005, Reinemann and Wilke (2007) find a (non-linear) increase in the references to the chancellor candidates and, more importantly, a change in the personal traits referred to as a consequence to televised debates introduced in 2002. To mention an example of mixed findings, Rahat and Sheafer (2007) show how there is an increasing focus on political actors vis-a-vis parties in Israel 1949–2003 while, however, there is no trend toward an increasing media focus on personal traits or private lives of politicians in this period. To mention another example of mixed findings, in his study on Swedish election news coverage in the years 1979–2006, Johansson (2008) does not find an increasing focus on party leaders, although there are indications of the tabloid press increasingly visualizing party leaders. Finally, are there differences across space and time periods? In their comparative study of personalization in Austria, Germany, Italy and the US, Plasser and colleagues (2009) find a significant difference between public-service broadcasters and commercial broadcasters with the latter presenting viewers substantially more personalized news coverage. In addition, in their comparison between election and routine times, van Aelst and de Swert (2009) find that there is more focus on

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parties than individual politicians during election times, at least with respect to Belgian television. Needless to say, although one cannot conclude that there is a general trend across countries and time toward an increasing personalization of political news coverage, the extent of personalization is not the same everywhere. Downey and Stanyer (2010) provide an important contribution to the debate on cross-country differences by, first, providing an overview of the extent of media focus on politicians rather than institutions and organizations in 20 different countries across the globe. Second, based on a fuzzy set analysis they provide first steps into an analysis of understanding why these countries differ. This analysis points at two causal paths leading to personalized, i.e., individualized, political communication. First, presidential systems with low party identification irrespective of the media system and, second, a combination of low party identification, professionalized campaigns and a strong tabloid media lead to a more personalized political communication. While the measure of the extent of personalization did include information on media content, future studies need to focus more explicitly on it.

4 Whose agenda is covered in the news Politicians do not only want to be presented in a favourable way to the public, they are also concerned with promoting certain issues over others. As mentioned above, previous studies have documented that the news agenda has an influence on the public agenda which, in turn, influences the public’s voting behaviour. However, studying the congruence of issue agendas is demanding in terms of data requirements. Detailed analysis asks for time-series data on both politicians’ and media issue agendas. In particular outside of the US, researchers have only recently begun to publish longitudinal analysis of how related issue agendas are and, hence, the number of available studies is still limited. Two discussions will be presented in this section; first, several studies have investigated to which extent political news coverage is concerned with substantive policy issues or non-substantive issues such as electoral strategies or the horserace; second, another strand of research has looked more specifically at whose agenda the media follows, i.e. whether the media has a tendency to favour certain issues sui generis or certain issues promoted by specific actors.

4.1 Substance versus process To which extent news coverage is focusing on substantive issues or not has been investigated in several ways. Investigators have either coded the specific issue of a news story or they have coded the framing of a news story. Coding procedures also differ on another dimension; whether a focus on substantive versus non-

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substantive issues has been coded as mutually exclusive. These differences may – at least to some extent – explain why studies reach different conclusions. Studying the proportion of “soft news” versus “hard news” (the latter defined as news referring to policy issues) in the US media, Patterson (2000) reports a substantial increase in soft news from around 35 percent in 1980 to almost 50 percent some 20 years later. Another, earlier study on US television coverage 1968–1988 reports a more complex picture as focus on policy issues can go hand in hand with focus on the horse-race “when a candidate’s statement on a policy issue is shown as an illustration of his or her ‘game plan’” (Hallin 1992: 17). In fact, Hallin (1992) shows that television news time devoted to policy issues and the horse race increased in the studied period (see also Farnsworth and Lichter 2008: 45). Research outside of the US has raised the question whether other countries will experience an Americanization of their news coverage in the sense that focus on the horse-race and other non-substantive issues will rise. These expectations cannot be confirmed. In his comparative analysis on sound-bites in France, Germany, the UK and the US, Esser (2008: 416) finds no lower proportion of politician sound-bites dealing with substance in the US than elsewhere. The same picture is documented by a comparison of news stories on Austrian, German, Italian and US television (Plasser, Pallaver, and Lengauer 2009). Yet, these findings are not in line with the conclusion reached by a comparison of Swedish and US television news; public-service television in Sweden focusses substantially less on the political game than commercial television in both countries (Strömbäck and Dimitrova 2011). Such findings jibe well with findings from the Netherlands showing no general trend away from substantive political news reporting, but some substantial differences between public-service and commercial broadcasting (Brants and van Praag 2006). Listening to Danish public service radio news 1984–2005, policy focus is always above 90 percent in routine times and 75 percent in election times (Binderkrantz and Green-Pedersen 2009). In short, “most evidence suggests that although horserace coverage is common in all countries, it is more common in the United States than in most other countries” (Kaid and Strömbäck 2008: 425) (see also the chapter by Aalberg).

4.2 Composition of issue agenda in the news coverage Across countries and time studies have found substantial overlaps between the issue agenda in the media and the issues political parties or candidates emphasize. These studies cover diverse countries and political systems such as Denmark (Hopmann et al. 2009), Ireland (Brandenburg 2005), Sweden (Asp 1983), or the UK (Brandenburg 2006; Semetko et al. 1991), although the results for the US case appear somewhat mixed as some results indicate a fairly low congruence between the issue focus of politicians and of the news media (Dalton et al. 1998; Ridout and Mellen 2007; Semetko et al. 1991; Vavreck 2009). Moreover, time-series analy-

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ses indicate that it often is the media which follows the issue agendas of politicians rather than the other way around (Brandenburg 2004, 2002; Hopmann et al. 2012b; Kleinnijenhuis and Rietberg 1995) but not necessarily always as “who follows whom”, among other things, may depend on the specific issue in question or the time period, e.g. routine or election times (Green-Pedersen and Stubager 2010; Soroka 2002; Walgrave and van Aelst 2006; Walgrave, Soroka, and Nuytemans 2008; see also the chapter by van Aelst). Apart from the issue there are other contingent factors moderating the extent of overlap between the politicians’ and the media’s agendas. Semetko and colleagues (1991) have suggested that one explanation for cross-country differences in the media’s ability to set the agenda may be the role played by public service broadcasting and the strength of the party system. The remainder of this section will discuss these two other factors. First, not all politicians experience that their issue agenda is covered, whether we deal with the general media agenda or the specific issues on which they are covered. Second, there may be differences between news media types, i.e. television news and the press. Above, we have seen that incumbent and otherwise powerful political actors are more visible in the news than less powerful political actors. Is this bonus also reflected in the issue coverage in the news? Bennett’s (1990) point is exactly this: views expressed by powerful actors are more often covered by the news. Several other studies, focussing primarily on the differences between political parties, document results pointing in the same direction (Brandenburg 2002; Brettschneider 2002; Hopmann et al. 2012b), while other findings show a, though not contradictory, mixed picture (Brandenburg 2005, 2006). Next, a number of studies have looked at the differences between television news and the press. Once more, no clear-cut picture emerges from previous results. Studies from Sweden (Asp 1983) and the US (Hayes 2010) indicate that the issue agenda in the press tends to be more than not in line with the issue agendas of politicians. One possible explanation may be that newspaper coverage tends to be more extensive and comprehensive and, therefore, its issue attention less punctual. Another explanation could be that newspapers exert a larger effect on politicians’ issue agenda than does television (Walgrave, Soroka, and Nuytemans 2008; see also the chapter by Stanyer). Yet, Brandenburg (2002) found that television was more responsive to parties’ agenda-building efforts than was the press during the 1997 UK general elections. In this particular case, press coverage was more responsive to the Tories’ agenda, a finding found even when controlling for press partisanship which, therefore, cannot explain the result. Moreover, in neighbouring Ireland no systematic difference is found when analysing how congruent the news agenda in the press and on television is with the parties’ issue agenda (Brandenburg 2005).

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5 Conclusion Based on the above presentation of previous studies, some general conclusions on the news coverage of politicians, parties and issue agendas can be drawn. First, the actors most often covered in the news are high-ranked political actors. This dominance is only threatened in case of extraordinary events. Second, the soundbites of political actors covered in the news are shrinking, while the use of imagebites appears to be fairly stable. Third, while news coverage – in particular on television – tends to be more negative than positive, this negativity is not overwhelming and we do not witness a general trend of increasing negativity. Fourth, an increasing focus on political leaders is found in several countries, but if personalization is understood as a broader concept covering more than the individualization of political news coverage, we cannot speak of a general trend toward personalization. Fifth, there is no general trend toward more process coverage at the cost of substantial issue coverage. Sixth, and finally, there is in general a substantial overlap between the news media’s issue agenda and the issues politicians aim at promoting, particularly in the press. Several of the studies presented in this chapter highlighted that commercial broadcasting is more prone to the many trends assumed in public and scholarly debates on the changes in news coverage of politicians and politics. For example, commercial television news appears to focus more on the political process than substantive policy issues (Brants and van Praag 2006; Strömbäck and Dimitrova 2011). Personalization appears also to be more common on commercial broadcasting than on public-service broadcasting (Plasser, Pallaver, and Lengauer 2009). Does this indicate a systematically different news coverage on public-service broadcasting? Not necessarily. For example, the negativity in European election campaign news on public-service broadcasting is not always different from commercial broadcasting (de Vreese et al. 2006). To mention another example, soundbites are not systematically longer or shorter on public-service broadcasting compared to commercial television, at least according to the German data published by Donsbach and Jandura (2003). Although we cannot conclude that there are systematic differences between public-service and commercial broadcasting across countries, it is noticeable that one of the few (western) countries without a relevant public-service broadcasting appears to be a special case on several of the concepts discussed in this chapter: the US. Given that most studies on news content originate from the US, these studies become a natural starting for scholars in other countries. However, the question arises how fruitful such comparisons with the US are for the development of theory and formulation of hypotheses given the repeated finding that US appears to be a special case (Blumler and Gurevitch 2001). To give one example, the recent scholarly debate of the consequences of selective exposure to the news (e.g., Bennett and Iyengar 2008; Prior 2007) is most likely of limited relevance for

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many scholars outside of the US. At least in (western) Europe the (strong publicservice) broadcasting media is less biased with respect to e.g. the visibility of politicians or the issue agenda coverage than e.g. Fox News and news consumption is much less selective (see also Hopmann, van Aelst, and Legnante 2012a; Meffert 2011). At any rate, comparing studies on media content across countries and time is a difficult task. There are substantial differences in the data sources (e.g., television, press or radio coverage), the time period studied (routine or election campaign period), the operationalization of concepts (e.g., how to measure negativity) and so forth. Hopefully, future studies will find more common ground rendering comparisons more feasible (see Esser, Strömbäck, and de Vreese 2012). Acknowledgments: For their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper, I am indebted to Arjen van Dalen, Lene Rimestad, Carsten Reinemann and Adam Shehata.

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Lengauer, Günther, Frank Esser and Rosa Berganza. 2012. Negativity in political news: A review of concepts, operationalizations and key findings. Journalism 13: 179–202. McCombs, Maxwell and Donald Shaw. 1972. The agenda-setting function of mass media. Public Opinion Quarterly 36: 176–187. Meffert, Michael F. 2011. Selective exposure and audience fragmentation? An assessment of partisan selectivity in Germany. Paper presented at the 69th ICA Annual Conference, Boston. Molotch, Harvey and Marilyn Lester. 1974. News as purposive behavior: On the strategic use of routine events, accidents, and scandals. American Sociological Review 39: 101–112. Neuman, W. Russell and Lauren Guggenheim. 2008. The evolution of media effects theory: Fifty years of cumulative research. Unpublished manuscript. Patterson, Thomas E. 1993. Out of Order. New York: Knopf. Patterson, Thomas E. 2000. Doing Well and Doing Good. Cambridge: John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Petrocik, John R. 1996. Issue ownership in presidential elections, with a 1980 case study. American Journal of Political Science 40: 825–850. Plasser, Fritz, Günther Pallaver and Günther Lengauer. 2009. Die (trans-)nationale Nachrichtenlogik in Mediedemokratien – Politischer TV-Journalismus im Wahlkampf zwischen transatlantischer Konvergenz und nationaler Divergenz. In: Frank Marcinkowski and Barbara Pfetsch (eds.), Politik in der Mediendemokratie, PVS-Sonderheft, 174–202. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Prior, Markus. 2007. Post-Broadcast Democracy – How Media Choice Increases Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections. New York: Cambridge University Press. van Praag, Philip and Kees Brants. 2005. Gefascineerd door de horse race: De campagne bij NOS-journaal en RTL-nieuws [Fascinated by the horse race: The campaign in the news of NOS and RTL]. In: Kees Brants and Philip van Praag (eds.), Politiek en media in verwarring: De verkiezingscampagnes in het lange jaar 2002 [Politics and Media in Chaos: The Election Campaigns in the Long Year 2002], 66–91. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis. van Praag, Philip and Cees van der Eijk. 1998. News content and effects in an historic campaign. Political Communication 15: 165–83. Rahat, Gideon and Tamir Sheafer. 2007. The personalization(s) of politics: Israel, 1949–2003. Political Communication 24: 65–80. Reinemann, Carsten and Jürgen Wilke. 2007. It’s the debates, stupid! How the introduction of televised debates changed the portrayal of chancellor candidates in the German press, 1949–2005. International Journal of Press/Politics 12: 92–111. Ridout, Travis N. and Rob Mellen. 2007. Does the media agenda reflect the candidates’ agenda? International Journal of Press/Politics 12: 44–62. Schoenbach, Klaus, Jan de Ridder and Edmund Lauf. 2001. Politicians on TV news: Getting attention in Dutch and German election campaigns. European Journal of Political Research 39: 519–531. Schulz, Winfried and Reimar Zeh. 2003. Kanzler und Kanzlerkandidat in den Fernsehnachrichten. In: Christina Holtz-Bacha (ed.), Die Massenmedien im Wahlkampf – Die Bundestagswahl 2002, 57–81. Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag. Schulz, Winfried and Reimar Zeh. 2005. The changing election coverage of German television – a content analysis: 1990–2002. Communications 30: 385–407. Schönbach, Klaus and Holli Semetko. 2000. Gnadenlos professionell: Journalisten und die aktuelle Medienberichterstattung in Bundestagswahlkämpfen 1976–1998. In: Hans Bohrmann, Otfried Jarren, Gabriele Melischek and Josef Seethaler (eds.), Wahlen und Politikvermittlung durch Massenmedien, 69–89. Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag. Sellers, Patrick J. and Brian F. Schaffner. 2007. Winning coverage in the U.S. Senate. Political Communication 24: 377–391.

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21 Entertaining and emotional elements in political coverage Abstract: This chapter provides an overview of research on the relevance of entertaining and emotional aspects of political media coverage. Based on a discussion of the normative preference for information apparent in most work on political communication, the authors reflect on how and why emotional and entertaining message components nevertheless matter. They argue that investigating the political relevance of those elements has become important because of the rise of new formats of political information and changes of traditional news (e.g., late-night talks, tabloidization, softening of news). More specifically, the chapter reviews the state of the art in research on the presence and effects of humor, visuals, negativity, and fear in political coverage. The authors conclude that the effects of those elements may not necessarily be entertaining. Rather, politically significant repercussions on political knowledge, attitudes, and participation can result from such ostensibly nonpolitical content. Key Words: entertainment, information, emotions, humor, visuals, negativity, fear

1 Introduction Concerned with how mediated and interpersonal communication influences citizenship, political communication scholars traditionally have operated under the normative assumption that information matters. Indeed it does. However, the notion of what constitutes information has shifted fluidly as the media landscape has begun to incorporate new forms of news. Social media that redefine one’s sense of community, partisan enclaves of media that enable one to seek ideologically consonant content, and satirical television programming that disseminates the news of the day all stand alongside older, mainstream news outlets that have migrated online to a 24/7 news cycle. With this plethora of media outlets from which to learn about one’s social and political world, it is no surprise that scholars must revisit what constitutes political information and its potential effects (see also the chapter by Jandura and Friedrich). Against this increasingly complex media backdrop, this chapter begins with a brief discussion of how and why messages that are not based on “quality” information or “rational” content can matter. We review shifts in the media landscape that have shaped how citizens around the world understand politics, then focus on some specific elements of entertainment- and emotion-based political coverage.

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2 Looking beyond the manifestly political To understand why content matters, it is necessary to briefly address the normative ideals undergirding the research in this domain. Namely, what do we expect of citizens? At the broadest level, citizens should possess certain types of political information that allow them to discern their interests (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996), assess alternatives to public problems, and take action according to their values and principles (Conway 1991). The role of information in the creation, socialization, and maintenance of the democratically engaged citizen cannot be over-emphasized. After all, individuals can experience only so much firsthand within their immediate environment. Information about geographically distant events and issues, like wars and other overseas conflicts, are brought to one’s attention through mediated channels, very likely involving a combination of foreign bureaus, stringers, social media, and non-news media. Because politically relevant information travels in many guises, derives from numerous sources, and has a broad range of impacts, asking the question of what information matters is crucial (Delli Carpini 2004: 423; see also Williams and Delli Carpini 2012). The role that the media play in fostering democratic engagement is further complicated by the consideration of assumptions about the individual citizen. Are citizens, as Lippmann (1922: 16) contended, ill-equipped to deal with a large and complex environment and therefore forced to rely on whatever available to create for themselves trustworthy pictures of the world? Are they, in the parlance of political psychologists, able to process information sufficiently to make rational political choices (Sears 2002)? Traditionally, scholars’ answers to these questions implicitly have viewed citizens as making decisions based on a limited range of ostensibly political information, e.g., information gleaned from television news broadcasts, newspapers, and political advertising (see also the chapter by Kepplinger). This rather narrow perspective of the flow and impact of political information, however, has long fallen by the wayside. Downs’s (1957) seminal piece on how humans engage in cost-benefit analyses when considering what actions to take (or not take) opened the door for a spate of studies on political decision-making. It is clear that citizens make decisions based on informational shortcuts, or heuristics (see Kim 2012 for a review). In the absence of full or easily accessible “political” (issue-based) information, individuals make judgments about candidates based on shortcuts such as which friends have endorsed them, the party to which the candidates belong, or candidates’ personal traits. For instance, does this candidate’s profile align with what one believes a president (or other elected leader) should resemble (Popkin 1994)? Clearly, judgments of political leaders are based on their issue stances as well as their personalities (Stewart and Clarke 1992), the latter reflecting the processing of information that transcends any political issue (see also the chapters by Arendt and Matthes and by Becker and Scheufele).

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3 Blurring boundaries The boundaries that traditionally have separated the political from the non-political and news from non-news no longer exist. Writers for prime-time television draw from real-life political affairs – e.g., a post-9/11 lawsuit involving wiretapping on the American courtroom drama Law & Order, whose previews are tagged “Ripped from the Headlines.” For those who eschew televised dramas, political developments as well as politicians’ personal foibles provide constant fodder for late-night comedians like David Letterman, comedy sketch shows around the world (e.g., Eretz Nehederet in Israel), and satirical news shows like South Africa’s Late Night News and Germany’s heute-show, an adaptation of the American The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Accordingly, scholars have begun to rethink the nomenclature used to describe these media outlets. Early classifications of “traditional” vs. “nontraditional” news no longer hold as what constitutes old vs. news is a moving target. Conceptions of the former generally have included news about politics and public affairs as they appeared in newspapers and television news broadcasts; the latter, on the other hand, has included a broad array of sources including debates, political advertisements, political opinion polls, and talk shows (McLeod et al. 1996), as well as television news magazines and late-night comedy (Moy and Pfau 2000). Even within the category of late-night comedy exists a panoply of styles ranging from variety shows featuring jokes and interviews with celebrities, to mock news programs, to sketch-based shows. Then there is the distinction between “hard news” and “soft news,” the former characterized as being of higher quality with its imparting of “real information.” Soft news, on the other hand, tends to refer to news communicated in a sensational fashion, focusing not on discrete political facts, but on entertaining information (Zaller 2003) that can include personality magazines and television news magazine shows (Baum 2003). “‘Hard news’ generally refers to important political and economic news, while soft news amounts to ‘everything else’” (Just 2012: 109; see also Reinemann et al. 2011). The shift toward “pop politics” (Mazzoleni and Sfardini 2009) includes “infotainment,” which emerges when information aims at being entertaining or when entertainment shows take on serious political issues. Others go even farther, labeling this genre “infoenterpropagainment” (Caulfield 2008). Though many of these terms refer to developments in electronic media, the term “tabloidization” has been used as well to reflect a movement toward lower standards of journalistic integrity, marked by “sensationalism, prurience, triviality, malice, and plain, simple credulity” (Sparks 2000: 1). Nonetheless, Williams and Delli Carpini (2012) warn against the use of such terms, particularly given their pejorative connotation and the shifting boundaries of what constitutes news vs. entertainment. Rather, they argue that contemporary attempts to understand political coverage move beyond genres of content and

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focus on the utility of this information for a democratic system (see also the chapter by Jandura and Friedrich).

4 Humor Given the breadth of these media, it is impossible to study or theorize about all under one rubric. However, it is possible to discern among these media the communality of humor, which in and of itself is not a singular phenomenon: Gruner’s (1978: 5–7) early review provides a ten-point classification that includes admittedly overlapping tactics such as surprise, slapstick, ridicule, and defiance. In attempting to unpack this concept, he differentiates humor, typically associated with affect and feeling, from wit, which tends to be linked to intellect. Complicating the conceptual terrain is the term “satire,” viewed as a specific type of wit (Gruner 1978: 92–94), and one used to describe some of these media outlets of interest (note, for instance, the Satire TV volume by Gray, Jones, and Thompson 2009). Satire differs from other forms of humor as its goal is ultimately to effect positive change. “The satire humorously prods or tickles its audience into an awareness of absurdity or abnormality. They have become more rational, but they aren’t aware of their education, and their subsequent political action is their own. Satire is negative on its first level, and the positive remedy for the satirized must be inferred” (Schultz 1977: 78). Even within the rubric of satire, scholars have distinguished different types. Horatian satire is designed to simultaneously please (audience members) and critique (social or political on-goings), a form that aligns more with Schultz’s characterization of satire (Highet 1962). Juvenalian satire, on the other hand, is relentless and designed “not to heal but to wound” (Holbert et al. 2011: 192). Obviously, viewers do not attend to mediated satire necessarily expecting political commentary and veiled suggestions as to how to take action. However, uses and gratifications research (Katz, Blumler, and Gurevitch 1973) indicates that viewers are more likely to seek content that they believe to fulfill some need, whether it be to learn about their political environment, to have something to discuss with others, to find a means of escaping their lives temporarily, or to just pass the time. This view of the media consumer resonates with the perspective that humans continuously assess their internal and external environments with the goal of attaining enjoyment, deemed “the oldest and still key function regulating human behavior” (Miron 2006: 344). But enjoyment is not the only outcome of engaging with these media. When asked the question whether these continually redubbed genres of media matter politically, the answer is an unequivocal yes. However, upon closer scrutiny, and when considering the democratic normative ideals of holding informed opinions and being politically engaged, we find that some citizens are affected some of the time by some of this content.

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At the most basic level, because humorous messages attract attention (Sternthal and Craig 1973; Weinberger and Gulas 1992), it is not surprising that individuals who are exposed to these satirical messages become more attentive to politics. Indeed, research indicates a “gateway effect” of watching late-night comedy, whereby viewers pay greater attention to televised campaign news over the course of a primary campaign season (Feldman and Young 2008) as well as engage in online information-seeking, although there is no increase in recall of political information (Xenos and Becker 2009). This latter finding echoes those from the study of humor in other disciplines (e.g., Schmidt 1992), where attention does not necessarily translate into recall. Although research finds increased attention to politics deriving from exposure to late-night comedy and soft news, it is not clear whether humor is the mechanism of influence. Experiments have manipulated stimulus materials to include a comedy clip or a hard-news clip (e.g., Xenos and Becker 2009) or embedded the same transcript in mock websites for a late-night talk show vs. a formal news interview program (Parkin 2010). And college students from focus groups report being drawn to The Daily Show for its humor (Rottinghaus et al. 2008). But in much of the survey-based research in this domain, it is more difficult to ascertain the specific content in a particular program or genre to which a respondent has been exposed. These same survey data collectively reveal a broad array of findings where other political outcomes are concerned (see the chapter by Holbert, Hill, and Lee). Viewing late-night comedy increases political knowledge, particularly when knowledge is measured by closed-ended items with fewer response categories, and among those viewers who normally do not pay close attention to political news (Baek and Wojcieszak 2009). This may be because the politically disinterested may not be motivated to attend to ostensibly political media content, but they may be passively learning from venues such as late-night comedy (Baum 2002). As well, watching these shows is linked to changes in attitudes (e.g., Moy and Pfau 2000) and increased political participation (Cao and Brewer 2008), particularly among those who are already more politically knowledgeable (Moy, Xenos, and Hess 2005). Why does humor work? Much humor tends to emphasize in-group and outgroup differences and therefore functions as a way for media consumers to maintain their sense of superiority over the target of that humor (Meyer 2000; Weise 1996). But because political jokes are funny only when the audience member has a contextual understanding of politics, it is no surprise that those with greater political expertise potentially have greater gain from viewing these shows (Moy, Xenos, and Hess 2005). The jokes that politicians make – presented unfiltered by journalists or talk show hosts – are effective as they make politicians appear more human and personable (Moy, Xenos, and Hess 2006). Concerns about one’s appearance and personability have been perennial in politics, and made only more salient with the advent of television, beginning with

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the Kennedy-Nixon presidential debate of 1960. Questions about which candidate won the debate have centered around the medium individuals used to attend to the debate (Vancil and Pendell 1987), and have led scholars to worry about how visuals could impact political coverage.

5 Visuals Both in and outside the domain of political communication, there has long been a concern that mediated images might convey false or incomplete information (Boorstin 1992; Caldwell 1995). Indeed, with modern technological tools, manipulating images has become easier than ever, as TIME magazine did when it darkened a 1994 cover picture of O. J. Simpson. This photographic alteration generated outrage and triggered allegations of racism, ultimately leading the editors to pull the publication and issue a second cover. Sometimes the mere fact that visuals are used can be problematic, as in the case of pundits charging that television coverage of the war in Vietnam stoked anti-war sentiment (see also the chapter by Robinson). Thus, the increasing prominence and use of photos, graphics, and other visual elements in news products have implications for the integrity of journalism as a profession (McCartney 1997). While the visual arrangement of text in a newspaper, or layout, underwent various changes over the first few centuries of print journalism, concern with the possible deleterious consequences of visual elements coincided with the introduction of photography and moving pictures to news coverage, from tabloid papers to cable news to USA Today (Barnhurst and Nerone 1991). Moreover, this change was international: daily papers in other countries tended to follow the model of American modernism in their design (Barnhurst 2000). Criticism of visuals was rooted in a conception of text as neutral, informational, and objective, as opposed to the emotional, shallow, and slanted nature of photographs and film (Graber 1996). Visuals, in this view, diminished the hard-won authority of the news, replacing seriousness and rigor with lurid sensationalism. Scholarship on the subject, however, has expanded beyond these critiques by devising new methods to study visual communication (Griffin 1992; Graber 1996; Maurer, Nagel, and Reinemann 2012). Research generally has shown that the degree of graphic information delivery in news content has indeed increased, and quite rapidly, over the past four decades (Cooke 2005; Utt and Pasternack 1989). Also, visuals have the potential, if not always the actual effect, of increasing knowledge and ensuring consistent views on public affairs subjects (Graber 2001; Brosius, Donsbach, and Birk 1996; David 1998; Zelizer 2010). A picture can be worth a thousand words, and as long as the visual information works in concert with other forms of knowledge, graphic elements can help news consumers gather and retain information (Graber 2001). Given these findings, such increased visual content might well be viewed as a net boon to democracy.

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The shift toward visuals came quickly in print journalism. A juxtaposition of the front page of a newspaper from 1797 with a front page from 1880 reveals two virtually identical pages; indeed, save for a few scattered photos, they match another front page, reproduced later, from 1930 (Barnhurst 1994: 171). Compared to the wild-type experiments and graphical explosions seen on front pages from the 1970s and beyond, they look positively staid (see also Barnhurst and Nerone 1991). Graphic-heavy publications, focusing in particular on photographs, were certainly common, but they tended to exist separately from the “respectable” papers in tabloids and photo magazines like Life, communicating the idea that photojournalism was qualitatively different from print reporting. However, rather than a response to new technology, such tendencies were part of a larger effort to establish the credibility of journalism, and by emphasizing the book-like appearance of the text, publishers sought to communicate authority to their readers (Barnhurst 1994). The advent of television, however, provided an impetus for even broadsheets to change their design style (Cooke 2005). While it took some time after the advent of television news as a major journalistic force for stylistically conservative broadsheets to incorporate the design innovations visible in on-screen graphics, the changes quickly took hold of the newspaper industry. Starting in the 1970s, daily newspapers slowly and then quite rapidly underwent a series of major design changes, including the use of color, “thumbnail” photos, and larger typefaces (Utt and Pasternack 1989). This shift from text to graphics has happened in similar ways across all forms of news media besides radio. TV news began by using graphics as static visual wallpaper, then began using white space more skillfully to organize information, incorporating animations in the 1990s and then in the 2000s keeping multiple moving elements on screen simultaneously (the “news ticker”) to produce a feeling of constant activity. News websites, however, have remained fairly static over their development, moving from a basic three-column index to a digital version of the “modular” design popular with print newspapers in the 1980s. Taken together, the design of newspapers, television news, and news websites seems to have converged into a consistent form (Cooke 2005). What, then, are the effects of this increased visualization on news consumers? According to conventional wisdom, visual information presented on television news is inferior to what can be communicated through text (Postman 1984). However, this has largely been shown to be untrue. Visual communication does not communicate less than does text; rather, it communicates differently. As such, it can have effects both on political learning and political attitudes. Discoveries in the realm of information processing have shown the massive potential for political learning (Graber 2001). In large part stemming from the barrage of everyday stimuli, humans tend to consume information quickly and inconsistently (Fiske and Taylor 1991). In these conditions, the focused reasoning

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needed to process textual communication is hard to achieve. But visual communication can efficiently convey a large amount of information by activating preexisting schema. Key to these findings is dual coding theory, which values visuals but not at the expense of other streams of information (Paivio 1986). Dual coding theory recognizes that human cognition can effectively deal with language and nonverbal information simultaneously. Therefore, a media message that employs redundancy, or an overlap between visuals and words, will most likely lead to message retention (see also Lang 1995), particularly when concrete, specific nouns are employed (David 1998). However, the use of visuals is not without its downside. Because individuals encode visual information relatively automatically (Lang, Potter, and Bolls 1999), and begin doing so even before they learn to read (Graber 1996), visuals can play an extremely critical role in how short- and long-term impressions are formed (Zillmann, Gibson, and Sargent 1999). Photographs and graphics are part and parcel of how stories are framed (Tankard 2001), and news photographs are not merely illustrations, in the way that news professionals tend to conceive of them. Rather, they must be balanced in the same way information is; using a single picture that favors one side of a story will tilt readers to understand the story in those terms (Zillmann et al. 1999; see also Zelizer 2010). Moreover, in a world where individuals are bombarded with messages from print, electronic, and social media, individuals run the risk of information overload. It is not surprising then to expect message producers to rely on strong and emotive visuals to draw people’s attention. This is especially true in the case of certain issues; for example, particularly vivid or graphic visuals relating to victimization make readers more likely to choose to engage with a news item when they are free to choose from among a variety of options (Zillmann, Knobloch, and Yu 2001) (see also the chapter by Knobloch-Westerwick).

6 Negativity Concomitant with the blurring of media genres and the increasing prevalence of visuals is the growing concern that news media negativity is on the rise (Cappella and Jamieson 1996; Patterson 2000) and that a feeding frenzy has emerged among journalists (Sabato 1991). Negativity, whether it appears in the form of editorials lambasting an elected leader for calling for social change or journalists covering politicians attacking one another, aligns with the notion that conflict and drama can enhance a story’s perceived newsworthiness (Price and Tewksbury 1997). Negativity is also attention-grabbing and entertaining (Cohen 2008; Lengauer, Esser, and Berganza 2012; Vliegenthart, Boomgaarden, and Boumans 2011) and, in a competitive news environment, news outlets that run the most compelling stories win the largest audiences and the most advertising dollars (Cohen 2008; Grabe and Kamhawi 2006; Lang and Newhagen 1996).

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Market orientation, however, is not the only driving force behind increased negativity. Some view this tonal shift – at least in the United States – as a function of the changing relationship between the press and politicians, with Watergate serving as the pivotal event that would inculcate in journalists more adversarial attitudes toward the political systems they cover (Sabato 1991). On the tail of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, this political scandal instilled in American journalists the value that cynicism toward politicians and the government could make careers. “[It] began the press’s open season on politicians in a chain reaction that today allows for scrutiny of even the most private sanctums of public officials’ lives” (Sabato 1991: 61). Indeed, this close scrutiny into what Meyrowitz (1985) calls the “backstage region” continues today in a media world rife with investigative reporting, exposés, and as in the case of the recent News of the World scandal dubbed “Murdochgate,” phone-hacking (see also the chapters by Stanyer and by Hopmann). Scholarly concern with the general rise in increased news media negativity has led to a series of studies of the effects of exposure to such negativity. In their seminal study, Miller, Goldenberg, and Erbring (1979) found that individuals who read more critical newspapers reported greater levels of distrust toward politicians and institutions. Subsequent research examining a broader array of media forms – national and local television news, political talk radio, late-night talk shows as well as newspapers – found that with some exceptions, individuals who consumed negative political news are more likely to be cynical toward democratic institutions (Moy and Pfau 2000). Another study, this time of the 2002 Dutch elections, found campaign coverage to be more negative than in previous election years, and that consumption of this negative news coverage was related to lower levels of trust in political party leadership and, subsequently, lower levels of voter turnout (Kleinnijenhuis, van Hoof, and Oegema 2006). Negativity in other media formats has political impacts as well: Individuals exposed to televised incivility in political talk shows reported lower levels of trust in politicians, Congress, and the American political system (Mutz and Reeves 2005). Despite this general trend of findings, scholars have yet to reach consensus about how to define and operationalize media negativity. This is particularly true for the study of negativity in Europe, where communication research encompasses a wider array of research approaches and media systems (Lengauer, Esser, and Berganza 2012). The aforementioned studies also lend support for the “videomalaise” hypothesis, referring to how negative television news makes viewers more cynical about politicians and political institutions (Robinson 1975). This term was adapted later to “media malaise” (Bennett et al. 1999) to refer to the general negativity across media. Despite the terms’ intuitive appeal and empirical support, some researchers have questioned the normative assumptions underlying studies in this area. Namely, some scholars argue that distrust is valuable in any political system as it can motivate citizens to effect social and political change (Miller 1974). In other

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words, conflict is an essential part of politics, and because negativity draws citizens’ attention to important issues and events, it actually benefits democracy (Geer 2006). Citizens wait for the press to indicate that they should be paying attention to something happening in the government, and “if the media tell citizens that the country is in turmoil, then the incentive to act becomes stronger” (Martin 2008: 181). In this way, negative news has a positive effect on democratic participation, albeit only if this news focuses on social concerns rather than personal attacks (see also the chapter by Maurer).

7 Fear One clear theme emerging from our review thus far is that people’s attention is more easily captured by the presence of humor, visuals, and negativity. Any review of affect-inducing coverage would be remiss without a discussion of fear, another emotional element often found in news coverage of political affairs (see also the chapter by Schemer). Research has mostly examined how fear is evoked in media reports on crime (e.g., see Heath and Gilbert 1996), a subject where mass public anxiety has potentially broad policy implications. Crime coverage that exploits public fears or arouses new ones can evoke political concerns and foster political attitudes, perhaps to the benefit of particular politicians, parties, or causes. In this way, fear can be thought of as a type of news frame, a concept which refers to a journalist’s choice to “select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described” (Entman 1993: 52) (see also the chapter by Aalberg). Like the deployment of other emotional elements, macro-level trends have led to the increasing use of fear in political coverage. Namely, the increasing commercialization of news has prioritized the value of entertainment-oriented journalism, which is more likely to characterize complex societal issues as simplistic problems – problems that often are framed in terms of fear (Altheide 1997). At the most basic level, the news media have used the word “fear” more often over the years. A frequency analysis of the word “fear” and its synonyms in the Los Angeles Times found fear being referenced more in 1994 than in 1985. Over this same period, use of the word “fear” in news articles and headlines increased 64 % and 161 %, respectively, while analyses of ABC World News Tonight showed a 173 % increase in the use of the word (Altheide 1997). Other analyses of national and regional newspapers also found increased usage of the word “fear” in news stories, particularly in front-page articles (Altheide and Michalowski 1999). Much of this research on news frames in crime coverage has its roots in cultivation theory, or the idea that the programming to which we are exposed “cultivate[s]

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stable and common conceptions of reality” (Gerbner 1998: 179). Television, the theory contends, is a tool for socialization and “the central cultural arm of American society” (Gerbner and Gross 1976: 175). Thus, when television consistently portrays the world as a violent and dangerous place, heavy viewers perceive their real-world communities to be violent and dangerous as well. Many studies have found support for cultivation theory by showing relationships between exposure to fear-inducing news reports and increased levels of fear and anxiety among the public. From 1978 through 1992, the vast majority of Americans did not think crime was the most important problem facing the nation; however, by 1994, polls showed roughly half of Americans thought crime was the country’s most important problem (Lowry, Nio, and Leitner 2003). This large increase was not correlated with an increase in actual crime. Similarly, a survey conducted during a rush of violent crime reports in Tallahassee, Florida, revealed that people who consumed radio and television news reported feeling more fearful for their personal safety (Chiricos, Eschholz, and Gertz 1997). Children have also been found to think that television news is scary, and children who watch TV news are more likely to think that high numbers of murders occur near them (Smith and Wilson 2002) (see also the chapter by Arendt and Matthes and by Schemer). However, the most important outcome of framing news coverage of political affairs in terms of fear perhaps is not an increase in the public’s fear of crime. Instead, the key political outcome may be the byproducts of that fear – by making the public feel vulnerable and unsafe, fear frames can “promote a sense of disorder and a belief that ‘things are out of control’” (Altheide 2006: 420). According to the politics of fear theory, individuals with political agendas can exploit this fear to engender public support for increased social control, policing, and intervention (Altheide 2006). An analysis of fear in news reports on the September 11th terrorist attacks found the news media linked terrorism and fear through victimization, primarily as a result of the media’s reliance on government officials as information sources (Altheide 2006). Consequently, criticism of government and military action was stifled, and increased vigilance on the part of citizens and protection from the government was encouraged. This politics of fear can also be explained using Entman’s (1993) four functions of a news frame: The media define terrorism in terms of its potential for widespread personal harm; they diagnose the causes of terrorism as outside enemies; they make the moral judgment that terrorism is something that could personally affect every American; and they then suggest remedies to the problem – in this case, increased government intervention and policing. Like all frames, fear frames work by drawing attention to some aspects of a problem, while ignoring others – for example, by highlighting the violence and death toll associated with terrorism, but downplaying the fact that acts of terror in the United States are exceedingly rare. This is particularly important in the context of political news coverage, as frames can evoke different political attitudes

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and rally support for particular policies. The power of frames is why politicians compete to be the first to frame important issues and control how particular topics are discussed (see also the chapter by Robinson and by van Aelst). However, frames are only successful if the viewers have the capacity and motivation to process the information presented. According to the limited capacity model of motivated mediated message processing, humans have a limited amount of cognitive resources with which they can encode, store, and retrieve information (Lang 2006). During encoding, the process by which particular pieces of information are selected from all stimuli for further cognitive processing, two types of stimuli are likely to be selected: information that signals a change in the person’s environment, and information related to survival. Fear-based messages likely activate an aversive system, which functions to protect humans from possible danger. And when aversion is active, people cease trying to understand the information presented in the news story. Rather, they devote their cognitive resources to retrieving related information stored in their memory, and to the storage of information about “where this danger is located and hopefully the successful strategy about how to avoid it” (Lang 2006: 562) – perhaps making it easier for fear-based messages to have their intended effect (see also the chapter by Schemer).

8 Conclusions While this chapter has provided an overview of entertaining and emotional aspects of political coverage, we should note that these aspects are not necessarily employed in a mutually exclusive fashion. Indeed, in a media landscape where television and the internet have pervaded everyday life, it is almost a truism to talk about media without speaking of visuals. Certainly, political ads – which this chapter did not explicitly cover, but is political content that generates much coverage – have employed a combination of appeals. Take, for example, the 1964 “Daisy Girl” ad sponsored by the Lyndon B. Johnson campaign in which a young girl’s counting of daisy petals morphs into a countdown to a nuclear launch. Visually, the ad contrasts a peaceful, idyllic setting with the potential destruction wrought by a nuclear warhead, represented by a mushroom cloud. This combination of visuals and fear appeals is evident in other political ads, such as George H. W. Bush’s Willie Horton ad, which was criticized for preying on racial stereotypes and fears of violent crime. Such message strategies are not entertaining per se, but others are, as politicians have begun to avail themselves of talk shows and other opportunities to present themselves in a manner unfiltered by journalists. As candidates and politicians appear on talk shows, make self-deprecating remarks, and talk about their family lives, audience members are exposed to personas that candidates hope will offset the traditionally negative coverage that they garner from mainstream news

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media outlets. Though this newer type of coverage may be entertaining, their effects are not necessarily entertaining. Rather, politically significant repercussions can result as citizens learn political tidbits, form political attitudes, and take political action based on what they glean from such ostensibly nonpolitical content.

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R. Lance Holbert, Megan R. Hill, and Jayeon Lee

22 The political relevance of entertainment media Abstract: This chapter critically reflects on the state of the art in research on the political relevance of entertainment media. It is argued that most research on this important topic has been based on the ideas of understanding or consistency. While these lines of research also need to be expanded, the authors call for bringing the hedonic principle into the fold as a primary explanatory principle for the study of political entertainment media. Moreover, the chapter stresses the need to expand the range of entertainment media content/genres/forms that are investigated for their political influence. As an example, the authors reflect on the political influence of graphic novels in this essay. In addition, the authors highlight the importance of an international perspective and of comparative work in this area of study. Only when research expands in such a manner to include these lines of research will substantive judgments concerning the political relevance of entertainment media be forthcoming. Key Words: entertainment media, understanding, consistency, hedonic principle, graphic novels

1 Introduction: The political relevance of entertainment media Assessing the political relevance of entertainment media is a multi-faceted endeavour, difficult to wrap one's hands around given the field’s ever shifting scope of inquiry. This chapter could travel down many different roads to address its assigned task – providing an assessment of the political relevance of entertainment media. One road to travel would be to put forward a summary of the empirical evidence, critical-cultural perspectives, and rhetorical argumentation offered to date on the impact of political entertainment media. This road would be difficult to navigate, and we are not really sure it leads much of anywhere at this time. Although calls have been made for generating greater organizational power in relation to this area of study (Holbert 2005) and better grounding work of this kind in theory (Holbert 2013; Holbert and Young 2013), research on political entertainment media remains a seemingly random set of studies focusing on specific media outlets (e.g., The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report, Michael Moore’s films) and attending to a broad range of outcome variables (e.g., salience, knowledge, attitudes, political behavior). In addition, while many works on this topic

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could easily be defined as atheoretical, those studies which do employ theory pull from many different fields (e.g., social psychology, persuasion, mass communication, humor studies). To top it off, this area of study bridges many epistemological boundaries (Holbert and Young in press), making it more difficult to offer conclusions that provide clarity. In short, it is a challenge to offer any single summation of exactly what we know about the political influence of entertainment media given our inability to mold its many lines of research into a coherent whole. The study of entertainment media is not at a point in its evolution that would allow for a fruitful and well-organized assessment of what we know about its general influence on politics. However, there is a critical mass of scholarship being produced on this topic (e.g., Amarasingam 2011; Baumgartner and Morris 2008; Gray, Jones, and Thompson 2009) that requires serious thought be given to how best we can assess how, when, and why entertainment media can have political influence. Thus, this chapter will seek to approach the issue of political relevance via a second route, with its defining question being the following: How might researchers best approach the question of assessing the “political relevance of entertainment media”? The goal of this chapter is to offer a roadmap for how to approach the question of determining the political relevance of entertainment media in the coming years. A necessary, but not sufficient condition for whatever approach is taken to address this question is that it be grounded in theory. Given that this area of study is pulling from a wide range of theoretical traditions (both within and outside of communication), the use of any one theory as a single lens would be far too limiting. Instead, this chapter will focus on a series of explanatory principles (understanding, consistency, and hedonism) that serve as the basis for much communication theory building (Pavitt 2010). As Pavitt (2010) argues, “Communication cannot explain itself, and any attempt to do so limits one to a description” (p. 41). Explanatory principles bring distinct sets of assumptions and ways of looking at human activities, and these unique assumptions and perspectives lead to different questions being asked about a communication phenomenon of interest. The unique questions being asked produce distinct knowledge outcomes for this area of research. The study of political entertainment media is nested within the study of political communication, and any perspectives offered as to how these explanatory principles have shaped how we approach the political relevance of entertainment media must be placed within the context of their impact on the field as a whole. An argument will be offered that one of these explanatory principles, understanding, has defined a majority of the research conducted to date on political entertainment media. However, a call is made for additional political entertainment media research to spring from other explanatory principles, consistency and hedonism. First, this chapter will focus on political communication’s two most dominant explanatory principles, understanding and consistency. The role of each in relation

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to the exploration of political entertainment media will then be offered. Once these primary explanatory principles are offered in their proper context, the explanatory principle of hedonism, overlooked to date in the study of political entertainment media, will be outlined as an essential component for gaining any true understanding of political entertainment media effects. The only way to provide a proper assessment of the political relevance of entertainment media is to fully incorporate these diverse explanatory principles into a broad research agenda undertaken by a diverse set of researchers. Once the importance of these unique principles is outlined, only then will the chapter argue for the need to think creatively about the scope of what should be defined as “political entertainment media” and what type of research is being conducted across the globe on this important topic. So, what types of messages fall within the scope of “political entertainment media”? Holbert (2005) casts a fairly wide net by including media content which varies (a) in the explicitness of political messages offered and (b) the likelihood with which the topic of politics will be addressed in a given message segment. For the purposes of this essay, we will establish a tighter boundary condition by focusing on only the media content where there is a high likelihood of politics being the focus of attention, but with varying degrees of explicitness. The totality of embracing a diverse set of explanatory principles, assessing a wide range of entertainment media content, and assessing what work has been conducted around the world (not just in North America) will allow for the best means by which to offer solid judgments on the political relevance of entertainment media.

2 The dominant explanatory principles: Understanding and consistency Understanding builds off the assumption that people are motivated to make sense of how the world functions in order to best situate themselves within their environment; it is an explanatory principle which accounts for a motivation to see the world as whole (see Lewin, Heider, and Heider 1936). Acts of sense making stemming from this principle may occur as a result of internal motivations such as the desire to increase one’s knowledge or understanding of a phenomenon (e.g., Cacioppo et al. 1996). In contrast, consistency is a human motivation in which individuals strive for agreement among objects that are deemed to be connected and parallel to one another (Cialdini, Trost, and Newsom 1995: 325). Consistency is the inclination to adhere to what has come before (Cialdini et al. 1995). For instance, individuals may seek consistency between their behaviors and their prior attitudes and beliefs, or between their existing self-concept and their behaviors (Cross, Gore, and Morris 2003). In striving to create consistency, people will often change their attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, or the personal importance they place

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on an object in order to adhere to previously established attitudes, choices, or behaviors. Some of the more well-known consistency-based theories include Cognitive Dissonance Theory (Festinger 1957; Harmon-Jones and Mills 1999) and Balance Theory (Heider 1958) (see also the chapter by Knobloch-Westerwick).

2.1 Understanding and consistency in political communication: Eras of influence 2.1.1 The Lazarsfeld Era: The introduction of consistency Research on voting by Lazarsfeld and colleagues introduced consistency as a core explanatory principle for the field of political communication. The seminal book, The People’s Choice, examined the political behavior of residents of Erie County, Ohio, including their consumption of political information during the 1940 presidential campaign (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet 1948). The most influential finding from the study suggested that the primary effect of a political campaign is to reinforce people’s pre-existing beliefs (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet 1948). From this study emerged a portrait of people seeking consistency in the political materials they consumed. The People’s Choice influenced the next two decades of political communication research, a period in which consistency was the predominant explanatory principle. Building off Lazarsfeld’s work, the application of consistency as the predominant explanatory principle remained strong during the 1950s and 60s. Studies ranging from the effects of persuasive messages (see McGuire 1964) to the impact of campaigns (e.g., McCroskey and Prichard 1967; Lipset 1953; Schramm and Carter 1959; Stempel III 1961) used consistency as the theoretical lens. Voting and media selection studies also utilized consistency as the core principle. These studies found that voters surround themselves with like-minded individuals (Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee 1954), that people consider their group identity when voting (Campbell et al. 1960), and that people consume media that confirm their preexisting beliefs and avoid media that run counter to those beliefs (i.e., limited effects, Klapper 1960).

2.1.2 The institutionalist era: Dominance of understanding The early Lazarsfeld studies represent the building blocks for the field (e.g., the Erie County, Decatur, and Elmira studies; see Berelson et al. 1954; Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955; Lazarsfeld et al. 1948), and many have argued that the conclusions offered from these seminal works ushered in a new paradigm that touted limited media effects (see Klapper 1960). In the absence of results suggesting significant changes in attitude and behaviors in response to political media exposure, Lazars-

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feld and his colleagues concluded that individuals instead seek to reinforce preexisting beliefs through self-selection and contact with like-minded others (Chaffee and Hochheimer 1985). However, starting in the late 1960s, a group of empiricallyminded scholars (identified by Katz 1987 as the institutional paradigm) began to challenge the assumptions of the limited effects model. “Their [the institutionalists’] quarrel with the limited effects paradigm is, first, that it mistakenly treats the media as agents of persuasion rather than as providers of information, agendas, and ‘public space’” (Katz 1987: S28). By treating media solely as an outlet for persuasion (e.g., capable of generating attitudinal and behavioral change), scholars of the institutionalist vein argued that these voting studies not only failed to acknowledge other (perhaps more subtle or indirect) effects generated by media exposure, but also lacked an ability to recognize the role of media as a potential source for information. The coming of the Institutionalist era allowed understanding to emerge as an important explanatory principle in political communication research. The dominance of understanding as an explanatory principle becomes all the more self-evident when looking at effects-, use-, and content-based political communication media effects research from this era. Understanding underlies a significant amount of political communication effects-based research from the past forty years. Arguably one of the most influential communication theories, agenda setting (McCombs and Shaw 1972) puts forward an argument that news coverage affects the perceived importance of these issues (see McCombs et al. 2011). In summing up what agenda setting research has taught us, McCombs and Reynolds (2002) state that “Researchers have discovered that media audiences not only learn factual information from exposure to news, but that people learn about the importance of topics in the news based on how the news media emphasize these topics [emphasis mine]” (p. 2). The influence of understanding is also well situated in the study of audience motivations to consume political media. Katz, Blumler, and Gurevitch (1973–74) argued that “The surveillance function may be traced to a desire for security or the satisfaction of curiosity and the exploratory drive (…) attempts to correlate informational elements may stem from a more basic need to develop one’s cognitive mastery of the environment” (p. 513). The surveillance function describes the human motivation to know what is going on around us (McQuail, Blumler, and Brown 1972), and it is the single need most often linked to the consumption of news media. Uses and gratifications was the dominant perspective of its era (Holbert in press), and the more specific study of the ability of news to meet audience members’ surveillance needs was built from the explanatory principle of understanding. The universal influence of understanding in this era is also evident in the study of political media content. It can be argued that the reason why the field undertakes studies of objectivity (see Westerstahl 1983), the comparative study of models of journalism (Schudson 2003), and normative assessments of journalism

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(see Christians, Glasser, and McQuail 2009) is because of concerns built around the explanatory principle of understanding as an ideal. Collectively, scholars working within these lines of research seek to hold the news media industry accountable for the nature of its content because of the concern that if we abandon such oversight, the quality of information will suffer, and thus, so will the quality of the citizenry (Dewey 1927). All of this work is derived from the transmission of understanding as an ideal (see also the chapter by Jandura and Friedrich).

2.1.3 The reintroduction of consistency Although consistency remained a dominant theme in European study of political communication, the reemergence of consistency as a dominant explanatory principle in US scholarship can be traced to the expansion of political talk radio and 24-hour partisan cable television news channels such as FOX News in the early 1990s. Much of the initial work on political talk radio focused on the conservative host Rush Limbaugh and the self-selection activities of his audience (Barker 1998, 1999; Barker and Knight 2000; Jamieson et al. 1998; Lee and Cappella 2001). Given the makeup of FOX’s audience, much work has centered on whether FOX content and use serve to reinforce conservative ideals. To that end, research has looked at the content offered by the network, especially the extent to which it mirrors conservative ideals (Aday, Livingston, and Hebert 2005; Baum and Groeling 2009; Jamieson and Cappella 2008). Much attention has also been paid to who uses or tunes into the network (Coe et al. 2008; Morris 2005; Webster 2005) and whether partisan selective exposure contributes to FOX’s audience share (Iyengar and Hahn 2009). Finally, studies of FOX News have also explored the effects the channel has on audiences, in particular its ability to ideologically polarize the public through reinforcement of beliefs (Iyengar and Hahn 2009; Jamieson and Cappella 2008; Kull, Ramsay, and Lewis 2003). The decade following the 2000 US presidential election has seen an influx of research on partisan selective exposure in the United States (e.g., Chaffee et al. 2001; Garrett 2009a, 2009b; Iyengar et al. 2008; Iyengar and Hahn 2009; Knobloch-Westerwick and Meng 2009; Stroud 2008), further supporting the notion that consistency has resurfaced as the dominant explanatory principle in political communication media research – especially in the US. The primary focus of selective exposure research over the last ten years has been on whether partisan political media serve to reinforce preexisting beliefs and polarize the electorate. The lack of consensus on these two questions suggests that selective exposure research (i.e., consistency) will continue for years to come. On one hand, some have expressed concern that people are confining themselves to partisan echo chambers in which they only consume political news and information that reinforce their preexisting attitudes and beliefs (Bennett and Iyengar 2008, 2010; Jamieson and Cappella 2008; Stroud 2011). However, the evidence for

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selective exposure is equivocal. While it has been demonstrated that people do have a preference for content that reinforces their pre-existing opinions, numerous studies have also shown that people are willing to spend considerable time with information that challenges their beliefs (Garrett 2009a; Knobloch-Westerwick and Meng 2009) and do not immediately abandon that which is counter-attitudinal (Garrett 2009b; Holbert, Hmielowski, and Weeks 2012; Valentino et al. 2009; Webster 2005). Taken together, the research on selective exposure supports the idea that people do prefer content that is consistent with their belief system but will not automatically avoid political information that challenges those beliefs (Chaffee et al. 2001) (see also the chapter by Knobloch-Westerwick). The empirical political communication research highlighted in this section represents a seismic shift from understanding back to consistency as the field's primary explanatory principle. Recent works by Jamieson and Cappella (2008) and Stroud (2011) argue consistency effects will only become stronger and there is a risk that people will no longer use the news media as a means for understanding (see Bennett and Iyengar 2010). An important question underlying many of these recent works asks: if people are constantly looking to reinforce their beliefs, what place does understanding have? Some have even begun to question whether fundamental theories of understanding hold utility in today’s political media environment. As Bennett and Iyengar (2008) write, “just as the minimal effects paradigm may have strained against the realities of its own time, so, too, the agenda-setting paradigm reflects the capacity of ideas to motor on, unimpeded by the inconvenient realities to the contrary” (p. 709). This statement perhaps best reflects the degree of change being undertaken in the field.

2.2 Understanding, consistency, and the study of political entertainment media Given that the study of political entertainment media is nested within the field of political communication it stands to reason that the forces at work concerning the shifting of dominant explanatory principles within the broader field of study would impact how researchers go about assessing the influence of entertainment media on politics. So, how exactly have the explanatory principles of understanding and consistency impacted the study of political entertainment media? Addressing this question will go a long way to better understanding what has shaped the questions we have asked and the knowledge we have gained in this area of research. A critical mass of scholarship on what many would consider to be some of the core genres of political entertainment media (i.e., political satire, late-night talk show monologues, soft news) has been in existence for only a little more than a decade, and it can be argued that this decade has been dominated by the explanatory principle of understanding. Evidence to support this claim can be found in

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relation to content-, use-, and effects-based research on political entertainment media. In terms of content, there are core normative arguments surrounding what type of information is supplied on programs like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Some scholars like Hart and Hartelius (2007) argue that programs of this kind do little to aid the citizenry to better navigate the difficult terrain of politics. However, other researchers (e.g., Young and Esralew 2011) contend that political satire can provide the type of information citizens can use to take part in politics in a more meaningful fashion. In line with this latter camp of researchers, Fox, Koloen and Sahin (2007) conducted a comparative content analysis of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and national American network television news and found the political satire outlet to be every bit as substantive as traditional hard news in its coverage and discussion of politics. In terms of use-based research, most of the work done in this area has utilized a laundry list of individual-difference variables (e.g., political interest) that have been consistent and statistically significant predictors of hard news (e.g., Young and Tisinger 2006). The underlying assumption behind the use of these predictor variables is that what is best for predicting news should also predict satirical representations of news – this assumption derives most directly from the principle of understanding. Even the initial “selective exposure” work done in relation to political entertainment media has been grounded in understanding-based principles. For example, Young (2004a) reports that the audience for political TV satire is among the most knowledgeable across the medium, even more knowledgeable than the audience for many TV news programs. The argument made for why individuals who are politically knowledgeable selectively expose themselves to political satire is that a person needs to know a thing or two about politics if he or she is going to obtain any gratifications from consuming this type of media content (i.e., comprehend the jokes). The political messages offered in many forms of political entertainment are more implicit than what is often provided through news. As a result, audience members have to fill in the gaps to obtain meaning from political entertainment media (see also the chapter by Moy, Johnson, and Bartel). As for effects-based research, many of the baseline studies focusing on political entertainment media influence have devoted some or all of their attention to political knowledge as a key variable of interest (e.g., Baumgartner and Morris 2006; Baym 2005; Brewer and Marquardt 2007; Cao 2008; Hollander 2005; McKain 2005; Xenos and Becker 2009; Young 2004b). Knowledge is the most explicit example of a political outcome variable in the understanding tradition. It appears clear that understanding has been the dominant explanatory principle in the first decade for which there has been a critical mass of scholars studying political entertainment media. Only recently has the study of political entertainment media started to adopt more of a consistency-based approach, and this is most likely due to its return to

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prominence for the field of political communication as a whole. Xenos, Moy and Becker (2011) have focused their attention on the presentation of partisan heuristics in political satire programs like The Daily Show. Hmielowski, Holbert, and Lee (2011) reveal that political ideology serves as a strong predictor of political TV satire consumption, with liberals tending to consume more of this content than conservatives. In addition, exposure to political news which leans to the political left appears to be a strong, positive predictor of political TV satire use as well. In terms of effects, LaMarre, Landreville and Beam (2009) find evidence of biased processing of The Colbert Report, with liberals and conservatives finding the show equally funny, but for very different reasons. LaMarre and colleagues report that enjoyment of the program for liberals derives from their recognizing the show’s satirical representation of conservative talk show punditry. Conservatives tend to approach Colbert’s character more at face value and find humor in the seemingly derogatory way in which he pokes fun at the political left. Research of this kind is in the tradition of consistency-based inquiry and this approach will only continue to increase in the coming years as this explanatory principle gains stature within the field as a whole.

3 Expanding the study of political entertainment media There is no question that the understanding-driven research which has guided many of the efforts to assess political entertainment media effects has served us well in producing new knowledge and insights. In addition, there is much to be offered by many consistency-driven lines of political communication research (see Holbert and Benoit 2009). However, what needs to be stressed is that the study of political entertainment media is currently at a vulnerable stage, and it would be a disservice if there were to be a discarding or devaluing of research derived from one explanatory principle at the expense of another. The study of entertainment media and politics needs to take a more balanced approach to its preferences for explanatory principles. This area of research needs to continue to welcome new research that advances knowledge based around the explanatory principle of understanding. The field would not be well served if it were to discard all understanding-based approaches to the study of political media. In addition, the field should look to bring into its fold a broader range of explanatory principles (e.g., hedonism) that can lead to the generation of new empirical questions and insights (see also the chapter by Jandura and Friedrich).

3.1 Adding the hedonic principle While addressing the need for diversity of preferences, let's focus for a moment longer on what additional explanatory principles like hedonism would bring to

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this area of study. Some hedonistic-based communication theories identified by Pavitt (2010) include Bandura’s (1986) Social Learning Theory, Witte’s (1992) Extended Parallel Processing Model, Nabi’s (1999) Cognitive-Functional Model for the influence of negative affective reactions, McGuire’s (1964) Inoculation Theory, and Giles’ Communication Accommodation Theory (see Giles and Ogay 2007). Political communication has delved into the use of some of these theories (e.g., Pfau’s use of inoculation theory; see An and Pfau 2004; Pfau et al. 1990), and there has been some work on the study of discrete emotional reactions to political messages that parallels the work of Nabi (e.g., Holbert and Hansen 2006; Hullett, Louden, and Mitra 2003) (see also the chapter by Schemer). However, a vast majority of hedonistic-based theories have not seen the light of day for political entertainment media, and none of them have been explored to the extent enjoyed by understanding- or consistency-based approaches. The lack of attention given to the explanatory principle of hedonism is a major oversight by the field of political communication as a collective, and nowhere is this more evident than the study of political entertainment media. We wish to argue that political communication researchers interested in entertaiment media cannot gain a true understanding of potentially important media messages without addressing the core concepts of pleasure and pain (see Holbert et al. 2011). The concept of pleasure, which is a hallmark of the study of hedonistic-based research questions, needs to become an integral part of the study of media and politics. However, the field will only be able to do so in a valid and reliable manner when it chooses to embrace hedonism as a core explanatory principle. Until that time comes, there is no way to properly judge the political relevance of entertainment media.

3.2 Adding new types of media In addition to the lack of study of political entertainment media through a wide range of explanatory principles, the field remains constrained in devoting virtually all of its attention to society’s dominant audio-visual media forms (e.g., television, film). To focus on only these media is a disservice to assessing entertainment media’s full influence in politics. When we survey the landscape of media defined as both entertainment and political, we would be remiss to cast aside additional forms, such as the graphic novel (the preferred term), or contemporary comic book. Only recently has this medium gained critical recognition for its maturity and sophistication (Hoppenstad 2006) after years of being confined to the outskirts of the intellectual mainstream, considered by many “a juvenile medium that can only trivialize serious matters” (Versaci 2007: 9). In fact, recent scholarship has argued that use of the term “graphic novel” can be seen, in part, as an attempt to “rescue comics from their critical neglect” (Frey and Noys 2002: 255) and to draw attention to a unique form of narrative capable of serving as a “viable vehicle for subversive

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and even incendiary political messages” (Versaci 2007: 27; Kodosky 2011). As Dittmer (2005) asserts, “the seemingly innocent nature of the comic book medium contributes to its significance in the battle over American identity because it usually operates beneath the gaze of most culture critics” (628). In short, “comics have never been just for kids,” (Hoppenstad 2006: 522) a point that speaks directly to the need for more sustained scholarship on this medium, particularly in the realm of political entertainment media. To that end, we first identify the boundaries of the graphic novel as medium before diving more directly into the historical and socio-political messages addressed by this communicative form. Finally, we address how opening our research agendas to the graphic novel creates additional opportunities for connections across media. First, what is a graphic novel? Undoubtedly, the term is often used synonymously with comic book (Campbell 2007). However, the term ‘graphic novel’ represents more than this singular artifact of popular culture. It is also used to classify a contemporary format (i.e., a hard or soft-cover book as opposed to a stapled magazine) and to describe a hybrid narrative form mixing both text and images. As such, graphic novels are multi-layered, capable of presenting more content at any given moment than literature, art, or film (Versaci 2007; McLoud 1993). Indeed, the graphic novel, as medium, “offers range and versatility with all the potential imagery of film and painting plus the intimacy of the written word” (McLoud 1993: 212). Once more, the focus of several of these graphic novels is squarely on deeply political matters. As Pulitzer Prize winner Art Spiegelman, creator of the acclaimed Maus (1986, 1991) explains, “I prefer the word co-mix, to mix together, because to talk about comics is to talk about mixing together words and pictures that tell a story” (1998: 174). The story told by Spiegelman in Maus (1986, 1991) is that of the Holocaust. More specifically, it is a self-referential explication of the process by which Spiegelman crafted the graphic novel from stories narrated by his survivor father. The importance of Maus to the medium of the graphic novel cannot be understated, but neither can its representation of history, as it offered a “critically-self conscious contribution to the debate concerning the limits of representation surrounding the Holocaust” (Frey and Noys 2002: 255). Here we begin to see the political potential of the graphic novel as a site where “history, or representations of history, are put into play: interrogated, challenged and even undermined” (258). More recent examples of this include Joe Sacco’s Palestine (dealing with the occupation of the West Bank in Israel) and Safe Zone Gorazde (dealing with the UN in Bosnia), as well as Brian K. Vaughan’s Pride of Baghdad (dealing with the U.S. invasion of Iraq and based on the true story of lions escaping the Baghdad zoo), and Jay Cantor and James Romberger’s Aaron and Ahmed (dealing with 9/11 and its aftermath, particularly prisoner interrogations at Guantanamo Bay). To cast these artifacts aside as mere “entertainment,” or even worse, “children’s media” devoid of scholarly merit is to turn a blind eye to the multitude of political media

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awash in contemporary society. These graphic novels address contemporary political topics in critically substantive ways by promoting critiques of “how the world is represented” (Versaci 2007: 13). Case in point, Vaughan has explicitly described Pride of Baghdad as an allegory, indicating that his anthropomorphized characters signify the suffering felt by the Iraqi people during the first days of the war (Mangum and Creekmur 2007). Of course, none of the animals clearly represent an identifiable human position on the war, a feature indicative of the medium’s ability to traverse and critique multiple competing perspectives, sometimes within a single frame. What is important to note, however, is that none of this is new. Comic books have been dealing with political content since 1939 when they became vehicles for American propaganda dealing with World War II. At that time, comic villains became stereotypical representations of the enemy (i.e., German, Russian, and Asian characters), thereby conveying “complex political issues to all social and educational groups from young children to adults” (Scott 2007: 328). According to Scott (2007), many comic book writers even joined forces with the Office of War information (OWI) to coordinate media for the war effort, including creating comics “to give children hope in the outcome of the war, a bit of escape from the actual events, and a sense of contributing to the effort” (p. 329). In short, graphic novels that explore political and public affairs content have long resided beside their more well-known superhero counterparts. What is new to this medium is its rising acceptance within the scholarly community as a form worthy of critical scholarship. It is important for political communication scholars to join this effort and to recognize the opportunities sustained engagement with graphic novels creates within and across media. Graphic novels have increasingly been plucked by Hollywood for film adaptations (e.g., Captain America: The First Avenger 2011; Iron Man 2008, 2010; Punisher: War Zone 2008), and their content has been turned in to numerous TV series (e.g., Super Friends 1973–1986; Justice League 2001–2004). Moreover, the graphic novel is an international medium, taking its subject matter from historical and political events across the world. This diversity, in conjunction with the complexity of its hybrid form, is an opportunity for the international scholarly community to join forces in unpacking the political potential of this largely untapped medium. The graphic novel is just one example of political entertainment media that has been overlooked by the field. Although space constraints prohibit us from offering the same level of detail, a similar argument could be applied to a wide range of media. Building on the print medium theme, there is entirely too little work being done on weekly satire outlets (e.g., The Onion) or serial newspaper cartoons (e.g., Doonesbury). Both types of outlets devote a significant portion of their content explicitly to politics, but we know very little empirically about the effects of these messages (especially over the long term). Outside print-based media, there is much political satire/political material to be found in traditional

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radio content, audio pod casts, and satellite radio. There is virtually no work being conducted on this area in Western countries. There is also the need to study usergenerated content that is both explicitly about politics and offered with clear intention to create entertainment (e.g., Obama Girl, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= wKsoXHYICqU). As with these other outlets and message types, the field retains more known-unknowns than known-knowns. There is much important work still to do, but true understanding can come only when the concept of political entertainment media is given its proper scope.

3.3 Adding an international perspective The increase of political entertainment outlets is not a phenomenon peculiar to the United States. Outside the United States, scholarly debates have revolved around the socio-economic meanings of soft news that blends political information and entertainment (Brants and Voltmer 2011). Another line of research has focused on analyzing political messages embedded within magazines and prime-time TV dramas (e.g., Cornor and Richardson 2008; Hermes 2000; Meijer 2001; Van Zoonen 2007). Mano (2004, 2007) has explored Zimbabwean radio and popular culture to find how social and political changes relative to the democratization of the country are reflected in entertainment media. All of these works speak to entertainment media being assessed for its political influence outside the bounds of the United States. As political parties seek celebrities to endorse their campaigns and more politicians appear on infotainment shows hoping to get their messages across to those who would otherwise stay away from their messages (Brants and Voltmer 2011; Street 2011), scholarly attention is now shifting to explore politicians’ actual experiences on these shows in comparison with their motives and perceived benefits (Van Zoonen, Coleman, and Kuik 2011), as well as the electoral consequences following these appearances (Ikuo and Steel 2007; Masaki 2011). Soft news and talk shows are not the only venue politicians seek to reach. George Galloway, a member of the small British political party Respect, even appeared in the celebrity version of the reality TV program Big Brother (Street 2011) (see also the chapters by Strömbäck & Kiousis and by Sheafer, Shenhav, and Balmas). Whereas some critics lament the depoliticization and sensationalism of political communications (Brants and Voltmer 2011; Higgins 2011), some scholars propose to accept the change from different viewpoints. Van Zoonen (2005), for example, insists on breaking down the boundaries between politics and popular culture, arguing that popular culture eventually drives citizen interpretations of the political landscape. Entertainment shows are regarded by politicians as a risky but effective channel to get their messages across to those who are less interested in and knowledgeable about politics (Brants and Voltmer 2011; Street 2011). Political message providers are proposed to consider the audience actively and strategically

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utilizing various media channels while the audience is redefined as individual “consumers”, or “enjoyers” (Meijer 2005), rather than “subjects” of “mass education” (Brants 2006) (see also the chapter by Jandura and Friedrich). As many countries outside of the U.S. now have political satire in varying degrees, including programs with more focus on political components, more research on these programs is expected to be conducted. In Asian countries where the media have historically refrained from political humor that touches on realworld politics, viewers are now observing the emergence and popularity of newer formats of infotainment programs that deal with political issues in an entertaining or sarcastic manner (e.g., Beat Takeshi’s TV Tackle in Japan, Saturday Night Live Korea in South Korea). When Koizumi Junichiro won the 2001 Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) presidential election and became prime minister of Japan, his victory was attributed to his appearances on popular soft news-oriented programs called “wide shows” where Koizumi developed public popularity by showing his personality to viewers (Ikuo and Steel 2007). Even in China, where the state and the ruling Communist Party control most of the media, commercialization of broadcasting is on the rise (Lee 2003). Additionally, in Israel, entertainment talk show consumption was examined relative to increased concerns about security and lower levels of political mistrust (e.g., Tsfati, Tukachinsky, and Peri 2009). With all of this work being summarized, research on political entertainment across the world looks to be every bit the hodgepodge we have born witness to in the United States. There has not been much progress in forging connections among research agendas across continents, but this needs to happen. Although some political entertainment programs across the world are mentioned in comparison with American political satire such as Saturday Night Live (Choe 2011, November 1), the effects of political satire have yet to be rigorously studied by a wide range of scholars outside the United States, not to mention the lack of formal comparative research with U.S. cases. All of this work needs to be done with great haste if we are to move toward offering a proper set of judgments about the political relevance of entertainment media (see also the chapter by Pfetsch and Esser).

4 Conclusions and future perspectives An argument is offered in this essay that it would be futile at this time to put forward a summary of the political relevance of entertainment media. A critical mass of scholarship is being amassed on the subject, but much more work needs to be done if research is to provide citizens with valid and reliable insights on this important topic. The call made for more research provided in this chapter stresses the following: (1) stepping beyond, but expanding understanding-based lines of inquiry, (2) extending recent efforts at generating consistency-based inquiries, (3) bringing the hedonic principle into the fold as a primary explanatory principle for

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the study of political entertainment media, (4) expanding the range of media content/genres/forms being defined as entertainment media that has the potential to generate political influence (focus was given to the graphic novel in this essay, but several other outlets should be included as well; e.g., user-generated content Web sites), (5) bringing together international research on this topic, and (6) conducting comparative research on political entertainment media influence between countries. Only when this area of study expands in such a manner to include all (or at least most) of these lines of research will substantive judgments concerning the political relevance of entertainment media be forthcoming.

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Iyengar, Shanto and Kyu S. Hahn. 2009. Red media, blue media: Evidence of ideological selectivity in media use. Journal of Communication 59: 19–39. Iyengar, Shanto, Kyu S. Hahn, Jon A. Krosnick and John Walker. 2008. Selective exposure to campaign communication: The role of anticipated agreement and issue public membership. The Journal of Politics 70: 186–200. Jamieson, Kathleen H. and Joseph N. Cappella. 2008. Echo chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jamieson, Kathleen H., Joseph N. Cappella and Joseph Turow. 1998. Rush Limbaugh: The fusion of party leader and partisan mass medium. Unpublished report, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Jones, Jeffrey P. 2010. Entertaining Politics: Satire Television and Political Engagement. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Katz, Elihu. 1987. Communications research since Lazarsfeld. Public Opinion Quarterly 51: 25–45. Katz, Elihu, Jay G. Blumler and Michael Gurevitch. 1973–1974. Uses and gratifications research. Public Opinion Quarterly, 37, 509–523. Katz, Elihu and Paul F. Lazarsfeld. 1955. Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications. New York: The Free Press. Klapper, Joseph T. 1960. The Effects of Mass Communication. New York: Free Press. Knobloch-Westerwick, Silvia and Jingbo Meng. 2009. Looking the other way: Selective exposure to attitude-consistent and counterattitudinal political information. Communication Research 36: 426–448. Kodosky, Robert J. 2011. Holy tet westy! Graphic novels and the Vietnam war. The Journal of Popular Culture 44: 1047–1065. Krauss, Ellis S. and Robert Pekkanen. Forthcoming. The Rise and Fall of Japan’s Dominant Party. New York: Cornell University Press. Kull, Steven, Clay Ramsey and Evan Lewis. 2003. Misperceptions, the media, and the Iraq war. Political Science Quarterly 118: 569–598. LaMarre, Heather L. and Kristen D. Landreville. 2009. When is fiction as good as fact? Comparing the influence of documentary and historical reenactment films on engagement, affect, issue interest, and learning. Mass Communication and Society 12: 537–555. LaMarre, Heather L., Kristen D. Landreville and Michael A. Beam. 2009. The irony of satire: Political ideology and the motivation to see what you want to see in The Colbert Report. International Journal of Press/Politics 14: 212–231. Lazarsfeld, Paul F., Bernard R. Berelson and Hazel Gaudet. 1948. The People’s Choice. New York: Columbia University Press. Lee, GangHeong and Joseph N. Cappella. 2001. The effects of political talk radio on political attitude formation: Exposure versus knowledge. Political Communication 18: 369–394. Lewin, Kurt, Fritz Heider and Grace M. Heider. 1936. Principles of Topological Psychology. New York, London: McGraw-Hill. Lipset, Seymour M. 1953. Opinion formation in a crisis situation. Public Opinion Quarterly 17: 20–46. Mano, Winston. 2004. Renegotiating tradition on radio Zimbabwe. Media, Culture and Society 26(3): 315–336. Mano, Winston. 2007. Popular music as journalism in Zimbabwe. Journalism Studies 8(1): 61–78. Masaki, Taniguchi. 2007. Changing media, changing politics in Japan. Japanese Journal of Political Science 8(1): 147–166. McCloud, Scott. 1993. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper. McCombs, Maxwell E. and Donald L. Shaw. 1972. The agenda-setting function of the press. Public Opinion Quarterly 36: 176–187.

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Section VI: Citizens

Jens Wolling and Martin Emmer

23 Individual political communication and participation Abstract: This chapter reflects on political media use, political talk, and political participation in nations across the globe. Based on a discussion of normative perspectives on individual political communication the authors present results from a comparative secondary analysis of the World Values Survey (WVS). In the analysis, the authors compare patterns of individual political communication and participation for 15 selected countries from all continents, also investigating correlations with individual and contextual factors (e.g., press freedom, political culture). The findings show that political talk and media use remain the most important link to politics for most citizens, while more demanding forms of participation in most countries are confined to a minority of people. Given the rise of the Internet the authors highlight the danger of a digital divide between activists using the multiple political options of the Web and large segments of societies left behind in this respect. Key Words: political media use, political talk, political participation, World Values Survey, press freedom, political attitudes, political culture

1 Introduction The definition of democracy as “government of the people, by the people, for the people” by Abraham Lincoln draws attention to the individual citizen as the key player in the political process. By 1863, when Lincoln made his statement, the United States were the only modern nation with significant experience with this kind of government, which was elaborated first in a comprehensive way by JeanJacques Rousseau in his work The Social Contract in 1762. For Rousseau (2004), the source of legitimate political authority was no longer the divine right of monarchs but the rights of every single human being, who enters a contract with his fellow citizens in order to define rules of social interaction and government. Organizing principle of this political process is the development of a “volonté générale”, which is based on well-informed reasoning of citizens and representing the will of the people as a whole. In modern territorial states, however, it is impossible for citizens to get involved in all the decisions that have to be made because the political process is too complex and the amount of every day’s political work overwhelming. Instead they give legitimacy to political representatives by regular elections. The participation of citizens in elections then is the fundament on which modern democracies are built – a concept that has been developed over the centu-

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ries following the works of Hobbes (2010), Locke (2003), Montesquieu (1989) and others. From a normative perspective this process of legitimization of political action depends on some important preconditions: The citizen has to be well informed. He should know which political topics are relevant and he should be able to identify the standpoint of the different candidates and parties on these issues. He has to be able to evaluate the available arguments in the light of his own system of values, beliefs and interests and to build a reasoned opinion this way. He has to be able to choose and execute political actions – at least voting – in order to make his will effective in the political process. The ideal of the well-informed citizen goes back to Alfred Schütz (1964), who contrasts “experts” having distinct knowledge in limited fields with “men on the street” relying on just working knowledge, which may not be comprehensive or complete, but sufficient for managing their everyday life. The “well-informed citizen” finds himself between these both extremes: “To be well informed means to him to arrive at reasonably founded opinions in fields which as he knows are at least mediately of concern to him although not bearing upon his purpose at hand” (Schütz 1970: 240). This definition does not refer to mere quantitative demands of a minimum amount of knowledge (Hagen 1997) but can be understood as the necessity to know enough in order to form reasoned opinions on issues that may be of concern to a person. Nevertheless the concept has been discussed and challenged as it fails to meet the reality in most modern societies: studies regularly show that a relevant number (if not the majority) of citizens correspond more with the “man on the street” type than the “well-informed citizen” (Delli Carpini 2000; Schudson 2004) (see also the chapters by Kepplinger, by Jandura and Friedrich and by Holbert, Hill, and Lee). An open question remains also the desired extent of citizen participation in the democratic process. Different theories of democracy come to different conclusions about how and how much citizens should participate. Following the classic liberal paradigm, voting is the only legitimate form of participation; further political activities of citizens are neither necessary nor desirable, actually they might be an indicator of democratic crisis (Martinsen 2009; Schumpeter 1947). The pluralistic version of the liberal paradigm is also focused on the legitimization through elections but at least accepts the participation of interest groups in the democratic debate (Schmidt 2000). From the view of the deliberative paradigm according to Habermas the free and open reasoning of citizens is the heart of the democratic process. It demands that people shall engage in the discussion, because this is the guarantee of the best outcome (Habermas 1989). Finally, the participative paradigm postulates that only through a broad and intense participation of citizens a real democratic process can be realized. Participation here is a value on its own right (Schumpeter 1947) (see also the chapters by Kepplinger and by Jandura and Friedrich).

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Theories of democracy evaluate participation quite differently, but even from an empirical perspective it is not always clear if high rates of participation are a good indicator of a healthy democratic system. On one hand, in many countries low and declining levels of party membership or voting turnout usually cause concern about the situation of democracy (Flickinger and Studlar 1992). But high levels of engagement can also be an indicator of political crisis: under normal conditions, when feeling that there are no major problems, many people prefer not to get involved in politics, while they tend to engage in political (protest) activities when they feel affected by unwanted developments like economic downturn, rising levels of unemployment or international conflicts. So even a high turnout at the ballots could be regarded as an indicator of political crisis. Furthermore the participatory potential of some activities is quite limited, e.g., direct interaction of elected officials with their electorate: such activities can not work if too many people engaged in them too frequently, due to natural restrictions of time and other resources particularly on the side of the politicians. As mass media are the main source of information citizens need for political engagement it should become clear that media use and political participation are closely interrelated. Consequently we will argue in this chapter that political communication should be understood as a broad concept, including not only media use and political talk but also the different forms of political participation. Media use is the most important tool for gaining knowledge about political issues and becoming an informed citizen. Even citizens without much political interest or knowledge might get in contact with political media content without actively searching for such information (“inadvertent audience”). But media provide more than just facts about issues: they also present a more or less varied portfolio of opinions about relevant topics. However, exposure to political media content is not the only relevant factor in the process of opinion formation: research on political communication has shown that political talk of citizens is a major catalyst of the processing of media content (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1965; Schmitt-Beck 2003): people more interested in politics and therefore better informed can serve as “opinion leaders” due to their salient position in social networks. The digital revolution has reinforced the relevance of interpersonal communication as online media provide plenty of new options for social interaction (see also the chapter by Boomgarden). From a communication studies’ perspective, citizen participation can be regarded as part of political communication as well: Although participation in political science is defined as deliberate action aiming on influencing political decisions (see below), there can be no doubt that all these activities are specific forms of communication – including for example casting a vote, which communicates the will of the people to a representative body. When analysing political communication as defined here, several influencing variables and context factors have to be taken into account. The concept of political culture was developed in the context of comparative political communication

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Fig. 1: Model of individual political communication and participation.

research (Almond and Verba 1963) and points out that political communication is closely interrelated with political orientations and attitudes (Figure 1): A country’s political culture depends on macro-factors like the political system (e.g., voting/ party system) or structural characteristics of the media system (e.g., public/private ownership), and is also influenced on the micro-level by individual variables like education, income and others (see also the chapter by Pfetsch and Esser). Against this backdrop, the following sections will give an overview of how citizens in various countries across the globe (with different political cultures) make use of media to inform themselves about politics and how their media use relates to political talk and indicators of civic and political engagement. As comparative studies on political media use are rare and even the few existing multinational studies “lack any formal comparability of method or measurement” (Holtz-Bacha and Kaid 2011), we will mainly refer to data from the World Values Survey (WVS) that had been gathered between 2005 and 2007.

2 Media use, political talk and participation Knowing about the political process in general and political issues in particular is an important fundament for engaging in democratic politics, thus political scien-

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tists like Milbrath (1965) have regarded media use as a starting point or even as the first stage of political participation. Until early 20th century print media – especially newspapers – were the unrivaled major source of daily news. Their leading role has been challenged by radio in the 1920s, then by television from about 1950 on and most recently by online media. Nevertheless daily newspapers, weeklies and magazines still remain an important source of political information for citizens. Radio as a source of political information has received comparably little attention by communication research. Except during a short period in its main phase of diffusion (Lazarsfeld 1940), other media like television and even print media were observed more thoroughly. The focus on other media however underestimates the possible impact of radio and radio news exposure even in western, industrialized countries (an example may be the presumed influence of talk radio in the US) and much more the role radio plays in many developing countries because of its ubiquity and technical robustness. Television has been the leading political medium throughout the last decades. As it transmits information over both the audio and visual channel, it allows a much closer experience of events than just reading a newspaper or hearing a radio report – especially in the case of live coverage. This richness of communication modes is one of the reasons for the extensive research on the political effects of television (Shrum 1999). Online media have entered the scene only a few decades ago but already have developed into one of the major sources of political information particularly for younger parts of the population. With the Internet, the characteristics of most of the previously developed media converge into new, hybrid forms. Written text, audio files, pictures, and live videos can be perceived, edited and distributed by every citizen, making the Internet not only a source for almost every kind of information but also a place for opinion expression and interpersonal communication (see below). Early research on political communication highlighted the significance of political talk about political issues: Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet (1944) discovered that the expected effects of campaign coverage by media were strongly mediated by interpersonal communication about political media content. This resulted in the development of the Two-Step-Flow of Communication-model, stating that opinion formation is a social process and not a simple, media-induced stimulusresponse-mechanism. In this process, people with high levels of media use and high reputation within a social network serve as “opinion leaders”, who transmit information and interpretations to their social surrounding. Dependent on their credibility they may have significantly more influence on opinion building of their fellows than persuasive messages from mass media. Recent studies in this area show that this is true even under the conditions of our much more developed media system of the early 21st century (Muhlberger 2003; Richey 2008) (see also the chapter by Boomgarden).

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Political action of individuals in an (instrumental) sense of participating in the political process includes all activities that aim on influencing political decisions (Kaase and Marsh 1979; Verba, Nie, and Kim 1978: 46). As discussed above, from a communication science perspective these activities can be seen as part of an integrative concept of political communication. Starting from the 1960s, empirical research on participation – both domestic and comparative – explored this field and described its forms and intensity (Almond and Verba 1963; Asher, Richardson, and Weisberg 1984; Barnes and Kaase 1979; Bashkirova 2002; Bennett 2000; Norris 2000). From a theoretical point of view voting is the most important activity among them and therefore probably also the most frequently and intensively researched variable in the field. However, participation rates differ to some extent and declining participation is a matter of concern in several “experienced” democracies. In the United States, participation in national elections lies just slightly above 50 percent, but also in Germany, where participation still is much higher voter turnout frequently is an issue of public debate. During the 1960s and 1970s, when the “participatory revolution” (Barnes and Kaase 1979; Kaase 1984) brought on new forms of political action, the focus of research changed and a wide range of participatory activities by citizens came to the fore. To better understand the peculiarities of these new forms of participation several authors started to develop categories of political action (Barnes and Kaase 1979; Parry, Moyser, and Day 1992; Verba and Nie 1972). Based on their theoretical work and empirical findings, participation can be differentiated along several dimensions (which are mostly not independent from each other): A frequently applied approach is the distinction between political vs. civic participation (Delli Carpini 2004): In this differentiation political participation includes all election related activities (e.g., voting, campaigning) and direct contact with office holders or government officials, while civic participation describes activities dealing with the management of specific public issues (e.g., volunteering in local action groups). The probably most frequently applied distinction is the dichotomy of conventional vs. unconventional or protest participation (Barnes and Kaase 1979): This distinction originates from the observation of the political movements of the 1960s and 1970s in Europe and the US that called for social change, peace, environmental protection etc. They used new and therefore called “unconventional” forms of political participation, like manifestations, sit-ins, demonstrations (see also the chapter by Hertog and Zuercher). These unconventional forms of participation can further be differentiated in legal vs. illegal political action (Westle 1992): unconventional but legal protest activities on one side are contrasted by illegal and violent actions on the other.1 1 Other differentiations like the distinction between continuous vs. sporadic participation or issueunspecific and issue-centered participation (Verba and Nie 1972; Westle 1992) became more and more salient, especially because of the ongoing process of political dealignment (Dalton 1984). Beside these qualitative differentiations the amount of political participation structures the field: Starting with “apathetics” who are not involved in politics at all, over large groups of “spectators”

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Obviously, political participation is a multifaceted phenomenon that cannot be captured by a few isolated indicators. To assess the whole picture it is necessary to relate participation indicators on the individual level with the attitudes people hold towards politics (Almond and Verba 1963). If high levels of participation coincide with a positive evaluation of political processes and institutions, then participation is an indicator of support, otherwise it would be an indicator of political discontent. And as distribution and intensity of political communication and participation vary over time as well as between countries and political cultures, for a fully comprehensive picture of political culture data and analyses that meet the following criteria are required: (1) A broad variety of indicators of political communication has to be taken into consideration, starting with the use of different media, including interpersonal communication and ending with different forms of participation along the dimensions mentioned above. These indicators should not only be analyzed separately for the relations between them also carry relevant information. (2) A longitudinal perspective is required, including – if possible – time periods of political crisis and changes, to appraise the influence of these external factors on the political culture of a country. (3) Cross-national comparisons should be used to assess the impact of political systems and national political traditions on the current political culture. (4) Participation has to be correlated with political attitudes on the individual level to get a better understanding of what different political actions really mean to the people. (5) Finally, these correlations should be differentiated for subgroups of the population, for example age groups/generations or socioeconomic status groups, because aggregate data tend to suppress gaps and cleavages within a society that may be of importance for the understanding of current social or political problems.

2.1 Political communication worldwide Although there is extensive research on media use particularly for commercial purposes, comparative information on political media use in different countries is scarce. Besides the classic publications on political participation, which include some media use indicators (Almond and Verba 1963), most studies provide data limited to single countries or to a narrow selection of indicators (e.g., Tenscher 2009, who conducted a secondary analysis of Eurobarometer data, which do not include indicators of interpersonal political communication and participation). Therefore we present data from the World Value Survey (www.worldvaluesurvey. org), which provides at least basic data about the sources of political information for 57 countries from all continents. From those 57 we selected 15 (Table 1) ensuring doing little more than watching, to those more involved and therefore being called “gladiators” (Milbrath 1965; Milbrath and Goel 1977).

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Tab. 1: Political media use and political talk (in % of population). Daily Newspaper

Print Magazines

TV/Radio News

In-depth reports on TV/Radio

Internet/ E-Mail

Political Talk

Africa – Egypt – Ethiopia – South Africa

27 53 49

7 35 26

80 79 77

55 52 50

10 18 10

71 73 68

America – Argentina – Brazil – Mexico – USA

44 36 48 64

21 28 27 44

91 86 89 87

52 87 71 62

19 25 22 67

59 86 66 82

Asia – China – India – Indonesia – Japan

23 52 53 90

17 22 33 36

75 61 91 98

55 35 68 94

11 9 21 46

44 61 86 69

Europe – Germany – Italy – Romania

83 71 51

50 51 32

97 96 94

68 85 75

46 40 15

88 87 60

Oceania – Australia

85

57

98

82

50

89

Source: World Values Survey (own calculation); data collection between 2005 and 2007. Note: Values indicate that the media were “used last week” to “learn what is going on in their country and the world”.

(a) a maximum of variance in terms of level of development and communication freedom (based on United Nations’ Human Development Index (HDI) and the press freedom index (PFI) of Reporters Without Borders), (b) a fair distribution over all five continents, and (c) the inclusion of countries with a larger number of inhabitants. The news provided by traditional electronic media – TV and radio – can be regarded as the backbone of basic political information in most parts of the world. Even in India, where the lowest rates are observed, more than 60 percent of the population get basic political information through broadcast media. Also in-depth information by television and radio is highly relevant in almost all 15 countries. However the mixing of exposure to TV and radio in one survey question may hide a higher relevance of radio in underdeveloped countries. The levels of print media use are considerable lower. Only a minority in most of the countries reads print magazines. Almost the same picture appears concerning the daily newspapers: Particularly in China, the Latin American and the Afri-

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can countries the figures are quite low. While online media have reached the same share than most other media for political information in the United States, in most other countries its relevance is significantly lower than print and TV/radio – at least by the time the surveys were conducted. As can be seen in Table 4 below especially the use of the Internet for political communication is highly correlated with the state of a country’s economic and social development. These data, however, are aggregates of the whole population and research on political communication and participation has highlighted the role of social and demographic variables (Barnes and Kaase 1979) indicating differences between subgroups in societies: According to the data from the WVS, in the United States and Australia upper middle class people (according to self-evaluation of the respondents) are about 30 percent more likely to be newspaper readers than lower class people, while in countries with wider social gaps like South Africa or China the share of newspaper readers in higher status groups is more than two or even three times (China) higher than in the lowest class. Following the idea of media use and search for political information as a precondition for further participatory activities, western societies obviously provide better starting conditions for their citizens. In most societies around the world, political talk is common routine. The World Values Survey reports an average of 75 percent of citizens who “talked with friends or colleagues” last week about “what is going on in the(ir) country and in the world” (Table 1). National differences are moderate with the share of talkers mainly varying between 70 and 80 percent. Only China did not cross the 50 percent threshold. Regarding intra-national differences, social gaps are not that big either: In Germany, for example, 90 percent of citizens of all social classes say they are engaged in political talk with friends and colleagues. Even in countries with significantly lower rates like China or in developing countries with large parts of the population without adequate school education the differences between social groups scarcely exceed 20 percentage points. These limited differences highlight the importance of interpersonal communication in the political communication process compared to mass media, where the influence of socio-economic variables on frequency of use is much stronger. Political participation comprises a very wide area of citizen activities, and the WVS provides a broad (though not a very deep) overview over some relevant variables around the world. Four activities beyond voting are displayed in Table 2: Signing petitions is a quite formal way of participation and obviously a tradition of the more developed countries. 50 percent or even more of their citizens have experience with this kind of action, while it plays a marginal role in transforming or developing countries from Africa or Asia. The participation rates at demonstrations are considerably lower in most of the countries under investigation. Only in some western European countries (Italy and Germany) this protest activity mobi-

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Tab. 2: Political participation activities (in % of population). Party membership

Signing petitions

Peaceful demonstration

Joining in boycotts

active

passive

done

would do

done

would do

done

would do

2 7 6

2 28 19

7 12 21

15 35 44

2 13 26

7 35 44

1 10 11

8 25 41

America – Argentina – Brazil – Mexico – USA

3 5 10 16

7 5 10 32

28 56 21 70

39 27 40 24

18 18 16 15

40 40 43 55

3 8 3 20

15 26 15 53

Asia – China – India – Indonesia – Japan

6 18 5 2

7 49 12 5

6 29 6 60

45 26 26 28

n.a. 19 14 10

n.a. 27 34 32

3 15 3 7

43 29 20 52

Europe – Germany – Italy – Romania

2 3 3

3 7 1

50 54 6

30 32 28

31 36 6

39 33 29

9 20 1

40 50 14

Oceania – Australia

2

8

79

16

20

47

15

49

Africa – Egypt – South Africa – Ethiopia

Source: World Values Survey (own calculation); data collection between 2005 and 2007; n.a.: not asked.

lizes more than 30 percent of the citizens, in most of the other countries the participation rate is significantly lower. Other than petitions and demonstrations, joining boycotts is a kind of activity that usually uses the power of citizens as subjects in the economic system to reach political goals. It is not as common as other activities and national differences are smaller, with the United States and Italy as leaders in this field. But also in some transformatory societies like India or South Africa 10 percent or more have participated in boycotts. Activities like joining a boycott, signing a petition or participating in a demonstration depend largely on occasions for participating, making current relevant issues a precondition for citizen action. Thus, factual participation is certainly an important aspect for the assessment of the political culture of a country, but not the only one. To detect the potential relevance of participation in a society also the readiness of people to participate in the different activities has to be assessed (Barnes and Kaase 1979). These indicators reveal that joining demonstrations is a

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widely accepted way of political action (Table 2). Even in most of the countries with low participation rates there is a high readiness to take to the streets for a political concern. The same picture emerges in the case of signing petitions, while the situation is different regarding participation in a boycott. There are some countries with generally low participation rates but a quite high potential participation like Germany, Japan or China, and there are other countries like Romania, Egypt, Indonesia or the Latin American countries where not only factual participation is low but also the readiness to join. A completely different picture emerges when party membership is regarded. In most of the countries less than eight percent of the population characterize themselves as active party members. This is also true for passive membership that exceeds the limit of 10 percent only in a few countries. But there are some remarkable exceptions: In the USA, Mexico and India elevated percentages of active and passive members are reported and in Indonesia, South Africa and Ethiopia at least the amount of passive members is astonishingly high.

2.2 Typologies of political communication and participation The complexity of the field of political communication is probably one reason for the application of a typology approach to the analysis of participation in many empirical studies. Typologies are a method to reduce complexity in a multidimensional field of variables that highlights characteristics that are separating distinctive groups, each having a homogeneous internal structure. There is a huge number of typologies in the research literature, which cannot be discussed here in detail, but some examples will give an impression of the potential that typologies provide for the understanding of political participation. Methodologically, typologies can be constructed by use of both qualitative and quantitative measures. Ideally, qualitative approaches lead to the development of theories and to the discovery and selection of relevant dimensions and variables. Based on such a process quantitative data can be gathered and analyzed by cross tabulation or cluster analysis in order to identify separable groups within a sample. An early example is the above mentioned theory-based concept of “Apathetics”, “Spectators” and “Gladiators” by Milbrath (1965). More complex is the typology of Parry, Moyser, and Day (1992), who identified seven types of citizens based on their political activity in Great Britain: They distinguished “Just Voters“, “Almost Inactives”, “Collective Activists”, “Contacting Activists”, “Direct Activists”, “Party Campaign Activists” and “Complete Activists”. Two larger groups with low levels of participation complement several smaller groups showing activity profiles with different core areas. This pattern is repeated in various studies: all the tables presented above show that – besides voting and using political news – all participation activities are executed just by minorities. Typologies add the finding that activities are not ran-

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Source: Emmer and Füting 2007; Füting 2011. Note: Percentages represents the share of citizens belonging to one type of political communicators. Fig. 2: A political communication typology: The case of Germany.

domly distributed, with some people engaging in one activity, others in another, but that there are specific patterns that can be identified for example by means of cluster analyses. One of the most stable patterns is the “apathetic-inactive” one: For people belonging to this group participation is not a common and everyday activity, but something that happens just occasionally. One important reason for the great number of existing typologies is the fact that the construction of types usually is restricted to a particular set of data, and researchers take different decisions about the inclusion of variables. One example of a typology that includes not only all forms of political communication discussed above but also several options of online participation is a typology from a longitudinal study on political communication in Germany (Emmer and Füting 2007; Füting 2011). Beyond the majority type of the “Passive Mainstreamer” with just basic political information use and no regular political participation, there are four more active types with a specific communication profile: the “Lobbyist”, the “Traditionally Engaged”, the “Organized Extrovert” and the “Lazy Modernist”. While the first three types represent classic patterns of political communication (Figure 2), the latter type is a quite new phenomenon. He is a type characterized by low rates of traditional and out-on-the-street activity (like voting, demonstrations, and political meetings) but significantly high levels of all kinds of online action: expressing one’s opinion online, search for political information online or signing petitions online. This new and online-based type is of relevant size (about 16 % of the German population) and shows some interesting characteristics regard-

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ing socio-demographics and political attitudes: members of this type are on average much younger than those of all the other groups and show the strongest postmodernist orientations.

2.3 Relationships of media use, interpersonal communication and participation As argued above, media use, interpersonal communication and participation are connected to each other in multiple ways. The overall picture known from studies

Tab. 3: Correlations of political media use with political talk and different forms of participation. Interpersonal Communication

Party Membership

Unconventional Participation

Print Media use

Broadcast use

Internet use

Print Media use

Broadcast use

Internet use

Print Media use

Broadcast use

Africa – Egypt – South Africa – Ethiopia

.15 .28 .30

.27 .33 .11

.17 .19 .10

.16 .10 (.06)

.10 .19 (–.01)

America – Argentina – Brazil – Mexico – USA

.27 .17 .24 .29

.23 .10 .21 .26

.22 .13 .25 .32

.12 (.04) (.05) .17

Asia – China – India – Indonesia – Japan

.36 .28 .10 .23

.33 .36 .16 .08

.28 .16 .07 .22

Europa – Germany – Italy – Romania

.08 .15 .29

.15 .11 .19

Oceania – Australia

.20

.10

Internet use

.08 .08 .12

.19 .17 .08

.13 .18 (.01)

.19 .09 (.04)

.08 (.04) .08 .15

(.05) (.03) (–.01) .09

.13 .20 .14 .21

(.04) .18 .10 .16

.22 .28 .17 .15

.25 .23 .11 (.01)

.12 .19 (.05) (–.01)

.17 .14 .12 (–.08)

.22 .30 .19 .13

.19 .29 .11 .08

.19 .10 .19 (–.03)

.18 .20 .24

.07 (.06) .08

.09 (.07) (.02)

(.02) .11 (.06)

.11 .16 .11

.15 (.06) .14

.19 .31 .14

.21

(.06)

(.02)

(.00)

.11

.13

.18

Source: World Values Survey (own calculation); data collection between 2005 and 2007. Unconventional participation: Index built from the variables “signing petition”, “peaceful demonstration” and “joining in boycotts”. Print use: Index built from the variables “Daily Newspaper” and “Print Magazines”. Broadcast use: Index built from the variables “TV/Radio News” and “In-depth reports on TV/Radio”. Note: Correlation coefficients in brackets are not significant at the level of p < .01.

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in western societies – showing that indicators of media use, interpersonal communication and participation are positively related (Emmer, Wolling, and Vowe 2012) – can be replicated with the data from the transforming and developing countries (Table 3). Nevertheless the strength of the correlations varies somewhat between countries. But more important than the variation in the data is the fact that all significant correlations between these different activities are positive. This is to say that communication and participation activities are supporting each other, no matter whether people use print media, TV or the internet and no matter whether interpersonal communication, party-membership, or unconventional participation is observed, and no matter in which region of the world a country is located.

3 Putting political communication into context: Macro level and political culture Despite several methodological limitations2 the WVS-data give a rough impression of the general situation and differences between countries concerning individual Tab. 4: Correlations between press freedom, human development and political communication and culture. Press Freedom Index (PFI) 2006 (rank)

Human Development Index (HDI) 2011 (rank)

Interpersonal Communication Political talk

–.63*

.42

Political media use Daily Newspaper Print Magazines TV/Radio News In-depth reports on TV/Radio Internet /E-Mail

–.57* –.60* –.71** –.59* –.60*

.51 .63* .70* .63* .82**

Political participation Signing petition Joining in boycotts Peaceful demonstration Party membership

–.55* –.20 –.14 .62*

.74** .33 .19 –.42

Political Culture Trust in political institutions Support for democracy

.44 –.16

–.41 –.25

Source: WVS, PFI and HDI (own calculation). Note: * = p < .05, ** = p < .01.

2 The data are collected using a common questionnaire adjusted to some national specifics. Nevertheless caution is necessary when interpreting the data, because some findings put the comparabil-

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Individual political communication and participation

Tab. 5: Correlations between political activities and attitudes towards politics. Trust in Institutions

Importance of Democracy

Mean (Scale 1–4)

Mean (Scale 1–10)

Correlations Print Media use

Broadcast use

Internet use

Correlations Political Talk

PartyMembership

Unconventional Particip.

Africa – Egypt – Ethiopia – South Africa

n.a. 2.15 2.70

n.a. .11 –.17

n.a. .23 (–.02)

n.a. (.03) –.19

9.2 8.8 8.4

.06 .08 .10

(.04) .18 (.04)

.06 .11 .18

America – Argentina – Brazil – Mexico – USA

1.87 2.00 2.05 2.14

(.03) (–.02) .09 (.06)

(.06) (.06) .12 (.05)

(–.08) (–.05) (.05) (.05)

8.7 7.9 8.7 8.2

(.04) (.06) .12 .15

(.02) .09 (.03) .23

.11 .21 (.05) .29

Asia – China – India – Indonesia – Japan

3.26 2.58 2.38 2.05

–.06 .13 (–.06) (.04)

(.03) .19 (.03) (.05)

–.13 .08 –.06 –.11

8.2 7.6 9.2 8.0

(.01) .14 .07 (.04)

(–.01) .10 (.03) (.03)

(.02) .09 .06 .26

Europe – Germany – Italy – Romania

1.93 2.05 1.86

.11 (.06) (–.01)

(.00) (.05) (.02)

(.03) (.07) (.00)

8.5 8.8 8.5

.07 (.06) .15

(.06) (.03) .06

.20 .13 .15

Oceania – Australia

2.18

(.03)

(–.02)

(.05)

8.7

(.04)

(.04)

.18

Source: World Values Survey (own calculation); data collection between 2005 and 2007. Notes: n.a.: not asked; correlation coefficients in brackets are not significant at the level of p < .01. Trust in Institutions: Index built from three questions regarding “confidence in government”, “confidence in political parties” and “confidence in parliament”. Importance of Democracy: Index built from the two questions regarding the “importance of democratic governance” and the “quality of the democratic political system”.

political communication activities in the world. In order to interpret these findings in the light of political theory as discussed at the beginning, the data can be related either to macro-level variables or other attitudinal indicators of the political culture. ity of the data across countries into question. To give one example: The literacy rate in Ethiopia is below 40 % but 53 % of the respondents said that they read a newspaper last week. Such inconsistencies might be due to sampling distortions, which are a huge problem especially in rural areas of underdeveloped countries. These problems probably lead to an underestimation of the differences between developed and underdeveloped countries.

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Table 4 shows rank order correlations of the “Press Freedom Index” (PFI) from Reporters Without Borders and the United Nations’ “Human Development Index” (HDI) with indicators of political media use, interpersonal political communication, political participation and attitudinal indicators of political culture. The data indicate that a free media system and a high level of social development are positively associated with political media use. Interpersonal political communication is backed up by a free media system but is more or less independent from human development. Political participation activities show rather diverging patterns when connected to the macro-level indicators: Quite important is the fact that higher rates of party membership appear in countries with low levels of press freedom. Furthermore, there is no linear relation between the support for institutions and democracy by citizens and the state of press freedom and development. Table 5 demonstrates the connections between political communication and the attitudinal dimension of political culture. The relations between all kinds of media use and trust in political institutions are quite weak. Furthermore there are also some negative correlations indicating that high media use can even go along with low trust in political institutions. This can be observed especially for the Internet and for such different countries as Indonesia, Japan, China and South Africa. In the case of attitudes towards democracy in general the picture is somewhat clearer. We find low (frequently insignificant) but always positive correlations. The most remarkable detail is that in developed countries high rates of unconventional or protest participation correspond more strongly to a positive evaluation of democracy than in developing or transforming countries. In developed countries such protests obviously does not challenge the widely accepted democratic system as a whole, while in less developed countries this is somewhat ambiguous.

4 Recent developments and future perspectives The development of political participation is closely related to cultural and value change in western countries from the 1960s until early 21st century. The participatory revolution came along with the increasing importance of postmaterialist values. In other parts of the world – for example in the countries of the former soviet block or in emerging economies – processes of transformation have contributed to a development of new patterns of political communication and participation. Beside these differences it is another general finding that media use and political participation are positively related. Furthermore, macro-level factors like press freedom and social development support political communication. These findings underpin the importance of political communication for democracy. More recently, digitalization and the change of the media and communication environment appeared as causes for changes in the field of political communica-

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tion (see the chapters by Schulz and by Jandura and Friedrich). Recent examples for the power of this transformation may be the organization of protests in Iran in 2009 and the revolutionary processes during the “Arab Spring” in 2011. Digital media enable citizens not only to exercise many traditional forms of political participation now also in the digital sphere, but they furthermore allow for new kinds of political action. Examples are running one’s own website for the presentation of political opinions, digital campaigning on facebook or aggressive forms like “denial of service attacks” on webservers. But even in the United States, during the national election campaign of 2010 just 17 percent of American citizens shared election related media content and only 4 percent donated money for a candidate. Solely the use of campaign news online (58 %) was a majority activity (Smith 2011). These data show that, besides information use, political online participation still occupies only a niche. However, more detailed analyses – particularly with a focus on age groups – show that many of these online activities are most popular among the youngest segment of society; together with the on-going evolution and diffusion of online media, cohort effects are very likely to make the Internet a more relevant place of political activity in the future. Data from a longitudinal and comprehensive study of political online communication in Germany (Emmer, Vowe, and Wolling 2011) show, for example, that political social media activities almost doubled from 15 to about 28 percent of the 16–29 year old population, while among the over 60 year olds only 2 percent used Facebook, Twitter and other social network sites (SNS) for political communication. Not every kind of online activity develops rapidly like the use of SNS and moreover this growth does not mean that traditional forms of communication and participation will be substituted completely by the Internet. Nevertheless this development points towards a problem that will be relevant throughout many countries for the future: the Digital Divide (Brundidge and Rice 2010; White and Le Cornu 2011) – not so much in terms of online access but in terms of use of the multitude of options of the Internet for political activities: On one hand international or even worldwide operating social movements like “Occupy Wall Street” cannot be thought without the communication power of social online networks. The availability of these options is a direct way in which new media may change participation, but there are also indirect ways: the capacity for social interaction may strengthen ties between citizens and increase social capital, which is regarded an important factor in motivating people to participate in politics (Uslaner 2004; Zhang 2006). On the other hand, factors increasing participation may lead to widening gaps between activist groups and other segments of society that are left behind. As discussed above, social status and age are variables that distinguish groups with different levels of adoption of new forms of participation and communication. Thus, these processes of change may also raise new questions about how to assure that all parts of a society have the chance to be integrated in the political process. Furthermore some of the old questions remain

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virulent: Political participation of citizens is to some extent necessary to keep a democratic system running, but some kinds of participation can also be a threat for the efficiency of the political process. Protests against big infrastructure projects – the so called NIMBY activism – are a current example for that. This points to the fact that political participation is led by political interests and not every particular goal is also in the interest of the society as a whole – which brings us back to a basic questions of democratic theory: How much and what kind of participation is needed and desirable for a healthy democratic system? This question still has not been answered by political communication research.

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Hajo G. Boomgaarden

24 Interpersonal and mass mediated political communication Abstract: This chapter discusses the state of the art in research on the interplay between mass mediated and interpersonal political communication. After giving basic definitions, direct and mediated effects of political talk on various outcomes (e.g., knowledge, attitudes, participation) are discussed on the basis of several key models (e.g., mediation model, O-S-R-O-R model). Generally, it is argued that the Internet has renewed scholarly interest in the issue but that most studies still investigate interpersonal or mass communication separately, largely neglecting the other mode of communication. Only recently researchers have begun to more explicitly address the interplay between interpersonal and mass mediated political communication. Therefore, the chapter calls for a more thorough theoretical and empirical integration of interpersonal and mass communication perspectives in political communication research. Key Words: interpersonal communication, political talk, two-step-flow, opinion leaders, communication networks

1 Introduction Interpersonal communication has long been acknowledged as a central element in political communication processes. A crucial conceptual question triggered by studies of interpersonal communication is whether citizens should be conceived of and studied as autonomously acting individuals, or whether, by contrast, their ecological embeddedness in interpersonal discussion networks is relevant when investigating political cognitions, attitudes or behaviours. The study of interpersonal political communication puts an emphasis on the latter and stresses that investigations of information effects in politics should not ignore citizens’ interpersonal interactions. Despite the fact that interpersonal communication research in general has developed a distinct set of assumptions and approaches (see for instance Capella 1987 or Berger 2008 for overviews), it appears that in political communication, interpersonal communication is often understood and studied as a functional equivalent or alternative to mass media information provision (e.g., Shaw 1977). Also Mutz (1992) emphasizes interpersonal communication as one of the three main information sources for citizens, alongside personal experience and mass mediated communication. This perspective, accentuating the independence of mass media and interpersonal communication as information transmitters, has been coined the competition thesis (Schmitt-Beck 2000: 69). There are, however,

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good reasons to believe that the processes through which information affects citizens’ may well differ for different sources of information. More recent research in the area of interpersonal political communication takes into account such differences, but also the potential of cumulative and/or interactive consequences of different information sources as discussed below (see for overviews for instance Lenart 1994; Reardon and Rogers 1988) – a more complex perspective coined the interaction thesis (Schmitt-Beck 2000: 70). Studies of interpersonal political communication (IPPC) have, sometimes explicitly discussed, sometimes implicitly suggested, clear normative assumptions. Talking to others about politics is seen as an essential facet of democracy. “The public sphere comes into being in every conversation in which private individuals assemble to form a public body” (Habermas 1974: 79). In fact, deliberative democracy is defined as a discursive system in which citizens freely discuss public affairs, form opinions and participate in politics (e.g., Barber 1984; Fishkin 1991; Habermas 1984; Page 1996) and consequently political conversation and discussion lies at core of democracy itself (Kim, Wyatt, and Katz 1999; for an opposing view see Schudson 1997) (see also the chapter by Jandura and Fredrich and by Wolling and Emmer). It is this centrality of interpersonal conversation for the quality of democratic life that is reflected in much of the empirical research on the nature, the antecedents and the consequences of political talk. This is also evident in the choice of dependent variables, with political knowledge and participation at the focus of much recent research (see below). Whereas thus IPPC plays an important role for democratic life, similar assertions are frequently made about the mass media (e.g., Page 1996). This normative rivalry of both IPPC and mass mediated political communication (MMPC) again calls for a more integrated theoretical and empirical approach in current political communication research. Graber defines political communication as dealing with the “construction, sending, receiving, and processing of messages that potentially have a significant direct or indirect impact on politics” (2005: 479), such impact characterised by message effects on the thinking, beliefs and behaviours of individuals and groups (among others). It is this delineation of the field (see also Perloff 1998) that guides the demarcation of the contents of this chapter. It provides an overview of research on interpersonal communication as related to mass communication in political communication, focussing on the consequences of the interplay of both on citizen’s political cognitions, attitudes and behaviours. Hence, the review is less concerned with the actual contents of IPPC (or of MMPC) but rather with the process of how it impacts on citizens. Acknowledgements of the relevance of IPPC in political communication are far from novel. Paul Lazarsfeld and his colleagues (e.g., Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet 1944) drew attention to the importance of interpersonal communication in studying campaign effects (e.g., Katz 1957; Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955). Despite this

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Fig. 1: The interplay between interpersonal political communication (IPPC) and mass mediated political communication (MMPC) affecting outcome variables.

early recognition in political communication research a systematic and comprehensive understanding of the role of interpersonal vis-à-vis mass mediated political communication and a theoretical integration of the consequences of both types of information is still in development (e.g., Cho et al. 2009; Schmitt-Beck 2000). Too often the two domains are (still) investigated in distinct studies and models. In this vein Katz (1987) observed that scholars’ belief in mass media effects would be inversely related to a belief in social, interpersonal influences. The rise of the Internet and alternative digital political communication tools has sparked renewed interest in interpersonal communication, both theoretically (Mutz and Young 2011) and methodologically (Hopmann 2012). Such developments challenge the conceptualizations of both interpersonal communication and mass media, furthering the need for an integration of mass and interpersonal communication. Figure 1 provides a conceptual model outlining the different ways in which IPPC and MMPC are theoretically and/or empirically related in the literature, thereby also providing an overview of the remainder of this chapter. As argued above, the focus is on effects of IPPC and MMPC on citizens’ political cognition, attitudes and behaviour. Much of the literature deals with mediation models in which either the influence of IPPC on outcome variables such as political knowledge or participation is mediated via MMPC, or vice versa. These two theoretical

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routes are denoted by the dashed arrows in Figure 1 and they are discussed in sections four and five below. Another approach to investigating the interplay between IPPC and MMPC relies on moderation models, where, for instance, characteristics of discussion networks may enhance or limit mass media effects. These interaction perspectives (denoted by the combined arrow in the centre of the model) are elaborated in section six. Before, however, discussing these approaches that deal with the interplay of both IPPC and MMPC, the following sections elaborate on the main object of this chapter and further conceptualize the nature of interpersonal political communication, its qualitative aspects such as the homogeneity of networks and opinions, its measurement (all in section two) and finally will also relate some information about relevant direct effects of IPPC as such (section three below).

2 Talking and listening: The concept of interpersonal political communication Definitions of interpersonal communication in general are manifold (e.g., Berger 2005) but in political communication they usually centre on two aspects. The first is that interpersonal communication at its core takes place between two (interpersonal communication dyad) or a few people (interpersonal communication group/ network) that share a rather direct living environment. The second characteristic is that interpersonal communication is direct and face-to-face (see for instance Rogers 1973: 290–291), thus free from and uninterrupted by technical or contentrelated mediators. Interpersonal political communication includes talk, conversation, discussion or debate about politically broadly relevant contents between two or a few people that are in direct contact with each other. Mutuality in IPPC is less consensually debated, with some, in particular those taking a deliberative perspective, insisting on meaningful IPPC having to include an exchange of facts or interpretations, while others maintain that IPPC could be uni-directional (see also the chapter by Jandura and Friedrich). Generally IPPC also includes nonverbal and relationship-focussed interactions, however, the vast majority of political communication research conceptualizes IPPC as verbal communication. A broad inclusive definition of IPPC involves any kind of political information provision or exchange between a limited number of individuals in an unmediated manner. This allows for a clear demarcation with MMPC, which is centralized around one, usually institutionalized, sender, speaking to many receivers; it is by definition mediated, thus filtered through some sort of again mostly institutionalized, mediator; and it is one-way and does not allow for mutual exchanges of political information. The Internet and related online communication tools, however, contest this traditional demarcation (Mutz and Young 2011). Although communication through

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online media probably should be characterized as mediated and therefore noninterpersonal, it does nevertheless share defining features of interpersonal communication. Where does one-to-few communication stop and one-to-many begin? Does a political blog read by 30 people allowing posting commentary not share more resemblance with IPPC? And what about a blog that is read by 30.000 people every week? Is twittering by definition interpersonal communication, since it allows for immediate feedback confined to a limited number of followers? Is discussing politics in a café different from discussing politics in an online chat room? These questions not only bear definitional relevance, more importantly they reflect on how and where theoretically to place these more recent forms of communication that seem to blur the lines between interpersonal and mass mediated communication.

2.1 Interpersonal communication networks Interpersonal political communication cannot be an individual activity. Citizens usually have more than one person with which they, at least occasionally, discuss politically relevant information. These exchanges characterise interpersonal communication networks. Such networks may serve the function to review and elaborate one’s understanding of political issues (Sotirovic and McLeod 2001) and are described as vital components of political life (Wyatt, Katz, and Kim 2000). Early studies of IPPC have described what were called primary networks in which people seek communication partners in their immediate surroundings, with the consequence that primary networks are very homogenous in terms of political opinions (but see Morey, Eveland, and Hutchens 2012). An important leap has been from the traditional conceptualization of discussion networks as homogenous, primary networks in the Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955) sense to a recognition of the oftentimes diverse and rather heterogeneous sub-networks postulated among others in the work of Huckfeldt (e.g., Huckfeldt and Sprague 1995; Huckfeldt et al. 1995). A citizen’s interpersonal political communication network consists of all those people that he or she directly engages with politically. Such engagement ranges from talking to others about even remotely relevant political information to listening to others when talking politics. Discussion networks usually include family, friends, colleagues, neighbours, co-members of social communities (e.g., sports clubs), etc. Accordingly, an individual’s network can be divided into several subnetworks, some closer and some further removed from the person’s daily life world. The places where political discussion takes place (e.g., church, work) matter and can have different and very real consequences (e.g., Scheufele et al. 2006). More than the place where political discussion takes place, the quality of the discussions and discussion networks matters. Some differentiate between political talk, narrow discussions of politics, and sociable conversation, that is everyday exchanges of citizens (Schudson 1997; Scheufele 2000). A prominent stream of

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literature on interpersonal discussion about politics emphasizes the importance of the distribution of opinions in individuals’ networks. If all members of a network share the same or rather similar opinions on for instance a political party or a political issue, then the network is characterized by strong homogeneity. If, by contrast, the opinions of network members are very diverse, the network is described as heterogeneous. Others refer to cross-cutting pressures (e.g., Mutz 2002) or network ambivalence (Nir 2005) and recent research distinguishes between political (dis)similarities of discussion partners and the utterance of diverse opinions within the network (Morey, Eveland, and Hutchens 2012) (see also section 3 below).

2.2 Measuring interpersonal political communication The measurement of interpersonal discussion and IP networks is challenging and arguably at the root of the limited amount of studies integrating IPPC in political communication research. At a very basic level the frequency of IPPC is measured in surveys by asking questions such as “How often do you discuss politics with family, friends or colleagues?” (e.g., de Vreese and Boomgaarden 2006) (see also the chapter by Wolling and Emmer). Such an approach may be satisfactory for certain questions, but certainly leaves little room for theoretical advancements of IPPC (McLeod, Kosicki, and Pan 1991) and does not respond to the importance of networks as described above. In order to assess the nature of discussion networks, surveys ask a respondent whether he or she, when discussing politics, would frequently encounter opinions that are rather close to his or her own opinion, or whether these are rather distant. Also respondents are probed for the places at which they tend to discuss politics and reveal some features of discussion partners. Such reliance on self-reported measures, while having yielded an impressive body of literature, is far from ideal. Most advanced techniques turn to surveying the actual discussion networks of individual respondents. Here, typically a respondent is asked to identify one or several discussants, and these discussants are then also approached as survey respondents (e.g., Beck et al. 2002; Ikeda and Huckfeldt 2001; Roessler 1999). The identification of discussion partners can be general but usually concerns a specific field of politics. This method, ideally in combination with multiple waves of data collection (Lazer et al. 2010) is a promising route for advancements of our understanding of the consequences of discussion networks and the internet may facilitate the application of this approach (Hopmann 2012). Finally, if online social networks are conceptualized similarly to offline networks, the availability and accessibility of data is increased, making the measurement of discussion networks and the contents of discussions potentially easier and more reliable in the future.

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3 Direct effects of interpersonal political communication While the focus of this chapter is on an integrative perspective on interpersonal vis-à-vis mass mediated political communication, it cannot ignore the multitude of studies on the consequences of political discussion unrelated to the use and contents of mass media. These studies either largely disregard concurrent influences of the mass media or position the media alongside interpersonal influences in line with the competition thesis (Schmitt-Beck 2000). In sum extant studies suggest that IPPC matters. In line with the normative assumptions reviewed above, interpersonal discussion is usually related to outcome variables that are relevant for the quality of democracy, such as political knowledge, types of political engagement or participation, or the quality of voting. Fewer studies relate IPPC to actual changes in attitudes or to vote choice. A strong hypothesis in research on the consequences of IPPC is that discussing politics is (causally) related to citizens’ participation in politics. Pattie, Seyd, and Whiteley (2004) distinguish three forms of political engagement: individual acts of participation such as voting or signing a petition, contact participation such as writing letters to editors, and collective participation when taking part in protest groups. Much of the existing research, however, relates to electoral participation. In particular it is argued that deliberation through conversation in which there is disagreement, thus exposure to conflicting points of view, would mobilize citizens to represent their different opinions through participating in politics (Dahl 1989). At the same time, people tend to dislike and therefore avoid conflict, also through silence (Festinger 1957), which should lead to lower likelihoods of participation. In fact there is empirical evidence for both perspectives (see also Pattie and Johnston 2009 for a comprehensive review). Some indeed find that disagreement in conversation fosters a range or different forms of political participation (e.g., Leighley 1990; Pattie and Johnston 2009). Others by contrast show that network heterogeneity depresses participation (e.g., Mutz 2002; Kwak et al. 2005; Huckfeldt, Morehouse Mendez, and Osborn 2004). The overall results are qualified, for instance, by whether a citizen holds the majority or minority opinion, with those holding minority views being less likely to participate when exposed to cross-cutting opinions (McClurg 2006). Also the positive impact of network heterogeneity appears to be stronger the more frequently and attentively people discuss politics (Kwak et al. 2005). Furthermore, whereas Eveland and Hively (2009) report lower probabilities of turnout due to disagreement in communication networks, they do find that agreement in political discussions actually makes people more likely to vote. Finally, some recent studies find no evidence of direct positive or negative effects of network ambivalence/political disagreement on participation or turnout (Hopmann 2011; Nir 2005). A striking observation is that these conflicting results come from studies that do not consider

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a simultaneous interplay with MMPC, and with the exception of Kwak et al. (2005) and Nir (2005) do not control for media use despite its acknowledged relevance (e.g., Delli-Carpini 2004) (see sections 4 and 5 below for more integrative approaches). Political knowledge is another important outcome variable, either directly measured or conceptualized in terms of the correctness of voting decisions (vote choice in line with underlying preferences). Here the sheer frequency of interpersonal discussion is a prominent variable, and studies usually do control for the effects of mass media. The evidence clearly suggests that the frequency of discussing politics increases knowledge about candidates and candidate positions, political issues, government figures, current affairs, parliament and elections (e.g., Bennett, Flickinger, and Rhine 2000; Kwak, Shah, and Holbert 2004; Eveland 2004; Eveland and Thompson 2006). These effects are accentuated by qualitative aspects of discussions, such as attention, heterogeneity, or elaboration (Kwak, Shah, and Holbert 2004; Eveland 2004; Eveland and Thompson 2006; but see Feldman and Price 2008). Similarly it was shown that talking about the news is related to news comprehension (Robinson and Levy 2001). Finally, although it appears that those who are exposed to opposing opinions in discussions tend to make up their minds who to vote for later than others (Nir 2005; Hopmann 2011), it is also suggested that the correctness of the vote is not strongly affected by encountering opposing points of view (Ahn, Huckfeldt, and Ryan 2010). A third set of studies discusses the consequences of IPPC for attitudes, opinions or vote choice. Whereas talking to likeminded people leads to more extreme attitudes (Binder et al. 2009), more heterogeneous discussion networks lead to a higher awareness of opposing points of view and to more political tolerance (Mutz 2002; see also Parsons 2010). Visser and Mirabile (2004) demonstrate that congruent, homogenous discussion networks led to stronger attitudes and less likelihood of attitude change. Similarly it appears that discussion networks show a tendency towards conformity through individuals adjusting their opinions towards those of their discussion partners (Lazer et al. 2010). Finally, the work of Beck and colleagues (Beck 2002; Beck et al. 2002) convincingly shows that actual vote choice for a political candidate is affected by the composition of discussion networks. Overall there is firm evidence for IPPC having considerable consequences for a range of politically relevant outcome variables. Different conceptualizations of discussion networks matter, arguably depending both on the research goal and on data availability. Still, such studies are confined by putting a focus on interpersonal communication and treating mass media as a mere control variable, if at all. The next sections extend to more complex models of how IPPC and MMPC may mediate or moderate each other’s effects.

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4 Interpersonal political communication as a mediator of mass media effects Among integrated notions of the effects of interpersonal and mass communication, theoretical assumptions and empirical evidence most prominently relate to what can be broadly understood as mediation of mass media effects via interpersonal communication on a range of outcome variables (the lower dotted arrows in Figure 1). Whereas the second step in this mediation process, the influence of IPPC on various dependent variables, has been discussed above, a host of studies explicitly link both steps of the mediation process. These, in very basic terms, postulate that mass media provide information that enters citizens’ political discussions, which in turn affect message processing and thereby cognitions, attitudes or behaviours (see Cho et al. 2009). Research attempts focussing solely on the first step of the mediation process, at least when it comes to political matters, are rare. It is, however, not surprising to say that political media contents do, at least from time to time, come up and play a prominent role in citizens’ discussions of politics. At least some base their discussion contribution on information obtained through the mass media (Chaffee 1986) and media contents thereby influence the contents of interpersonal communication (see also Atwood, Sohn, and Sohn 1978; Mondak 1995). Also the fact that people’s motivation to follow the media stems from an anticipation to talk about politics is discussed in the literature (Atkin 1972; Chaffee, McLeod, and Atkin 1971; Berelson 1949; see also McDonald 2008). In particular the field of news diffusion studies has paid attention to how interpersonal communication takes up and transmits breaking news stories. Already Larsen and Hill (1954) showed that – at least among the well-educated – interpersonal communication ranged second behind radio in terms of informing about the death of Senator Taft, but also in terms of how quickly people got to know about the event. A decade later it was television that got “early knowers” informed about the Kennedy assassination (Greenberg 1964), while the “late knowers” largely relied on information from others. It has been suggested that in particular those news stories that are personally relevant are most likely to be discussed with others (Basil and Brown 1994). News diffusion studies, however, are rare and usually respond to a tragic event only, such as the 9/11 terror attacks (e.g., Rogers 2003). The rise of online communication, particularly in social networks, is again likely to affect how people are made aware of and discuss news media contents (e.g., Mutz and Young 2011). This may change the dynamics in news diffusion, but also, as discussed below, may affect mediation models.

4.1 The two-step flow hypothesis The most prominent stream of research on mediation models falls under the headers of the Two-step Flow Hypothesis and the associated concept of opinion leader-

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ship (for short reviews see also Maurer 2008; Weimann 2008). It was in the tradition of assumptions about strong mass media effects that Lazarsfeld and colleagues conducted the classic studies of voting in the 1940 US presidential election (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet 1944). Media effects showed to be less persistent than expected. Mass media, rather than affecting audiences directly, were found to have an indirect, mediated effect. The two-step flow hypothesis of media effects in very basic terms argues that mass media contents influence the opinions of those who are well-informed, interested and involved. These so-called opinion leaders or influentials (Weimann 1991) then, through interpersonal discussions with peers, distribute information and opinions that partly stem from the mass media and thereby influence others, the followers, who may not have been exposed to the original media content (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955). Thus, most people are not primarily informed by the mass media, but by conversations with others. And some people are more important than others in the balance of the flow of political conversations – the opinion leaders that follow the mass media and like to inform and convince others. Opinion leaders and their interpersonal conversations with other people are thus the decisive link between mass media and the public at large (Katz 1957). This original idea, though frequently challenged throughout the past decades, has proven to be one of the most influential theories in political communication (Mutz and Young 2011). Others, however, have argued that there has been little progress on the two-step flow hypothesis in recent decades, arguable due to a lack of clear empirical support (see Bennett and Manheim 2006). Research was in fact quick to dismiss the general premise of a distinct twostep flow. Menzel and Katz (1955) suggest that opinion leaders not only rely on mass mediated information but also on other opinion leaders as sources of information, which is indicative of a multi-step rather than a two-step flow. The notion of a multi-step flow also suggests that opinion leadership depends on contexts and issues. Here, the multi-step flow hypothesis clearly moves in the direction of a network perspective. Huckfeldt’s, Morehouse Mendez’s, and Osborn’s (2004) agent based models essentially suggest similar processes in that it is the predispositions of network members to change opinion that could ultimately lead to individual opinion change. In particular agenda-setting studies have provided empirical evidence for the two- or multi-step flow, triggered by a disparity between aggregate- and individuallevel models (see also the chapter by Arendt and Matthes). Weimann and Brosius (1996), Yang and Stone (2003) or Vu and Gehrau (2010) all provide empirical evidence for agenda-setting effects first occurring for influentials or those relying strongly on mass media, who then pass on this information to the portion of the public not directly exposed to media contents (see also Roessler 1999). Moreover a range of agenda-setting studies similarly does acknowledge the potential importance of interpersonal discussions and in different ways juxtaposes IPPC influen-

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ces with those of the media, overall yielding rather mixed results (e.g., McLeod, Becker, and Byrnes 1974; Erbring, Goldenberg, and Miller 1980; Wanta and Wu 1992; see also Yang and Stone 2003: 59–60; Vu and Gehrau 2010: 102–103). Through consistently advancing measurement of the concept of opinion leadership, the literature provides some basic features characterising opinion leaders. Weimann (1994) lists opinion leaders as having higher levels of knowledge, interest, social recognition and more politically active than others, at the same time however acknowledging that generally “profiling of the opinion leaders is almost impossible” (85). Whereas early studies have measured opinion leadership by selfreflective measures (e.g., Katz 1957), Noelle-Neumann (1985) proposed a scale of personality strength to identify opinion leaders, later validated and refined (Weimann 1991; Weimann and Brosius 1994; Brosius and Weimann 1996). More recently, Shah and Scheufele (2006) have extended knowledge about the predictors and consequences of opinion leadership. In recent years, social networks and blogs have sparked renewed interest in the concept of opinion leadership (see also Mutz and Young 2011). Some of these deal with the identification of opinion leaders in online environments (e.g., Bross et al. 2012; Mathioudakis and Koudas 2009). Others show how information from traditional news media is passed on to others through online discussion fora (Himelboim, Gleave, and Smith 2009), via e-mail (Purcell et al. 2010) or via posts on social network sites, like Facebook and Twitter (Larsson and Moe 2011). It is to be expected that insights from these studies will renew scholarly interest in two- or multi-step flow models (see also Norris and Curtice 2007).

4.2 Other types of mediation models Assessments of IPPC as an intervening variable between media and the public outside the framework of the two-step flow hypothesis are rather rare. Bennett, Flickinger, and Rhine (2000) have – more or less implicitly – modelled IPPC as a mediator. In particular in the 1950s and 1960s reading the press and during the 1980s and 1990s using television and radio was positively related to talking about politics. And talking about politics, in turn, positively predicted political knowledge, at least in the 1990s. An extended model is presented by Scheufele (2000) who adds a distinction between political talk and sociable conversations. Hard news use is more strongly related to political talk than to conversations and hard news use – contrary to conversations – is a strong predictor of political knowledge and participation. Finally, Binder et al. (2009) distinguish between political discussions in homogenous versus heterogeneous networks and show how media use relates to both types of discussions, and furthermore how discussions in networks of like-minded people result in more extreme attitudes. This finding ties in nicely with a host of studies looking at how mass media bias affects opinion polarization (e.g., Stroud 2010).

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Finally, Shah and colleagues have explicitly placed IPPC in the process of what is called the Citizen Communication Mediation Model (Cho et al. 2009; Shah et al. 2005, Shah et al. 2007). Inspired by the initial communication mediation model (McLeod, Kosicki, and McLeod 1994) the O-S-R-O-R model (Cho et al. 2009: 73) argues that IPPC serves a reasoning (first R) function in that people reflect on and deliberate about mass media messages (S) before these trigger a response (second R). For instance, news use (both online and offline) was found to lead to more talk about politics, which in turn affected political knowledge and participation. This stream of literature presents a theoretically and empirically thorough integration of MMPC and IPPC.

5 Mass media as a mediator of interpersonal communication effects In line with the upper dotted arrow in Figure 1, IPPC can be understood and studied as an antecedent of media use, with media in turn affecting the audience. Such studies generally fall under the theme of selective exposure (see also the chapter by Knobloch-Westerwick). Some early evidence suggests interpersonal conversations to matter for selective exposure patterns (e.g., Friedson 1953). The role of IPPC in selective exposure however remains understudied (see McDonald 2008), with online political communication potentially renewing interest in the influence of social networks on media exposure (Mutz and Young 2011). Similarly, one could see IPPC having a notifying function, with conversations pointing to certain upcoming media events. Whereas this has not been at the centre of research, again the rise of discussion networks online may increase the relevance of studying this phenomenon. With online social networks or Twitter, it becomes very easy and popular to make partners in the network aware of a certain piece of information, be it text or film, by pasting a hyperlink (Mutz and Young 2011). Assuming this relationship from interpersonal discussion to media exposure, and taking for granted established media effects practically yields a perspective in which MMPC is considered a (partial) mediator of IPPC on relevant outcome variables. Very few studies, however, were identified that rely on such a conceptualization, again focussing on political knowledge and participation. Scheufele et al. (2004) distinguish between different types of political discussion and relate these to media use and knowledge and participation. Whereas political discussion in a volunteer organisation has a direct effect on political participation, the results show that the impact of work- or church-based discussion is mediated, also, and for knowledge primarily, through hard news use. In a similar model, Scheufele et al. (2006) again find the effect of church-based discussion networks on knowledge and participation to be partly mediated through hard news use. In sum, although there are arguments to be made for a causal link between

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talking about politics and subsequent media exposure, the exact nature of this fully mediated relationship remains unclear and future research on online communication should take up some of these ideas (see also the chapter by Becker and Scheufele).

6 Conditional effects of interpersonal and mass mediated political communication Mass media effects in political communication are increasingly recognized as being conditional (e.g., McLeod, Kosicki, and McLeod 2007). Not all people are affected by exposure to mass media contents in the same way; in particular differences in political sophistication and prior attitudes appear to matter. Overall IPPC is seen as either inhibiting or promoting the effects of mass media contents. For instance it was shown that the effect of elite frames on opinion depends on the nature of political discussion. When discussion network were homogenous, elite framing effects were found, whereas heterogeneous discussions led to an elimination of the framing effect (Druckman and Nelson 2003). In a similar vein, SchmittBeck (2003) discusses the interactive relationship between media and interpersonal discussion effects on vote choice, showing that if the evaluative nature of media messages is in line with the prevailing opinions in interpersonal discussion networks, the media effect on vote choice is more likely to occur. Likewise, there is evidence suggesting that IPPC moderates the influence of mass media. Citizens were more likely to know about current affairs and to participate in politics if they consumed hard news and at the same time frequently talked about politics (Scheufele 2002). Similarly, using the Internet for political purposes had a positive influence on political efficacy, political knowledge and participation, but only for those who also frequently discussed politics (Nisbet and Scheufele 2004). Importantly, it appears to be less relevant if such interpersonal political discussion takes place face-to-face or online, as Hardy and Scheufele (2005) suggest. Both discussing politics offline and online amplified the relationship between hard news use and a broad range of (offline) participation features. Furthermore, it has been argued that the type of message flow from the mass media can condition the influence of interpersonal communication on attitude changes (de Vreese and Boomgaarden 2006). The authors argue that under conditions of a one-sided information flow (Zaller 1992) interpersonal communication will affect those with high levels of political sophistication, whereas under a twosided flow those with low levels of political sophistication will be affected by IPPC. Finally, evidence suggests that reliance on news media versus interpersonal communication during election campaigns affects the primes that citizens use to come to a vote choice, with interpersonal sources contributing to a reliance on issues

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and party identification, and news media use to a reliance on candidate evaluations (Cho 2005; Mendelsohn 1996).

7 Conclusion and directions for future research It appears that research on the role and influence of interpersonal political communication is (still) the little brother of mass media effects research. Whereas political mass media effects are gradually investigated in more advanced models drawing on a multitude of methods (see also section VII), and although over the past two decades there is a growing and increasingly sophisticated literature on IPPC in political communication, an integration of mass media and interpersonal perspectives is still in its infancy. The notion that does put a distinct emphasis on media and interpersonal influences, the two-step flow hypothesis, is not widely applied in recent media effects research. Some two decades ago Lenart (1994: 4) wrote “Media and interpersonal effects tend to be separate research agendas in political science” and Reardon and Rogers a little earlier (1988: 295) contended “there is one set of theories for interpersonal communication, and a different set of theories for mass communication”. These assertions still apply to some degree. As this review shows, a number of studies do address the interplay between IPPC and MMPC influences on different outcome variables. However, the clearly greater amount of studies still investigates either one of the two, neglecting the other. For instance, the flood of framing effects studies in political communication with a vast majority neglects interpersonal communication (Druckman and Nelson 2003 being one exception). The lack of theoretical integration is also surprising since generally interpersonal communication research has developed a set of theories arguably relevant in a political context. A move away from theorising interpersonal communication effects as purely informational to investigating the personal relationships between discussion members and their developments (essentially group dynamics) would be a promising area of research (see Berger 2008 or Chaffee 1986 for more inspiration). A broader acceptance of general interpersonal communication theories in political communication potentially advances the notion of how interpersonal and mass mediated information interact. One could speculate that measurement and design issues are part of the explanation of the neglect of interpersonal communication in political communication research. Standard surveys, often the base of media effect studies, usually include only very rudimentary assessments of interpersonal political conversations that impede further theorizing. Surveys of discussion networks are difficult to realize and expensive. Furthermore, experiments are usually centred on very specific message effects, leaving little room for interpersonal factors. An exciting future avenue of research would be to make use of the experimental revival in political science

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(Druckman et al. 2006) and political communication and apply it to the study of the influences of interpersonal networks vis-à-vis mass media effects. A final aspect that should and certainly will be stimulating for an integrative field of interpersonal and mass political communication is the increasing use of digital media for political purposes. As discussed throughout the chapter, online political communication blurs the dividing line between IPPC and MMPC, which gives impetus to study both in a more integrated manner (see also Zhang et al. 2010). Furthermore, the growth of online social networks potentially increases the importance of interpersonal communication in understanding mass media effects. Increasingly people consume those bits of the news that are recommended to them by others in their networks. As Mutz and Young (2011: 1036) argue “[online] social networks are probably a bigger influence now than ever before on the type of news to which people are exposed, and this influence is likely to become even stronger in the future”. Among others, we are awaiting empirical studies to assess this phenomenon.

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Yariv Tsfati

25 Uses and perceptions of political media Abstract: This chapter integrates literature on both expectations toward and perceptions of media. The author argues that those expectations and perceptions are important explanatory variables for the selection and effects of media. The chapter brings together ideas from the uses-and-gratifications tradition, from research on hostile media and third person perceptions, and from media credibility research in a model of the uses and perceptions of media. In the model audience perceptions are introduced as important antecedents of media use as well as of future expectations toward media. The chapter emphasizes the importance of media perceptions as their effects are not limited to an attitudinal level, but also regard political participation, voting and other behavioral responses. The chapter concludes with a call for more scholarly efforts linking uses and perceptions of media in political communication research. Key Words: media use, uses and gratifications, media credibility, hostile media perceptions, third person perceptions

1 Introduction This chapter is about how people perceive and use the news media. It reviews and attempts to connect two hitherto distinct research traditions. The first research tradition focuses on audience perceptions of media. While research on this topic includes three subfields, focusing on perceptions of media trustworthiness, hostility and impact, these three subfields are intellectually connected (as evident, for example, by cross-references) and often point out to similar empirical findings. Taken together, this tradition implies that people react to their perceptions of media in various ways. The second is grounded in the early functionalist tradition of the Columbia school and focuses on the uses audience make of, and the gratifications they obtain from, their media experiences. Its main thesis is that people purposively select and use media texts in order to satisfy human psychological needs. The primary intellectual move promoted by the uses and gratifications (U&G) tradition was a shift in focus from what the media do to people to what people do with media. The main argument that I wish to advance in this chapter is that perceptions of media are important. They not only shape news media effects. They also determine to a large extent their uses by the audience. Long ago, Katz, Blumler, and Gurevitch (1973–1974: 516) claimed that U&G research may be profitably connected with research about perceptions of media. Simply put, the expectation to satisfy a

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specific need when selecting a specific channel or program is shaped not by an intrinsic quality of the media, but rather by its perception by the audience. While by definition expectations relate to the future and perceptions relate to the past or the present, it seems logical that perceptions of the past will affect expectations towards the future. However, while this simple idea was put forth long ago, little research (in both traditions) have paid attention to the relationship between expectation and perception and thus Katz and colleagues’ call for an empirical and theoretical connection between U&G and research on perceptions of media was left unanswered. The chapter begins by separately reviewing aspects of each of the traditions that are relevant to political communication, and then discusses common assumptions and points of divergence, stressing empirical findings connecting these research traditions. The chapter concludes with a call for more convergence between research on uses of media and perceptions of media.

2 Audience perceptions of media and their consequences As noted above, research on audience perceptions of news media has focused on audience trust in the news media, hostile media perceptions (HMPs), and third person perceptions (TTPs) focusing on perceptions of media impact. The reasons for discussing these three separate lines of research together are, first, that all three are perceptions of media that impact the political world in important ways. Moreover, sometimes the impact of these perceptions is amplified when they appear together. When people mistrust media institutions, perceive their coverage as hostile, and also perceive it exerts unduly large impact on public opinion, they are more likely to react to the coverage. Finally the three research traditions are discussed together because they are empirically related. While the statistically significant relationship between HMPs and TPPs has long been established (Vallone, Ross, and Lepper 1985; Perloff 1989), work documenting the association between both of them and trust in media is relatively recent (Choi, Yang, and Chang 2009; Tsfati and Cohen 2005a; Wei, Lo, and Lu 2011).

2.1 Trust in media Trust in media has been a key ingredient in media research since the days of pioneering scholar Karl Hovland, who demonstrated that perceived trustworthiness is a major component of source credibility – a concept that was found to play a significant role in the process of communication (Hovland and Weiss 1951). Later research had gradually shifted focus from viewing credibility as an objective and

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static attribute of the source to more subjective perceptions of the trustworthiness of mainstream news institutions (Sternthal, Phillips, and Dholakia 1978). Current research demonstrates that trust in media is composed of several elements including the audience’s trust in journalists’ selection of topics and facts, the accuracy of depictions, and in journalists’ interpretation (Kohring and Matthes 2007). In general, when we trust someone we expect him, or her, to behave in accordance to shared norms, in a way that maximizes the odds of us benefiting from the interaction and minimizes the odds of us being damaged. When we talk about trust in media, the potential gains and losses may not be as dramatic as in other contexts, but still, when we trust media we expect to gain access to valid political information, and when this trust is violated we may find ourselves buying the wrong stocks, voting for the wrong candidates, or preparing for unlikely catastrophes. Fukuyama (1995) defines trust as an expectation of cooperative behavior, based on common norms that include “secular norms like professional standards and codes of behavior” (p. 26). Thus, since trust encompasses professional norms, trust in media could be viewed as an expectation that the news media would report the news professionally. The explanations underlying audience trust in news media are not fully clear. Surely, journalists strive hard to cultivate audience trust and use a variety of techniques, practices and tools to preserve it. Experimental research on source credibility has documented that many cues (e.g., social information and stereotypes about reporters and anchors, Weibel, Wissmath, and Groner 2008; practices such as quoting, Sundar 1998) influence audience credibility perceptions. Audiences also take into account the performance of media when assessing their trustworthiness: For example, when media predictions about an approaching earthquake were not realized, audience trust decreased (Major and Atwood 1997). Trust in media is also shaped by social discourse about the media (Watts et al. 1999), and since in the US most critics of mainstream media come from the political right, and these critics include some notable and popular talk radio hosts (Jamieson and Cappella 2008), conservatives in the US (Lee 2010) and especially frequent talk radio listeners, tend to mistrust media (Jones 2005). Factors such as general political trust (Lee 2010), interpersonal trust (Bennett, Rhine, and Flickinger 2001) and political conversation (Eveland and Shah 2003) were also found to predict media trust. Finally, given great cross-national variation in trust in media, macro level factors such as governmental control, have an impact on audience trust (such that trust in media is lower where governmental control is higher, at least in European countries, Connolly and Hargreaves Heap 2007). Beyond examining the reasons for audience trust, scholars have also uncovered some of its consequences. Audience mistrust in media is associated with mistrust in democracy (Tsfati and Cohen 2005) and political polarization (Ladd 2005). When audiences mistrust news media they are also less affected by their exposure, at least when it comes to agenda setting (Tsfati 2003), Framing (Druck-

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man 2001) and priming effects (Miller and Krosnick 2000). This set of results in essence echoes Hovland, Janis, and Kelly’s (1953) classic finding that source credibility moderates persuasion effects. Meyer and Hester (2003) also demonstrated that decreased trust in newspapers also decreases circulation as well as the value newspapers get for advertising, even controlling for a host of covariates. One can conclude that trust in media has ramifications on the news media’s reach, effectiveness and profitability, as well as for more general democratic attitudes.

2.2 Hostile media perceptions While research on trust in media examines expectations targeted towards media institutions in general, research on what is called the hostile media perception (HMP) looks at how people perceive specific texts. Moreover, as trust was defined above as an expectation, it first and foremost relates to future expectations (however grounded in past experiences as they may be). HMPs, in contrast, typically relate to texts that people have already read, and as such they relate to the past (see Tsfai and Cohen 2005a for a discussion of the association between trust in media and HMP). In a seminal study, Vallone, Ross, and Lepper (1985), showed six segments of relatively unbiased televised news reports about the 1985 Beirut massacre to pro-Israeli, pro-Arab and neutral Stanford students and requested them to assess the fairness and objectivity of these specific news segments. Findings demonstrated that pro-Israeli students perceived the segments as more antiIsraeli while pro-Arab students perceived them as pro-Israeli. Meta analysis surveying 34 subsequent HMP studies demonstrates a rather robust statistical effect across studies (r = .296, p < .001, Hansen and Kim 2011). This meta-analysis also confirmed more recent results (Choi, Yang, and Chang 2009; Perloff 1989) stressing the role of ego-involvement as a moderator in the process (i.e., stronger HMPs were observed for involved partisans). HMP findings can be extended to cases in which the news text is clearly biased towards one of the groups. Even then, the partisans whose side of the topic receives favorable media treatment see it as less favorable than the opposing partisans, whose side receives clearly unfair coverage (Gunther and Chia 2001). For example, current findings on this “relative HMP” finding demonstrated that perceived bias of Fox News was smaller for conservative audiences and the perceived bias of The Daily Show was smaller for liberals (Coe et al. 2008; see also Arpan et al. 2011). What is even more interesting about the HMP is that the tendency to view media coverage as hostile runs contrary to a well documented psychological tendency to view that other people and groups are congenial to our point of view (Gunther et al. 2001; Gunther, Miller, and Liebhart 2009). Interestingly, research showed that the very same news material is perceived as more biased by partisans when presented as a media text, compared to when presented as a student assign-

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ment (Gunther and Schmitt 2004). Subsequent research (Gunther and Liebhart 2006) showed that both the source of the message (news vs. student essay) and the reach of the message (will or will not be published in the press) independently contributed to HMPs. While it is impossible to conclude that the HMP is unique to media texts (both sides in a sports match often perceive the referee as hostile towards their side, for example) these studies do point out that not every portrayal of our group by any source is necessarily perceived as biased, and something about the reach of media texts, combined with our previous attitudes toward media (Giner-Sorolla and Chaiken 1994) triggers perceptions of bias when we examine news materials. Several studies have tried to decipher the cognitive mechanism behind the HMP (Giner-Sorolla and Chaiken 1994; Gunther and Liebhart 2007). One possibility is that, for partisans exposed to media coverage of an issue they care about, the mere exposure to opposing arguments that are quoted in the neutral text invalidates the text and the decision to include these arguments is interpreted as evidence that the text as a whole is biased. Another possibility is that the information is selectively categorized, such that each piece of information (even supportive) is categorized by partisans as relatively more biased, resulting in a perception that the text on aggregate is biased. On the other hand, the possibility that partisans selectively recall the opposing arguments (and thus deduce that the text as a whole is biased), was empirically ruled out (Gunther and Liebhart 2007). What happens when people perceive media texts as hostile? While the consequences of HMPs have not been fully explored, it seems as if the main ramification for the perceivers has to do with their assessments of public opinion on the topic. Perceptions of media hostility are often coupled with perceptions of media influence, and hence people tend to asses that the bias in media coverage would translate into a similar bias in the distribution of public opinion (Gunther 1998; Gunther and Christen 2002). When people feel they are in the minority because of a biased portrayal of a given topic in the news media, they may become alienated from the democratic process and from society at large, and this is perhaps the reason for the empirical association between HMPs, alienation and mistrust in democracy (Tsfati 2007; Tsfati and Cohen 2005).

2.3 Presumed media influence Research on perceptions of media impact originates from W. Phillip Davison’s (1983) notion of the third person effect. Davison noted that people tend to perceive that others are more influenced by media compared to themselves and that this perception is as of itself influential, shaping other perceptions and impacting human behavior. Numerous studies documented that the perceptual gap between media impact on self and others is highly robust (see Sun, Pan, and Shen 2008 for a meta analysis) and the third person effect was found to be one of the most

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popular concepts in contemporary communication research (Bryant and Miron 2004). The reasons for the biased perceptions of media impact on self and others were reviewed extensively elsewhere (Tal-Or, Tsfati, and Gunther 2009). According to some accounts, we tend to perceive larger media effects on others because perceiving ourselves as immune to negative media influence helps us preserve a positive self-image. This self-motivational explanation is supported by the fact that the third person perception (TPP) is reversed when it comes to perceptions of impact of socially desirable media texts (that is, people perceive that they are more influenced than others, for example, by safe driving or safe sex PSAs, a finding dubbed “the first person perception”; Duck, Terry, and Hogg 1996), and by the fact that larger media effects are perceived the more the object of influence is remote from the estimator (for example, for people in your state, compared to other students on your campus, a finding dubbed “the social distance corollary”; Cohen et al. 1988). Also consistent with the motivational explanation, and with social-psychological research on self-enhancement mechanisms, the TPP is substitutable with other self-preserving mechanisms, such that TPPs are reduced after the self has already been affirmed using other strategies. On the other hand, the use of other self-preservation strategies is reduced after participants have had an opportunity to report the TPP (Tal-Or and Tsfati 2007). Other accounts of the TPP see biased perceptions of media impact on self and others as stemming from people’s knowledge about their world and from their best effort to come up with an answer to a question that even media scholars cannot decisively answer. One source of knowledge people use when answering survey questions about media impact is what they know about media exposure. When they feel a certain group is highly exposed they tend to perceive stronger media impact (Eveland et al. 1999). But other forms of common knowledge, such as stereotypes and schemata (Scharrer 2002), knowledge about the relevance of the text for various groups (Jensen and Hurley 2005; Tsfati and Cohen 2004), and the social norms of in-groups and out-groups (Reid et al. 2007) also come into play when assessing media impact. Biased attribution, due to the fact that others are viewed as innately gullible, is also a cognitive mechanism that may explain the TPP (Gunther 1991). So is it the motivation to view oneself positively or biased knowledge about the world that underlies TPPs? Some have argued (Tal-Or, Tsfati, and Gunther 2009: 103) that motivational processes are related to reduced perceptions of media impact on self, while cognitive processes underlie biased perceptions of media impact on others. This seems to be the case given that experimental manipulations aimed to affect TPPs through the motivational self-preservation mechanism succeeded alerting the items measuring self-influence, but not those measuring perceived influence on others (Tal-Or and Tsfati 2007), and given that cognitive mechanisms (such as perceived exposure) seem to affect perceived influence on others rather than perceived influence on self (McLeod, Detenber, and Eveland 2001).

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The mechanisms underlying audience perceptions of media impact are important, because such perceptions were shown in prior research to be highly consequential. The variable that has attracted the most research as a consequence of the TPP is support of censorship of harmful political messages (Xu and Gonzenbach 2008 for a meta-analysis), although the effect of TPP on message restrictions is smaller in the political domain, in comparison to when it comes to violent and sexual messages (e.g., Salwen and Driscoll 1997). In addition to restricting the spread of harmful media, research has documented that people are also likely to try to correct the messages’ undesirable outcomes by resorting to political activity (Rojas 2010). These “corrective” activities include trying to persuade a friend to vote for a specific candidate, or expressing their views offline (by attending protests or signing petitions) or online (by posting their views in online forums) in order to mitigate the presumed negative effects of the biased media messages “that would otherwise sway public opinion” (Rojas 2010: 343). While Rojas focused on expressive “corrective” reactions to perceptions of influence in which “people use the communication tools at their disposal to make sure their views are heard” in what they perceive as a biased public sphere, other research has focused on more active behavioral reactions. Two studies to date demonstrated that what we think about media impact may make us more likely to vote (Golan, Banning, and Lundy 2008), or may even change our voting intentions (Cohen and Tsfati 2009). When people perceive that less-sophisticated others are affected by campaign ads, they may be more likely to vote in order to compensate for the possible electoral participation of those duped by such materials. The logic here is that of compensation, similarly to the “corrective” actions described by Rojas (2010). On the other hand, when people believed that media may have affected the voting decisions of others, they were more likely to vote for a party other than the one they most prefer. The logic here is one of adjustment rather than compensation. For example, due to the estimated impact of negative news coverage of a small party, people who had originally intended to vote for that party may have switched their support to a larger one, because they were afraid to waste their vote on a party that would not pass the threshold needed to gain representation. Audience perceptions of media impact may in extreme cases lead to support of violence. Right-wing Jewish settlers in the Gaza Strip who believed that Israeli public opinion about the settlements was swayed by overtly negative media coverage were more likely to report they would forcefully resist the upcoming disengagement plan (Tsfati and Cohen 2005b). Again, in accordance with Rojas’ (2010) notion of corrective actions, the settlers believed that without the role played by media, the public would never have supported the plan to evacuate the Gaza Strip, a plan they saw as pointless. In sum, studies have demonstrated that people react upon their perceptions that media are powerful in numerous ways that span from posting an online comment through voting, and in extreme cases even violent forms of protest.

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All in all, literature on the three distinct perceptions of media – trust in media, HMPs and TPPs and presumed media influence – demonstrate that these perceptions have attitudinal and behavioral implications (attitudinal implications include political alienation and trust in democracy and behavioral implications include various forms of political participation). They also shape important political perceptions, such as climate of opinion assessments (that are as of themselves influential) and impact the way people respond to media messages. But in addition, the current chapter wishes to advance the argument that perceptions of media shape the way people use media. To proceed with this argument we first need to review media literature on uses and gratifications.

3 Media uses in the political domain The U&G paradigm argues, in short, that human needs underlie exposure to media and that people purposively and actively select to expose themselves to media materials that best serve these needs (Rubin 2009). The media are seen as a multipurpose toolbox that is taken out and utilized to fulfill numerous purposes, but also, that is sometimes left on the shelve so that other (non-media tools or activities) can fulfill the same human functions and help obtain gratifications. Any set of media materials, news included, is capable of serving multiple needs and functions (Katz, Blumler, and Gurevitch 1973–1974: 517) and the reasons for selecting a specific content or medium can vary from one person to another. The reasons for watching news are diverse, according to U&G research (Gantz 1978; Wenner 1985). Schramm (1949) claimed that news consumption is guided by either reality motives or pleasure motives (or both). The traces of this reality/play distinction can be found in the writings of scholars who talked, instead, about information/entertainment (Rubin 1984), content/process (Cutler and Danowski 1980) or hard news/soft news (Reinemann et al. 2011) distinctions. However, many additional motives have been identified. Wenner (1985) offers a map of news gratifications that contains 16 different motivations, including ego-defense, expressive, tension reduction and so on. Some people follow the news to fulfill social integrative needs (Levy 1977). These social gratification seekers are not very interested in the political world, but they do not want to lose touch with other people. For others, the news may fulfill “surveillance” functions (Wright 1960). These audiences follow the news in order to get bits of information necessary for their daily lives (whether, traffic, the stock market) and other components of the newscast are attended to simply because they are there (see Gantz, Fitzmaurice, and Fink 1991). The theoretical mechanism of mood management (Zillmann 1988) might offer yet an additional explanation as to why people watch news: bored viewers are more likely to seek stimulating contents and might find them in news items that focus on controversy, conflict, or disaster.

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3.1 Similarities of the U&G and perceptions of media research traditions The research reviewed above on audience perceptions of media shares several key assumptions with the U&G approach. Importantly, both assume that audiences are active, rather than the passive victims of a powerful media. U&G research assumes that “people are usually more influential than the media in the media effects process” (Rubin 2009: 148). Likewise, research on media perceptions sees the audience as critical, active and capable of resisting media power. Perceptions of media are viewed by this tradition as having a “liberating” effect on the audience (Tsfati 2003: 78). Second, both traditions are part of the “administrative” line of communication research (e.g., see Katz 1987), and as such they are epistemologically similar. The intellectual roots of both traditions date back to the Columbia School which emphasized the limited power of media and the relative autonomy of the audience (although the roots of the “media perceptions” tradition also go back to the Yale School). While U&G is a bit more alienated to the concept of “media effects” (seeing the question of effects as somewhat futile and the concept of effects less useful than the concept of processes), both theories could be conceptualized as theories of effects. Importantly, it is interesting to note that the concept of gratification is often used synonymously with the concept of “outcome” in the U&G tradition (e.g., Galloway and Meek 1981: 438). Third, while the assumption of goal-directedness is more explicitly stated by U&G research (Katz, Blumler, and Gurevitch 1973–1974: 511), it is still compatible with research on media perceptions. For example, research on coordination responses to perceptions of media influence (Tal-Or, Tsfati, and Gunther 2009: 106) portray a goal-directed audience response to perceptions of media influence (e.g., voters who want to make the best of their vote switch preferences in response to their perception of what media are doing to others). Fourth, in both approaches people are not only goal-directed but quite rational: In U&G, they try to use media to obtain gratifications and interestingly, while they do not always succeed, their expectations for future gratification is changed after such “failures” and their subsequent exposure is also alerted (Galloway and Meek 1981: 445). In the “perceptions” tradition the findings demonstrating that audiences are more influenced by trusted media is likewise indicative of a rational audience (see Tsfati 2003: 69). However, many TPP and HMP researchers would not view themselves as “rational audience” scholars. The fact that human behavior is affected by perceptual biases, they would argue, points out that the audience is irrational. Still, the fact that people use whatever information they possess, even inaccurate, when forming their attitudes and subsequent behaviors, can be viewed as quite logical, even if limited. Fifth, methodologically, both traditions assume that individuals are sufficiently self-aware to be able to report their perceptions, needs and motivations.

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This assumption is again more explicitly stated by U&G scholars (Rubin 2009), and is not necessarily fully compatible with “media perceptions” tradition (e.g., audiences need not be fully aware that they are participating in politics or supporting message restrictions because of their perceptions of media impact), but still both traditions heavily rely on self-reports of key concepts.

3.2 Integrating U&G and perceptions of media U&G and research on media perceptions not only share several key assumptions, a common intellectual heritage, and a similar methodological standpoint. The processes described by the two traditions are in fact connected (Katz, Blumler, and Gurevitch 1973–1974: 516). Audience perceptions of media shape future expectations to a large extent, and thus they impact the uses audiences make of the media (this spiraling process is described in Figure 1). This fact was implied by U&G research on application of Expectancy-Value Theory to the context of media consumption (e.g., Rayburn and Palmgreen 1984). This line of research stresses audience expectations and beliefs as an antecedent to the gratifications sought by the audience in the U&G process. Expectancy-value literature also highlights the fact that, essentially, it is people’s expectations of what media would do to them which forms their quest for gratifying needs through media (Palmgreen and Rayburn 1982). Put differently, perceived media impact not only directs how one would support restricting media use by others, via censorship or parental intervention for one’s children, expected media impacton oneself (stemming from previous perceptions of media effects on oneself, as described in Figure 1) also directs one’s exposure to the media, to the extent this impact is evaluated as gratifying. For example, when I expect that exposure to news would make me more informed I will attend to news to the extent that I evaluate being informed as a positive outcome. Moreover, gratification research finds that not only perceived effects on self, but also perceived effects on others, guide the U&G process (this takes place through what is termed third person expectations referring to expected effects on others in Figure 1). Lichtenstein and Rosenfeld (1984) demonstrate that people’s evaluated-gratifications for various media channels are based on their beliefs regarding how most other people would respond to those channels. In the context of news selection, if we anticipate that people’s response to news includes talking about news with friends and acquaintances, and we are motivated by social needs, then we may watch the news because of our expectation of what the news would do to other people (resulting from our previous perceptions as described in Figure 1) and our expectation that our exposure would help us gratify our social needs. Similarly, in rare cases of historic events, people feel that media exposure is almost mandatory, presumably because of the impact of the televised event on other people and on the course of history (Katz and Dayan 1992). In sum, people’s percep-

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tions of media impact on self and others affect the uses they make of media exposure. However, perceptions of media trust and hostility, not only of media impact, shape media use as well. Research has long ago demonstrated that audience trust in mainstream media is correlated with mainstream media exposure (Rimmer and Weaver 1987): When people trust mainstream news they watch more mainstream news, and when they mistrust mainstream news they watch less, and seek alternative sources (Tsfati and Peri 2006; Tsfati 2010). The mere association between trust in media and news media exposure attests that people factor in their perceptions of media when they form their media diets. However, the magnitude of the association is relatively small. In terms of explained variance, news media skepticism accounts for only a fraction of the variance in news exposure (Tsfati and Cappella 2003). This means that research on media perceptions had to confront an interesting question: why do people watch news they do not trust? In attempting to answer this question Tsfati and Cappella (2005) found an interaction between cognitive needs and media trust in their effect on news exposure, so that the association between media trust and news exposure is stronger for people with low cognitive needs. They explained that for people high on need for cognition, “the need to think, to understand, to make sense of the world, and to learn about various points of view motivates news exposure, regardless of whether the news media are perceived as trustworthy or not” (p. 252). They reasoned that media skeptics may also follow mainstream news despite their skepticism to gratify other needs. While beyond the scope of their data, they suggested that trust in media may also interact with social and entertainment needs, such that people watch un-trusted news sources in order to fulfill integrative needs or the need for entertainment. This proposed interaction between needs (that are arguably more deeply-routed than media perceptions) and media-related expectations that result from our previous perceptions of media is marked in Figure 1 by the dashed arrows, portraying interactive patterns. The findings by Tsfati and Cappella (2005) in fact point to an interaction between consistency-based selective exposure (the prevalent approach in studies of audience perceptions of media, e.g., Rimmer and Weaver 1987) and uses and gratifications research. Interestingly, research in social psychology demonstrates that perceptions of media credibility interact with cognitive needs, not only when it comes to message selection, but also with regards to message processing. Priester and Petty (1995) manipulated source credibility, measured need for cognition, and examined their impact on message processing and persuasion. A key finding was that need for cognition interacted with source credibility when influencing message processing, such that those low on cognitive needs were influenced by the trustworthiness of the source, but those high on cognitive needs were not. That is, because those high on need for cognition enjoy thinking in general, their cognitive needs made them process the message regardless of their mistrust of the

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Fig. 1: A model connecting U&G research with research on media perceptions.

source. All in all, research seems to point out that people factor in their needs, as well as well as their perceptions of media, when they select and process messages (see also the chapter by Knobloch-Westerwick).

3.3 Politicians’ perceptions and uses of media Media perceptions also affect the way people use media not only in terms of media exposure and processing. If we use the term “using the media” more broadly, then it should be said news media perceptions also indirectly affect the way political elites utilize the media in their quest for gaining or maintaining political power. Cohen, Tsfati, and Sheafer (2008) demonstrated that politicians’ perceptions of media impact on the electorate increase their motivation to gain media coverage: When politicians (Israeli members of Knesset, in their study) perceived that news media exerted a strong influence on the public, they were more likely to cooperate with media and to initiate coverage, and this media motivation subsequently affected the actual coverage they received. Perceptions about news media power shape not only politicians’ public relations efforts but also affect other aspects of their work, such as initiating legislation in response to heightened media coverage of a specific issue (Yanovitky and Stryker 2001). More generally the process of mediatization of politics (referring to a growing influence of the logic of news on political life) is driven to a large extent by politicians’ conviction that the news media have a powerful influence over political life. Drawing on their belief that news media make and break elections and political careers, politicians conclude that they need to comply with media demands in order to succeed in the political realm (Strömbäck 2010) (see also the chapters by van Aelst and by Shafer, Shenav, and Balmas).

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4 Conclusions, limitations and directions for future research The conclusion from the above review is simple: Perceptions of media are important. They shape people’s responses to media. While these responses are mainly attitudinal, some evidence demonstrates that people’s perceptions of media may be affecting their political participation, voting and other behavioral responses. The main argument advanced in this chapter, however, was that people’s perceptions of media not only shape audience attitudes and subsequent behaviors. Perceptions of media hostility, trustworthiness and impact also shape the uses people make of media. That is, they affect the way people select and process media messages. Research on perceptions of media is connected to research on media use in many ways. First and foremost, through U&G’s argument that when people select media based on expected gratifications, they rely on their perceptions of what media would do to oneself and to others. That is, the notion of “gratifications sought by media use” that has been an indispensable part of U&G research, is heavily shaped by people’s perceptions of media impact and trustworthiness. Moreover, research has demonstrated that perceptions of media credibility and trustworthiness interact with audience needs like the need for cognition when people select and process news messages. U&G research shares with research on media perceptions not only a joint intellectual legacy, and a similar epistemological and methodological stance. Both traditions could be criticized on similar grounds. First and foremost, the reliance on people’s self-reports and the focus on people’s expectations and perceptions (rather than more concrete indicators), plague both traditions. In studies of U&G and of TPP and media trust, the main result often boils down to a correlation between one perception and another, with the rival explanation, that the findings merely represent respondents’ attempt to maintain psychological consistency, left un-refuted. Moreover, both traditions’ assumptions regarding audience activity and rationality, could be viewed as overly naïve, and perhaps as stemming from the human tendency to justify human action using rather rational causal explanations. Research on media uses and perceptions should strive to provide better refutation of rival explanations (while some experimental evidence refuting the rival “consistency” account is already available, e.g., Tal Or et al., 2010). While both research traditions are extremely popular, both face similar challenges in responding to a media map that is becoming more diversified and complex due to the emergence of new communication technologies. Facebook, Twitter, a variety of news channels online and on the cable convertor, not only complicate the selection process described by U&G by offering far more options for using media to gratify needs. They also offer ample information on how others are responding to and are affected by news media messages. Audience reactions to online news stories may contain information that would positively or negatively

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affect our trust in the message and our perception of its hostility. Merely seeing how many readers visited a news story or watched or liked a political speech or an election ad may shape our perception of the power of these texts, and stimulate us to expose ourselves to specific messages. Social networking websites also offer diverse new opportunities for audiences to use media for the sake of gratifying social needs. While both U&G research and research on perceptions of media have already started adapting to the new online media environment (e.g., Hong and Park 2011 in the context of TPPs, Diddi and Larose 2006 in the context of U&G), this research is in its early stages. As always, much work remains for the future.

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Strömbäck, Jesper. 2010. Mediatization and perceptions of the media’s political influence. Journalism Studies 12: 423–439. Sun, Ye, Zhongdang Pan and Lijiang Shen. 2008. Understanding the third-person perception: Evidence from a meta-analysis. Journal of Communication 58: 280–300. Sundar, Shyam. S. 1998. Effects of source attribution on perception of online news stories. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 75: 55–68. Tal-Or, Nurit, Jonathan Cohen, Yariv Tsfati and Albert C. Gunther. 2010. Testing causal direction in the influence of presumed media influence. Communication Research 37: 801–824. Tal-Or, Nurit and Yariv Tsfati. 2007. On the substitutability of third-person perceptions. Media Psychology 10: 231–249. Tal-Or, Nurit, Yariv Tsfati and Albert C. Gunther. 2009. The influence of presumed media influence: Origins and implications of the third-person perception. In Robin L. Nabi and Mary-Beth Oliver (eds.), The Sage Handbook of Media Processes and Effects, 99–112. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Tsfati, Yariv. 2003. Media skepticism and climate of opinion perception. International Journal of Public Opinion Research 15: 65–82. Tsfati, Yariv. 2007. Hostile media perceptions, presumed media influence and minority alienation: The case of Arabs in Israel. Journal of Communication 57: 632–651. Tsfati, Yariv. 2010. Online news exposure and trust in the mainstream media: Exploring possible associations. American Behavioral Scientist 54: 22-42. Tsfati, Yariv and Joseph N. Cappella. 2003. Do people watch what they do not trust? Exploring the association between news media skepticism and exposure. Communication Research 30: 504–529. Tsfati, Yariv and Joseph N. Cappella. 2005. Why do people watch news they do not trust: Need for cognition as a moderator in the association between news media skepticism and exposure. Media Psychology 7: 251–272. Tsfati, Yariv and Jonathan Cohen. 2004. Object-subject distance and the third-person perception. Media Psychology 6: 335–362. Tsfati, Yariv and Jonathan Cohen. 2005a. Democratic consequences of hostile media perceptions: The case of Gaza settlers. Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 10: 28–51. Tsfati, Yariv and Jonathan Cohen. 2005b. Democratic consequences of hostile media perceptions: The case of Gaza settlers. Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 10: 28–51. Tsfati, Yariv and Yoram Peri. 2006. Mainstream media skepticism and exposure to extra-national and sectorial news media: The case of Israel. Mass Communication and Society 9: 165–187. Vallone, Robert P., Lee Ross and Mark R. Lepper. 1985. The hostile media phenomenon: Biased perception and perceptions of media bias in coverage of the Beirut massacre. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 49: 577–585. Watts, Mark D., David Domke, Dhavan V. Shah and David P. Fan. 1999. Elite cues and media bias in presidential campaigns. Communication Research 26: 144–175. Wei, Ran, Ven-Hwei Lo and Hung-Yi Lu. 2011. Examining the perceptual gap and behavioral intention in the perceived effect of polling news in the 2008 Taiwan presidential election. Communication Research 38: 206-227. Weibel, David, Bartholomaus Wissmath and Rudolf Groner. 2008. How gender and age affect newscasters’ credibility. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 52: 466-484. Wenner, Lawrence A. 1985. The nature of news gratification. In: Karl Erik Rosengren, Lawrence A. Wenner and Philip Palmgreen (eds.), Media Gratification Research, 171- 193. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Xu, Jie and William J. Gonzenbach. 2008. Does a perceptual discrepancy lead to action? A meta analysis of the behavioral component of the third person effect. International Journal of Public Opinion Research 20: 375–385.

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Yanovitzky, Itzhak and Jo Stryker. 2001. Mass media, social norms and health promotion efforts: A longitudinal study of media effects on binge driving. Communication Research 28: 208– 239. Zillmann, Dolf. 1988. Mood management through communication choices. American Behavioral Scientist 31: 327–340.

Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick

26 Selection, perception, and processing of political messages1 Abstract: This chapter reviews literature on selective exposure in political communication. It first points to the importance of selectivity given an unprecedented amount and diversity of media sources. The chapter then focuses on the antecedents, psychological processes (e.g., confirmation bias), and outcomes of selective exposure to media content. The relevance of media credibility and hostile media perceptions, of tendencies to self-confirm, and of informational utility for selective exposure are discussed. The chapter then reflects on the consequences of selective exposure for the accessibility of attitudes and partisanship. The author concludes that selective exposure is in fact governed by attitude importance and a confirmation bias, even though informational utility may override this tendency under certain circumstances. Key Words: selective exposure, incidental exposure, confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, hostile media perceptions, informational utility, attitude accessibility

1 Introduction Normative democratic theory implies a well informed electorate (e.g., Dahlgren 2005). Yet much survey research has yielded evidence of an overall poorly informed public (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1997). However, some scholars have argued that being fully informed may not be necessary for citizens to function adequately in a democracy (Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee 1954; Neuman 1986). Recent empirical research even suggests that weighing all sides of a political issue, which would be desirable based on ideas on political discourse (Habermas 1989), can even impair political participation (Dilliplane 2011; Knobloch-Westerwick and Johnson 2012; Matthes 2012; Mutz 2002, 2006) (see also the chapters by Kepplinger and by Jandura and Friedrich). Given the important role that media exposure to political content plays in providing political knowledge to citizens, the present chapter examines the psychological processes involved in individuals’ exposure and selection, perception, and processing of political messages in the media, with an emphasis on selective exposure, its antecedents, and its consequences. 1 The author thanks Benjamin K. Johnson for his assistance with preparing this chapter as well as the COPS (Communication, Opinion, and Political Studies) research group at the School of Communication, Ohio State University, for their helpful feedback on an earlier draft of this chapter.

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2 Context and types of exposure to political messages 2.1 Media environment The availability of political messages in a given media environment naturally has important implications for exposure and selection, perception, and processing of political content. Cross-national differences and developments across time yield fundamentally different media environments in this regard. For instance, newspapers in Great Britain provide much more slanted coverage than American newspapers (Mutz and Martin 2001). During the last century, television developed into a major source for political information and provided a context in which exerting a preference based on political leanings was more difficult due to its sequential presentation format (Chaffee 1991). But during the last decade, American television has seen the emergence of decidedly partisan TV news channels such as Fox News (e.g., Stroud 2008), whereas many European broadcasting systems are subject to regulation to ensure balanced TV news coverage and a certain extent of news broadcasting. In addition, a very rich and mostly unregulated cornucopia of political messages from a multitude of sources now exists on the Internet (e.g., Bennett and Iyengar 2008; Sunstein 2001).

Note: Based on Donsbach (1991). Fig. 1: Steps in selective media reception, by medium.

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These formal characteristics inevitably influence what exposure to political content can occur. Beyond the provision of content, media users can exert much influence at numerous levels of media selection, as illustrated in Figure 1. This illustration also draws on the idea that political content is not confined to news and alike formats because many fictional entertainment formats such as movies and TV series as well as music feature political messages (Holbert 2005; LaMarre, Knobloch-Westerwick, and Hoplamazian 2012. Because media users can typically choose from numerous channels and ample messages and message elements, the antecedents of media exposure are of utmost importance.

2.2 Incidental exposure Citizens can acquire political information through incidental exposure to media coverage of politics (e.g., Visser, Holbrook, and Krosnick 2008). Even individuals with no interest in politics may accumulate political knowledge through habitual viewing or co-viewing of TV news (“inadvertent audience”). While it is a topic of debate whether entertaining elements and vivid imagery in news coverage distract from political information (Baum 2003; Prior 2003) or make it possible to attract those agnostic about politics to news (e.g., Zillmann, Knobloch, and Yu 2001), it is likely safe to assume that any news exposure is better than none for individuals’ levels of political knowledge (e.g., Xenos and Becker 2009). Indeed, some research has demonstrated that even incidental exposure to online news headlines on a search engine site, while searching for information on other topics, conveys some public affairs information to online users (Tewksbury, Weaver, and Maddex 2001) (see also the chapters by Moy, Johnson, and Barthel and by Holbert, Hill, and Lee).

2.3 Exposure driven by general interest in politics Beyond such incidental exposure, much learning of political information will result from media exposure that is driven by a general interest in politics and public affairs or by more general surveillance motives (e.g., Eveland, Shah, and Kwak 2003). Many citizens regularly tune in to general news programs or visit pages on the Internet that pertain to various political topics (e.g., Delli Carpini and Keeter 1997). A number of factors may underlie this general political interest, such as valuing the importance of citizens’ involvement in democracy, using politics as a conversational topic, high political self-efficacy, etc. Because the setup of television and radio news in a steady flow of information does not allow news consumers opportunities to easily select some stories and not others, some scholars have labeled this phenomenon non-selective exposure (Visser, Holbrook, and Krosnick 2008). However, the emergence of partisan news channels such as Fox News in the U.S. now allows politically motivated selectivity in the broadcast con-

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text as well (e.g., Stroud 2008) (see also the chapters by Puppis and by Jandura and Friedrich). Further, it can be argued that even under the circumstances of broadcast media, recipients can exert selectivity by gazing at the screen or elsewhere and allocating more or less cognitive capacity to the messages (which likens exposure to attention). But the general decision to tune in to news broadcasts is certainly affected by interest in politics, with those attracted to political topics being more likely to expose themselves to news programming intentionally than those who are agnostic regarding politics (e.g., Delli Carpini and Keeter 1997) (see also the chapters by Wolling and Emmer and by Tsfati).

2.4 Selective exposure driven by specific political interests Once an individual attends to a media outlet that features political messages, it can be argued that selectivity will inevitably occur because most outlets present more messages than can be consumed within the typical media time budget. A factor that has been frequently demonstrated to affect political message exposure is simply issue interest (e.g., Donsbach 1991). Many media users seek out information about some issues while virtually ignoring information about others. Why are certain issues and related attitudes more interesting and important to an individual than others? The concept of attitude and three primary antecedents of attitude importance (Boninger, Krosnick, and Berent 1995), which in turn fosters selective exposure, will be discussed in the following (Figure 2).

3 Attitudes and attitude importance as exposure antecedents Attitudes can be conceptualized as “evaluative knowledge, represented in memory (…). As summary evaluations associated with the representation of an attitude object, these attitudes can be activated from memory automatically when the object (or a sufficiently related object) is encountered” (Fazio 2007: 629). Attitudes serve as cognitive shortcuts and guide behaviors in relatively thoughtless manner by prompting approach or avoidance behavior toward objects depending on their evaluative component. If the object is a political actor or issue, the corresponding attitude is thus a political attitude (see also the chapter by Maurer). Firstly, people attach importance to some attitudes because they perceive that the attitude object impinges on their material status or opportunities. Obviously, individuals differ in these self-interests. Someone who receives social security payments will attach high importance to potential policy changes affecting these payments, whereas others worry more about policies that affect business corporations because they earn money through them. But beyond economic interests, issues

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Fig. 2: Conceptual model of the effects of recipient and media characteristics on confirmation bias and its subsequent political effects.

that influence one’s health or other aspects of well-being will certainly induce high associated importance. For example, citizens in a neighborhood in which a new nuclear plant may be built may take strong interest in that matter if they feel it affects their personal safety. Secondly, individuals will attach importance to an attitude if they perceive the attitude object to be linked to their norms and values (Rokeach 1968). Attitudes that are closely associated with one or several personal key values are seen as more important than other attitudes. For instance, a person who greatly appreciates honesty will likely connect this value with an instance in which a politician has knowingly misrepresented facts to the public. This link would lead the individual to attach importance to this attitude regarding politicians’ integrity. Thirdly, affiliating with others – groups or individuals – can result in high attitude importance, if these others are affected by an issue in their material status or opportunities or regarding their core values. For instance, a well-off parent might consider secure access to food for all families with children to be an important topic because he or she relates to these families, despite not having to worry about food access. Thus connections of issues such as healthcare or gun control to material interests, key values, or group identities frequently lead to increased importance linked to political topics. Resulting from one or several of these three factors, attitude importance can be defined as “subjective sense of how much significance to attach to an attitude – how much to care and be concerned about it” (Visser, Holbrook, and Krosnick 2008: 131). Attitude importance affects information processing, decision-making, and behavior (Boninger, Krosnick, and Berent 1995) and certainly exposure to political information (e.g., Knobloch-Westerwick 2007). Moreover, increased expo-

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sure to information related to high-importance issues results in greater related knowledge (Berent and Krosnick 1995; Krosnick et al. 1993; Wood 1982) (see also the chapter by Arendt and Matthes). Yet studies into selective exposure guided by attitude importance suggest that this knowledge may be affected by a bias toward confirmation of pre-existing attitudes (Figure 2).

4 Selective exposure 4.1 Concept The term selective exposure refers to the phenomenon that when many choices are readily available to the user, some selections are chosen more often than others (Sears and Freedman 1967; Zillmann and Bryant 1985). For example, if visitors to a political online forum with ten topic threads of equal length allotted 10 percent of their time to reading one of the ten different available discussion threads, they would have spent a proportional amount of time with this article. However, recipients often exhibit a preference for certain parts of a website, which they actively choose to consume. A different understanding of the term selective exposure pertains to a specific exposure pattern that reflects a confirmation bias, in which specifically attitudeconsistent messages are preferred, and stems from some classic research in this area. About seven decades ago, the seminal Erie County study (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet 1944) demonstrated that individuals preferred messages consistent with their political partisanship. Later work drew on Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory (1957) to explain such confirmation bias – the preference for attitude-consistent over attitude-inconsistent content.

4.2 Theory of cognitive dissonance In his theory of cognitive dissonance, Festinger (1957) postulated that individuals strive for cognitive equilibrium. Such a balance exists when related cognitions converge without contradictions. An example for a lack of a cognitive equilibrium is the case of a person who prefers a political party that is involved in a political scandal (Jonas et al. 2003). Cognitive dissonance then occurs, as conflicting cognitions (e.g., “I prefer party X; party X has used fundraising in an immoral and unlawful way”) produce unpleasant tensions according to Festinger (1957). His theory postulates that the cognitive dissonance will produce motivation to dissolve the conflicting perceptions, for example through reinterpreting the information or through selective exposure to information that helps to resolve the cognitive conflict.

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The latter strategy has received particular attention in communication research. The “limited effects” model (Klapper 1960), guided by the assumption that media use can hardly instill attitude changes and mostly helps bolstering existing attitudes, goes back to these ideas (see also the chapter by Maurer). According to cognitive dissonance theory, media users prefer attitude-consistent messages and avoid counter-attitudinal content. This pattern prevents dissonances but also encountering alternative views that might inspire one’s opinion formation. Hence, attitude changes due to media consumption are unlikely to begin with, at least from Festinger’s (1957) “cognitive dissonance” point of view. Such selective behavior poses problems for a democratic system because avoidance of counterattitudinal messages inhibits an opinion formation based on diverse arguments – the media audience would persist in preexisting viewpoints even if an opinion change was more rational in light of additional information or arguments (Mutz and Martin 2001).

4.3 Empirical work on the confirmation bias After a whole host of studies about Festinger’s (1957) theory had been presented, an influential synopsis by Sears and Freedman (1967) judged the evidence about a confirmation bias in selective exposure as inconsistent and contradictory. Nonetheless, textbooks in communication continued covering the theory’s assumptions, even though often commenting on the lack of empirical support for them. Research reviews about media effects often suggest a weak tendency to avoid counterattitudinal messages (Chaffee et al. 2001). Yet, although the theory of cognitive dissonance served as basis for hundreds of social-psychological studies (Bagby, Parker, and Bury 1990; Irle and Möntmann 1978), relatively few investigations pertained to selections in the context of mass media use. Typically, these studies are concerned with selection of political information depending on preferences for political parties or candidates (Atkin 1971; Barlett et al. 1974; Chaffee et al. 2001; Donsbach 1989; 1991; Jonas et al. 2003; Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet 1944; NoelleNeumann 1973; Rhine 1967; Sears and Freedman 1965; Sweeney and Gruber 1984). The present review shows that the evidence for avoidance of attitude-discrepant media messages has been mixed. Clearly, media message selection is not determined only by dissonance avoidance, and exposure to counter-attitudinal information is commonplace (Garrett 2009b). Sears and Freedman (1967) suggested that inconsistent findings in selective exposure research resulted from the fact that attitude-discrepant messages may carry utility. The motivation to be accurately informed and to address tasks effectively would then override the confirmation bias. This notion has also received empirical support (e.g., Canon 1964; Freedman 1965). Other factors such as news values (Donsbach 1991; Eilders and Wirth 1999), emphasis of content aspects through framing (Zillmann et al. 2004), as well as formal weight through layout (Donsbach 1991; Knobloch et al. 2003) affect select-

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ive exposure. Moreover, recipient characteristics such as dissonance tolerance, political interest, and educational level influence the extent of a confirmation bias in exposure (Chaffee et al. 2001; Festinger 1957; Olson and Zanna 1979) (Figure 2).

4.4 Confirmation bias in the election context Selective exposure during election campaigns are of special interest, because the balance of attitude-consistent and attitude-discrepant exposure can affect voting intentions and other political outcomes. Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet’s (1944) classic The People’s Choice was the first study to identify that individuals engage in selective exposure to political media content, writing that “[t]he fact that people select their exposure along the line of their political predispositions is only a special case of a more general law which pervades the whole field of communication research. Exposure is always selective; in other words, a positive relationship exists between people‘s opinions and what they choose to listen to or to read” (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet 1944: 164). Experimental work on selective exposure in election settings followed, drawing from cognitive dissonance theory (Festinger 1957) and generally finding a confirmation bias (Chaffee et al. 2001; Freedman and Sears 1963 [reported in Sears and Freedman 1967]; Rhine 1967; Ziemke 1980) although some studies did not (Chaffee and McLeod 1973; Chaffee and Miyo 1983). National elections usually bring increased interest to the political process. A pending change in government generally has some clear consequences for citizens, regardless of their party or candidate of choice. Therefore, these citizens will choose election-related information about likely incoming officials, parties, or coalitions. This motive of informational utility (Knobloch-Westerwick 2008) will be especially pronounced prior to an election and may override a confirmation bias in exposure. Although recent survey research on selective exposure during U.S. election seasons has found that respondents report heightened use of media channels aligned with their political leanings during the five months prior to the 2004 presidential election (Stroud 2008), recent experiments yielded a more nuanced picture. Tracking of information selected by experimental participants found that only conservative participants were susceptible to a confirmation bias in partisan selective exposure during the 2000 U.S. presidential election (Iyengar et al. 2008) and only liberal participants were susceptible to confirmation bias in the 2008 election (Knobloch-Westerwick and Kleinman 2012). In each study, partisans from the losing side that cycle were just as likely to attend to information from or about the other side as they were to their own, providing support for the informational utility hypothesis. For liberals in 2000 and conservatives in 2008, attitude-discrepant information carried greater utility because the future government was likely to align with these messages. Thus under specific circumstances, utility will override a confirmation bias.

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4.5 Confirmation bias in the Internet age The abundance and customizability of information on the Internet inherently affords people with greater opportunities to engage in selective exposure (Bimber and Davis 2003). The Internet could therefore have a strong polarization effect on political behavior if users exclusively consume attitude-consistent messages and completely avoid discrepant messages. This has led some to declare a “New Era of Minimal Effects” (Bennett and Iyengar 2008), a return to a view in which selectivity is a barrier to media effects (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet 1944; Klapper 1960). This argument states that because online media allow users to only encounter agreeable information, they will exercise that option, and existing confirmation-biased exposure patterns will be exacerbated. This pattern is sometimes described as “echo chamber effect” (Garrett 2009a) in which individuals engage in a discourse only with like-minded sources. On the other hand, when selectivity does occur, it may actually lead to meaningful media effects rather than limit their possibility (Holbert, Garrett, and Gleason 2010). Yet empirical findings show that selective exposure online does not seem to be as polarized as is often suggested (Gentzkow and Shapiro 2010). The variety of information online and the ease of access may actually allow for more diverse exposure, as long as individuals are not solely driven by a confirmation bias motive. In fact, evidence suggests that patterns of partisan selective exposure may be different for the Internet, compared to more traditional media, which foster habitual partisan exposure through targeted channels and subscriptions. Although the Internet features many outlets targeted at partisans, a recent survey found that online news users in the U.S. report very little loyalty to partisan news websites (Purcell et al. 2010). Thus, online news exposure may be less subject to confirmation bias (DiMaggio and Sato 2003; Garrett 2009a; Knobloch-Westerwick and Kleinman 2012; Stromer-Galley 2003). However, the explanation for these intermedia differences is unclear. Online news genres may encourage different styles of news consumption. Eye-tracking research shows that online news involves more intensive reading than print news. But, print readers are less likely to scan news headlines, and seem to be less interested in opinion columns and editorials (Poynter Institute 2008). The net effect of Internet use on political engagement is still uncertain (Boulianne 2009). Yet recent evidence suggests that reduced selective exposure among frequent users of online news has a negative effect on political participation (Knobloch-Westerwick and Johnson 2012) because its counter-attitudinal exposure weakens attitudes and subsequently undermines engagement (see also the chapters by Boomgarden and by Becker and Scheufele).

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5 Perceptions of sources and of political messages 5.1 Credibility and source diversity Citizens are using the Internet for political purposes (Smith 2011), in part because of the easy access to a wide variety of information sources (e.g., Gerhards and Schaefer 2010). Although this is promising for the development of a vibrant public sphere (Norris 2001), a tendency for online political messages to represent more extreme standpoints than traditional media is worrying (e.g., Nie et al. 2010; Leccese 2009). The dramatic diversity of political information online messages, coupled with greater control over selectivity raises concerns about political polarization and fragmentation driven by selective exposure (e.g., Bennett and Iyengar 2008). Another concern that emerges with the proliferation of political information online is the need to make sense of source credibility. Citizens rarely focus on the credibility of sources of political information, relying on the most convenient sources (e.g., Moody 2011). Internet users often accept those messages first encountered rather than vetting information and its source (Flanagin and Metzger 2007). And, online, credibility is often judged by relatively superficial heuristics like site design and search engine rankings (Flanagin and Metzger 2007; Sundar 2008; Westerwick 2013). The visual display of political messages may play a bigger role in selection and trust than critical evaluation or cross-checking. Therefore it is evident that source credibility is a major concern in media use online (Flanagin and Metzger 2007; Metzger et al. 2010; Sundar 2008) and especially for political media. The diversity of information on display on the Internet is not just the product of professional journalists and expert sources – it also encompasses user-generated content, such as blogs and videos (e.g., Leccese 2009; May 2010). The expertise of online sources varies dramatically (e.g., Kohut et al. 2008), which makes user assessments of source credibility even more crucial (see also the chapter by Tsfati).

5.2 Credibility and selective exposure Some studies have considered the role that source plays in selective exposure to political information. Both survey (Stroud 2008) and experimental evidence (Iyengar and Hahn 2009) shows that individuals are more likely to choose news from sources that are politically consistent with the individual’s own views. For example, conservatives preferred news attributed to the Fox News Channel and avoided news from CNN and NPR, whereas liberals showed the opposite pattern of selective exposure (Iyengar and Hahn 2009). With regard to source credibility, a recent experiment tested the influence of high and low source credibility on selective exposure to attitude-consistent search

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engine results for political topics (Westerwick, Kleinman, and Knobloch-Westerwick 2013). Participants with low levels of political interest avoided high-credibility, attitude-discrepant results and tended to select high-credibility, attitude-consistent results. In contrast, those with high political interest preferred low-credibility, attitude-consistent compared to low-credibility, attitude-discrepant results. The findings show that source credibility plays a role in selective exposure, but that it seems to work in different ways depending on political interest. Attitude-discrepant messages from high-credibility sources may be threatening to online users without intense, and perhaps more fragile, political beliefs. Although cognitive dissonance is generally prevented by selective exposure to attitude-consistent information and by avoidance of discrepant information (Festinger 1964), Lowin (1967) suggested that exposure to attitude-discrepant information was likely when it was anticipated that the information could be easily refuted and function as a straw man. In contrast, for those with strong political interest, they might find all high-credibility information worth reading, but low-credibility, attitude-discrepant information to offer neither utility nor attitude reinforcement (Figure 2).

5.3 Message credibility and hostile media effect While classic research on source credibility (Hovland and Weiss 1951) suggested that credibility is an objective characteristic of the source, the contemporary view is that credibility is an audience perception (Metzger et al. 2003). News story content is evaluated on the basis of preexisting attitudes about the news media – the extent to which news coverage is thought to diverge from one’s own views, however, is likely the most important determinant of perceived bias. The hostile media effect – “the tendency for partisans to view media coverage of controversial events as unfairly biased and hostile to the position they advocate” (Vallone, Ross, and Lepper 1985: 584) – has consistently been demonstrated in empirical research (see meta-analysis by Hansen and Kim 2011). The extent of the effect is larger if recipients attach greater importance to the topic but still emerges when importance is relatively low (Hansen and Kim 2011). The original hostile media effect research (Vallone, Ross, and Lepper 1985) assumed that news coverage is balanced. Work on the relative hostile media perception (Gunther et al. 2001) extends the original idea but applies it to news that is slanted in favor of or against a particular issue. When supporters and opponents of a given issue perceive bias in the same direction (i.e., leaning toward one side), but each group perceives coverage as significantly more unfavorable to their own position relative to those in the other group, a relative hostile media effect occurs. In other words, issue partisans perceive less bias in news coverage slanted to support their view than their opponents on the other side of the issue. For example, the relative hostile media effect suggests that liberals and conservatives would

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both perceive Fox News as conservatively-slanted news coverage biased against liberals, but conservatives would see it as less biased than liberals would (Coe et al. 2008). Thus, recipients are more likely to identify bias in news coverage when it does not converge with their political perspective. Interestingly, then, whereas the implication of the original hostile media effect is a partisan public perceiving bias where none is present and thus potentially rejecting useful information, the relative hostile media effect suggests that partisans fail to fully recognize bias in news that is biased, in instances when that bias is congruent with their views. Yet some evidence suggests that the hostile media effect may be an artifact resulting from forced-exposure research settings. The effect may vanish when recipients select to read news reports – in other words, partisans tend to find bias in content they are forced to read, whereas they perceive it as more neutral if they have selected the article themselves (Goldman and Mutz 2011; Mende 2008). More research is needed to examine the hostile media effect in a natural media use context that allows for selective exposure. Similarly, patterns of biased, motivated reasoning about political matters (e.g., Druckman and Bolsen 2011) may depend on forced-exposure conditions or at least differ in contexts allowing for selectivity (Meffert et al. 2006) (see also the chapter by Tsfati).

6 Consequences of selective exposure 6.1 Normative and methodological concerns Selective exposure and the information processing that follows it have important consequences for political behavior at both the individual and social level. Many authors have warned that confirmation bias in the selective consumption of political information may polarize political factions, decrease tolerance and deliberation, and prevent well-informed attitude formation or change (Bennett and Iyengar 2008; Mutz 2002; Sunstein 2001). However, there are little data on these effects of selective exposure. Much of what is available is drawn from studies of interpersonal communication discussion rather than mediated communication, or is hindered by conceptual and methodological issues (see discussion by Stroud 2010) (see also the chapter by Boomgarden). Perhaps the biggest methodological problem in trying to uncover effects of selective exposure is the use of cross-sectional data and other designs that preclude causal judgments. Many of the consequences of selective exposure like political attitudes or polarization are also antecedents of selective exposure, which complicates causal analysis even further. Another challenge is that, by its very nature, selective exposure is not a behavior that can be manipulated and randomly assigned in the lab. Finally, many studies are not able to draw general conclusions due to a focus on a single political topic or single political message (e.g., Paletz et al. 1972).

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Research has begun to surmount these methodological challenges, measuring changes in the effect of selective exposure on attitudes and polarization over time (e.g., Stroud 2010). Continued work along these lines is needed, as is research that identifies the mechanisms through which selective exposure impacts political outcomes. For example, the accessibility of attitudes and the self-concept show promise in explaining how selective exposure reinforces political beliefs and behavior (compare Fazio and Williams 1986).

6.2 Selective exposure and attitude accessibility Attitude accessibility, as indicated by latency to an attitude response task, indicates how much an attitude will determine perception and behavior regarding the attitude object (Fazio and Williams 1986). Because the attitudinal effect of selective exposure is one of attitude reinforcement rather than change, measures of attitude accessibility may offer more value in detecting effects than explicit measures of attitude. In short-term or experimental studies, latent response measures offer a more fine-grained measure of attitude strength that can detect the incremental changes involved in attitude reinforcement (Fazio 1990; 1995). Exposure to attitude-consistent messages reinforces existing political attitudes and the political self, perhaps by activating pre-existing cognitive constructs, a process known as priming (Roskos-Ewoldsen, Roskos-Ewoldsen, and Carpentier 2009). Although priming activates cognitions for a very short period of time, repeated priming of a construct may lead to increased chronic accessibility, which can lead to lasting changes in cognitive structures and information processing. By engaging in attitude-consistent selective exposure, message recipients are priming their existing beliefs and values, increasing attitude accessibility. Likewise, exposure to attitude-discrepant information should have the potential to weaken attitudes and their subsequent accessibility (see also the chapter by Arendt and Matthes). Research utilizing measures of attitude accessibility before and after opportunities to engage in selective exposure has shown that consuming attitude-consistent messages did increase attitude accessibility (Knobloch-Westerwick and Meng 2011; Knobloch-Westerwick 2012; Westerwick, Kleinman, and Knobloch-Westerwick 2013). Further, source credibility moderated the effect of selective exposure on increased attitude accessibility (Westerwick, Kleinman, and Knobloch-Westerwick 2013). However, attitudinal-discrepant exposure during the study did not have a consistent effect on attitude accessibility. Certainly there are other barriers to changes in attitude and attitude strength beyond exercising selectivity. The persuasion literature demonstrates the ways in which message recipients, for example, generate counterarguments (Eagly et al. 1999; Edwards and Smith 1996). Attitude-discrepant messages may also be processed differently, as selective exposure research has repeatedly suggested that although individuals approach attitude-

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consistent messages, they do not always have the same drive to avoid attitudediscrepant messages (e.g., Frey 1986; Garrett 2009b), especially when informational utility is a factor (e.g., Hart et al. 2009) (Figure 2).

6.3 Selective exposure and partisanship accessibility Just as attitudes and their accessibility elucidate the nature of selective exposure’s effects, so too does the notion of self-concept and its accessibility. “[I]ndividuals with highly accessible attitudes are more likely to act in attitude-consistent ways (…), and individuals with highly accessible self-concept content are more likely to act in ways consistent with that self-concept content” (Wheeler, DeMarree, and Petty 2007: 246). Like an attitude, a self-concept is a cognitive schema, but one that organizes and guides the processing of information related to the self (e.g., Markus 1977) with important implications: “these schemata function as selective mechanisms which determine whether information is attended to, how it is structured, how much importance is attached to it, and what happens to it subsequently” (Markus 1977: 64). Specific to thoughts and behavior about politics, the individual’s partisanship is a self-concept regarding their identification with a political party or ideology (e.g., Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet 1944). Self-concepts play a role in information processing, so of course the partisanship self-concept may play into selective exposure and its impact on the individual’s political information processing and behavior. The partisan self-concept may act as a central cognitive schema and govern political information processing in general. The accessibility of the partisan self-concept also plays a role in the likelihood of political behavior like voting (Fazio and Williams 1986). Once again, accessibility measures can capture changes in the strength of partisanship as an attitude about the self. Partisanship can be thought of as the essence of the individual’s political attitudes and a framework for organizing them. Therefore, in addition to the reinforcing influence of selective exposure to attitude-consistent messages on political attitudes through priming, this activation of existing political constructs should also increase the accessibility of the political self-concept. Partisanship should be reinforced, with the effect of selective exposure mediated by attitude reinforcement. In fact, findings show that selective exposure does strengthen the accessibility of existing political self-concepts, reinforcing partisanship (Knobloch-Westerwick and Meng 2011; Knobloch-Westerwick 2012) (Figure 2).

7 Conclusions In a media-saturated society, citizens obtain much of their politically relevant information from the media. Given the enormous diversity of outlets and messages

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available, some exposure to political content will occur incidentally or be motivated by a broad political interest; yet this exposure will inevitably involve selectivity. Selective exposure to political messages has been found to be governed by attitude importance and a bias toward messages that confirm pre-existing attitudes, even though informational utility may under certain circumstances override this confirmation bias – for instance, when preparing for likely change as consequence of an upcoming election. The Internet age has brought unprecedented easy access to a great diversity of messages and sources, which highlights the importance of selectivity as well as credibility. Many of the available online sources may be perceived as low in credibility and nonetheless attract exposure, which may appear counterintuitive. First research into the interplay of the aforementioned factors yielded that attitude importance, attitude consistency, and credibility perceptions affect selective exposure, which in turn also affected accessibility of attitudes and of partisanship. These accessibility impacts are thought to capture reinforcement effects from selective exposure. From a normative perspective, the ultimate role of selective exposure can be debated (e.g., Knobloch-Westerwick and Johnson 2012) – on the one hand, citizens should encounter a diversity of views on a given topic in a democratic discourse, while on the other hand, ongoing exposure to conflicting viewpoints may paralyze political engagement.

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Section VII: Effects on citizens

Claes H. de Vreese and Judith Möller

27 Communication and political socialization Abstract: This paper reviews research on the role of communication in political socialization. Starting from a basic definition the impact of different agents (family, peers, school, mass media) and communicative processes (interpersonal vs. mass communication) on various outcomes of political socialization (i.e. political knowledge, norms and values, attitudes, participation) is discussed. It is argued that research has amply demonstrated the role of media and communication as agents of socialization. However, the paper highlights that changes in parental generations, the media landscape, and in adolescents themselves provide good reason to revisit questions of how communication impacts how adolescents develop into citizens in democratic societies. Finally, the chapter addresses several aspects that researchers should consider in their future work on political socialization. Key Words: political socialization, agents of socialization, political talk, knowledge, norms and values, attitudes, participation

1 Introduction Political socialization research has a long history, primarily in political science. In a nutshell, research in this area has been concerned with the processes and mechanisms that create, define, and maintain democratic principles and institutions. In 1959, Hyman published Political Socialization and his definition of socialization as an individual’s “learning of social patterns corresponding to his societal position as mediated through various agencies of society” (p. 25) has been central in much of the scholarship in the field. It shares a great deal of overlap with Sigel’s (1965) definition of political socialization as “the process by which persons learn to adopt the norms, values, attitudes, and behaviors accepted and practiced by the ongoing (political) system” (p. 1). Concerns about declining political engagement and the negative implications for the future of democracies have sparked a research interest in political socialization spanning decades (e.g., Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995). Sapiro (2004) provides a comprehensive overview of political socialization research. She documents the rise of the research field and the way it has branched off in different directions. Jennings (2007) notes that while the evolution and development of the field of political socialization research has taken different directions, it has not been out of the research focus for any significant amount of time. Interestingly, and perhaps disappointing from the viewpoint of political communication research, the overview by Sapiro (2004) does not even mention the

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words media or communication. However, given the importance of media in young citizens’ lives there are good reasons to include the media in theorizing about the political socialization in children and adolescents. According to 2010 data of the European Social Survey 93 percent of 15 to 19 year old Europeans use the Internet on a daily basis and 95 percent of 15 to 19 year old Europeans watch TV every day. In total, children aged 8 to 18 spend over seven hours every day using the media (Rideout, Foehr, and Roberts 2010). With the abundance of media effects research that has shown that media and communication can affect, for example, political knowledge, satisfaction with democracy, perceptions of politics, and the evaluation of political candidates – all outcome variables that are of relevance to processes of political socialization – there is good reason to look at media and communication (see also the other chapters in this section). In Sherrod, Torney-Purta, and Flanagan’s (2009) comprehensive Handbook of Research on Civic Engagement in Youth, however, two chapters authored by Shah and McLeod and colleagues from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Bennett and colleagues from the University of Washington, Seattle are included. In this chapter we map the development and key issues in political socialization research while bringing in and putting central to this endeavor the work focusing on communication in political socialization. The chapter proceeds with an overview of the key agents of political socialization. It then zooms in on the communicative processes in socialization and it reviews key findings with respect to different outcome variables. At the end, we look ahead to new pertinent research questions as a result of changes in key socializing agents and the media landscape.

2 Conceptualizing political socialization Political socialization is a life-long process in which political norms, beliefs, attitudes and behaviors are transmitted through agents (Sears and Levy 2003). The most important agents of political socialization are family, educational system, peers, and mass media, all of which will be discussed in detail below. Broadly speaking, transmission through agents happens in two ways: through learning from example and through providing information about the political world. It is important to note that this is not an automatic process. Individuals are active participants in their own socialization by actively seeking out specific information and negotiating its meaning. Agents contribute to socialization during the whole life course, but in varying degree. Parental influence is most prominent from early childhood to adolescence. When children become teenagers, they start to challenge the views of their parents and rely on peers to reinforce either their views on politics or open up new perspectives. The influence of school and teachers is obviously limited to the time children and young adults spend in the educational system. Media, as an agent of

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Fig. 1: The role of communication in the process of political socialization.

socialization, already plays a role during childhood, when children encounter political actors on the television screen (Connell 1971). However, at this time its influence is minor compared to the influence of the family. As children grow into adulthood and leave their parental home, media gain importance as information source and means to feel connected with the world (Shah 2008). In the process of political socialization talking about politics is of key relevance. During conversation about politics with family members, friends, class mates or co-workers information about politics is spread, views on politics reinforced or challenged, and political information is framed and contextualized (see also the chapters by Wolling and Emmer and by Boomgarden). Given the importance of political communication in the socialization process, McLeod et al. (2010) suggest seeing political communication as a crucial civic competence. During the process of political socialization children need to learn a set of media skills needed to engage in politics in the long run: “surveillance of the environment, awareness of current events, information search skills; understanding the difference between evidence and inference; distinctions among news, editorial, and public relations or advertising content; other information-processing strategies; and making cognitive connections between issues that yield more complex issue understanding processes” (McLeod et al. 2010: 368). Parents, school, peers, but also the media itself are important in the development of these skills (Figure 1)

3 Agents of political socialization 3.1 Family, peers, and school Political socialization research has – from the early studies onwards – put a premium on the role of the family. In the words of Jennings (2007: 38): “By inference

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it was assumed that the family, mainly parents, played a predominant role given the child’s easy and prolonged exposure to the family on the one hand, and the relative degree of continuity observed in political cultures on the other hand”. In many ways political socialization was seen as something a child was born into and the understanding of the process relied on a mix between civic development and developmental theories in addition to theoretical grounding stemming from social learning theories and the social milieu literature (Wilkenfeld, Lauckhardt, and Torney-Purta 2009). The research focused on a rather top-down approach to socialization with a very passive conception of children as recipients of socialization. The key assumption was that individuals’ political beliefs and attitudes are socialized from especially parents by absorbing and assimilating political messages from the immediate environment. Research indeed showed that adolescents often hold attitudes that are similar to those of their parents, especially when the parents are politically active (Jennings 2002; Metzger and Smetana 2009). Another key agent and place where children develop civic engagement and political beliefs is the educational system. As noted by Astuto and Ruck (2009: 257) “early classrooms are powerful socializing agents”. Schools and classrooms being part of a child’s proximal influences, the impact is considerable since it is the first “template of society” for children. Based on US research, Flanagan et al. (2009: 307) concluded that schools are “the institution with the most universal mandate for incorporating younger generations of Americans into the polity”. They mention specific curricular components in addition to basic skills such as reading, writing, and maths, enabling participation in society. Specific activities such as mock trials and elections are highlighted for their deliberative potential, contributing to civic attitudes (Kahne and Westheimer 2003). And citizenship education may change students’ attitudes and skills and their intention to participate in civic activities later (Torney-Putra et al. 2008). Finally, research has focused on the importance and positive impact of a participatory school culture for later citizenship outcomes (Flanagan et al. 1999; Torney-Purta et al. 2008). In political socialization research, some of the early studies in the United States relied on data from school-age children (Easton and Dennis 1969) and there was a focus on the role of childhood vis-à-vis socialization (see also Sapiro 2004). But soon the focus changed towards adolescence and the transitional period between adolescence and early adulthood. Jennings and Niemi’s (1981) work following high school students into early adulthood is a good example of this research. The period is important to study since family and educational influences decrease during these years. As Finlay et al. (2009: 278) conclude “civic engagement in adolescence is associated with a range of positive outcomes in adulthood (…) Adolescence and young adulthood are ideal times to develop civic skills and competencies, and participation in organizations may help establish social networks where members are then recruited into political activities.” In research on political socialization in adolescence there has been a focus on the impact of peers. This has been investigated by looking at the peer network’s

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socio-demographic composition and processes of, for example, reinforcement taking place depending on the degree of homogeneity of the network. The impact of peers is generally underscored, but McLeod (2000) points out we can only speculate if the composition of a peer network has the same ramifications for adolescents we know it has for adults where the heterogeneity can affect, for example, both media use and the frequency of political issue discussion (see also the chapter by Boomgarden). Extant research on the key agents of political socialization has also shown the interconnected nature of the relationships. However, while this interconnected and reciprocal influence is often implicitly part of the research, many empirical studies have focused on one of the agents in particular. In addition to the key agents, scholars have also pointed to the relevance of key events and interventions. Experiences such as community service on the one hand and dramatic changes or societal processes of democratization on the other can significantly affect and boost political socialization (Jennings 2007). The latter, dramatic changes and key events, relate directly to the role of the media and communication since most individuals may not have direct experiences with such changes and extant research has shown the crucial role played by the media in shaping public perceptions (see the following chapters in this section).

3.2 Media As outlined above, media and communication have been largely absent from much of the mainstream political socialization research outside communication science. Today this seems particularly surprising given that media consumption has become one of the key activities of humans in general and of adolescents in particular. Research in political communication on political socialization has engaged directly with several of the studies discussed above. The reverse has been much less the case. In this uphill struggle, as one of the pioneers in the field, Steve Chaffee, summarizes that most attempts have been concerned with merely documenting the importance of mass media as agents of socialization of young people (Chaffee and Yang 1990). As a consequence, media and communication were under-theorized in much of the early work. The main objective was to point to information which would allow young people to expand extant knowledge and little attention was paid to the conditionalities of this role or the processes involved (McLeod 2000). Jack McLeod and Steve Chaffee undertook a pioneering effort in investigating the role of media and interpersonal communication in socialization processes. Using samples of adolescents and their parents, they found a strong relationship in particular between newspaper reading and political knowledge (Chaffee et al. 1979; McLeod and Brown 1979).

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Taking a step back from these historical origins of political communication research and political socialization, we observe that communication and media use is a multi-faced factor in political socialization research. In models of the political socialization use of public affairs media has been conceptualized and tested as classic agents of socialization (e.g., Esser and de Vreese 2007; Hart 2009; Hively and Eveland 2009), and as mediator of the influence of traditional agents family, school, and peers. In studies that treat media as a mediating agent, media use is regarded to be determined by social-cultural background variables, which, in turn affect the development of political attitudes, political knowledge and political participation (Huntemann and Morgan 2001; Shah, McLeod, and Yoon 2001). A number of studies has been devoted to the varying influence of different media on political socialization. Television, as a popular channel among children and adolescents, plays an important role, especially during childhood. At a young age television is the bridge to the political world. On the TV screen abstract concepts of leadership and governance become concrete (Connell 1971). However, television’s influence on political socialization diminishes during adolescence. During young adulthood reading newspaper becomes the single most important source of media influence on political participation (Chaffee and Tims 1982; Esser and de Vreese 2007). From this perspective, the present decline in young readership of newspapers raises serious concerns about the future of democracy. However, this is not the full story, as online media might be able to fill some of the void left by newspapers. For the politically engaged, the Internet offers plentiful opportunities to seek information without the limitations traditional news media (Bakker and de Vreese 2011). It also provides opportunities to engage instantly, e.g., by signing an online petition or joining a cause online. Moreover, there are abundant opportunities to discuss politics in the context of recent events. That means that in this interactive environment news use and political engagement overlap. Recent empirical evidence coherently shows a positive relationship of online news media use and political participation among the young generation (Shah et al. 2005) (see also the chapter by Wolling and Emmer and by Becker and Scheufele).

4 Communicative processes in political socialization 4.1 Media use While research on political socialization by political communication scholars has amply demonstrated the role of media and communication as an agent of socialization, we may ask how media use contributes to participation and political attitudes. As political socialization is a life-long process and using media is part of our daily

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lives, the influence of media on political socialization is best understood as a cumulative effect of a series of distinct episodes of media use. During these episodes individuals can be influenced by media content in their knowledge about politics as well as their attitudes towards the political world. Broadly speaking, at least three causal mechanisms have been proposed that are based on different strands of research (Lerner and Steinberg 2004): Cultivation theory, social cognitive theory, and media effects on political knowledge gains. According to classic cultivation theory, mass media paint a darker picture of the world than reality would demand. Being exposed to a negatively biased portrayal of reality, heavy users of media, slowly develop the idea that the world is a mean place and therefore retreat from public life (Gerbner et al. 1986). As cultivation theory developed it became clear that this notion only holds for specific types of media content, most prominently entertainment content (Holtz-Bacha 1990). In fact, there is recent empirical proof that mean world cultivation theory is relevant for political socialization when it comes to entertainment and reality television, (Shah et al. 2001) (see also the chapters by Arendt and Matthes, by Moy, Johnson and Bartel and by Holbert, Hill and Leee). As entertainment content is popular among adolescent media users these effects are important, however, the size of the effect is rather small. That means that watching entertainment programs does not necessarily lead to political alienation, but rather a small tendency to retreat from the political world. News content, on the other hand is coherently found to have a positive impact on political mobilization (Norris 2003). Keeping in mind that surveillance of the environment and awareness of current events are competences, essentially needed to participate in politics, it is evident that effects of news media use on political participation ought to be positive. More recent perspectives on cultivation theory have a broader conception of cultivation. In this view the portrayal of reality in the media is reflected in the perception of reality of media users. This stresses the key role media can play in shaping the understanding of politics among media users (see also the chapter by Arendt and Matthes). The amount of time spent with media is also a relevant perspective. According to Putnam (2000) the younger generations lack time to interact in public and build social capital as they spend more time using media than all generations before them. Kraut et al. (1998) extend this argument to the Internet, claiming that Internet use erodes communication with friends and family. However, the time budget argument – like cultivation theory –, disregards the fact that there is (also) media content which inspires, educates, and stimulates political engagement. This particularly holds for new media public affairs content, which has been proven to stimulate participation among young people (Bakker and de Vreese 2011; Lee, Shah, and McLeod 2013). Social cognitive theory is rooted in the work of Bandura (1976). According to this theory individuals learn by observing the actions of a role model. During

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childhood children observe politics and politicians – most prominently the head of state – in the mass media and learn what is done and not done in politics (norms) as well as understand the workings of the system (cognitions). At a young age children are unable to distinguish between the images they see on TV and reality, but they become increasingly aware of the difference growing into adolescence (Cohen, Adoni, and Drori 1983). Therefore television is the bridge to the political world that forms the bases for further development of political norms and values during adolescence (see Chaffee and Kanihan 1997). Yet, to our knowledge the specifics of the influence through observation of mediated political content is still limited and needs further research. The third mechanism through which mass media contributes to political socialization are media effects on political knowledge gains. According to this approach the media provide information about politics that teaches adolescents about the political world. As a consequence political knowledge rises and they become enabled and motivated to engage in politics. To date, the number of empirical studies that test this mechanism is limited and mostly experimental in nature (Clifford, Gunter, and MacAleer 1995; Drew and Reese 1984). However, the findings are counter-intuitive. These and other experimental studies conducted among adult audiences (e.g., Gunter 1987) mostly find that information effects of news are in fact rather low. Most participants could not remember the majority of news item not to mention details of the news outlets they had been exposed to. Yet, a long term panel study by Chaffee and McLeod does find a significant increase in political knowledge among adolescent news media users (Chaffee and Kanihan 1997) (see also the chapter by Arendt and Matthes). There are two explanations that can clarify the reason why short term effects and long term effects of exposure to news media on political knowledge among adolescents are so different. Graber (1997) suggests that news users scan the news and select to process only the information which is new and relevant to them, neglecting the majority of information being offered to them. As most of the news is repetition, this is a sensible approach to “save” cognitive resources. A second explanation is that experimental studies lack to include an important factor in the processing of political information which is interpersonal communication or political talk. During conversations with family, peers, and colleagues adolescents process and evaluate information obtained through mass media. Political talk is essential for building long term memory of information (see below). It is important to note that it may not be exposure to media itself that triggers political knowledge gains or participation, but that attentive media use is crucial (Chaffee and Yang 1990). The more attentive adolescents follow the news, the higher are their gains in political knowledge. This becomes especially clear in panel studies when socio structural variables are controlled (Chaffee and Schleuder 1986). If socio-structural variables such as education are added to the equation, attentive media use is best considered to be a mediator, thus channeling

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the effects of background variables on the dependent variables. In fact, McLeod et al. (2010) find that 59 percent of the effects of socio-structural variables on political knowledge is mediated by news attention, for campaign participation the share of the effects that is mediated by news attention is even higher.

4.2 Political talk The process of media influence is best understood if interpersonal communication about politics is added to the equation. We have established that attentive media use mediates an important part of the effect of key socializing agents (family, school, and peers) and background variables such as education or social class on the dependent variables. This mediated influence, however, is itself mediated by interpersonal communication (Lee et al. 2013; Shah, McLeod, and Lee 2009) (see also the chapters by Boomgarden and by Wolling and Emmer). In day-to-day conversations about politics with parents, peers, and teachers, information about politics, which was obtained through mass media earlier, is processed. During these conservations meaning is created. It is important to note, that this implies that adolescents are active participants in their own political socialization. Hence, both media and interpersonal political communication, which could also take place online, are channeling the influence of the socio-cultural background of an adolescent. As the pioneer study of Chaffee, McLeod, and Atkin (1971) clarified, a great share of the explanatory power of socio-structural variables is due to a particular family communication patterns. Chaffee and his colleagues conceptualize family as a “microcosm in which the child learns communication roles that can be carried into the large world beyond the home” (Chaffee and Yang 1990: 144). In their study they discovered how varying forms of family communication affected children’s media use, political knowledge and school activities (Chaffee et al. 1979; McLeod and Brown 1979). They introduced the idea of concept orientation in family communication focused on “exposing the child to controversial issues and encouraging her or him to express ideas.” This was contrasted with a socio-orientation reflecting a “parental stress on avoidance of interpersonal conflict and deference to authority” (McLeod 2000: 47). A key conclusion was that adolescents from families high on concept orientation (and low on socio-orientation) were most interested in public affairs media content and had higher civics knowledge. Children who are encouraged to seek information and discuss politics in a controversial manner will continue to be interested and engaged in politics, those who are discouraged from participating in adult conversations remain distant to the political world. In sum, political talk, in its different conceptions, is both an antecedent of political socialization processes as well as a consequence and moderator of the effects of media exposure and attention.

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5 Outcomes: Norms and values, attitudes, behavior, and political knowledge So far we have treated the outcome of political socialization processes rather in the abstract by referring to ‘political and civic attitudes and behavior’ in general. However, as it becomes clear from the definition of political socialization by Sigel (1965) introduced earlier, there are in fact at least four groups of outcome variables in political socialization research: “norms, values, attitudes, and behaviors accepted and practiced by the ongoing (political) system” (p. 1). Additionally, political knowledge is commonly investigated in political socialization research, especially when media effects are being studied. Norms and values. From a system persistence perspective it is important that young citizens develop a positive attitude towards the political system they live in accompanied by a general sense of trust in its institutions and leaders. Research by Sears (1975) has demonstrated that this positive sentiment is developed early in life. Young children mostly show a naïve, uncritical positive affect towards the state and its symbols. As children grow into adolescence and their cognitive abilities develop the general positive sentiment is replaced by a more complex set of norms and values. These include democratic values like political efficacy, political and social trust, and civic norms like civic duty (Delli Carpini 2004). The development of those norms and values is influenced by a number of background variables, most prominently ethnic background, religion, and neighborhood context, parents and civic education in school (Gimpel, Lay, and Schuknecht 2003; Sears and Levy 2003). Political attitudes. Political attitudes are long-term perspectives on the political world like ones political ideological orientation and partisanship. Like civic norms and values they are acquired early in life, though not necessarily stable during the life course (Sears and Levy 2003). Again, family transmission is a very influential source in the development of political attitudes (Jennings and Niemi 1974), yet there are other noteworthy influences. A number of them are vivid political events, peers and civic education at school and the media. Because political attitudes are developed early in life, it is hard to disentangle media effects from other sources of influences, so there are only a handful of studies describing these processes. For example, Byrne (1969) stated that viewing TV news is associated with favorable views on the government in children and adolescents and Van Deth, Abendschön, and Vollmar (2011) note that news use during childhood is related to higher issue awareness and political awareness. Political knowledge. Knowledge about the workings of the political system (structural political knowledge) as well as recent developments in the political world and current political staff (factual political knowledge) is essential to participate in a democracy in a meaningful way (Galston 2001). The importance of civic education in school in the acquisition of political knowledge cannot be stressed

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enough, but media also contribute in a significant way. Even young children who are regular users of news media have a better understanding of basic concepts of democratic values like free speech than those with little access to media (Pingree 1983). The positive relationship between political knowledge and public affairs media use in children and adolescents is affirmed by research by Chaffee and Kanihan (1997), and Torney-Purta, Schwille, and Amadeo (1999). Political behavior. Arguably one of the most commonly investigated outcome variable in political socialization research is actual political behavior. There are two reasons for this interest in behavior, one is substantial and the other methodological: At least some forms of political behavior of citizens directly influences decision making in democracies and measuring behavior is more reliable than measuring attitudes or values. Although political socialization research mostly takes place in a period in which adolescents have not reached voting age yet and a measurement of the wellestablished turnout variable is therefore foreclosed, there are plentiful ways to measure political participation among adolescents. In the pivotal study by Hess and Torney (1967) asked high school students whether they had “given out handbills for a candidate at election time, worn buttons for one or another candidate, talked with your friends about politics and public events, talked with your parents about politics and current events, taken sides in elections for one or another candidate for public office” (p. 10). This collection of political behaviors already shows that there is a wide range of political behavior of adolescents to investigate: conventional or citizen-oriented political behavior like engaging in a political campaign, unconventional or cause-oriented political behavior, like signing petitions, demonstrating or even spraying political messages on subway walls. In the past two decades two more sets of political behaviors became virulent: political consumerism (buying or refraining from buying certain products for political or social reasons) (Shah et al. 2007) and online political activism (de Vreese 2007). These examples corroborate what we can see as a broadening conceptualization of what is considered relevant political behavior in recent research. With regard to media effects it is important to note that the causal relationship between news media use and participation is reciprocal, sometimes in the form of a reinforcing spiral (Slater 2007). Keeping that in mind, most of the effects of news media use on political participation of adolescents are positive.

6 Conclusion and directions for future research Research on political socialization has a history dating back to at least the 1950s. In political communication research, the topic really hit the agenda in the 1970s, pioneered by Steve Chaffee and Jack McLeod. A recent communication centered research agenda is developing (Lee et al. 2013; McLeod et al. 2010; Shah et al.

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2009) with first results showing how the impact of key socializing agents such as peers and school influences are often indirect, mediated by informational use of media and subsequent discussion of politics with peers, family members and beyond. To further push a next generation of political socialization research several issues are at the top of the agenda: Most of the summary and observations so far have been made as if the key actors involved are static and time invariant. Obviously this is not the case. We highlight three ongoing changes that are of relevance: changes in the parental generations, changes in the media landscape, and changes in adolescents. First, members of the parental generation are changing. In one of the hay day periods of political socialization research in the US, the parental generation was comprised of those who had experienced the depression of the 1930s, World War II and the immediate post war cohort. This “long civic generation” (Putnam 2000) was given great prominence in the socialization process. In democracies beyond the US, this generation was characterized by a strong degree of civic commitment, political participation, and electoral stability (Dalton 2002). Today, the picture is much more nuanced. In the case of the Netherlands, for example, turnout at elections has remained high, but the volatility (both in terms of the share of voters who change parties between elections and the share of voters making up their mind late in the campaign compared to long before a campaign) has increased tremendously (Mair 2000). In other countries turnout has gone down while electoral volatility has not increased much (Dalton 2002). Membership of political parties is decreasing, but engagement in specific issue movements is increasing. The key point here is that the role of the family in political socialization processes is subject to change and that today’s parents are themselves to a much stronger degree floating voters, providing them with a different role as one of the key agents of political socialization. Second, the media landscape of today is fundamentally different from 40 or even 20 years ago. This dramatic change in the landscape may explain, in hindsight, the absence of media and communication from the political socialization literature prior to 1970 and even beyond that in political science. The media landscape of that time was much less diverse with only few television channels being available and a stable newspaper readership. Today’s media landscape is profoundly diverse and omnipresent. On the one hand, there has never before been as much political information available (Aalberg et al. 2010; Esser et al. 2012), but on the other hand it has never been easier to avoid political information in the media altogether (Prior 2007). At the same time important discussions take place about the changes in the contents and packaging of political information (e.g., van Zoonen 2005). The potential of new, primarily online media, for political socialization is evident (e.g., Bakker and de Vreese 2011; Lee et al. 2013) but the evidence in terms of actual use and consequences for political purposes is still only emerging and is far from conclusive.

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Third, one may contend that adolescents themselves are changing. Adolescents of the 1990s and 2000s in many western democracies have, for example, (with important economics ups and downs) experienced a high degree of prosperity and have lived in stable democracies. For the current generation of adolescents there may be less economic guarantees and research has suggested that socialization and mobilization processes are different when the conditions are more conducive to “getting in action”. While this perspective is obviously a Western world perspective, it is important to note that scholars have pointed to instances of rejuvenated youth culture and engagement (e.g., around the 2008 US elections). It remains yet to be seen, however, if these recent increases in youth political activity are isolated examples or part of a trend. Finally, as an extension, of the second point, the media use of today’s adolescents is very different from that of an adolescent in say 1980. Young people are online almost 24/7, with an opportunity to do anything from avoiding politics altogether to consuming and contributing to political communication non-stop. Suffice to say, that adolescents themselves are also subject to change in our understanding of political socialization. For political communication socialization research here are some points to consider: Research should broaden the perspective with respect to the relevant outcome variables. Political socialization is about much more than voting and also about democratic norms, reflective and critical evaluations of power holders, knowledge, and alternative forms of political participation. Research should interact and integrate knowledge from political science on traditional socializers and political institutions, from psychology on developmental stages of young adults and their degree of impressionability, and from communication science on the roles of different media contents, the mediating role of interpersonal communication, and the moderating role of individual level characteristics. Research should take as a starting point in its designs that socialization is a process. The study by Lee and colleagues on the 2008 US elections is an excellent example of the study of communication effects. However, even more ambitious projects such an ongoing six year project in Sweden including both adolescents, peers, and parents, and spanning six panel survey waves (Amnå et al. 2009) will become important milestones. Researchers should welcome the expected influx of research on the “left hand side” of political socialization models. Recent work on political behavior has turned to the importance of genetics and personality traits, for example, in explaining behavior and political preferences (e.g., Hatemi et al. 2009). This research lends itself well for being integrated with work on situational factors and the impact of, for example, media and new information, especially in an era where media choice is abundant. The impact of mediated and interpersonal communication in processes of political socialization is by no means a new topic on the scholarly agenda. How-

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ever, given recent changes in both the media landscape and in the composition of key socializing agents such as parents and peers there are very good reasons to revisit questions of how communication impacts how adolescents develop into citizens in democratic societies.

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Shah, Dhavan V., Jack M. McLeod and So-Hyang Yoon. 2001. Communication, context, and community – An exploration of print, broadcast, and Internet influences. Communication Research 28(4): 464–506. Sigel, Roberta S. 1965. Political Socialization: Its Role in the Political Process. Washington, D.C.: American Academy of Political and Social Science. Slater, Michael D. 2007. Reinforcing spirals: The mutual influence of media selectivity and media effects and their impact on individual behavior and social identity. Communication Theory 17(3): 281–303. Torney-Purta, Judith, Britt Wilkenfeld and Carolyn Barber. 2008. How adolescents in 27 countries understand, support and practice human rights. Journal of Social Issues 6: 857–880. Torney-Purta, Judith, John Schwille and Jo-Ann Amadeo (eds.). 1999. Civic Education across Countries: Twenty-Four National Case Studies from the IEA Civic Education Project. Amsterdam: International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement. van Deth, Jan W., Simone Abendschön and Meike Vollmar. 2011. Children and politics: An empirical reassessment of early political socialization. Political Psychology 32(1): 147–174. Verba, Sidney, Kay L. Schlozman and Henry E. Brady. 1995. Voice and Equality. Civic Voluntarism in American Politics. London: Harvard University Press. de Vreese, Claes H. 2007. Digital Renaissance: Young consumer and citizen. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 611: 207–216. Wilkenfeld, Britt, James Lauckhardt and Judith Torney-Purta. 2009. The relation between developmental theory and measures of civic engagement in research on adolescents. In: Lonnie R. Sherrod, Judith Torney-Purta and Constance A. Flanagan (eds.), Handbook of Civic Engagement in Youth, 363–392. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley and Sons.

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28 Cognitive effects of political mass media Abstract: This chapter reviews the major lines of research on five prominent concepts of political communication research linked to the cognitive effects of political mass media: Knowledge gains and gaps, cultivation, agenda setting, priming, and framing. Basic ideas, typical methodologies, key findings and the cognitive processes behind the concepts are discussed in detail, common conceptual roots are identified, and key methodological challenges are highlighted. Finally, some of the overlaps and differences between the approaches are discussed in order to take a step toward a more integrative and coherent view of cognitive media effects in political communication. The chapter argues that both empirical and theoretical advances are needed to get to a better and less fragmented understanding of cognitive media effects in political communication. Key Words: cultivation, agenda-setting, knowledge gain, knowledge gap, priming, framing, accessibility, availability

1 Introduction According to normative conceptions of democratic citizenship, citizens should be capable of understanding the social and political world that surrounds them. They should be able to decide what is important and what is not, activate concepts or knowledge structures to come to enlightened conclusions about candidates, issues, and parties, and to know and acknowledge campaign arguments in national and local elections. However, political communication scholarship has frequently observed a huge gap between the ideal democratic citizen and the “real” citizen. A plethora of research has shown that many citizens are illinformed, unlikely to separate important from unimportant campaign arguments, or inconsistent in their opinions, values, and beliefs (see Bennett 1989) (see also the chapters by Kepplinger, by Jandura and Friedrich and Holbert, Hill, and Lee). In political communication research, a number of prominent theories have been developed that help to explain this gap. Most of these theories center on the so called cognitive effects of mass media. Although highly intertwined, cognitive effects are often conceptually separated from attitudinal effects. In the early years of the field, scholars studied various source, message, or receiver characteristics in relation to their impact on citizens’ attitudes (see the chapter by Maurer). The findings of these early studies have pointed to a model of minimal media effects. That is, the conclusion drawn from this research was that audience selectivity and interpersonal influence impede a massive impact of the mass media (see the chap-

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ters by Boomgarden and by Knobloch-Westerwick). As a consequence of this mass media’s “minimal” power to change attitudes, scholars turned their attention to cognitive as opposed to attitudinal effects (McCombs and Shaw 1972). In a nutshell, the notion of cognitive media effects refers to topics that are related to citizens’ “knowledge” or “thinking”. This involves, but is not limited to, people’s real world beliefs, understanding of issues and events, or activated bits of knowledge. Such cognitive effects can have substantial consequences for the formation of judgments, attitudes, or emotions. The cognitive perspective on mass communication was first introduced in the 1970s and 1980s by a number of seminal papers (e.g., Gerbner and Gross 1976; Iyengar and Kinder 1987; McCombs and Shaw 1972) that stimulated more than 1000 empirical studies in the years to come. It therefore comes as no surprise that cognitive media effect theories are a substantial part of communication research as a scientific discipline these days. In this chapter, we will review the major lines of research on five prominent approaches of political communication research: Knowledge, cultivation, agenda setting, priming, and framing. We will introduce and discuss each of these approaches in detail, identify common conceptual roots, and point to key methodological challenges. Finally, we will discuss some of the overlaps and differences between those approaches in order to take a step toward a more integrative and coherent view of cognitive media effects in political communication.

2 Cognitive effects approaches 2.1 Knowledge gains and gaps 2.1.1 Basic idea The acquisition of new knowledge (knowledge gain) can be seen as one of the most basic media effects phenomena amongst all. If we read newspaper texts, view a television show, or listen to a radio newscast, are we able to remember at least some bits of information. However, research has demonstrated that people typically learn relatively little from mass mediated political news content. For example, Neuman (1976) showed that television viewers could freely recall only approximately 1 out of 20 stories on the evening newscast. People’s knowledge gain is dependent on a number of diverse factors. For instance, one crucial predictor is the motivation to learn. This notion has lots of face validity: If we are interested in the arguments of a political candidate on a specific issue, we may not only expose ourselves to the respective content but also pay more attention to it. In line with this notion, Eveland (2001) has found that surveillance gratifications seeking (i.e., those motivations pertaining to gaining information about one’s environment) increases attention to news media. Attention to news media, in turn, increases elaborative processing. Both of the latter

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variables, attention to news media and elaborative processing, influence political knowledge (for a detailed discussion on elaborative processing, see Petty and Cacioppo 1986). It is important to note that not everyone learns the same things and at the same rate. A prominent approach within communication science is the so called knowledge gap hypothesis: Tichenor, Donohue, and Olien (1970) assumed that “as the infusion of mass media information into a social system increases, segments of the population with higher socioeconomic status tend to acquire information at a faster rate than the lower status segments, so that the gap in knowledge between these segments tends to increase rather than decrease” (p. 159–160). Tichenor, Donohue, and Olien argued that five contributory reasons are responsible for knowledge gaps. First, they assumed that individuals with more formal education have higher reading and comprehension abilities necessary to acquire public affairs knowledge. Second, they argued that individuals who are already better informed are better prepared to understand the information that is reported in the news. Third, based on the notion that people with higher socioeconomic status have a more information-rich social network, it was theorized that the amount of social contact should increase the likelihood of discussions about public affairs topics. This should lead to an increase in knowledge. Fourth, the authors noted that education predicts storage and recall of information. Highereducated individuals store and recall information better. Fifth and finally, there is a consensus that a large share of the news can be found in print media. Highereducated individuals are more likely to use print media. Therefore, the knowledge gap should increase.

2.1.2 Typical methodology There are at least two research perspectives regarding knowledge gain: First, researchers are interested in just documenting if individuals are knowledgeable about a political issue and the extent to which this is the case (i.e., descriptive level). Second, (media effects) researchers are also interested if specific mass-mediated events (e.g., a political campaign over the long-term, a specific late-night comedy) increase political knowledge. The latter can be measured by using surveys as well as experimental methods. The most important variable which has to be measured is knowledge. Thus, researchers have to ask political knowledge-related questions and construct a knowledge measure for further analyses. Knowledge has been operationalized in a number of ways (Wirth 2006): Participants are asked about their factual (who, what, where, and when?) or structural (causes, consequences, or intentions) knowledge on the investigated topics. Such procedures have been criticized because it often remains unclear how these knowledge indicators have been derived. For example, Dervin (1980) argued that the subjective

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component of the knowledge construct should be considered more thoroughly. Thus, researchers (and readers of research studies) should always question the validity of the utilized knowledge measures. Tichenor et al. (1970) suggested two operational methods to test the knowledge gap hypothesis. First, the hypothesis assumes that the acquisition of knowledge of a publicized topic will proceed at a faster rate among individuals with a higher socio-economic status. Therefore, the preferred method is incorporating time as a relevant variable. Second, it is possible to compare the knowledge gaps for different issues (for which media publicity is different) at a given point in time. The knowledge gap hypothesis predicts that the correlation between knowledge and socio-economic status should be stronger for highly publicized topics than for less publicized topics (because of an increase of mass-mediated information). Furthermore, the expectation is that stronger knowledge gaps should be observable for individuals with high compared to low media exposure. When it comes to the operationalization of the central variable “socioeconomic status” (see Wirth 2006), the vast majority of knowledge gap studies has used formal education as a single indicator. This is noteworthy because socioeconomic status is a multidimensional construct for which variables like education, income, occupation, prestige, power, as well as properties can serve as indicators. Finally, the knowledge gap hypothesis can only be tested if there is an increase of mass mediated information over time. Thus, in order for a knowledge gap between lowand high-educated individuals to emerge, the amount of mass mediated information perceived by those groups must increase.

2.1.3 State of the art The acquisition of knowledge from the mass media is generally seen as beneficial and, thus, as a positive media effect. However, it can also be a negative effect: For example, Maurer and Reinemann (2006) investigated the increase in knowledge about economic facts after watching a televised debate among presidential candidates. At first glance, the authors could document a “positive” learning effect: Participants knew more about the topic after watching the debate. However, analyses showed that a lot of information that viewers learned was actually wrong information. This was merely due to candidates’ selective presentation of facts (also see the cultivation approach further down). As a supplement to traditional “political” media content like “news”, people also learn political knowledge from mass-mediated content which is not framed in this traditional sense. For example, Baek and Wojcieszak (2009) found that watching late night comedy increased political knowledge. However, this increase could be documented mainly for inattentive citizens and with regard to rather simpler information (see also the chapters by Moy, Johnson, and Barthel and by Holbert, Hill, and Lee).

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A key factor influencing learning of new mass-mediated political information is the set of existing knowledge structures: It is much easier for an individual to learn new information about a familiar topic (e.g., Shen 2004). Furthermore, important enhancing factors include the ability to process information (e.g., children typically have less ability, Fisch 2000) and emotional involvement (e.g., Newhagen 1998). An important environmental factor which can decrease the learning outcome is distraction (e.g., Pool et al. 2003). The empirical evidence regarding the knowledge gap hypothesis is not as clear as it appears in the original research paper. Because it is a societal level theory and specifies a complex relationship between at least three factors (i.e., socioeconomic status, knowledge, and increase of mass mediated information) it is very difficult to test this hypothesis. Hwang and Jeong (2009) conducted a meta-analysis of forty-six primary studies. They found a positive correlation between education and level of knowledge (r = .28). However, they could not find a difference in the size of the gap (1) over time and (2) between issues of higher and lower publicity (see Gaziano, 2010, for a critical discussion). Based on this meta-analysis, it appears that there are existing knowledge gaps, but there are no increasing knowledge gaps as predicted by the original theory. However, Wirth (2006) suggests to look at the process of the knowledge gap phenomenon. He argues that knowledge gaps are more likely to occur at the early stage of a topic (i.e., when it is introduced to the public). Thus, especially at this early stage, those with a higher socio-economic status are better able to process this information. Future research should therefore more carefully elaborate the conditions under which an increase in knowledge gaps can be observed.

2.1.4 Underlying cognitive processes Lang (2006) assumes that memory performance (e.g., what knowledge a reader learns from specific political mass-mediated content) is the result of how much of the message was encoded, how well the encoded material was stored, and how much of the stored material is retrievable. Therefore, if people encode political information thoroughly, it may be stored better. As a consequence, it is likely that these individuals have more political memories available when building a judgment in a subsequent situation (e.g., during an election). To be more precise, according to Lang (2006), the assumption is that processing resources must be allocated to mass-mediated political information in order for it to be encoded (i.e., to create a mental representation). These resources can be allocated as a result of automatic or controlled processes. One way this is done is through the presence of motivationally relevant stimuli. It is assumed that there are two independent motivational systems: The appetitive system, which evolved to help organism get food and mate to ensure survival and reproduction, and the aversive system. It is

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argued that an increase in negative stimuli in the environment (e.g., crime articles) leads to increased activation in the aversive system. The goal of the aversive system is protection. Thus, potentially negative stimuli need to be identified. Therefore, resources are automatically allocated to encoding. This has relevance for political information because political information often has an intrinsic valence (e.g., financial crisis versus tax reduction), or is often presented within valenced contexts (e.g., immigrants as scientists versus criminals; see below for the framing approach). In the context of political campaigning, for example, research suggests that there are at least two different forms of political ads (for a review see Kaid 1999): First, there are negative political ads (i.e., attack ads) that elicit negative emotions toward candidates, issues, or social groups. Such ads focus on failures, current political problems or negative characteristics of social groups such as foreigners or asylum seekers. Second, there are ads that appeal to positive emotions by creating a calming and benign feeling, for instance, by showing beautiful landscapes, happy citizens or the candidates’ families. Such ads have been found to foster positive emotional states and feelings such as pride, reassurance, trust, optimism or hope (see Arendt, Marquart and Matthes 2013). Needless to say, such valenced political ads might be able to activate the appetitive or the aversive system. Indeed, emotional content and emotional reactions to mass-mediated content have been shown to increase memory performance (e.g., Cahill et al. 1996) (see also the chapter by Schemer).

2.2 Cultivation 2.2.1 Basic idea Cultivation research investigates a mass mediums contribution to the conceptions recipients have of social reality. The basic idea is that “to the extent that viewers see television drama – the foreground of plot or the background of the television world – as realistic, they may derive a wealth of incidental ‘knowledge’” (Gerbner and Gross 1976: 179). Based on the content-analytic findings of Gerbner and Gross (and many subsequent researchers) that the mass-mediated reality is biased and not an accurate representation of the real world, it has been assumed that heavy viewers develop a biased conception of social reality congruent to the one presented on television (= cultivation hypothesis). It was argued that television is most powerful in “cultivating assumptions about which there is little opportunity to learn first-hand, and which are not strongly anchored in other established beliefs and ideologies” (Gerbner and Gross 1976: 191). Although the first cultivation studies investigated solely the consequences of mediated violence, the investigations that followed looked at the cultivation effect of very different topics like political ideology, gender and family roles, health, aging, perceptions of science and environment, acceptance of sexual stereotypes (see Shanahan and Morgan

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1999; Morgan and Shanahan 2010), or investigated the cultivation effect of other media channels like newspapers (e.g., Grabe and Drew 2007) and video games (e.g., Williams 2006). The crucial point is that cultivation is about the long-term consequences of exposure to mass-mediated content – “fact and fable play equally significant and interrelated roles” (Gerbner 1969: 142) – which is biased pertaining to some aspects of social reality. It is the cumulative and consonant, more or less unintended presentation of biased “facts” in the message system from which viewers, readers, or players incidentally learn some knowledge about the real world. Further developments in cultivation research include the concepts of mainstreaming and resonance. Although most cultivation studies measure direct effects of exposure on the dependent measures, Gerbner et al. (1980 ) introduced these new concepts which go beyond simple “across-the-board” cultivation (i.e., every social category is equally cultivated by mass-mediated content). Both concepts define an interaction between the independent variable “amount of exposure” and a moderator variable. By mainstreaming the authors “mean the sharing of that commonality among heavy viewers in those demographic groups whose light viewers hold divergent views. In other words, differences deriving from other factors and social forces may be diminished or even absent among heavy viewers” (p. 15). Therefore, mainstreaming assumes a homogenization of social reality perceptions with increasing exposure levels. In fact, research could document mainstreamingconsistent empirical patterns (Morgan et al. 2009; Shanahan and Morgan 1999; Shrum and Bischak 2001). In contrast to mainstreaming, resonance assumes a more heterogeneous reality perception among high exposure groups: “When what people see on television is most congruent with everyday reality (or even perceived reality), the combination may result in a coherent and powerful ‘double dose’ of the television world and real-life circumstances may ‘resonate’ and lead to markedly amplified cultivation patterns” (Gerbner et al. 1980: 10). Hirsch (1981: 18) criticized both concepts as “ambiguous, untestable, and irrefutable”, because every empirical pattern may be explained post-hoc with mainstreaming or resonance. Indeed, cultivation research has been largely unable to predict mainstreaming and resonance a priori. However, as Shrum and Bischak (2001) noted, it seems that mainstreaming occurs for some variables (e.g., political orientations and attitudes), and resonance for some others (e.g., fear or probability estimates). Despite the limitations, mainstreaming and resonance are interesting extensions of the original across-the-board cultivation hypothesis.

2.2.2 Typical methodology Cultivation research typically consists of two steps. The first step is to investigate the depiction of the “bald facts” and the “subtle interplay of occurrence, co-occur-

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rence, and non-occurrence of actors and actions” (Gerbner and Gross 1976: 179). This is done by a quantitative content analysis. The Gerbner group argued that it is important to investigate the long-term consequences of television. Therefore, cultivation is not about the effects of one specific television show aired at a specific point in time, but about the consequences of television as a whole. For example, cultivation research started back in the 1960s by investigating televised violence: The researchers could document in their “message system analysis” that violence is omnipresent in the world of television. Based on these content-analytic data, a cultivation hypothesis was formulated. This hypothesis was tested in the cultivation analysis which constitutes the second step of research. Mostly through crosssectional surveys, investigations looked at whether heavy viewers had a more television-congruent biased conception of social reality than light viewers. In the initial study, Gerbner and Gross found that heavy viewers overestimated the proportion of people employed in law enforcement and their own chance of being involved in violence when compared to light viewers. They argued that “fear – that historic instrument of social control – may be an even more critical residue of a show of violence than aggression” (p. 178).

2.2.3 State of the art A meta-analysis of the cultivation literature supports the general cultivation hypothesis: Shanahan and Morgan (1999) conducted a (quantitative) meta-analysis based on a database consisting of 5.799 separate findings, derived from 97 cultivation studies conducted since 1976. Average Pearson r’s were about .10. Partial r’s were slightly lower at .09. The authors concluded that the cultivation literature has demonstrated that there is a small positive, yet significant relationship between watching television and various dependent variables. Although Gerbner and his group argued for the investigation of the long-term consequences of exposure to television as a whole, research has also begun to investigate content-specific cultivation effects. Content-specific cultivation research focuses on specific content genres such as crime, drama, soap operas, or talk shows (Bilandzic and Rössler 2004). This research indicates that exposure to such specific content can explain a dependent variable’s variance over and above general measures of TV exposure (see Lee and Niederdeppe 2011). Some cultivation researchers question whether such content-specific effects should be called “cultivation” because cultivation originally was conceptualized as a more general phenomenon in the sense that it was the whole message system that was explored (Morgan and Shanahan 2010). However, the specific content in content-specific cultivation research (e.g., genre specific effects) is, again, conceptualized as a system. If one considers the fact that a social object may be represented very differently in different genres, the content-specific cultivation approach should be added to a cultivation researcher’s theoretical and methodological toolbox.

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More recent cultivation research has introduced an additional concept: implicit attitudes (Arendt 2010). According to Gawronski and Bodenhausen (2006), implicit attitudes are interpreted as “automatic affective reactions resulting from the particular associations that are activated automatically when a person encounters a relevant stimulus” (p. 697). This process does not require much cognitive capacity or an intention to evaluate an object. Associations can be activated irrespective of whether a person considers these evaluations as accurate or inaccurate. It can be assumed that exposure to cumulative and consonant (more or less unintended) presentations of biased “facts”, from which recipients incidentally learn, influences the automatic affective reactions toward a political object in a subsequent situation (i.e., implicit cultivation hypothesis). Indeed, Arendt (2010) showed that cumulative exposure to a tabloid-newspaper that held a very negative view toward the European Union predicted readers’ negative automatic affective reactions toward the EU. The utilization of a cross-lagged panel design with two waves increased the confidence with regard to the causal interpretation. Thus, media exposure seems not only to influence our more controlled and deliberate explicit evaluations of political concepts, but also our automatically evoked “gut” reactions toward them. For example, implicit attitudes can predict voting behavior of decided and undecided voters (see Nosek, Graham, and Hawkins 2010): There is no doubt that explicit evaluations are predictive of voting behavior, but implicit preferences appear to provide added predictive value, especially in undecided voters (Galdi, Arcuri, and Gawronski 2008).

2.2.4 Underlying cognitive processes Research has also begun to investigate the cognitive processes underlying the cultivation effect (e.g., Bilandzic and Rössler 2004). Rather than just asking if and to what extent cultivation effects may occur, research increasingly focused on the question why they occur. Today, the most prominent cultivation model likely is Shrum’s (2009) heuristic processing model. The basic assumptions are that, (1) television enhances the accessibility of frequently presented concepts (i.e., the ease with which available information can be retrieved from long-term memory, see Tversky and Kahneman 1973), and that (2) a heavy user’s overestimation of the frequency of a subordinate category (e.g., people employed in law enforcement) on a superordinate category (e.g., whole workforce) is due to heuristic processing (instead of systematic processing) during the construction of a memory-based cultivation judgment. Shrum’s model tries to explain the cultivation effect on socalled first-order judgments (i.e., set-size and probability estimates) by examining the processes that are at work when people form their judgments. More recent research has also started investigating so-called second-order judgments (i.e., attitudes and values). Cultivation effects on second-order judgments are seen as a

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form of persuasive communication effects by some leading scholars (e.g., Shrum 2009). However, an in-depth discussion of similarities and differences between second-order cultivation and persuasion is still outstanding.

2.3 Agenda setting 2.3.1 Basic idea Another seminal cognitive media effects concept, agenda setting, investigates if the mass media have the ability, by virtue of the selective coverage of particular public issues, to signal which issues are important to their audiences. That is, agenda setting refers to the assumption that there is a relationship between the emphasis that the mass media place on some particular issues and the importance attributed to these issues by the readers, viewers or listeners. The basic notion is that “while the mass media may have little influence on the direction or intensity of attitudes, it is hypothesized that the mass media set the agenda for each political campaign, influencing the salience of attitudes toward political issues” (McCombs and Shaw 1972: 177). This hypothesis builds upon the notions that “the information in the mass media becomes the only contact many have with politics” (p. 176), and that “some, normally better educated and most politically interested (and those least likely to change political belief), actively seek information; but most seem to acquire it, if at all, without much effort. It just comes in” (p. 176– 177).

2.3.2 Typical methodology Agenda setting research typically consists of two steps. First, a content analysis tries to capture the “media agenda”. In their landmark paper, McCombs and Shaw (1972) coded the news and editorial comments in the sampled newspapers, magazines, and news broadcasts for 15 key issues. The rank-order of issues was determined by the number of stories about each issue. Second, researchers collected data on the “public agenda” with a cross-sectional survey of 100 undecided voters. In this classic design, survey participants were asked the following question: “What are you most concerned about these days? That is, regardless of what politicians say, what are the two or three main things which you think the government should concentrate on doing something about?” (p. 178). The resulting rank-order (in 15 categories) of the coded answers to this question was interpreted as the public agenda. The rank order correlation between the media agenda and the public agenda, that is, “between the major item emphasis on the main campaign issues carried by the media and voters’ independent judgments of what were the important issues” (p. 180) was almost perfect, r = .97.

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Subsequent empirical work has investigated agenda setting effects with a variety of methodologies. McCombs’ so called “Acapulco typology” suggests two dichotomous dimensions (see McCombs and Reynolds 2009): The first dimension distinguishes between two ways of conceptualizing the “agenda” (i.e., the focus can be on the entire set of issues that define the agenda, or on a single issue). The second dimension describes the measurement of salience of the issues: The agenda can be measured on the aggregate level for the whole population, or on an individual level for a single participant. For instance, the landmark study by McCombs and Shaw focused on the entire set of issues and measured the public agenda on an aggregate level. Subsequent research also worked with longitudinal designs (e.g., Matthes 2008), as well as experimental studies (e.g., Iyengar and Kinder 1987).

2.3.3 State of the art A meta-analysis of 45 agenda setting studies (Wanta and Ghanem 2007) which involved comparisons of 90 results, found a significant average effect size of r = .53, 95 % CI [.47, .59]. Thus, there is a significant relationship between the media agenda and the public agenda. The meta-analysis found agenda setting effects for studies using a variety of methodologies: There were, for example, no significant differences between multiple versus single issue studies and between aggregate versus individual data studies. Despite this strong overall effect, a large number of contingent conditions have been observed. For instance, Demers, Craff, Choi, and Pession (1989) examined the influence of issue obtrusiveness; Wanta and Wu (1992) explored the role of interpersonal communication, and Yagade and Dozier (1990) looked for the optimal time span for agenda-setting effects (see McCombs 2004). In addition, the need for orientation, as a psychological explanation for why people engage in information seeking, “is the most prominent of the contingent conditions for agenda-setting effects” (McCombs 2004: 67; see also Weaver 1980). Recent scholarship has broadened the concept of agenda-setting to the second level (see McCombs 2004; McCombs and Reynolds 2009). While first level agendasetting involves issues, second level agenda-setting refers to more specific characteristics of objects. These objects can be sub-issues or specific aspects and selections of issues (cognitive attributes). Furthermore, the second level of agendasetting also incorporates specific evaluations or journalistic assessments of issues (affective attributes). Following this idea, agenda setting “is a process that can affect both what to think about and how to think about it” (McCombs and Shaw 1993: 63). The second level of agenda setting as a research paradigm has received significant scholarly attention but also has been challenged for its theoretical premises and its relation to news framing (e.g., Scheufele and Tewksbury 2007).

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2.3.4 Underlying cognitive processes Some scholars have suggested memory-based models of information processing (Price and Tewksbury 1997; Scheufele and Tewksbury 2007) to be the major mechanism behind agenda setting effects. Similar to (first-order) cultivation which we described above, it is assumed that people form their judgments about the issue importance (at least partially) on the basis of the accessibility of information available in memory. Thus, the assumption is that if a concept is more accessible in memory, an issue related to this concept is rated as more important (but see McCombs 2004). The underlying mechanisms of second level agenda setting appear to be very similar to the underlying mechanisms of framing effects. We will discuss the similarities of those approaches at the end of this chapter.

2.4 Priming 2.4.1 Basic idea Media priming research investigates the short-term effects of mass media content on people’s behavior or judgments. Although there are differences in the understanding of the term “priming” among cognitive psychologists, social psychologists, and media effects researchers, there are highly visible similarities: At a general level, priming refers to the short-term impact of exposure to a mass-mediated stimulus on subsequent judgments or behaviors (Roskos-Ewoldsen, Roskos-Ewoldsen, and Carpentier 2009). A vivid example given by Srull and Wyer (1979) illustrates the idea behind priming: Someone told his friend that his new hairstyle is unattractive. He can interpret this information as either honest or unkind. The encoding depends upon which of the two concepts, honest or unkind, is most accessible at the time the information is received. Thus, the general hypothesis is that once a concept is activated or primed, its relative accessibility is enhanced, and its likelihood of being used to encode subsequent information increases. If priming is investigated by media effects scholars, mass-mediated content represents the prime. The term priming is used in at least three different areas in media effects research, (1) media violence priming (i.e., mass media’s potential to activate hostility- and aggression-related concepts in memory), (2) stereotype priming (i.e., mass media’s potential to activate stereotypes including, for example, gender and ethnic stereotypes), and (3) political priming. A meta-analysis of the media priming literature (Roskos-Ewoldsen, Klinger, and Carpentier 2007) suggests that these phenomena may be fundamentally different. Due to the focus of this article, we will only discuss research on political priming.

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2.4.2 Typical methodology At a general level, priming effects fade with time. Therefore, most of the (psychological-oriented) priming studies involve a maximum temporal delay between the presentation of the prime and the collection of the target variable of 15 to 20 minutes. However, for political priming, it has often been argued that the effects last much longer (see Roskos-Ewoldsen, Roskos-Ewoldsen, and Carpentier 2009). Therefore, the basic political priming hypothesis has been tested using experimental and survey methods. Similar to designs used in agenda setting research, experimental studies expose subjects to news media content and measure the effect on the interpretation or evaluation of a target object. Effects are usually observed immediately after exposure, although some authors have extended the exposure time to target stimuli to four or five days (see Iyengar and Kinder 1987). In survey designs, researchers observe that exposure to an issue in the news increases the correlation between a citizens’ approval of the president on this issue and their approval of the president´s overall performance. This suggests that the overall rating of a politician might not be changed because people alter their opinion about his performance in a given policy field but because the relative importance of an issue for the overall performance rating is boosted. Most of these surveys, however, are cross-sectional and unable to address the question of causal order. Because there is a time-gap between the original priming event and the measurement of the priming effect, some scholars interpret these effects as an evidence for longterm priming effects. However, it remains to be proven that the mechanisms underlying these findings are the same as those used to explain experiment-based priming effects.

2.4.3 State of the art Roskos-Ewoldsen, Klinger, and Carpentier (2007) conducted a meta-analysis based on a database consisting of twenty-nine political priming studies. The global effect size across these studies was small, but significant, r = .08, 95 % CI [.07, .09]. The authors explained the rather small effect size with rather untypical long time intervals between the presentation of the prime and the measurement of the prime’s effect. Eleven of the twenty-nine political priming studies involved survey data from actual political events. Due to the fact that laboratory research may result in stronger effects (Roskos-Ewoldsen et al. 2007: 67), the survey method may partially explain the small effect size. Interestingly, the average effect size of the eighteen violence priming studies (r = .30, 95 % CI [.26, .34]), was significantly higher than the effect size of the political priming studies. With respect to mediating factors on the side of the audience, results are mixed: Some authors have found political priming effects to be strongest among

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people with high trust in news media and high prior knowledge (Miller and Krosnick 2000). Yet others reported strongest effects for people low in political knowledge (Krosnick and Kinder 1990) or no relationship between knowledge and the strength of effects (Iyengar and Kinder 1987). This hints to the complexity of the media priming process that is contingent on a number of source, content, and receiver characteristics.

2.4.4 Underlying cognitive processes The notion of priming was introduced by Iyengar and Kinder (1987). The basic hypothesis assumes that when people are asked to evaluate a public policy or a political candidate (e.g., the president), they do not use all of the information they have available in memory: “people do not pay attention to everything” (p. 64). In contrast, people ordinarily prefer heuristics (i.e., intuitive shortcuts and simple rules of thumb). One such heuristic is the reliance upon highly accessible information (Tversky and Kahneman 1973). Thus, people are likely to use only a small subset of highly accessible information. This idea is based on an associative network model of human memory which assumes that knowledge is organized as an associated web of cognitive units or nodes. Within this network, the activation of one unit can spread through the network to interconnected units leading to the activation of related concepts. At any single point in time, only a small part of the knowledge store is subject to active thought. First, there are nodes always ready to be activated because they have a high baseline excitation level (chronic accessibility). Moreover, there are salient attributes of the current situation which can also influence the accessibility of a concept (temporary accessibility). The distinction between availability and accessibility with regard to information in memory is important (see Price and Tewksbury 1997): Information is available if it simply exists in memory. Accessibility refers to the ease or speed with which available information can be retrieved from memory. Recency and frequency of activation contribute to a construct’s temporary accessibility. Based on this theoretical clarification, the basic assumption is that the mass media enhance the accessibility of those concepts that have been portrayed in the news repeatedly (Kosicki 2002: 71). As a consequence, by “calling attention to some matters while ignoring others, television news influences the standards by which governments, presidents, policies, and candidates for public office are judged” (Iyengar and Kinder 1987: 63). For instance, if the news media carry an unusually large number of stories about an ailing economy, a political candidate will be evaluated more likely in terms of their perceived success in handling economic problems (Price and Tewksbury 1997: 181).

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2.5 Framing 2.5.1 Basic idea According to Entman (1993), to frame is to “select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text in an effort to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/ or treatment recommendation for the item described” (p. 52). Thus, the mass media can select, accentuate, or exclude some aspects of the perceived reality (i.e., frame building). This, in turn, can evoke a specific, sometimes constricted perspective on an issue (i.e., framing effects). The latter is the reason why Tewksbury and Scheufele (2009) define framing effects as interpretation effects. According to this conceptualization, framing effects are not knowledge effects or information effects: Information effects result from a process where readers, viewers, or listeners acquire more (or less) new knowledge of an issue or a context. In contrast, framing effects occur when a phrase, image, or statement suggests a particular interpretation of an issue. A vivid example for framing is presented by a study investigating the so-called partial-birth abortion (PBA) debate in the United States (Simon and Jerit 2007). Participants read an article from the New York Times that described PBA and reported on a pending Congressional ban. In one condition, the word “fetus” appeared 16 times. In another condition, the researchers substituted this word with “baby” for all 16 appearances. The information in the article was the same in each experimental condition. The only difference was the word fetus/baby. Note that “fetus” is not a logical equivalent of “baby”. Both terms stand for different perspectives. The researchers argued that these words should activate different associations in memory and, thus, should influence the interpretation of the mediated information (i.e., framing effect). This, in turn, should influence subsequent judgments. Indeed, it was found that reading the newspaper article with the fetus frame reduced the support for the PBA ban. In addition, participants in the fetus condition used the word fetus more often when they were asked to summarize the article in their own words after reading.

2.5.2 Typical methodology Although there are some recent exceptions (see Matthes and Schemer 2012), evidence for framing effects is almost solely based on experiments. Typically, two experimental groups are exposed to two different frames, and the cognitions and attitudes of both groups are compared. Results of a vast amount of such studies find large differences between the experimental groups, indicating rather strong framing effects. However, such findings should be interpreted by keeping in mind that these experiments are designed as idealized framing environments. For

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instance, experimental framing studies have neglected prior judgments and the strength or types of prior judgments. Also the complex world of mediated politics is often reduced to unrealistic one-sided framing stimuli, neglecting the effects of competing frames over time (see Matthes and Schemer 2012).

2.5.3 State of the art Research has shown that framing a mass-mediated content differently can have important effects on the interpretation of the topic which, in turn, can also influence attitudes. Framing effects could be documented with survey experiments (e.g., Kinder and Sanders 1990), with experiments investigating short-term (e.g., Simon and Jerit 2007) as well as long-term effects (e.g., Tewksbury et al. 2000), and with designs combining content analysis and panel data (Matthes and Schemer 2012). The conclusion drawn from these studies is that news frames can significantly shape the interpretation of issues, which can have, in turn, an effect on attitudes. As with all cognitive effects models, however, these effects are moderated by factors such as frame competition, frame repetition, interpersonal communication, attitude certainty, or news content credibility (see Chong and Druckman 2007).

2.5.4 Underlying cognitive processes McCombs argued that framing effects can be considered as the second level of agenda setting or attribute agenda setting (McCombs and Reynolds 2009), noting that a comparison of both concepts “range from substantial overlap to total dissimilarity” because of “the large number of definitions for framing” (p. 7). Price and Tewksbury (1997) and Scheufele and Tewksbury (2007) challenged the idea that agenda setting and framing are based on the same theoretical premises and, therefore, negated the perspective that framing effects are only an extension of agenda setting. They argued that agenda setting effects are driven by accessibility as the underlying psychological mechanisms as we already reported in the political priming section. In contrast, they argued that framing effects are driven by an applicability process. Applicability refers to “the outcome of a message that suggests a connection between two concepts such that, after exposure to the message, audiences accept that they are connected” (Scheufele and Tewksbury 2007: 15). There is also a debate about the similarities and differences between framing and persuasion (see Matthes and Schemer 2012). There are at least two differences between the two. First, frames are rather complex patterns of argumentation pointing to several diverse but interconnected issue aspects or frame elements. Persuasion research, in contrast, usually studies the persuasive power of single argu-

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ments or statements while other context is unimportant. Second, framing and persuasion research are typically concerned with different outcomes. Issue interpretation is the primary outcome of framing effects research. Persuasion, in contrast, is about the negative or positive evaluation of attitude objects. While the primary outcome of framing is issue interpretation, this does not necessarily mean that framing is unrelated to attitudinal outcomes. Issue interpretations will correlate with final issue attitudes. It follows that every framing effect is potentially a persuasion effect. However, the key difference is that not every persuasion effect is a framing effect. Persuasion, as an overarching theoretical concept, can be the result of many different mechanisms.

3 Toward integrating cognitive effects approaches In contrast to an isolationist perspective on cognitive effects, we argue, as Scheufele and Tewksbury (2007) did, that it is important to explicitly address the relationships between those various approaches because “failing to do so will leave the field with a confusing set of concepts and terminologies” (p. 12). Cultivation, agenda setting, and priming have often been explained with memory-based models: It has been assumed that exposure to mass-mediated content increases the accessibility of (biased) memory traces (first order cultivation, priming), and of specific issues (agenda setting), which may influence subsequent memory-based judgments. Therefore, these three cognitive media effects approaches assume that the accessibility of information in memory (at least partially) mediates the proposed effects. However, it seems unlikely that all these different effects can be fully explained by accessibility (e.g., Miller 2007). Simple learning (i.e., availabilityeffects) may also explain some of these effects (knowledge gain and gaps). In contrast to cultivation, agenda setting, and political priming, framing proposes a somewhat different mechanism. Regardless of the nomenclature, it has been (at least implicitly) assumed that “framing” an issue with a specific interpretation (i.e., attribute) strengthens the association between (at least two) concepts in memory (i.e., issue concept and attribute concept). The crucial point is that this strengthening is supposed to mainly occur during exposure. In this respect, framing fundamentally differs from priming: Here it is assumed that a concept’s (e.g., an issue’s) accessibility influences a judgment about another concept (e.g., attribute of a political candidate) in a subsequent situation. This means that in political priming there are two concepts involved in the target judgment (as is the case in framing). However, media exposure increases the accessibility of only one concept during exposure, not of both. Thus, the “concept-pairing” in priming (assuming a memory-based judgment) occurs during the subsequent target judgment, not – as is the case in framing – during exposure.

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Cultivation can be integrated within this unified perspective: First-order cultivation effects on probability estimates (e.g., estimated probability of getting involved in violence [= one concept]) can be seen as similar to agenda setting or political priming: Exposure may make biased knowledge regarding one concept (e.g., crime) more available and accessible in memory. Thus, based on the higher availability and accessibility of this concept, a subsequent judgment may be influenced by exposure. In contrast, similar to framing effects, a first-order cultivation effect on set-size estimates (e.g., percentage of foreigners of all criminals [= two concepts]) is based on the strength of the association between two (or more) concepts in memory. Again, the associations are strengthened during exposure, which may influence a subsequent judgment. From this perspective, cultivation can be seen as some kind of meta-model for political priming, framing, and agenda setting. We already mentioned the important role of accessibility of memory traces in the explanation of the political priming effect. That is, accessibility effects fade quickly with time. The priming phenomenon, as investigated by political communication researchers, is conceptualized (at least implicitly) as a long-term phenomenon. Based on this fact, Roskos-Ewoldsen, Roskos-Ewoldsen, and Carpentier (2009: 83) argued that “rather than calling this phenomenon political priming, perhaps it would be better if we referred to it as political cultivation”. This notion underlines the similarities between the already discussed approaches of (firstorder) cultivation and (political) priming.

4 Conclusion and directions for future research Political communication scholars have been investigating cognitive effects of mass mediated content for over 50 years. Our discussion of cultivation, agenda setting, knowledge gain and gaps, political priming, and framing shows that the diverse streams of research have found significant effects on cognitive outcome variables. Some of them can have consequences for attitudinal outcomes as well. Moreover, all cognitive effects are moderated by more or less the same source, content, and receiver factors, although the relative weight of these factors might differ. Likewise, most concepts make assumptions about underlying mechanisms that can be treated as mediating factors. Yet these are not always explicitly modeled in empirical research. As impressive as this large body of research is, we believe that some aspects have not been adequately addressed. First and foremost, all these concepts mark different streams of research; their conceptual similarities and differences have not sparked much scholarly debate. We discussed possible overlaps and differences between those approaches as well as their connections to other concepts above. Another lingering issue in cognitive media effects research is how to observe real

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world complexity with empirical research methodologies. Experimental research is often flawed by a simplified picture of news media, exposing subjects to isolated bits of information in controlled and often unrealistic settings. It is also important to note that many experimental studies have not tested the stability or longevity of cognitive effects. When it comes to survey-based research, the vast majority of studies have employed cross-sectional data. Such studies are quite vulnerable to spuriousness, and they are unable to tackle the important issue of causation. Furthermore, studies combining content data with survey data are faced with an immense set of critical methodological problems that have not been fully understood in cognitive effects research (i.e., weighting, data matching, and treatment of missing values). So although we have a rich body of empirical evidence in all these diverse areas of scholarship, we believe there is still a clear need for better and more advanced research designs. We need to better understand how shifts in news media content influence changes in the dependent variables over time. Yet the theoretically and methodically more intriguing and challenging dynamic aspects of all those approaches would require data that involve at least three panel waves, preferably even more. In fact, these are hard to find in extant cognitive effects research. Also, an examination of dynamics in multi-wave experimental settings would additionally allow for a more fine-grained analysis of variation over time, between and within individuals. More complex designs of this nature could make a palpable difference to the contribution of cognitive effects models to our understanding of the “real” citizen and recipient in modern media environments.

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Christian Schemer

29 Emotional effects in political communication Abstract: This chapter reviews research on emotional effects of political news and ads. Starting with definitions of affects, moods, emotions, and arousal, political media effects on affective reactions are conceptualized. It is argued that both specific content and formal features can elicit affective responses via three different processes: empathetic responding, contagion, and emotion induction. These processes can result in affects, arousal, and various specific emotions (e.g., fear, anger, sadness). Although research has identified several moderating factors the chapter also points to the fact that affective reactions to media content are not without consequence on, for example, political attitudes and behavior. Furthermore, affective effects are not only short-term, but can also have long-term consequences. Because of that, from a normative perceptive, the affective influence of political information is a double-edged sword that deserves more scholarly attention in the future. Key Words: emotion, affect, arousal, fear, anger, sadness, media content, formal media features

1 Introduction Most previous research on affective media effects focuses on the impact of entertainment content, such as soap operas or computer games (for an overview see Wirth and Schramm 2005). However, numerous studies have convincingly demonstrated that political news or advertising also results in affective reactions in viewers (Way and Masters 1996). News-induced affective reactions are most likely to occur when news topics are relevant to the life of the audience, e.g. during elections or when issues are involved that people deeply care about. In addition, political news are explicitly chosen based on affective gratifications. As well as affective political communication effects, exposure to political news is also influenced by affect-related motives such as entertainment, sensation seeking, or mood regulation (Perse 1990; Unz, Schwab, and Winterhoff-Spurk 2008). In other words, audiences expect news stories to arouse emotions. This chapter reviews extant research on political communication effects on affective reactions. The subsequent section briefly reviews definitions of emotions and related affective phenomena. The third section deals with the impact of political communication on affects, specific emotions, and arousal, respectively. Specifically, the subsections demonstrate how the content and the form of political

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information prompt emotional responses from audiences. The fourth section emphasizes the importance of inter-individual differences in affective reactions to political news or ads. The fifth section is devoted to the consequences of affective reactions for learning or attitude formation. Finally, the chapter closes with a discussion of the perspectives of future research.

2 Defining affective phenomena 2.1 Affects Affect is often used as a generic term that encompasses different reactions, such as arousal, feelings, moods, or specific emotions (Giner-Sorolla 1999; Schimmack and Crites 2005). The term affect or affective reaction is used whenever reference is made to these affective phenomena in general without further specification of what particular reaction is meant. Sometimes affect is equated with the evaluative component of attitudes (e.g., Sheafer 2007). This reflects the notion of affect as the experience of an object as positive or negative in valence. However, the understanding of affect as evaluation gives rise to conceptual problems. For instance, this understanding complicates the analytical distinction between evaluative and emotional reactions to objects. In line with previous research affects are therefore considered as states that refer to feelings that vary in pleasantness or desirability (Schimmack and Crites 2005). The experience of negative affects indicates that a stimulus event is perceived as unpleasant by the individual. In contrast, positive affect is a reaction to situations perceived as beneficial or pleasant. This view of affective reactions can also be transferred to the effects of political communication. For instance, the news that a highly preferred candidate failed to win in the elections is likely to elicit negative affect because the candidate’s failure violates the individuals’ hopes and expectations. In order to measure affects, researchers typically rely on established scales. For instance, the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) is one important instrument to assess affective reactions (Watson and Clark 1994). In this scale, several items reflecting different emotions of the same valence (e.g., enthusiastic, proud, and inspired) form a factor that represents positive affect. Similarly, indicators such as afraid, irritable, and ashamed load on a factor that is termed negative affect. It is important to note that participants in a study report these emotions in response to a specific object, e.g., a political candidate (Abelson, Kinder, Peters, and Fiske 1982). However, there are not only self-report measures of affect. For example, facial electromyography (facial EMG) assesses facial expressions of negative and positive affect and can reveal changes in affective responses over time (Ravaja 2004).

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2.2 Moods Similar to affects moods are subjective experiences that differ in valence and experienced pleasure. Unlike affects, moods are diffuse and lack an identifiable cause (Frijda 1993). Thus, individuals in a certain mood often find it difficult to identify what exactly caused their current state of mind. In addition, mood states can be experienced over a longer time, but are less intense than specific emotions (Scherer 2005). The origins of mood may be internal or external. Internal causes of mood states are people’s energy level, immune system, or neurological functioning (e.g., low energy levels or dysfunctions of the immune system produce depressive or anxious moods; Schimmack and Crites 2005). More interesting in the present context is that moods are also influenced by external stimuli, such as news programs or political events (Isbell, Ottati, and Burns 2006). In order to assess moods, researchers also use items that refer to specific emotions, such as unhappy or bad to gauge negative mood. Study participants are instructed to report how they feel right now. In other words, participants are not required to report their feelings in response to a specific object as is the case in the study of positive and negative affect (Schwarz and Clore 1983).

2.3 Emotions Unlike moods, emotions are object-specific. This means that emotions are about something, e.g. people feel angry about blameworthy acts. In addition, emotions are felt with higher intensity and are shorter in duration than moods (Frijda 1993; Scherer 2005). Emotions are considered to be complex reactions to environmental situations that encompass affective, cognitive, conative, and physiological components (for an overview, see Davidson, Scherer, and Goldsmith 2003). Affective responses refer to the subjective feeling of a state. Cognitive responses can be thought of as perceptions of situations that are relevant to the individual. Conative responses refer to action tendencies (e.g., avoidance of fear-eliciting situations) and behavior (e.g., facial expressions or gestures) related to an emotion. Finally, physiological responses are bodily reactions (e.g., skin conductance rate or heart rate). To date, there are different emotion theories dealing with the causes, the structure, and the consequences of emotions. For example, a structural perspective distinguishes emotions along two dimensions: pleasantness-unpleasantness and activation-deactivation (Russell and Barrett 1999). Structural models of emotions have difficulties distinguishing between specific emotions of the same valence, such as anger and fear. Functional emotion theories assume that specific emotions have different causes and consequences for individuals. In general, emotions help individuals adapt to their environment. In order to detect whether stimulus events in the environment require a certain reaction, individuals have to appraise their

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current situation. This evaluation process is at the core of cognitive appraisal theories of emotions (Frijda 1986; Scherer 2005). Accordingly, individuals evaluate situations along several dimensions, such as personal relevance, pleasantness, novelty, certainty, or coping potential. These appraisal patterns determine the specific emotion that is experienced. For instance, a situation appraised as relevant, negative, and uncontrollable is likely to elicit fear, e.g., learning about the increase of crime in one’s neighborhood. In contrast, anger is aroused by the appraisal of highly relevant, unpleasant situations that could have been avoided, such as an accident caused by a drunk driver. Emotions as well as affects may be short-lived phenomena compared with moods. Nevertheless, such reactions can also become chronic, e.g., when individuals are repeatedly confronted with an attitude object, e.g., a political candidate who elicits affective reactions. Given that these repeatedly elicited affects are integrated in people’s cognitive-affective networks they can become episodic or chronic and function as affective predispositions toward attitudinal objects (Frijda 1993; Scherer 2005). In order to measure specific emotions researchers typically rely on self-report measures (for an overview, see Scherer 2005), such as the differential emotions scale (Izard 1991) or on measures that can assess the change of emotion experience over time, such as the Emotional Facial Action Coding System (EmFACS; Rosenberg and Ekman 1998).

2.4 Arousal The previous reasoning suggests that arousal is an important component of emotions (Frijda 1993; Russell and Barrett 1999). Although different terms have been used for arousal in previous research, such as activation, intensity, or excitation (Schimmack and Crites, 2005), individuals perceive arousal as a feeling of intensity, energy, or activity of an affective state (Russell and Barrett 1999). In the present context, arousal is therefore considered as the intensity or activation dimension of affective reactions that can vary from high to low activation. There are both self-report measures of arousal (Bradley and Lang 1994), but also objective measures such as skin conductance rate (Dawson, Schell, and Filion 2005).

3 Conceptualizing media effects on affective reactions News can elicit emotional reactions that are similar to emotional responses to realworld events (Wirth and Schramm 2005). Thus, learning about negative events in the news can result in negative affective reactions that are similar to the experience of negative events in the real world. However, the valence of situations por-

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Fig. 1: Affective impact of the content and form of political communication.

trayed in the news need not necessarily translate into emotional reactions of the same valence among audience members. Whether individuals experience a negative emotion in response to a negative event depends on whether the event is perceived as relevant and whether it is congruent with the individual’s goals. All else being equal, goal-congruence of relevant situations produces positive emotions and goal-incongruence generates negative emotions in individuals (Scherer 2005; Wirth and Schramm 2005). Basically, three processes can be distinguished by which news stories can elicit affective responses in the audience: empathetic responses, contagion, and induction. (1) Empathetic responses are congruent with the feelings of people depicted in news stories. When recipients learn about the misfortunes of people after a catastrophe then the experience of compassion represents an empathetic response. However, affective reactions to news stories need not necessarily be empathetic. Counter-empathetic responses can occur when viewers receive negative news about people they dislike (Zillmann 1991). (2) Contagion produces an affective reaction that is congruent with an affective reaction shown in a news story. For instance, people may experience anger as a primary reaction to seeing a news story in which a political actor gets angry about an opponent. This effect may be independent of the specific situation that caused the politician’s angry reaction. (3) News stories need not depict visual expressions of affective reactions in order to elicit affects in the audience. A sober short news story can also elicit the emotions of a reader when she or he interprets the story in a way which is consistent with a specific appraisal pattern that corresponds with a specific emotion (Kühne and Schemer 2013; Nabi 2003). This process is called affect induction. These processes are also depicted in Figure 1. The subsequent sections deal with the review of effects of the content and form of political information on different kinds of affective reactions. First, findings regarding media effects on positive and negative affect are reported. Then,

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research on the impact of political communication on arousal is reviewed. The final section reports results from studies which investigate the influence of news on specific emotions.

3.1 Effects on affect 3.1.1 Effects of content features Previous studies demonstrate that news framing of issues elicits positive and negative affects depending on whether issues are perceived as congruent or incongruent with perceiver’s goals. In most studies affect induction is the process that causes the affective reactions in the audience. For instance, Brader and colleagues (2008) demonstrate that news stories about the costs of immigration produce more negative affective reactions when the story refers to Latinos than when it refers to Europeans. The reason is that Latinos are perceived as a threat to the safety and welfare of Americans. This perception, in turn, elicits a negative affective response in message recipients. Consistent with these findings, research demonstrates that negative affects mostly result from reports on issues perceived as having negative consequences, such as immigration (Esses, Veenlivet, Hodson, and Mihic 2008), terrorism (Cho et al. 2003; Gadarian 2010), war (Pfau et al. 2008; Scheufele and Gasteiger 2007), environmental problems (Sandman, Miller, Johnson, and Weinstein 1993), or public crises (Gortner and Pennebaker 2003; Sinaceur, Heath, and Cole 2005). In the context of strategic communication, negative advertising or attack ads can depress people’s mood (Stevens 2008) and elicit negative affect in voters (Chang 2001; Thorson, Christ, and Caywood 1991).1 Similarly, embedding issues, such as crime, violence, or immigration in political advertising arouses negative affect in voters (Brader 2005; Schemer 2012). Numerous studies demonstrate that exposure to political information can also result in positive affect. For example, positive exemplars of immigrants in news or entertainment programs increase positive affective reactions toward minorities (Igartua, Moral-Toranzo, and Fernández 2011; Pan and Kosicki 1996; but see Brader, Valentino, and Suhay et al. 2008). Furthermore, the depiction of immigration in the context of a common ingroup identity can arouse positive affects toward ethnic minorities (Richardson 2005). This is due to the fact that recipients perceive themselves and minorities as joint members of a superordinate group. This common ingroup identity is associated with positive affect toward all other members of the ingroup even members that originally belonged to the ethnic minority. In addition, the depiction of the misfortunes of people after a crisis has been shown to provoke positive emotions (Gross 2008; Scheufele and Gasteiger 2007). 1 Unlike attack ads that emphasize the negative characteristics of political opponents, support or positive ads encompass issues that the candidate supports or principles that she or he promotes.

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Finally, issue and support ads (Chang 2001; Thorson et al. 1991) and the use of humor (Young 2008) elicit positive affects in viewers. For instance, a politician’s self-deprecatory humor has been found to elicit more positive affective reactions than other-deprecatory humor (Stewart 2011) (seel also the chapter by Moy, Johnson, and Barthel). Although most studies examined affect-congruent responses, i.e., negative affect in response to negative media content, affect-incongruent or counter-empathetic responses are not unlikely (Zillmann 1991; Zillmann and Knobloch 2001). Counter-empathetic affects occur when viewer predispositions are incongruent with the valence of stimulus events. For example, negative (positive) affective reactions are the result of watching news stories about the good (bad) fortunes of characters they like (dislike; Zillmann and Knobloch 2001). In sum, previous research has convincingly demonstrated the immediate or short-term affective influences of news content or political ads. However, there is also survey evidence which indicates that repeated and frequent exposure to mediated political communication elicits positive and negative affects in the public (Cho and Choy 2011; Gadarian 2010; Hibbing and Theiss-Morse 1998; Pan and Kosicki 1994; Schemer 2012). For example, exposure to television news enhanced patriotic feelings and strengthened positive affective reactions toward President Bush in the Gulf war (Pan and Kosicki 1994). Thus, for heavy users of emotionarousing news affective reactions may become chronic over time.

3.1.2 Effects of formal features Similar to the specific content of political communication the style and form of news or ads can prompt affective reactions in viewers. Visualization is an important news feature to elicit affective reactions in news recipients (Graber 1996). For instance, negative images in news increase negative affect (Lang, Newhagen, and Reeves 1996; Mendelson and Papacharissi 2007; Newhagen and Reeves 1992). Furthermore, pictures of ethnic minorities in crime news have been shown to arouse negative affect in recipients (Dixon and Maddox 2005). Another study showed that pictures in leaflets of environmental groups elicited affective responses. More specifically, depictions of a cute monkey increased positive feelings while pictures of a bug were associated with negative feelings (Huddy and Gunnthorsdottir 2000). However, other studies failed to find an affective influence of compelling visuals (Pfau et al. 2008). Language also affects the way audiences respond emotionally to news (Roseman, Abelson, and Ewing 1986). The use of metaphors (Miall 1987; Sopory and Dillard 2002), punchy and expressive language (Pallak, Murroni, and Koch 1983; Sparks and Areni 2008), or emotion words (Nabi 2003) are features that are likely to elicit affective reactions in recipients. Especially metaphors are important devices in political communication. For example, immigration discourse includes

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metaphors, such as “country is swamped by immigrants” or immigration described as a “flood” (Charteris-Black 2006). Such metaphors are likely to elicit affective responses in news recipients because the negative connotation of natural disasters is transferred to a minority group (see Miall 1987). The discourse structure of news stories can also prompt affective reactions (Brewer and Lichtenstein 1982; Miall 1988). News stories that present a course of events in a linear-type narrative elicit suspense while a reversal-type narrative arouses curiosity or surprise (Knobloch, Patzig, Mende, and Hastall 2004). In addition, political information in a narrative form is also likely to result in affective reactions in audience members (Fabrigar and Petty 1999). For instance, exposure to a story about a fictitious animal in the context of a narrative elicited stronger negative affective reactions than a factual article (Fabrigar and Petty 1999). Similarly, episodic frames in news stories are more likely to elicit affective reactions than thematic frames (Arøe 2011; Gross 2008). Specifically, readers of a news story about mandatory minimum sentencing felt more sympathy and pity when the story was episodically framed (i.e., presentation of a specific individual as an exemplar) than when it was thematically framed (i.e., providing factual details and background information, Gross 2008) (see also the chapters by Aalberg and by Arendt and Matthes). Finally, music is a prominent cue designed to arouse affective reactions in the audience. For example, including depressing music in negative issue ads increased negative affect in voters while positive affect resulted from the addition of uplifting music to positive issue ads (Brader 2005; but see Thorson, Christ, and Caywood 1991 for discrepant findings). In sum, most of these studies show that the positive or negative affective response of viewers or readers is amplified by formal or style elements in political communication content.

3.2 Effects on specific emotions 3.2.1 Effects of facial mimicry One of the first systematic research efforts regarding emotional media effects in political communication dealt with the automatic impact of facial leader displays on the experience of emotions in viewers. These studies clearly demonstrate that observers mimic the emotional facial expression of politicians (i.e., facial mimicry; Lanzetta et al. 1985; McHugo et al. 1985). Specifically, exposure to a smiling and reassuring facial display of Ronald Reagan in a speech led to a smile in viewers. In contrast, anger and threat displays resulted in a corresponding frowning response (Lanzetta et al. 1985). These immediate reactions were assessed by using facial EMG and cannot be consciously controlled by the individual. Interestingly, the recipients’ facial reactions were independent of their initial attitude toward Ronald Reagan. Thus, the immediate impact of leader displays can be considered an emo-

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tional contagion effect. Unlike the immediate emotional response the self-reported emotion toward the candidate was strongly influenced by viewers’ initial attitudes. In other words, regardless of the automatic congruent facial emotional reactions viewers with a negative pre-test attitude toward Reagan also reported negative feelings in a post-test (McHugo et al. 1985). These studies also suggest that selfreports of feelings are congruent with automatic facial reactions when viewers have weak attitudes toward the politician (Lanzetta et al. 1985). Thus, initial attitudes moderate the impact of facial leader displays (see also Figure 1). The context of political leader displays also matters for the experience of emotions (Bucy 2000; Bucy and Bradley 2004). Specifically, appropriate facial displays (e.g., negative and calm reactions to negative news) prompt positive emotions while inappropriate displays (e.g., positive and intense emotional reactions to positive news) elicit negative emotions in viewers. Thus, inappropriate facial leader displays evoke counter-empathetic responses in the audience.

3.2.2 Effects on fear The framing of certain political issues in the media is the most likely cause of the experience of specific emotions. Most previous research has been devoted to fear appeals (Witte and Allen 2000). Typically, fear is elicited by the appraisal of negative events or situations that are uncertain and highly relevant to the individual’s goals, but are not under the individual’s control. For instance, Gleicher and Petty (1992) exposed participants to a radio broadcast that either dealt with a worrying crime problem or an innocuous situation. The depiction of crime as a dangerous and uncontrollable problem elicited more intense fear than the low-fear broadcast. Similarly, previous research indicates that exposure to crime (Holbert, Shah, and Kwak 2004; Sotirovic 2001), health or environmental risks (Dillard et al. 1996; Meijnders, Midden, and Wilke 2001), terrorism (Nabi 2002), war (Allen 1993), or violence (Unz et al. 2008) elicits fear in the news audience. Furthermore, the depiction of violence in the news causes fright reactions in children (Cantor and Nathanson 1996). Taken together, the depiction of negative situations that are highly uncertain and cannot be easily controlled elicits fear in audience members. Most of these and the subsequent findings are due to processes of emotion induction.

3.2.3 Effects on anger Unlike fear, anger typically arises from depictions of a blameworthy act that a causal agent could have avoided. For example, news depictions of intentional violence represent such blameworthy acts and should result in more intense anger reactions. Consistent with this assumption, Unz et al. (2008) demonstrated that

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news stories showing intentional violence, such as juvenile riots in a city or torture of human beings increased anger in viewers relative to a non-violence control group (see also Newhagen 1998). Holbert and Hansen (2008) demonstrated that watching the film Fahrenheit 9–11 increased anger toward President Bush (for related findings, see Butler, Koopman, and Zimbardo 1995). Furthermore, exposure to a news story about terrorism that portrayed terrorists as criminals that are getting away with it resulted in more intense anger reactions than a news article that depicted terrorism as an imminent threat, a message designed to evoke fear (Nabi 2002). Finally, exposure to a news article dealing with an environmental problem that was caused by the negligent behavior of individuals (i.e., a tanker running aground because the crew did not fulfill the safety guidelines) resulted in intense anger reactions of readers (Nerb and Spada 2001). In sum, portrayals in the news of political events or issues that are incongruent with viewers’ goals, which are due to blameworthy acts of other people, and which could possibly have been avoided are likely to increase anger in the news audience (see also Kühne and Schemer 2013).

3.2.4 Effects on sadness Sadness is typically elicited by situations of irrevocable loss (Lazarus 1991). For example, exposure to a news article dealing with the tragic outcome of a traffic accident that could not be avoided increased sadness in readers (Kühne and Schemer 2013). Similarly, portrayals of environmental damages as a result of strategies aiming at protecting humans (e.g., death of sea cows in fish nets intended to fence off sharks) elicit sadness (Nerb and Spada 2001). Finally, news stories dealing with violent acts against objects have also been shown to increase sadness in viewers (Unz et al. 2008). In all these news stories, news recipients are confronted with negative events that are difficult to avert by human agents or that cannot be avoided because of higher goals (Nerb and Spada 2001).

3.2.5 Effects on other emotions Very few studies to date have studied other emotions as responses to political communication. For example, previous research has demonstrated that news about desirable policy programs blocked by political maneuvers (Gross and Brewer 2007), violence (Unz et al. 2008), or victims of a famine (Newhagen 1998) elicited disgust in the audience. Studies also found that contempt and lack of admiration resulted from dehumanizing news editorials on immigration (Esses et al. 2008). Considering the bulk of previous research, it must be acknowledged that most news stories elicit a blend of different emotions (e.g., Arøe 2011; Bucy 2000; Dillard

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et al. 1996). Specifically, news stories covering negative issues evoke different negative emotions, such as anger and fear (Unz et al. 2008) or disgust and anger (Gross and Brewer 2007). This is mainly due to the fact that news stories are complex stimuli that result in various appraisal patterns. These appraisal patterns, in turn, produce a blend of different yet related emotions.

3.3 Effects on arousal 3.3.1 Effects of content features A consistent finding in previous research is that the reporting of negative issues automatically increases arousal (Bucy and Bradley 2004; Newhagen and Reeves 1992; Reeves et al. 1989). Thus, negative issues represent a survival threat that automatically elicit an orienting response and increase an individual’s arousal. However, other studies found no difference in the influence of positive and negative images on arousal or even obtained opposite effects (Bradley, Angelini, and Lee 2007; Simons, Detenber, and Cuthbert 2003; Thorson et al. 1991). For instance, the portrayal of new, surprising, and immediate events can also elicit arousal in news viewers (Reeves et al. 1991). In other words, effects on arousal depend on content and the intensity of images in the news (Lang, Dhillon, and Dong 1995). Additional research indicates that soft news (e.g., stories dealing with inconsequential sensational topics) produce more intense arousal than hard news (e.g. news dealing with consequential political developments; Grabe, Lang, and Zhao 2003). Furthermore, the use of support ads is more arousing than attack ads (Thorson et al. 1991). Finally, studies on the impact of facial leader displays found that activation was highest during anger and threat displays and lowest during happiness displays. Put simply, viewers relaxed and were calm when they observed Ronald Reagan smiling during a speech, but they were alert when seeing a threatening face (Lanzetta et al. 1985). In addition, the context of leader displays also matters, such that negative facial expressions of politicians in the context of negative news produce the highest levels of arousal in viewers (Bucy and Bradley 2004).

3.3.2 Effects of formal features Formal features, such as production techniques or style elements increase the arousal of recipients of news. These findings are based on self-report data, but also on physiological data, such as skin conductance rate which is an indicator of autonomic arousal. An experiment holding constant the visual and verbal content of television news demonstrated that a news report which includes dramatizing production techniques (e.g., sound effects, slow motion, or flash frames) produced higher self-reported arousal and physiological arousal (Grabe et al. 2000). Previous

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research has also found evidence that dynamic formal features in the news (e.g. cuts or camera turns) increases autonomic arousal and elicits orienting responses in viewers (Grabe et al. 2003; Lang et al. 1999). These techniques are more often used in tabloid news programs than in traditional broadcasts (Grabe, Zhou, and Barnett 2001). The embedding of pictures and images is another feature of news that increases arousal (Lang et al. 1996; Newhagen and Reeves 1992). Other research indicates that moving images are more arousing than still pictures (Detenber and Reeves 1996; Simons et al. 2003), and images perceived as real result in more intense arousal than fictional pictures (Mendelson and Papacharissi 2007). Camera close-ups are also a means of evoking arousal in viewers of news stories (Bucy and Newhagen 1999; Mutz 2007). A recent study indicates that camera closeups create an unnatural perception of intimacy which increases autonomic arousal in viewers (Mutz 2007). Furthermore, Mutz and Reeves (2005) provide evidence of increased arousal due to the depiction of uncivil conflict in televised political discussions. Finally, news stories or ads that include music increase arousal in viewers (Brader 2005; Lang et al. 1995; Lang et al. 1996; but see Thorson et al. 1991).

4 The importance of moderating factors The preceding overview should not suggest that the affective impact of political communication is universal and affects all audience members regardless of their predisposition. On the contrary, people differ in their susceptibility to such effects (see also Figure 1). For instance, prior knowledge and issue familiarity are likely to moderate the impact of political communication on affective responses. Numerous studies have shown that individuals who are well informed or familiar with an issue experience less emotional arousal in response to political communication (Nabi 2003; Stevens 2008). Similarly, prior attitudes act as a moderating variable that can increase or decrease people’s susceptibility to the experience of affective reactions. Thus, previous research found stronger media effects on emotions for partisans than for non-partisans (Cho and Choy 2011; Holbert and Hansen 2008). Similarly, existing emotional predispositions have been shown to moderate the perception of emotional appeals made by political interest groups (Roseman et al. 1986). Whether attitudinal predispositions increase or dampen the effect of political information on affective reactions depends on the congruence of news features with the goals of message recipients. If a negative message is congruent with an individual’s goals, then affectively congruent reactions (i.e., negative affects) will follow from the exposure to the message. If there is no congruence between the message content and the recipient’s goals, then the consequence is likely to be incongruent affects or no affective reactions at all. Prior attitudes have also been shown to moderate the strength of the emotional response to news frames (Gross and Brewer 2007; Gross and D’Ambrosio 2004),

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images (Peffley, Shields, and Williams 1996), or leader displays (Bucy and Bradley 2004; Holbert and Hansen 2008). For instance, the more individuals favored a reform of campaign finance, the more anger and disgust they felt when they learned that political parties were blocking this reform (Gross and Brewer, 2007). Additional research has produced valuable findings regarding the role of personality traits that moderate the affective impact of political communication (Dillard and Peck 2001; Huskinson and Haddock 2006; Laird et al. 1994; Witte and Allen 2000). In sum, these predispositions not only moderate the elicitation of affective responses to political communication but also subsequent influences of affective responses on information processing, learning, and attitude formation (see Figure 1).

5 Consequences of affective reactions Affective responses to media messages are not without consequences for learning or attitude formation (for a recent overview, see Kühne 2012). For instance, the experience of emotions in response to political information indicates that a specific issue is urgent and needs immediate attention (Storbeck and Clore 2008). Thus, specific emotions induced by political news can color people’s information processing and memory of news stories (Kühne and Schemer 2013; Nabi 2003). For instance, anger elicited by a news article biases information processing and learning such that readers remember more anger-related information (e.g., information related to harsher punishment). Furthermore, angry individuals are more likely to prefer restrictive policy programs (Kühne and Schemer 2013). The reason is that emotions are functional in the sense that they elicit a set of perceptual, cognitive, and behavioral responses that help the individual deal quickly with a given situation in the environment (Scherer 2005). The experience of specific emotions in response to political news is likely to bias subsequent processing, storage, recall, and evaluation of this information. Or, as Nabi (2003: 230) put it “selective processing and decision making is guided by the emotion’s emotivational goal or action tendency”. For instance, when news stories about negative events elicit anger then individuals are inclined to selectively focus information related to agents that may have caused a negative event and neglect information that are associated with situational causes. Furthermore, angry individuals favor retributive solutions that aim to punish putative agents instead of solutions that change situational causes of events. Thus, message-induced emotions can have considerable consequences for information processing and judgment formation. Finally, research has clearly shown that arousal influences the processing of information by modulating people’s attention. Medium arousal induced by formal features facilitates learning from political news (Lang, Potter, and Grabe 2003). In contrast, low arousal under-engages viewers while high arousal undermines

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recipient’s processing capacity thereby impeding the storage of information. As a consequence of this deficient storage of information, learning from political news can suffer considerably. In addition, affective reactions elicited by political communication can influence people’s attitudes and behaviors (Abelson et al. 1986; for an overview, see Isbell et al. 2006). For example, research demonstrates that exposure to news elicits negative affects toward ethnic minorities which, in turn, increases people’s preference for more restrictive immigration policies (Brader et al. 2008; Esses et al. 2008; Schemer 2010). Even irrelevant affective reactions (e.g., positive affect elicited by funny commercials) can affect the perception and evaluation of political news subsequent to a commercial break (Wirth, Schemer, and Matthes 2010). Furthermore, emotional arousal has been found to polarize people’s attitudes (Storbeck and Clore 2008). Although some of these studies reveal only short-term effects, additional research provides convincing evidence that the affective influence of political communication can have long-term effects, such as learning from optimally arousing news broadcasts (Lang et al. 2003), cultivation of fear of crime (Holbert et al. 2004), conditioning of negative emotions toward ethnic minorities (Schemer 2012), or a loss of political trust (Hibbing and Theiss-Morse 1998) (see also the chapters by Arendt and Matthes and by Maurer). These findings have clear normative implications that are also worth discussing. It is certainly functional in terms of citizen efficacy when a certain amount of arousal induced by formal news features facilitates learning from the news. It is also desirable that affective reactions in response to political information provides a sense of political awareness and raises attention to and participation in the political process (Marcus, Neuman, and MacKuen 2000; Valentino et al. 2011). In this sense, the affective reactions of citizens have important adaptive functions. However, affective reactions induced by political information can also have detrimental effects, such as an increase in intolerant attitudes toward minorities (Esses et al. 2008; Schemer 2012) or political opponents (Mutz 2007). Furthermore, media-induced affective reactions, such as anger or disgust that can result in a loss of political trust, a decline in participation, and a decrease of system support are certainly dysfunctional for democracies.

6 Conclusion and directions for future research This review documents the impact of political communication on affects, emotions, and arousal. Obviously, the affective influence of political information is a doubleedged sword. This ambiguity of effects and their long-term consequences deserve more scholarly attention in the future. In addition to valuable findings regarding the affective influences of political communication there are some other avenues of research that remain to be explored more thoroughly.

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First, individuals may not consciously experience all their affective responses. For instance, research on the effects of facial leader displays has shown that recipients automatically mimic the emotional expression of characters in the news. Although these immediate responses were not consequential for most people’s attitudes, recent research shows that unconscious affective reactions may be more consequential than previously assumed (e.g., Winkielman and Berridge 2003). Therefore, future communication research should study conscious and non-conscious affective processes. Second, future research should also devote more attention to mixed emotions or emotional blends as a consequence of exposure to political communication, i.e. the fact that political messages might not only result in one but a set of specific emotions (Dillard et al. 1996) in order to better predict the causes and consequences of emotional responding to political communication. Third, most studies on affective influences of political communication have been conducted in the U.S. There is only scant evidence of emotional effects in other countries let alone evidence from comparative studies (but, see Cwalina, Falkowski, and Kaid 2000; Kaid and Holtz-Bacha 1995; Scherer 1986). More comparative research is needed to find universals of affective responses to political news or ads. Finally, recent research suggests that there are reciprocal relations between the affective influence of political communication and affect-induced attention to political cues that elicited affective reactions in the first place (Schemer 2012). These findings indicate that there may be self-reinforcing spiral processes at work that can produce cumulative affective effects over time. However, additional research is required to bolster the conclusions that can be drawn from these preliminary studies.

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Marcus Maurer

30 Attitudinal effects in political communication Abstract: This chapter discusses attitudinal effects in political communication. It is argued that mass media are most influential in shaping political attitudes compared to direct experience and interpersonal communication. Furthermore, the role of message (e.g., tone, framing) and source characteristics (e.g., credibility) as well as elaborative vs. peripheral information processing is discussed. Based on a review of relevant studies, the chapter distinguishes between media effects on attitudes towards the political system (e.g., media malaise hypothesis) and towards parties, candidates, and issues and discusses respective findings. The chapter also critically reflects on factors moderating or mediating attitudinal effects as well as on methodological issues. Although attitudinal effects of political communication have been shown by numerous studies, the author argues that scholars should especially take a close look at media effects on party identification and issue preference in the future and more frequently use innovative research designs to further improve our knowledge of attitudinal effects in political communication. Key Words: political attitudes, media malaise, issue preferences, candidate image, party identification, political cynicism, information processing

1 Introduction Generally, there is not much consensus about how to define attitudes. While there are various partly contradicting definitions in psychological research, studies in political communication often use the term attitude simply interchangeable with terms like opinion or evaluation. In a quite simple way, an attitude can be defined as a positive or negative evaluation of a person, an event, an activity, an idea, or generally of any object in the environment. Therefore, a political attitude is as a positive or negative evaluation of a political object: a politician (e.g., candidate images), a political party (e.g., party identification), a political program (e.g., parties’ issue stands), or democracy as a form of government (for a detailed overview see Robinson, Shaver, and Wrightsman 1999; Oskamp and Schultz 2005: 295–344). Like every attitude, a political attitude is a function of affective and cognitive components. In other words: An attitude is influenced by emotional reactions towards an object as well as by thinking and arguing about the object. In some cases, one of the two components is clearly more important than the other one. For example, party identification is an affect-based attitude by definition (Campbell et al. 1960: 121, but see also Burden and Klofstad 2005) (see also the chapter by

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Schemer). In contrast, attitudes on parties’ issue stands may rather be cognitively based. Moreover, some attitudes are rather short-term, some are rather long-term. Short-term attitudes like candidate images or evaluations of the performance of the government sometimes change rapidly. In contrast, long-term attitudes like party identification or political values, e.g., the preference for a democratic political system, are much more stable over time. Political attitudes may have consequences for citizens’ political behavior, e.g., voting behavior, engaging in political parties, or participating in political protest (see the chapter by Becker and Scheufele) and there are many theories trying to explain the attitude-behavior relationship. The two most important are the theory of planned behavior and the concept of attitude accessibility. Following the theory of planned behavior (Fishbein and Ajzen 2010) a behavior is a function of the attitudes towards that behavior, subjective norms, and the perceived behavioral control. In other words, an attitude (e.g., being against nuclear energy) leads to a corresponding behavior (e.g., taking part in a demonstration against nuclear energy) in case a person holds a positive attitude towards the behavior, believes that others also hold positive attitudes towards the behavior, and believes that he is able to carry out the behavior. Challenging this quite reasoned approach to the attitude-behavior relationship, the concept of attitude accessibility (Fazio, Powell, and Williams 1989) states that an attitude only leads to the corresponding behavior in case it is accessible from mind (“on the top of the head”) in the moment a behavior has to be carried out (see also the chapter by Arendt and Matthes).

2 Conceptualizing attitudinal media effects Political attitudes can result from three different sources: (a) direct experience with the environment, (b) information from interpersonal communication, and (c) information from the mass media. Some, but not many people directly experience political matters. Some have met politicians personally, some have directly been affected by political decisions, some live close to places where politically relevant problems occur (e.g., a criminal neighborhood or a nuclear power station). But in most cases, political attitudes are not primarily shaped by direct experience with political objects, but rather by information about political objects. This information derives from interpersonal communication or from the mass media. Early research on the role of mass media and interpersonal discussion in political communication clearly supported a two-step flow model of communication. Following that model, most people are not directly exposed to mass media content but are rather getting informed by interpersonal communication with so called opinion leaders (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet 1944). But due to media expansion and social change, nowadays most people receive political information directly from the mass media. For example, Plasser and Plasser (2002: 200) show

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that for most people in European and North American democracies television is the most important source of political information (about 70 %) followed by daily newspapers (about 20 %). Since also the internet becomes more and more important nowadays, only five percent on average say that they are mainly informed by interpersonal communication (but see also the chapters by Boomgarden and by Wolling and Emmer). Because the mass media are the most important source of political information, one can assume that political attitudes result to a large extent from media effects. Using a quite simple definition, we can speak of attitudinal media effects when mass media content shapes, reinforces, or changes political attitudes (for an elaborated discussion see Potter 2011). Whether this is the case, depends on characteristics of the message, the source, and the recipients. First, the strength and direction of attitudinal media effects is influenced by message characteristics, especially its tone. On the one hand, effects can be caused by the neutral presentation of political events which are inherently positive or negative. In this case, collective media effects can be expected because everyone is more or less exposed to the same media content (aggregate effects). On the other hand, several analyses of political media content show that the media presentation of political events is rarely neutral. In fact, different media present the same politicians, parties or issues at the same time in a quite different way (e.g., Farnsworth and Lichter 2011; Gentzkow and Shapiro 2010; Hagen 1993). Therefore, media effects can obviously also result from journalistic decision rules and presentation styles which are caused by different editorial lines or attitudes of individual journalists (e.g., Patterson and Donsbach 1996). In this case, different effects on audiences by different media can be expected because individuals are exposed to different contents (individual effects). Other message characteristics influencing attitude change are the amount of information about a political object and the quality of arguments used. Second, whether attitudinal media effects occur depends on characteristics of the source of a message. The most important source characteristic is its perceived credibility, which is, of course, an attitude itself. Credibility falls into two dimensions: expertise (cognitive dimension) and trustworthiness (affective dimension). Overall, attitudinal media effects are more likely to occur when a recipient believes that a message comes from a credible source (O’Keefe 2002: 191–196) (see also the chapters by Knobloch-Westerwick and by Tsfati). Finally, whether attitudinal media effects occur depends on recipient characteristics. On the one hand, there are social variables (e.g., gender, age, and education) and general personality traits (e.g., the so called Big Five: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) which influence the strength of attitudinal effects. Those predispositions are more or less connected to certain initial attitudes already existing when being exposed to media messages. In case someone already holds strong attitudes towards an object, atti-

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Fig. 1: Attitudinal effects of political media content.

tudinal media effects are less likely to occur (see also the chapter by KnoblochWesterwick). On the other hand, there are several concepts measuring recipient characteristics which are directly related to the use and processing of information. The two most important of these concepts are need for orientation and involvement. The need for orientation towards a (political) object is high when a person perceives the object as relevant but feels uncertain about it. In this case, the person is expected to increase his or her attention to (media) information about the object. Consequently, the likelihood of the occurrence of attitudinal effects also increases (e.g., Matthes 2006). The concept of involvement describes a person’s motivation and ability to process information. In case a person is highly involved (high motivation, high ability), e.g., in a political issue, he or she is expected to process information deeply (elaborative processing). Consequently, high involvement should, on the one hand, increase the likelihood of the occurrence of attitudinal effects because the information is better understood and remembered. On the other hand, people who process information deeply tend to compare the new information used to their already existing attitudes. Therefore, at least attitude change is less likely to occur (e.g., Petty and Cacioppo 1986) (see also the chapter by Knobloch-Westerwick). In the context of political attitudes measuring the concept of involvement is often simply replaced by measuring political interest or political sophistication which may have about the same consequences for media effects (e.g., Zaller 1992: 21). Two-process models of information processing, e.g., the elaboration likelihood model (ELM) (Petty and Cacioppo 1986) combine message, source, and recipient characteristics in order to explain the likelihood of attitudinal effects. Following the ELM there are two (more or less) distinct routes of information processing. Highly involved recipients process information on the central route. They use

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information attentively and pay attention to the quality of arguments used, information processing is elaborated, but information is compared to already existing attitudes. Therefore, short-term attitude change is not very likely. But in case attitudes change, they will be quite stable from then on. On the other hand, less involved recipients will process information on the peripheral route. They mainly pay attention to peripheral cues like visuals or the credibility of the source, do not take their existing attitudes into account when processing information and, therefore, are more likely to change their attitudes.

3 Media effects on political attitudes Media effects on political attitudes are relevant in many different contexts (for some examples see Oskamp and Schultz 2005: 294–344). Indeed, most studies deal with either media effects on attitudes towards the political system or media effects on attitudes towards parties, candidates and issues that are especially relevant in the context of election campaigns because both seem to be the most crucial political attitudes in Western democracies.

3.1 Media effects on attitudes towards the political system Attitudes towards the political system have mostly been studied using one of three analytical frameworks: the concept of political support, the concept of political efficacy, and the concept of political cynicism. The concept of political support (Easton 1965) differentiates between specific and diffuse support. Specific support is measured as short-term attitude towards the performance of the government. Diffuse support is measured as long-term attitude towards democracy as a form of government. The concept of political efficacy (Balch 1974) differentiates between internal and external efficacy. Internal efficacy is an individual’s belief that he can understand and influence political decisions. External efficacy is an individual’s belief that government is responsive to citizens’ influence attempts. Finally, the concept of political cynicism (Capella and Jamieson 1997) mainly focuses on (dis)trust in political leaders and institutions. Because these concepts appear to be quite similar in terms of their causes and consequences, they are often mixed up in empirical studies. Although most theorists agree that high levels of support and efficacy and low levels of cynicism are essential for the health of democracies, in almost all Western countries political support of and trust in politicians, political parties, and political institutions has been declining especially during the final two decades of the 20th century (e.g., Pharr, Putnam, and Dalton 2000). Generally, there are two contradicting hypotheses about the role of mass media in this process which can be called the mobilization hypothesis and the media malaise hypothesis. The mobiliza-

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tion hypothesis states that exposure to political media content enhances support, trust, and efficacy. Indeed, evidence from survey research shows that those who are regularly exposed to political news show higher levels of support, trust, and efficacy compared to those who are rather exposed to entertaining media content or no media content at all. This holds especially true for exposure to newspaper content while television news do not seem to have the same positive effect (e.g., Holtz-Bacha 1990; Luengo and Maurer 2009; Newton 1999). Although those studies are not able to figure out the causal relationship between media exposure and political attitudes because both are measured at the same time, a “virtuous circle” (Norris 2000) has been assumed: in the long run exposure to political media content enhances political trust and vice versa. The media malaise hypothesis, on the other hand, states that exposure to political media content reduces support, trust, and efficacy. It is mainly based on the so called videomalaise hypothesis (Robinson 1976) which was quite popular during the 1970s. During that time, television became the most important source of political information in Western democracies. Because of television’s large and disperse audience, its high credibility, and its (presumed) tendency to present politics in a negative and controversial way, it has been assumed that exposure to television news reduces political efficacy compared to exposure to print news. Later on, this idea has been exaggerated step by step to the idea of a general negative influence of news media use on attitudes towards the political system. Taken together, empirical evidence is mixed. While some studies found lower levels of trust of those who are mainly exposed to television even when controlling for recipient characteristics (e.g., Bowen, Stamm, and Clark 2000; Hibbing and Theiss-Morse 1998; Robinson 1976), some found no media effects at all (e.g., Leshner and McKean 1997). Others identified mediating and moderating variables like recipients’ direct experiences with political problems (Mutz 1994), recipients’ perceptions of negativity in the news (Pinkleton, Austin, and Fortmann 1998) or recipients’ preferences for consensus and efficiency in politics (Floss 2010). Recent studies suggest that the idea of a general positive or negative effect of exposure to political news on attitudes towards the political system as proposed by mobilization or media malaise hypotheses is too simple. Instead, the direction and amount of effects largely depends on certain aspects of news coverage, especially the way politicians, parties, and political decisions are presented in the news. The most relevant aspect of news coverage is simply its tone. Long-term content analyses in Western democracies like the USA (Lichter and Amundson 1994; Patterson 1993), Sweden (Westerstahl and Johanson 1986), and Germany (Kepplinger 2000), more or less clearly show an increase in the amount of negative news in television, as well as in print media during the second half of the 20th century (see also the chapter by Schulz). Following those studies, this increase was caused by a change of journalistic decision rules (negativity and conflict as news factor) (see the chapters by McNaier, by Wahl-Jorgensen and by Hopmann),

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as well as by a change in political communication strategies (negative campaigning) (see the chapters by Strömback and Kiousis). Because the decline of political support, trust, and efficacy has been observed during the same time period, many studies empirically tried to find the link between both phenomena. Effects of the tone of presentation on recipients’ political attitudes have been found using three different research methods. First, experimental studies show that exposure to negative political media content about a politician, e.g. during a political scandal, not only reduces support for the politician but also for political parties in general (Maier 2011). The same effect has been found for televised political debates between candidates mostly attacking each other (Mutz and Reeves 2005). Second, time series analyses show that support for political leaders (Kepplinger et al. 1989), as well as for political institutions (Durr, Gilmour, and Wohlbrecht 1997) significantly decreases when media coverage becomes negative, even when other influences on political support are controlled. Third, studies combining content analysis and panel survey data on the level of individual recipients show that citizens who are mainly exposed to negative information about politicians and political parties between two survey waves change their attitudes towards politicians and political parties to the negative. This holds especially true for specific support, external efficacy, and political trust while diffuse support and internal efficacy are not affected by media coverage (Maurer 2003; Kleinnijenhuis, van Hoof, and Oegema 2006). Because negative information is more likely to be taken into account when forming attitudes than positive information (e.g., Skowronski and Carlston 1989), there was no comparable effect of positive information: Those who were mainly exposed to positive information during the same period of time did not change their attitudes, at all (Maurer 2003: 197–214). Besides a negative tone, also strategic news framing seems to lower political support, efficacy and trust. Strategic news framing is defined as focusing political news coverage on the competition between parties and especially candidates, presenting politics as a game or race, and frequently mentioning poll results in the news (Capella and Jamieson 1997: 33). It is assumed that strategic news framing suggests that political candidates and parties do not care for complex solutions of political problems. Instead, they are trying to win elections and do whatever is needed to be successful. This, in turn, fosters political cynicism. Capella and Jamieson (1997) first found empirical evidence for that hypothesis in a series of experiments. In those experiments, recipients who read newspaper articles or watched news films containing strategic framing showed higher levels of political cynicism compared to those who read or watched news items focusing on political issues. Since then, their findings have been replicated several times, mostly using experimental research designs (Valentino, Beckmann, and Buhr 2001; de Vreese 2004). However, field research combining content analysis and panel survey data did not yield a clear picture (de Vreese 2005). This research is especially relevant

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because it shows that mass media do not have to present politicians, political parties, or political institutions in an explicitly negative way in order to change recipients’ attitudes. Instead, they cause political cynicism by simply activating recipients’ thoughts by more or less neutrally focusing on certain aspects of politics (see also the chapters by Aalberg and by Arendt and Matthes).

3.2 Media effects on attitudes towards parties, candidates and issues Political science provides several theories explaining voting behavior. The two most popular theories are the Michigan model and rational choice theory. Following the Michigan model (Campbell et al. 1960) voting behavior is a function of three attitudes: party identification, candidate images, and attitudes towards political issues. Party identification is defined as the longstanding, affective attachment to a political party. It is mainly caused by social and psychological predispositions and is, in turn, a major factor influencing candidate images and issue preferences. Candidate images are rather short-term attitudes towards political candidates. They can be measured and grouped in several ways, which will be explained later in this chapter. Finally, issue preferences are short-term attitudes towards political issues. Their role is further explained by rational choice theory (Downs 1957). Following that theory, voters compare their own issue preferences with parties’ issue stands as, e.g., explained in their party programs. They decide to vote for the party whose issue stands come closest to their own. While it sometimes has been assumed that the rational choice model requests fully informed voters performing comparisons concerning all relevant issues, recent research suggests that most voters’ decisions rather depend on single issues which are accessible to them during the decision-making process (Iyengar and Kinder 1987). Moreover, for many voters it is quite rational to rely on heuristics and information shortcuts like party identification or ideology in order to minimize the cognitive effort needed for decision-making (Lau and Redlawsk 2006; Popkin 1991). Taken together, the likelihood of voting for a certain party increases when a voter shows a party identification for that party, a positive image of the party’s candidate, and a high level of consensus with the party’s issue stands. Although both theories do not really take into account media effects on those attitudes, it is quite reasonable to do so.

3.2.1 Party identification By definition, party identification is a durable attitude caused by social and psychological variables, as well as individual experiences in early youth. Consequently, it was supposed to be a constant in most voters’ lives. Following this idea party identification in most empirical studies is regarded as a filter in the selection

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and processing of news media content. Because individuals use news media favoring their “own” party and process information through the lens of their party identification, media effects on voting behavior seem to be limited (see first Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet 1944) (see also the chapter by Knobloch-Westerwick). In fact, recent panel studies measuring individuals’ party identification at several points in time show that they change much more often than expected – especially in multi-party systems and sometimes almost to the same extent as voting decisions do (e.g., Richardson 1991). This finding, first, casts doubt on party identification’s potential to explain voting decisions, because many people do not seem to be able to really disentangle the two concepts. Second, it raises the question whether the relationship between media exposure and party identification has to be reconsidered. In case individual party identification is not stable over time, its changes have to be explained. When taking into account the considerations on the sources of political attitudes discussed above, media effects on party identification are quite likely. Thus far, only a few studies dealt with that question. They found effects of media exposure especially on the acquisition of party identification. Regular news media consumption positively predicts an increase in the probability that an individual develops a party identification. This effect has been shown for immigrants (Wong 2000), as well as for the general public (Albright 2009). Whether there are also media effects regarding the direction and the changes of party identification, has not been examined thus far, but seems to be one of the most promising directions for future research.

3.2.2 Candidate images With no doubt, media effects on candidate images belong to the most intensively studied aspects of political communication. On the one hand, the image of a candidate can be measured as an overall evaluation, e.g., using a thermometer rating or a question on his overall performance (e.g., “All in all, what is your opinion on candidate x?”). On the other hand, candidate images can be measured using semantic differentials including a series of statements on different candidate traits (e.g., “Candidate x is trustworthy”) which are later grouped to broader image dimensions (Kaid 2004). Most simple, political traits in a narrow sense (e.g., competence, leadership quality) and more or less nonpolitical traits (e.g., physical attractiveness, sincerity) can be distinguished (e.g., Kepplinger and Maurer 2005; Nimmo and Savage 1976). Other studies group candidate images in three (character, leadership, competence; e.g., Bartels 1993), four (competence, leadership, integrity, empathy; e.g. Miller and Shanks 1996: 425), or even five (competence, integrity, reliability, charisma, personality; e.g., Wattenberg 1991: 81) dimensions. The relationship between attitudes on single candidate traits and overall opinions

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is probably reciprocal. On the one hand, single traits add up to overall impressions with different weights. On the other hand, attitudes on single traits may be retrieved from overall judgments. Moreover, attitudes on candidate traits influence attitudes on other candidate traits. This, for example, holds true for physical attractiveness which has been found to influence voters’ impressions of candidates’ competence (e.g., Budesheim and de Paula 1994). Concerning media effects, candidate images can be influenced by the presentation of political candidates in the news, as well as by candidates’ self-display in interviews, political talk shows, and televised debates. The influence of media presentation of political candidates on their image has been shown by using various research designs. In the most simple approach, survey studies show differences in the candidate images of those who are exposed to news media and those who are not (e.g., Kazee 1981; Bartels 1993). More elaborated studies combine content analysis and survey data either in time-series, or panel studies. Time-series analyses show that on the aggregate level changes in the media presentation of politicians cause changes in voters’ overall opinions with a short delay (Fan and Tims 1989; Kepplinger et al. 1989). Moreover, analyses on the individual level show that voters’ overall evaluations of political candidates (Dalton, Beck, and Huckfeldt 1998) and even the individual changes of overall evaluations (Maurer et al. 2013) can directly be traced back to their individual exposure to positive and negative news. Though, effects measured on the individual level seem to be much weaker than effects measured on the aggregate level. Media effects on single candidate traits have also been examined based on the theory of attribute or second-level agenda-setting. Following this theory, changes in the perception of candidate traits (attributes) are caused by the media presentation of exactly those traits. For example, when mass media present a candidate as credible, first, the trait credibility will become more accessible in voters’ minds and, second, voters will believe that the candidate is credible. This effect was first shown in a study by McCombs et al. (1997) using a cross-sectional design. In this study, the correlation between media and voter attribute agenda was stronger for substantial attributes (personality traits, issue stands) than for affective attributes (evaluations). Recent studies confirm these results also with panel designs (Balmas and Sheafer 2010; Bos, van der Brug, and de Vreese 2011) (see also the chapter by Arendt and Matthes). The influence of candidate’s self-display during media appearances on voters’ candidate images has frequently been examined especially in the context of televised debates. Many studies show differences in the candidate images of debate viewers and non-viewers (e.g., Benoit, Webber, and Berman 1998; Benoit, Hansen, and Vester 2003). Others find differences in candidate images before and after watching a debate (e.g., McKinney, Rill, and Watson 2011; Warner et al. 2011). Generally, these effects are stronger for challengers than for incumbents (Holbrook 1996). By combining traditional surveys before and after a debate and continuous

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response measurement during a debate, changes in candidate images can directly be traced back to certain rhetoric strategies (e.g., Maurer and Reinemann 2003). Taken together, candidates seem to improve their image when presenting their own plans and goals using vague rhetoric, while attacking the opponent negatively affects candidate images (see also Reinemann and Maurer 2005). Far more than other political attitudes, candidate images are also influenced by nonverbal communication. Experimental research shows that journalists can influence candidate images by using certain camera angles (e.g., Kepplinger and Donsbach 1990) and editing techniques (e.g., Scheufele, Kim, and Brossard 2007) (see also the chapter by Schemer). Other experimental studies find differences in the candidate images of voters who watched a political talk-show or a televised debate and voters who only listened to them (e.g., McKinnon, Tedesco, and Kaid 1993; Haumer and Donsbach 2009). Moreover, field studies based on framing theory (Coleman and Banning 2006; Grabe and Bucy 2009) show that the visual presentation of candidate traits in the news (image bites) influences candidate images. However, most studies comparing the effects of verbal and nonverbal communication on candidate images suggest that verbal communication is more important (e.g., Patterson et al. 1992; Maurer 2009; Nagel, Maurer, and Reinemann 2012).

3.2.3 Issue preferences Mass media can have various effects in which political issues are involved. First, media coverage on political issues influences citizens’ perceptions of issue importance (agenda-setting) and their criteria of evaluating politicians (priming). These cognitive media effects are discussed elsewhere in this volume (see the chapter by Arendt and Matthes). Second, media coverage on candidates and parties influences citizens’ perceptions of candidates’ and parties’ issue competence (e.g., Bartels 1993). These effects are quite similar to those already discussed in the previous section on candidate images and will, therefore, not be discussed here again. Finally, media coverage on political issues influences citizens’ issue preferences. Although these effects come closest to the idea of issue based voting, they have rarely been studied during election campaigns but frequently in the context of single issues in everyday life. Most simply, mainstreaming theory, which is a refinement of cultivation theory, suggests that individuals with different general ideological views (e.g., liberals and conservatives) develop similar issue preferences when watching television heavily (Gerbner et al. 1980). Following this theory, the uniform content of television converts individual beliefs and values into a general, rather conservative mainstream of attitudes shared by almost everyone. Mainstreaming effects of television have been found comparing heavy and light television users’ attitudes on

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issues like abortion, homosexuality, and marijuana consumption (e.g., Shanahan and Morgan 1999: 137–171) (see also the chapter by Arendt and Matthes). Quite similar, field studies show influences of media exposure on issue preferences in various other contexts. In the context of election campaigns, media exposure seems to influence voters’ ideology as well as their attitudes on single issues, e.g. defense spendings (Bartels 1993). In the context of risk communication, studies show effects of media exposure on attitudes towards climate change (Krosnick et al. 2006; Zhao et al. 2011) or technology (Nisbet et al. 2002). Those studies provide at least two additional findings: First, media effects on politically relevant attitudes towards risk issues are often mediated by factors like risk perception or knowledge. Second, citizens’ politically relevant attitudes towards risk issues depend on the content of media coverage. While exposure to science news leads to greater knowledge and higher risk perceptions, exposure to political news causes contrary effects. While in the case of climate change high knowledge leads to strong support for anti-climate change policy, in the case of technology high knowledge is associated with positive attitudes about science issues. Comparable results have also been found in field studies comparing media presentation of issues like nuclear energy and citizens’ attitudes towards those issues in longer periods of time (e.g., Kepplinger 1992). Recent experimental research on the effects of media coverage on recipients’ issue preferences has largely been based on framing theory. In those studies, two or more groups of respondents are provided with messages including different news frames. Results show, e.g., that respondents, who read newspaper articles framing the Kosovo war as a humanitarian crises showed a stronger support for intervention than do respondents who read articles framing the war as a risk to America (Berinsky and Kinder 2006; see also Edy and Meirick 2007 for similar results). Other studies found similar results for attitudes on policy issues like handgun policy (Haider-Markel and Joslyn 2001), genetically modified food (Druckman and Bolsen 2011) or diabetes prevention programs (Golust, Lantz, and Ubel 2011) (see also the chapters by Aalberg and by Arendt and Matthes).

4 Conclusion and directions for future research Nowadays, there is not much doubt about the role of mass media in shaping political attitudes. Because mass media are most citizens’ primary source of political information, effects of media content on recipients’ political attitudes are quite likely. Consequently, empirical studies based on various theories show those effects concerning various political attitudes in various contexts. Of course, media effects are rarely universal but mediated and moderated by source characteristics, message characteristics, and recipient characteristics. But even after controlling for other factors, media effects remain quite stable. Moreover, media effects on

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political attitudes have been shown using different methods and research designs. While experimental studies measuring attitudes directly after media exposure and time-series analyses on the aggregate level show strong effects of media content on political attitudes, field studies combining content analyses and survey data find only marginal effects. Generally, there are two different explanations for this finding. First, experimental research and research on the aggregate level produce artefacts, e.g., attitudes measured in experiments are only short-term and do not have consequences for real life or findings on the aggregate level are ecological fallacies. Second, research designs combining content analysis and survey data on the individual level have to be improved. While media effects on attitudes towards the political system and media effects on candidate images have frequently been under examination, effects on issue preferences and especially effects on party identification should further be taken into account in future research. Moreover, innovative research designs are needed. In field research, there is still a lack of studies combining content analysis and panel survey data on the individual level. In experimental research, there is a lack of studies measuring individual perceptions and information processing during media reception. Research tools like eye-tracking, continuous response measurement, and psychophysiological measurement show recipient’s immediate reactions to media messages and can be combined with content analysis and survey data in order to get deeper insights into the process of attitude formation.

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Amy B. Becker and Dietram A. Scheufele

31 Media effects on political behavior Abstract: This chapter reviews research on media effects on political behavior. It looks both at traditional activities of political participation and non-traditional activities like opinion expression. The chapter discusses several models (e.g., SES, Civic Voluntarism Model, and O-S-O-R models) in order to locate the impact of media exposure and selected mediating variables (e.g., political talk, trust, efficacy) on political behavior. Furthermore, it reflects on connections between negotiation models of media effects (framing) and the effects of media exposure on public opinion expression. The chapter concludes by proposing new directions for future research discussing the importance of emerging social-level influences and the implications of the changing news environment. Key Words: political behavior, political participation, voting, opinion expression, political trust, political efficacy, framing, media expansion

1 Introduction Research dealing with media effects on political behavior spans multiple disciplines, including communication, political science, psychology and a number of overlapping areas at the intersections of these fields. This has led to an equally diverse set of approaches to studying media effects on political behavior that differ – among other things – in the theoretical models underlying each strand of research, and also the conceptualization of political behavior as the dependent variable. Most conceptualizations of political behavior take a multidimensional approach, usually distinguishing two or more dimensions of relevant political behavior. What has been most problematic historically is the fact that different strands of research have used (a) different labels for similar dimensions of political behavior, (b) the same labels for different operationalizations of political behavior, and (c) particular indicators as components of different dimensions of political behavior. The following sections will therefore briefly review the differences across research traditions with respect to the number of dimensions identified and their conceptual definitions. In this chapter we begin with a review of the conceptualization of political behavior as an outcome variable, focusing on both traditional activities (e.g., voting, signing a petition, contacting an elected official, volunteering for a campaign, etc.) and non-traditional activities like opinion expression. We then consider a variety of models (e.g., SES, Civic Voluntarism Model, and O-S-O-R models) in an

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attempt to locate the impact of media exposure and selected mediating variables of interest including political talk, trust, efficacy, knowledge, and tolerance on political behavior. We continue the discussion by focusing on an examination of negotiation models of media effects and the connections with framing theory and the effect of media exposure on public opinion expression. We conclude by proposing some new directions for future research on the impact of media on political behavior, discussing the importance of emerging social-level influences and the implications of the changing news environment. To be clear, the focus of this chapter is on understanding the various factors that impact the frequency and intensity of political behavior; we are not concerned here with addressing the relationships that exist between media exposure, antecedent variables, and the expression of political attitudes and preferences. While research on the emotional, cognitive, and attitudinal effects that stem from exposure to media content is certainly related to the concepts we discuss in this chapter, our focus centers primarily on examining behavioral outcomes.

2 Conceptualizing political behavior 2.1 Political participation and voting A first research tradition, originating in political science, conceptualizes political behavior somewhat narrowly as participation in elections or the political process, more generally. Rosenstone and Hansen (1993), for instance, differentiate between two dimensions of political participation. The first one is participation in electoral politics and includes voting as the “most common form of citizen participation in America” (Rosenstone and Hansen 1993: 41). The second dimension, governmental politics, includes various forms of political action, such as signing petitions, writing to a congressman or senator, or writing an article for a newspaper or magazine. The major difference between the two dimensions, Rosenstone and Hansen (1993) argue, are the longitudinal patterns of participation. Participation in electoral politics is limited to election and campaign years whereas participation in governmental politics is to a large degree independent of external events. Crotty (1991) offers a similar dichotomous conceptualization of participation. He distinguishes voting as explicitly election-focused activity from all other forms of governmental participation. His conceptual distinction is supported by the different patterns of antecedent variables that predict each of the two dimensions: “Those with stronger roots within the society and the community (the older, married, working people who attend church on a regular basis) vote more regularly; and [...] those better-off economically and middle-and upper-middle-class status (the better educated, higher income respondents living in nonrural areas and with higher status occupations) participate more” (Crotty 1991: 4) (see also the chapter by Wolling and Emmer).

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These dichotomous conceptualizations of participation, however, may be overly simplistic. Governmental participation, for example, likely takes many different forms, depending on the circumstances under which citizens participate and a whole host of socio-demographic factors that make certain forms of participation more or less likely. Verba and Nie (1972), Nie and Verba (1975) and Verba, Nie, and Kim (1978) therefore offer a more elaborate system of what they call “modes” of participation. They differentiate four dimensions of participation, breaking participation in governmental politics further down into three dimensions: (1) frequency of voting in local and national elections, (2) campaign activities, including persuading others, attending meetings, or contributing money, (3) citizen-initiated contacts to local, state, and national officials, and (4) cooperative activities, i.e., involving group or organizational activities. Milbrath and Goel’s (1977) conceptualization of participation is even more detailed, distinguishing six dimensions or modes of participation: (1) Voting, they argue, is a separate mode of participation from party and campaign activity. (2) Party and campaign participation includes items like persuading others, contributing money, and joining or working for parties or organizations both during and between elections. (3) Similar to Verba and Nie (1972), Nie and Verba (1975), and Verba, Nie, and Kim (1978), Milbrath and Goel (1977) found community activities to be a separate factor, including forming and joining community groups concerned with public issues. (4) Similarly, contacting officials is equivalent to Verba and Nie’s (1972), Nie and Verba’s (1975), and Verba, Nie, and Kim’s (1978) operationalizations. (5) Joining public street demonstrations, rioting if necessary, or refusing to obey unjust laws form a fifth factor called protest. (6) The final factor emerging from Milbrath and Goel’s exploratory factor analyses is communication. This factor includes communication with other people in the community as well as political leaders (see also the chapters by Wolling and Emmer and by Boomgarden).

2.2 Opinion expression A number of communication scholars have proposed a broader focus that also includes non-traditional forms of participating in politics. This additional dimension is different from protests or civic disobedience, as defined by Milbrath and Goel (1977) and others. Instead, it refers to participation in public forums, organized by agencies, community groups, or local governmental bodies. McLeod and colleagues (e.g., McLeod, Scheufele, and Moy 1999; McLeod et al., 1999), for instance, measure non-traditional participation as a combined measure of participation in and speaking out at forums, especially if encountering people who hold different opinions. This distinction between traditional forms of participation and other expressions of opinions in public is also found in ethnographic work of volunteer groups.

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Eliasoph (1998), for example, found a clear difference between volunteering and participating in politics, on the one hand, and discussing politics with others – like-minded or not – on the other. Eliasoph describes what she labels “political avoidance” in discussions among volunteers as follows: “Volunteers’ political etiquette systematically silenced some types of ideas more than others: democratic ideas, participatory ideas, ideas with long time horizons, ambiguous or ambivalent ideas, ideas that would not lead to an immediate volunteer style solution: in short, any idea that demanded talk was avoided” (Eliasoph 1998: 46). Based on these observations, the notion of publicly expressing an opinion – especially about controversial issues – is different from political activity or participation. Scheufele and Eveland (2001) explore this distinction empirically. They propose a conceptual distinction between public and non-public forms of participation, and define public participation as political behaviors that require publicly communicating one’s opinion, including trying to persuade someone to vote for or against a given party or candidate; displaying a campaign button, sign, or bumper sticker; attending a meeting, speech, or rally for a candidate; and working for a party or candidate. Non-public participation, in Scheufele and Eveland’s (2001) view, taps behaviors that citizens can engage in with a reasonable expectation of short-term privacy, including voting in elections, contributing money to a candidate, and contributing money to a political party (see also the chapters by Emmer and Wolling, by Boomgarden, and by Knobloch-Westerwick).

3 The interplay of media and antecedents While the primary purpose of this chapter is to discuss the behavioral effects of mass communication, a comprehensive overview of media effects also requires a discussion of the antecedent and mediating variables that best predict key outcome variables of interest. In this next section we explore a series of models that have been used by political communication researchers over the course of the past few decades to explain the impact that mass media have on behavioral outcomes. Our overview will classify areas of research around four models: (a) SES models of political behavior, (b) mediated O-S-O-R models, (c) moderated negotiation models, and (d) the impact of opinion climates.

3.1 SES models of political behavior and the Civic Voluntarism Model Volumes of previous research have instructed us that those who are older, more educated, male, and have higher levels of socioeconomic status (SES) are more likely to get involved with politics (Milbrath and Goel 1982). Verba, Schlozman, and Brady’s (1995) Civic Voluntarism Model represents one of the first coherent

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efforts to expand upon SES models of political behavior. Their research was among the first to explore what factors best explain the likelihood to engage in a variety of participatory acts including: writing letters to the editor of a newspaper or government official to express political views, volunteering for political campaigns, signing a petition, and donating money to a political campaign. The findings of the research suggest that motivation, resources, and recruitment act as three key predictors of political engagement. Motivation represents an individual’s interest in becoming more involved with politics while resources or capacity represents the time, money, and skills needed to effectively participate in politics. In effect, capacity or resources measures the influence of SES and educational attainment in particular on political participation while recruitment measures the influence of networks (e.g., family, friends, community, church) on the likelihood of participation. Subsequent research on political participation has considered the impact of resources or socioeconomic status, motivation or political interest, and recruitment or membership in community, church, and social networks on the likelihood to engage with politics given both a general and issue specific context (McLeod, Scheufele, and Moy 1999; Scheufele et al. 2004; Scheufele and Shah 2000). While research by Scheufele, Nisbet, and Brossard (2003) suggests that in the U.S. secular – as opposed to religious networks – provide an ideal setting for citizens to share political information and in turn feel more motivated to engage in various forms of political participation, a considerable body of research has also documented a direct connection between involvement in religious and community groups and participation on issues as diverse as stem cell research, same-sex marriage, and nanotechnology (Becker et al. 2010; Becker and Scheufele 2009; Goidel and Nisbet 2006; Scheufele et al. 2008). More generally, research has shown that involvement with social networks and a local social or community context acts as a mobilizing agent, encouraging higher levels of participation and engagement (Huckfeldt and Sprague 1995; Rosenstone and Hansen 1993). Similarly, research has also shown that those with higher levels of motivation to engage with political life, or higher levels of political interest, are also more likely to discuss political issues, pay attention to relevant news content, and seek out direct avenues for engagement and involvement (Eveland and Scheufele 2000; McLeod, Scheufele, and Moy 1999; Mutz 2002; Scheufele and Shah 2000).

3.2 Mediated O-S-O-R models Simultaneously, research has explored the ways in which key variables like political talk, trust, efficacy, knowledge, and tolerance mediate the influence of resources, motivation, and various forms of media use on political participation and engagement. Using O-S-O-R models, political communication researchers have examined how a first set of orientations (O1), or demographics, interest, and mem-

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Fig. 1: O-S-O-R model and key variable elements.

bership in interpersonal networks, impact (S), exposure, or interpersonal discussion and media use. These first and second order variables then in turn influence a second set of orientations (O2 ), that includes variables like political knowledge, efficacy, and trust, known to mediate the relationship between communication, media use and the outcome variable of interest (R), generally specified as political participation, voting, civic engagement, or a willingness to speak out on a particular pressing issue (McLeod, Scheufele, and Moy 1999). Figure 1 offers a visual display of the variables that generally comprise O-S-O-R models. A review of past empirical research on the impacts of key second-level orientation variables (O2 ) and their ability to help predict behavioral effects or (R) is highlighted in the following sections.

3.2.1 Political talk Individuals who talk about and discuss matters of national and local politics with members of their social network (e.g., friends, family) have been shown to exhibit higher levels of political knowledge and an increased likelihood to participate politically (Scheufele 2000). Moreover, the act of engaging in political conversation has been shown to help individuals make sense of political information and it is this very discussion that in turn mediates the effects of exposure to media content on political participation and engagement (Hardy and Scheufele 2005). Known more formally as the differential gains model, talking about politics allows individuals to better understand media content and key political issues, encouraging connections between preexisting political knowledge and political engagement and

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activation (Scheufele 2002). In other words, the more an individual discusses politics with family members and friends, the more they understand about politics and the more likely they are to participate (see also the chapter by Boomgarden). A series of explanations have been used to describe the relationship between political talk and knowledge gain with recent research privileging an elaboration approach toward understanding the impact of discussion (Eveland and Thomson 2006; Hively and Eveland 2009). In other words, the more an individual talks about politics the greater the likelihood for cognitive engagement with political information both in an attempt to process information learned during current conversations and in anticipation of and preparation for future discussion (Eveland 2004; Eveland et al. 2005) While early research on political talk exclusively examined the impact of face-to-face political conversation, positive effects have also been documented for online political conversation (Hardy and Scheufele 2005). Moreover, political talk has been shown to amplify the impact of exposure to online political information as well as traditional news content (Nisbet and Scheufele, 2004). In addition, research has shown that it is not only the discussion forum (faceto-face vs. online) and anticipation of future discussion that matters, but also the nature or structure of the discussion group (Mutz 2002). With limited exception, research on discussion network heterogeneity has shown that discussing politics with those who represent diverse viewpoints positively impacts political participation given higher news media consumption and increased levels of political knowledge and learning (Scheufele et al. 2006; Scheufele et al. 2004). Similarly, the size of the discussion group matters – the more discussion partners an individual has, the more likely they are to encounter diverse political viewpoints (Eveland and Hively 2009; Moy and Gastil 2006) even if those additional discussion partners are only encountered on an infrequent basis. While research on political talk has recently shifted in part to focus on the impact of deliberation on political engagement (Gastil 2007) and the differential impact of discussion on emerging political generations (Hively and Eveland 2009), political talk or discussion remains as one key variable mediating the relationship between structural variables, media use, and key behavioral outcomes (see also the chapters by Boomgarden and by deVreese and Möller).

3.2.2 Political trust Political trust is defined as an individual’s faith or confidence toward the institutions of government (Hetherington 1998). Paired with a general expectation of how government should operate, political trust has been defined as a key pillar of a participatory democracy and clear connections have been documented between

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media consumption, an individual’s level of political trust, and their likelihood to engage with politics (Moy and Pfau 2000). More specifically, while some have shown that higher levels of political trust can actually encourage engagement and involvement (Joslyn and Cigler 2001), others have suggested that higher levels of political trust can actually depress or discourage the need for participatory activity (Moy et al. 2005). At the same time, research has shown that high levels of political distrust, or a lack of faith and confidence toward government institutions, can both encourage political involvement – particularly among those who feel politically efficacious (see Levi and Stoker 2000 for a review) and yet depress voter turnout (Cappella and Jamieson 1997). In fact, recent research has even suggested that the effect of political trust on participation is indirect, mediated by measures of political self-efficacy (Ho et al. 2011) (see also the chapter by Maurer).

3.2.3 Political efficacy Political efficacy has two dimensions and as such, it is important to note the clear distinction between internal vs. external political efficacy. According to Niemi, Craig, and Mattei (1991), internal efficacy refers “to beliefs about one’s own competence to understand, and to participate effectively in, politics” while external political efficacy represents “beliefs about the responsiveness of government authorities and institutions to citizen demands” (1407–1408). Previous research has offered evidence of a positive relationship between political efficacy and political participation and engagement (McCluskey et al. 2004; McLeod, Scheufele, and Moy 1999) suggesting that those with greater faith in their own political abilities and in the attentiveness of government are more likely to participate in the political process. Moreover, patterns of media use have been shown to influence evaluations of political efficacy, yet this impact often depends on the type of media content being consumed (entertainment vs. news) and the structural and informational differences that exist across mediums (e.g., online vs. traditional news sources) (Becker 2011; Kenski and Stroud 2006; Pinkleton, Austin, and Fortman 1998; Scheufele and Nisbet 2002). Moreover, previous research has also suggested that political efficacy is positively influenced by higher levels of political knowledge (Morrell 2003) (see also the chapter by Maurer).

3.2.4 Political knowledge Political knowledge, just like political trust and efficacy, is also seen as a cornerstone of participatory democracy (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996) and there is strong normative support for encouraging a more aware and informed citizenry. More specifically, political communication researchers have long believed that citizens

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should possess a certain familiarity with the rules of the political game (knowledge of institutions and processes of governance/elections), the substance of politics (issue and policy knowledge), and a working sense of the performance of the key people/political actors and parties (Neuman, Just, and Crigler 1992) (see also the chapters by Kepplinger, by Jandura and Friedrich and by Holbert, Hill, and Leee). As with talk, trust, and efficacy, an individual’s level of political knowledge and understanding of how the political process functions and operates has been shown to moderate the impact of orientations and media exposure on participation and engagement (Eveland and Scheufele 2000) and research has shown that political knowledge acquisition can often depend on the type of media content being consumed (Dalrymple and Scheufele 2007; Scheufele and Nisbet 2002). Moreover, as discussed previously there are clear connections between political knowledge, talk, and feelings of political efficacy (see also the chapter by Arendt and Matthes).

3.2.5 Political tolerance While research on tolerance or the “willingness to ‘put up with’ those things one rejects or opposes. Politically, it suggests a willingness to permit the expression of ideas or interests one opposes” (Sullivan, Marcus, and Piereson 1982: 2) is not as frequently connected with work on participation and engagement as is trust, efficacy, or political talk, political tolerance is important to consider when examining behavioral effects like the willingness to speak out or participation and engagement given an issue-specific context. While debate over the best way to measure political tolerance still persists among political communication researchers (Gibson 2005; Mondak and Sanders 2003; 2005), higher levels of political tolerance have been associated with greater public support for controversial political issues and have also been shown to moderate the impact of predispositions on public opinion (Becker and Scheufele 2009; Eisenstein 2006). While politically tolerant individuals may not fully support controversial policy proposals or be enthused about extending rights and benefits to members of least-liked groups, they are not opposed to these principles in practice and may be more likely to speak out or seek action on a particular political issue of interest. Given the right context of inquiry, political tolerance can serve as an important mediator of the influence of key structural and media exposure variables on behavioral outcomes of interest.

3.3 Negotiation models of media effects One of the key assumptions underlying both the SES and O-S-O-R model of media effects on political behavior is the notion of linear effects. In other words, effects of mass media in both models are explained away by spurious or mediated by intervening variables. Most recently, however, mass communication researchers

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have begun to develop effects models that McQuail (2005) has called negotiation models of media effects. These models assume that mediated messages interact with schemas, predispositions, and other characteristics audience members use to make sense of these messages. Media effects, as a result, are negotiated between mass media and audiences. One of the most prominent examples of these negotiation models of media effects is framing theory. Framing assumes that the way a particular piece of information is presented terminologically or visually will influence how that information is perceived by audiences (Scheufele 1999). Framing as a process is based on the idea that the way a message is framed resonates with a pre-existing schema among audiences. As a result, a piece of information that is framed in a schemaconsistent fashion is likely to have a stronger impact on audiences than one that is not framed in a schema-consistent fashion (Tewksbury and Scheufele 2009) (see also the chapters by Aalberg and by Arendt and Matthes). This idea of moderated media effects has also been explored for media effects on political behavior, and some researchers have suggested that potential mobilizing influences of mass media may depend on other audience characteristics. We discussed this earlier as the differential gains model. In particular, a series of studies showed that media effects on political participation are particularly pronounced among audiences who revisit what they have seen on TV or read in the newspaper (or online) in face-to-face discussions with others (Hardy and Scheufele 2005; 2009; Nisbet and Scheufele 2004; Scheufele 2001; 2002). There are two explanations for this phenomenon. The first explanation is rooted in the uses-and-gratifications (McLeod and Becker 1974) and cognitive tuning (Cloven and Roloff 1995) literatures. It assumes that audiences who anticipate discussions with others will use media in a more careful and goal-directed fashion in order to be prepared for these debates. The second explanation is a more cognitive one. It is based on the assumption that interpersonal discussions with others allow us to “talk through” and make sense of what we have read or seen in mass media. As a result, we are able to more easily extract information from mass mediated content that will be relevant for participation in political processes (e.g., Lemert et al. 1977).

3.4 (Media) Influences on perceptions of opinion climates Finally, it is important to mention a number of models from public opinion research that are not typically linked to behavioral outcomes in the literature, but are nonetheless important to discuss in this context. Most prominently, NoelleNeumann (1974; 1984) examined the influence that people’s perceptions of the opinion distribution in their social environments can have on their willingness to express their own views, which – in turn – alters public perception of the opinion environment and potentially leads to a self-reinforcing spiral in which minority

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views are silenced and majority views are established as social norms (Scheufele and Moy 2000). Noelle-Neumann’s original theorizing, of course, was influenced heavily by Asch’s (Asch, 1955; 1965) experimental research that had demonstrated how perceptions of being in the minority influenced participants’ willingness to openly express their views. And some of Noelle-Neumann’s original motivation for developing the spiral of silence model was directly linked to findings from German national elections that showed that citizens who had voted for the losing party were less likely to accurately report their votes in post-election surveys (NoelleNeumann 1989). In other words, opinion climates can directly influence people’s willingness to engage in various forms of political behavior, especially in “public” forms of political participation, as outlined by Scheufele and Eveland (2001). In fact, there are a number of other effects related to the perception of public opinion that can impact behavioral effects of interest like participation and engagement. For example, pluralistic ignorance is just one key concept often discussed in the research literature on perceptual influence and public opinion. In the case of pluralistic ignorance, the public misperceives the majority vs. minority opinion on a key issue or conflict and is actually convinced that the majority opinion runs counter to or is the direct opposite of the correct climate of opinion. Similar to the pluralistic ignorance hypothesis, other misperceptions of the opinion climate (e.g., false consensus, looking glass perception, etc.) are also important to consider when evaluating the impact of public opinion on key political activities like voter turnout or censorship (see Glynn, Ostman, and McDonald 1995 for a discussion of various perceptual mechanisms that influence public opinion) (see also the chapter by Tsafti). For example, sometimes the publication of pre-election polls can produce a bandwagon effect or conversely, an underdog effect. If a candidate is seen as doing well and sure to win the upcoming election, voters may feel inclined to jump on-board the bandwagon and support the candidate they now think will emerge as victorious. With an underdog effect, voters are more inclined to support the candidate they now think will lose the election in part as a lastditch sign of support (Hardmeier 2008; Simon 1954). Organized efforts at political mobilization that stress the benefits of participation and include tactics like voter registration drives, social media campaigns, door-to-door canvassing, direct mail, and robo-calls can also muddy the perception of both the opinion climate and potential electoral outcomes. While more personalized efforts at political mobilization have been replaced by targeted media spending over the years (Green, Gerber, and Nickerson 2003), previous research has shown that political mobilization efforts can help to improve voter turnout by removing key barriers to participation (Rosenstone and Hansen 1993) and by emphasizing the social and communal aspects generally associated with voting and participation (Gerber, Green, and Larimer 2008; Goldstein and Ridout 2002; Highton 2004). The advent of new media technologies has encouraged both politi-

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cal candidates and issue advocacy organizations to expand mobilization efforts in an attempt to influence participation and engagement.

4 Conclusion and directions for future research Given the diversity of approaches, models and findings, the research field surrounding behavioral effects of mass communication continues to be in flux. As a result, there are many emerging areas that warrant closer attention. In the following sections, we will highlight two of these areas that we believe will be particular growth areas for research dealing with the impacts that mass media have on political behavior.

4.1 Social-level influences Earlier, we outlined a series of theoretical models explaining how individual-level differences among citizens can explain their participation on political processes. These differences include sociodemographic factors, media use, trust, knowledge and a host of other factors. More recently, a number of scholars have gone beyond these individual-level antecedents and examined how a person’s social environment influences his or her willingness to participate in political processes (Huckfeldt, Johnson, and Sprague 2002; Knoke 1990; Mutz 2002a, 2002b; Scheufele et al. 2006; Scheufele et al. 2003). Findings on how discussion networks and political behavior are linked have been mixed at best. Some scholars have presented findings that suggest that frequent interactions with non-likeminded others, i.e., other citizens who hold different political viewpoints, may be linked to feelings of cross-pressure and ultimately more political apathy (Mutz 2002a, 2012b). Other researchers have shown that being exposed to different viewpoints can increase levels of political knowledge and participation (Scheufele et al. 2004) (see also the chapter by Boomgarden). This ongoing debate in the literature highlights the importance of social context for how citizens use information and how this information may translate into political action. Unfortunately, very little research in communication and political science has explored the social context in which citizens communicate and participate in politics in great detail. The key question for our field is therefore: How do many of the individual-level processes described earlier play out across the very different aggregate-level social contexts we all live in? Advancements in hierarchical linear modeling (e.g., Raudenbush, Johnson, and Sampson 2003; Raudenbush and Sampson 1999) and other more recent analytic techniques allow us to disentangle the effects of aggregate-level or regional characteristics and individual-level differences, and to assess the impacts that the latter have on political behavior within the context of the former. Future research should take advantage of these

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analytic tools to build more complex, multi-level models of political behavior that take into the account sociological, political, and communication-related antecedents of political behavior.

4.2 Changing news environments Future research will also need to pay careful attention toward understanding the ways in which the increasing choice of the post-broadcast media environment influences selective exposure to media content, knowledge acquisition and political learning, key mediators like talk and efficacy, and finally behavioral effects or outcomes of interest (Iyengar and Hahn 2009; Prior 2007; Stroud 2007). It will be important to understand the impact of exposure to varied traditional media forms (e.g., straight news, soft news, infotainment, etc.) as well as the ways in which social media can influence political behavior and engagement, especially as exposure to these less traditional media forms consistently varies across generations (Becker and Scheufele 2011; Xenos and Becker 2009). Recent research on selective exposure has suggested, for example, that viewers select media outlets based on their perceptions of the political orientation of the content provider, filtering out content with which they do not agree ideologically (Coe et al. 2008) (see also the chapter by Knobloch-Westerwick). At the same time, emerging research on the impact of social news suggests that greater exposure to news stories shared on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter actually increases exposure to diverse political points of view. More specifically, research suggests that social recommendation has a greater impact on information selection and has a higher utility than partisan selective exposure (Messing and Westwood 2012). In other words, social media enthusiasts are more likely to seek out news that has been recommended by a member of their social network even if the political perspective of the news source does not align with their preexisting political preferences and orientation.

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Biographical sketches Toril Aalberg (Ph.D. 2001, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim) is Professor of Media Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Political Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) (Trondheim). Currently, she is Project Director at NTNU Social Research AS. She was Associate Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and visiting scholar at Stanford University. Her fields of interest in research are the relationship between media and politics, election campaigns, how media affect public opinion and the role of stereotypes. Other research interests include media sociology, political psychology, and experimental methods. She is the author or editor of seven books, some in conjunction with others. These include Challenges to Representative Democracy (1999), Achieving Justice (2003), Communicating Politics (2007) and How Media Inform Democracy (2012). She has published 27 book chapters and 46 articles in peerreviewed journals. Moreover, Aalberg is on the editorial boards of International Journal of Public Opinion Research, International Journal of Press/Politics, Acta Politica and Political Communication. Furthermore, she is a member of The Network of European Political Communication Scholars (NEPOCS), which is a network for furthering research and teaching in comparative political communication. Peter van Aelst (Ph.D. 2006, University of Antwerp) is Associate Professor in Political Science at the Institutes of Political Science at the Universities of Antwerp and Leiden. He was visiting Fulbright fellow at the University of Washington, Seattle, postdoctoral fellow of the Fund for Scientific Research Flanders (FWO), and Lecturer in Journalism Studies at the Erasmushogeschool in Brussels. His main research interests are centered on the domain of political communication and include agenda-setting, campaign coverage, voting behavior, social movements and new media, and the relationship between journalists and politicians in a comparative perspective. He authored and co-authored several publications in international peer-reviewed journals, among them Political Communication, International Journal of Press/Politics, West-European Politics and Communication Research. He is a founding member of the research group Media, Movements and Politics (M²P), member of The Network of European Political Communication Scholars (NEPOCS) and vice-chair of the Political Communication Division of the International Communication Association (ICA). Florian Arendt (Ph.D. 2013, University of Vienna) is a senior researcher at the Department of Communication at the University of Vienna. His research focuses on the short- and long-term consequences of media exposure on recipients’ conceptions of social reality (priming, cultivation, media stereotyping, implicit and explicit stereotypes/attitudes). His work has been accepted for publication in leading international journals such as the Journal of Communication, Communication

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Research, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, or Journal of Media Psychology. Meital Balmas (Ph.D. 2012, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication and Journalism at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 2012–2013 she was a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Political Science, Columbia University (New York). She earned several prizes and fellowships before graduation. Meital Balmas’ research interests center on the relations between media and politics, with a specific focus on political personalization in the national and international arena, press independence from government officials and views, and public opinion research on, for example, the effects of political satire on political attitudes. She has published her work in leading international journals like the Journal of Communication, Party Politics, Communication Research and the International Journal of Public Opinion Research. Michael Barthel (Ph.D. 2014, University of Washington) conducts research related to media effects on trust in government and trust in the press, as well as the new media environment and its impact on political attitudes and behaviors. His articles have been published in Information, Communication and Society, Journalism: Theory, Practice, and Criticism, and Critical Studies in Media Communication. Philip Baugut (M.A., University of Salzburg) is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Communication Science and Media Research at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. His research interests include political journalism, political communication cultures, the mediatization of politics and normative theories of political communication. He has published in Studies in Communication/Media and German Policy Studies. Amy B. Becker (Ph.D. 2010, University of Wisconsin) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mass Communication and Communication Studies at Towson University (Towson, MD). Her research focuses on four areas in the field of communication: (1) public opinion and citizen participation on controversial political issues, (2) the political effects of exposure and attention to hybrid media, especially late night comedy and political entertainment, (3) new media and computational research methods, and (4) science communication. Her work has been published in a variety of communication and interdisciplinary social science journals including Human Communication Research, the International Journal of Press/Politics, the International Journal of Public Opinion Research, Mass Communication & Society, Political Communication, and Social Science Quarterly. Becker teaches undergraduate and graduate research methods at Towson along with courses on public opinion and popular culture and politics. She is currently serving as the Professional Freedom & Responsibility chair for the Political Communication Interest Group of AEJMC. Becker previously worked in political polling and corporate market research providing analysis and strategic insight to

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political candidates running for national and state office and for major corporations looking to redefine their brand image. Hajo Boomgaarden (Ph.D. 2007, University of Amsterdam) is currently Associate Professor for Political Communication at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research in the Department of Communication at the University of Amsterdam. In 2012 and 2013 he was a Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies, and during the past years he was Visiting Scholar at the University of Technology, Sydney, Emory University (Atlanta) and Auckland University. Hajo Boomgaarden is board member of the Centre for Politics and Communication and member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Public Opinion Research. His research interests focus on media portrayals of politics and on media effects on political attitudes and behaviors. He has co-authored more than 50 international journal articles and book chapters, among others on issues such as media and European integration, media and populism, media election campaign and issue coverage, media effects on economic perceptions, immigration attitudes and extreme-right voting and on framing effects. Martin Emmer (Ph.D. 2004, University of Technology Ilmenau) is Professor for Media and Communication Studies with a focus on media use in the Institute for Media and Communication Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. He was a visiting professor at Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, Freie Universität Berlin, and Lomonossow-University Moscow. His research focuses on political communication in general, uses and effects of online media, and methods of empirical social research. He has published three books and more than 20 book chapters and journal articles. From 2008 to 2012 he was the chair of the Computer Mediated Communication Division of the German Communication Association (DGPuK). Frank Esser (Ph.D. 1997, University of Mainz) is Professor of International & Comparative Media Research in the Department of Mass Communication and Media Research at the University of Zurich. He was assistant professor at the University of Mainz and the University of Missouri (Columbia), and visiting professor at the University of Oklahoma (Norman), University of Texas (Austin), and the University of California (San Diego). His research focuses on cross-national studies of news journalism and political communication. He has published seven books plus more than 80 book chapters and journal articles. He is on the editorial boards of Journalism, International Journal of Press/Politics and International Journal of Public Opinion Research, and served as chair of the Journalism Studies Division of the International Communication Association (ICA). In Zurich he is co-director of the NCCR Democracy, a National Center of Competence in Research funded by the Swiss Science Foundation to study the impact of globalization and mediatization on Western democracies.

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Katja Friedrich (Ph.D. 2010, University of Munich) is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication Science and Media Research at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. She has published several book chapters and journal articles. Her research interests include various aspects of political communication and media violence. James K. Hertog (Ph.D. 1990, University of Minnesota) is Associate Professor of Media Arts and Studies in the School of Journalism and Telecommunications at the University of Kentucky, where he began his teaching career in 1989. His research has reviewed media coverage of social protest, minor political parties and social problems. His current emphases are the study of the political campaign process from the perspective of the candidate and the means by which public opinion is (or is not) incorporated into public policymaking. He has published in a number of communications journals, including Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Communication Research, Gazette and Discourse & Society. He serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media and Mass Communication and Society. Megan R. Hill (Ph.D. 2013, Ohio State University) currently is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Albion College (Albion, MI). She has published in Communication Research, the International Journal of Communication and Mass Communication and Society. Her research interests include narrative persuasion, mass media effects, political entertainment and news with a particular focus on audience interpretations of stories circulating in entertainment media and political discourse. Lance Holbert (Ph.D. 2000, University of Wisconsin) is Associate Professor of Strategic Communication and Director of Graduate Studies in the School of Communication at Ohio State University (Columbus). He was Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Delaware and at the University of Missouri (Columbia). Currently, he is a member of the research board of the National Communication Association (NCA). He also was chair and vice chair of the Political Communication Division and the Mass Communication Division of the National Communication Association (NCA). His research focuses on persuasion, political communication, methods (especially structural equation modeling), as well as on the influence of entertainment television and other non-traditional political outlets on basic democratic outcome variables. He published two books and more than 50 book chapters and articles in peer-reviewed journals. He is also member of editorial boards, including Communication Research, Communication Quarterly, Mass Communication and Society, Communication Monographs, Communication Research Reports, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Journal of Communication, and American Communication Journal.

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David Nicolas Hopmann (Ph.D. 2009, University of Southern Denmark) is Associate Professor at the Centre for Journalism and the Department of Political Science and Public Management at the University of Southern Denmark (Odense). He has been a visiting scholar at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) and Mid-Sweden University (Sundsvall). In 2012, he received the Young Elite Researcher Award from the Danish Research Council. Currently, he also is a vice chair of the Political Communication Section of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA). His research focuses on the antecedents of media content and interpersonal political communication and their effects on consumers. His research has been published in both national and international journals. Among them are the International Journal of Press/Politics, European Journal of Political Research, Journal of Political Marketing, Communication Methods and Measurement, Journalism Studies, Journalism, and Party Politics. David Hopmann is a member of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA), the International Communication Association (ICA) and The Network of European Political Communication Scholars (NEPOCS), which is a network for furthering research and teaching in comparative political communication. Olaf Jandura (Ph.D. 2006, Dresden University of Technology) is a Professor of Communication Science at Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf. He was a visiting professor at the University of Mainz and a visiting scholar at the University of Pamplona. In addition, he was an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication Science and Media Research at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich and served as a head of the Methods Divison of the German Communication Association (DGPuK). He is a member of the International Communication Association (ICA) and the World Association of Public Opinion Research (WAPOR). Olaf Jandura’s research interests include political communication, media effects, media changes, and methods. He has published several books as well as numerous book chapters and journal articles. His work has appeared in the International Journal of Public Opinion Research, the International Journal of Press/ Politics, Publizistik and Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaft. Courtney N. Johnson (M.A., University of Wisconsin) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington. Her research interests revolve around the normative and empirical roles of journalism in democratic systems around the globe. This body of research has focused on the political economy of the news media, public opinion, and media effects. Her articles have been published in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, and the International Journal of Communication. Hans Mathias Kepplinger (Ph.D. 1970, University of Mainz) is Emeritus Professor of Empirical Communication Research at the University of Mainz’s Institute of Mass Communication since 1982. He was a Fellow at the University of California Berkeley

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and Harvard University, as well as a visiting professor at the University of Tunis, Southern Illinois University, University of Zurich and University of Lugano. Kepplinger has authored, co-authored or edited more than 30 books and 300 scientific articles, 66 of which have been published in English. Major topics include the effects of media coverage on the development of crisis, scandals and elections, reciprocal effects on politicians, managers, and lawyers who have become protagonists of media coverage, and the influence of journalists’ attitudes and role perceptions on the selection and presentation of news. Besides other memberships he is part of the scientific council of the Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington D.C., Munich Center on Governance, Communication, Public Policy and Law (MCG), as well as Journal of Communication and Studies in Communication Sciences. Spiro K. Kiousis (Ph.D. 2000, University of Texas) is Executive Associate Dean for the College of Journalism and Communications and a Professor of Public Relations. Previously, he served as chair of the Department of Public Relations from 20062012, director of distance education for the college from 2010–2013, and was a University of Florida Research Foundation Professor from 2009–2011. His current research interests include political communication, political public relations, and new media. Specifically, this interdisciplinary research explores the interplay among political public relations efforts, news media content, and public opinion in traditional and interactive mass mediated contexts. Besides the authorship, co-authorship, or (co-)editorship of books, Kiousis has had articles published in several leading journals, including Communication Research, Journal of Communication, the International Journal of Press/Politics, Mass Communication & Society, Public Relations Review and more. He has also served on numerous editorial boards and has presented papers to various organizations like the International Communication Association (ICA) or the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick (Ph.D. 1999, University of Music, Theatre, & Media, Hanover) is Professor at the School of Communication, Ohio State University (Columbus). She has held faculty appointments at Dresden University of Technology, University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), and University of California (Davis). She serves as editor of Media Psychology and has published over 50 peerreviewed articles, primarily in Journal of Communication, Communication Research, and Media Psychology, in addition to two books and about 30 book chapters. Her work addresses media effects and selective media use in the realms of political communication, news, health communication, entertainment, and new communication technologies. Jayeon Lee (Ph.D. 2012, Ohio State University) is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Journalism & Communication at Lehigh University (Bethlehem). She has published in journals such as Communication Monographs, Mass Communica-

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tion and Society, and Discourse and Communication, presented in many national and international conferences, and received a number of awards including two top student-paper awards from the International Communication Association (ICA). Lee’s research and teaching interests include social media, journalism, visual communication, political communication, and persuasion. Jörg Matthes (Ph.D. 2007, University of Zurich) is Professor for Communication Science in the Department of Communication at the University of Vienna. There, he chairs the Division of Advertising Research and Media Effects. He had a professorship (Assistenzprofessur) for Political Communication/Political Behavior within the NCCR Democracy at the University of Zurich, a National Center of Competence in Research funded by the Swiss Science Foundation to study the impact of globalization and mediatization on Western democracies. He was also visiting scholar at Ohio State University and George Washington University (Washington, D.C.). His research focuses on advertising effects, the process of public opinion formation, news framing, and empirical methods. Furthermore, he has published five books, 19 book chapters and more than 40 articles in international peer-reviewed journals. Since 2011, he chairs the Methods Division of the German Communication Association (DGPuK), and he is associate editor of the journal Communication Methods & Measures. From 2005–2010, he was also chair of the Methods Division of the Swiss Communication Association (SGKM). Marcus Maurer (Ph.D. 2003, University of Mainz) is Professor for Empirical Methods in Communication Science in the Department of Mass Communication and Research at Friedrich-Schiller University Jena. He was visiting professor at the Freie Universität Berlin, the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, and the Universities of Granada and Zurich. Until 2010, he was speaker of the Methods Division of the German Communication Association (DGPuK). He is a member of the International Communication Association (ICA). His research focuses on political communication in general, media effects, non-verbal communication and methods. He has published more than ten books and about 70 book chapters and journal articles. His work has appeared in the Journal of Communication, Communication Research, International Journal of Communication, International Journal of Public Opinion Research, European Journal of Communication, Publizistik and Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaft. Brian McNair (Ph.D. 1986, University of Glasgow) is Professor of Journalism, Media & Communication at the Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane. He held Chairs in media and communication at the Universities of Stirling and Strathclyde. He is the author of twelve books on political communication and other topics, including Journalism and Democracy (Routledge, 2000), Mediated Access (University of Luton Press, 2003), and An Introduction To Political Communication (Routledge, 2011). His books have been translated into 14 languages. He is a regular contributor to print, broadcast and online media on topics relating to media, journalism and political communication.

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Judith Möller (M.A., University of Amsterdam) is a doctoral candidate at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR). Before that she also worked as research assistant at the University of Düsseldorf and the University of Amsterdam. Currently she works on the project “Mediatization of Political Attitudes: Becoming a Democratic Citizen in a Multi-Media Environment.” In this project the University of Amsterdam and the University of Zurich collaborate to investigate political socialization in the 21st century. Patricia Moy (Ph.D. 1998, University of Wisconsin) is Associate Vice Provost for Academic and Student Affairs, Christy Cressey Professor of Communication, and Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington. Currently editor of Public Opinion Quarterly and editor-in-chief of Oxford Bibliographies: Communication, Moy is President-Elect of the World Association for Public Opinion Research. She is a Fellow and former president of the Midwest Association for Public Opinion Research, and sits on the editorial board of leading journals in the field, including Communication Research, Journal of Communication, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, and Political Communication. Moy is former head of the International Communication Association’s (ICA) Political Communication Division and the Communication Theory and Methodology Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). She has been a visiting professor at the University of Mannheim and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Moy’s research focuses on political communication, public opinion, and media effects. Her work on communication and citizenship examines the process by which various forms of communication influence citizens’ perceptions, bear upon their cognitions and deliberative processes, and shape their civic and political behaviors. Barbara Pfetsch (Ph.D. 1991, University of Mannheim) is Professor and Chair of Communication Science in the Department of Communication at Free University Berlin. She previously held a position as a Full Professor at the University of Hohenheim and as a Senior Researcher at the Science Center Berlin for Social Research. She was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University, a Visiting Fellow at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University, a Fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Havard University, and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University, Washington D.C. She recently was elected a member of the executive board of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA), is a board member of several international journals and has held similar positions in scientific organizations before. Barbara Pfetsch’s research focuses on comparative analyses of political communication and on media and the public sphere. She has published several books, including Political Communication Cultures in Western Europe (2014), Comparing

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Political Communication (2004) and Politische Kommunikationskultur (2003) as well as numerous book chapters and articles in national and international journals. Manuel Puppis (Ph.D. 2009, University of Zurich) is Associate Professor in Media Systems and Media Structures at the University of Fribourg’s Department of Communication Science and Media Research (DCM). For fall term 2012 he was appointed as Visiting Residence Scholar at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. Before, he was Visiting Scholar at the Center for Global Communication Studies, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania and the Hans Bredow Institute for Media Research at the University of Hamburg. His research centers on media policy, media regulation and media governance, media systems in a comparative perspective, political communication and organization theory. Besides publications in books and German-speaking journals he has authored or co-authored articles in Studies in Communication Sciences, International Communication Gazette, Communication, Culture & Critique, European Journal of Communication, and Communications. He currently serves as chair of the European Communication Research and Education Association’s Communication Law & Policy Section (ECREA-CLP) and co-chair of the “Netzwerk Medienstrukturen”. Carsten Reinemann (Ph.D. 2003, University of Mainz) is a Professor and Chair of Political Communication at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. He was an Assistant Professor at the University of Mainz and research assistant at the University of Leipzig. His interests include news and campaign coverage, political journalism, the relationship between journalists and politicians, and political media effects. Besides seven monographs and two edited books he has authored or coauthored more than 40 book chapters and more than 20 articles in peer-reviewed journals including Journal of Communication, Communication Research, European Journal of Communication, the International Journal of Press/Politics, Communications, International Journal of Public Opinion Research, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly and Publizistik. Reinemann is a member of the International Communication Association (ICA), the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA), the German Communication Association (DGPuK), the German Election Research Association (DGfW), the German Association of Political Science (DVPW) and The Network of European Political Communication Scholars (NEPOCS), which is a network for furthering research and teaching in comparative political communication. Piers Robinson (Ph.D. 2000, University of Bristol) is Senior Lecturer at the School of Social Sciences of the University of Manchester. His research centers on the relationship between media and war. Besides books or book contributions he authored or co-authored a wide range of articles in international journals like the Journal of Communication, European Journal of Communication, Critical Studies in Media Communications, Political Studies, Media Culture & Society and so forth.

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His most widely-known work is The CNN Effect: The Myth of News, Foreign Policy and Intervention (Routledge, 2002). Robinson is leader of a major ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) project exploring the media coverage of the 2003 Iraq invasion. Additionally, he is an editor of Critical Studies on Terrorism and a member of the International Communication Association (ICA), British International Studies Association and the Political Studies Association. Susana Salgado (Ph.D. 2007, University of Lisbon) is a researcher at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford, and Associate Professor of Political and Strategic Communication at the New University of Lisbon. Her most recent research includes a six-year comparative research project on African democratization and media fully funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology. Her main research interests are political communication, media and elections, comparative media studies, media and democratization, and Internet and politics and her publications include three single-authored books and more than 20 book chapters and journal articles on these topics. She is a member of the Network of European Political Communication Scholars (NEPOCS), which is a network for furthering research and teaching in comparative political communication. Christian Schemer (Ph.D. 2010, University of Zurich) is Professor for Communication at the University of Mainz. He also was a visiting scholar at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania (USA) and a visiting professor at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. His research focuses on media use and media effects, political persuasion, advertising research and methods. He published three books and more than 30 book chapters and journal articles. His work has appeared in leading journals like Political Communication, Communication Research, Journal of Communication, International Journal of Public Opinion Research, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Journal of Media Psychology and others. Since 2010 he is a spokesperson for the Methods Division of the Swiss Communication Association (SGKM). Also, he joins the editorial boards of Communication Methods and Measures and of the Communication Yearbook. Dietram Scheufele (Ph.D. 1999, University of Wisconsin) is the John E. Ross Professor in Science Communication at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Co-PI of the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University. His most recent research examines the role of social media and other emerging modes of communication in society. His most recent research examines the role of social media and other emerging modes of communication in our society. An elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters, Scheufele has published extensively in the areas of public opinion and public attitudes toward emerging technologies, including nanotechnology, synthetic biology, nuclear energy and bioenergy. His

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637

work has been supported by multi-year grants from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Department of Energy and other funding agencies. Andreas Schuck (Ph.D. 2008, University of Amsterdam) is Assistant Professor for Political Communication at the Department of Communication Science at the University of Amsterdam. He was post-doctoral research fellow at the Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR) at the University of Amsterdam until 2010. His research focuses on public opinion dynamics during election campaigns, electoral mobilization, public support for EU integration, and the news media. His work has been published in international peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Communication, Political Communication, European Journal of Communication, International Journal of Press/Politics, or International Journal of Public Opinion Research. He is affiliated with the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR), The Netherlands – Flanders Communication Association (NEFCA) and the Center for Politics and Communication (CPC). Winfried Schulz (Ph.D. 1968, University of Mainz) is Emeritus Professor of Mass Communication and Associate Lecturer at the Faculty of Economics of the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg. He was also Assistant Professor at the University of Mainz, research fellow at the University of California Berkeley and Professor at the University of Münster. His research focuses on political communication, election and information campaigns, media effects and methods of communication and media research. Schulz authored and co-authored eight books, edited or co-edited five books and published far more than 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals, among them the European Journal of Communication, Political Communication, Communications and Publizistik. Currently, Schulz is member of the International Communication Association (ICA) and honorary member of the German Association for Communication (DGPuK). Tamir Sheafer (Ph.D. 2001, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) is Associate Professor at the departments of political science and communication at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Vice Dean of the Social Sciences Faculty. He is one of the founders of the university’s political communication program. His research so far has focused on issues such as the role of charisma in politics, political personalization, media effects in Israeli politics and piece processes, and the role of political value proximity between actors in political communication processes, and particularly between national actors in mediated public diplomacy. He has published or co-published articles in Communication Research, Comparative Political Studies, International Journal of Press/Politics, Journal of Communication, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Political Communication, Political Psychology, Public Opinion Quarterly, and more international journals. He is on the

638

Biographical sketches

editorial board of Political Communication and Public Opinion Quarterly and a member of the American Political Science Association (APSA), International Communication Association (ICA), Israeli Communication Association, and Israeli Political Science Association. Shaul Shenhav (Ph.D. 2004, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) is Senior Lecturer in Political Science at the Department of Political Science, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is also director of the Levi Eshkol Institute for Economic, Social and Political Research in Israel. He was visiting scholar at New York University’s Skirball Department of Hebrew & Judaic Studies. His research interests include political discourse, rhetoric, political narratology and Israeli politics. Among his most recent publications or co-publications are articles for international peer-reviewed journals like Comparative Political Studies, Discourse and Society, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Narrative Inquiry, Political Psychology and Political Communication. At present, he is involved in several research projects, among them the role of narratives in voting behavior and Public Diplomacy. James Stanyer (Ph.D. 1999, London School of Economics) is Reader in Comparative Political Communication in the School of Social, Political, and Geographical Sciences, Loughborough University. He was appointed to lectureships or visiting lectureships at the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Cambridge University, Department of Politics, Queen Mary, University of London, City University, London, and the Centre for Mass Communication Research, University of Leicester. His main scientific concerns are campaign communication, political attitude expression and new communication technologies, transnational political movements and new communication technologies, personalisation of politics, impression and issue management, as well as political public relations. Besides the authorship or co-authorship of books, he published or co-published articles in international journals, among them International Journal of Press/Politics, Journalism, and European Journal of Communication. Stanyer is a member of the Higher Education Academy, Political Studies Association, and Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association. Jesper Strömbäck (Ph.D. 2001, University of Stockholm) is professor in Media and Communication, and Professor and Chair in Journalism at Mid Sweden University (Sundsvall). He is also research director at the Centre for Political Communication Research at Mid Sweden University. He was visiting professor at the Institute of Mass Communication and Media Research, University of Zurich, and the College of Journalism and Communications, University of Florida. His research mainly focuses on political news coverage, political campaigning and marketing, the mediatization of politics, and comparative political communication research. Altogether he has published about 100 books, book chapters and journal articles, among them the edited volumes Handbook of Election News Cover-

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age Around the World (edited together with Lynda Lee Kaid, Routledge 2008) and Global Political Marketing (edited together with Jennifer Lees-Marshment and Chris Rudd, Routledge 2010). He is chair (2014–2016) of the Political Communication Division of the International Communication Association (ICA) and associate editor of Journal of Communication. Yariv Tsfati (Ph.D. 2001, University of Pennsylvania) is Associate Professor in the Department of Communications at the University of Haifa (Israel). He was also a Research Associate in The Chaim Hertzog Institute for Communication, Society and Politics at Tel Aviv University. His research focuses on public opinion, in particular on trust in media, the third person effect, and campaign effects. He published more than 40 book chapters and journal articles and currently serves as associate editor for the Journal of Communication. He is also a past vice-chair (2009–2010) and chair (2011–2012) of the Political Communication Division of the International Communication Association (ICA). Claes de Vreese (Ph.D. 2003, University of Amsterdam) is Professor and Chair of Political Communication and Scientific Director of The Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) in the Department of Communication Science at the University of Amsterdam as well as Adjunct Professor of Political Science and Journalism at the University of Southern Denmark. He was visiting scholar at Harvard University’s Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, visiting professor at the University of Zurich and Invited Visiting Professor and Hans Christian Andersen Academy Fellow at the Department of Political Science/Center for Journalism Studies at the University of Southern Denmark. His research interests include comparative journalism research, the effects of news, public opinion and European integration, effects of information and campaigning on elections, referendums and direct democracy. He has published more than 80 articles in international peer-reviewed journals, including Communication Research, Journalism Studies, Political Communication, International Journal of Public Opinion Research, Public Opinion Quarterly, Journal of Politics, Scandinavian Political Studies, European Journal of Communication, Journal of Politics, and Public Opinion Quarterly. He is Director of NESCoR, the Netherlands School of Communication Research, the national research school in communication science, recognized by the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences (KNAW). Claes de Vreese is also the founding Director of the Center for Politics and Communication, which is a meeting place for students, scholars, politicians, journalists and others interested in the relationship between the media and politics. Karin Wahl-Jorgensen (Ph.D. 2000, Stanford University) is Professor at the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media & Cultural Studies at Cardiff University (Wales), where she is Director of Research Development and Environment. Prior to working as an academic, she was a journalist for newspapers and magazines in Denmark and the United States.

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Her research focuses on the relationship between citizenship, democracy and journalistic practices. She is the author of three books, Disasters and the Media (Peter Lang, 2012; co-authored with Mervi Pantti and Simon Cottle), Journalists and the Public (Hampton Press, 2007) and Citizens or Consumers? (Open University Press, 2005; co-authored with Justin Lewis and Sanna Inthorn). She is also coeditor of the Handbook of Journalism Studies (Routledge, 2009; with Thomas Hanitzsch) and editor of Mediated Citizenship (Routledge, 2008), and is currently writing Emotions, Media and Politics for Polity Press. She has published more than 60 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. She is currently an associate editor of Communication Theory and is also a member of the editorial collective for the JOMEC Journal. Most recently, she was the principal investigator for the 2012 BBC Trust Impartiality Review, which examined the breadth of opinion in broadcast news coverage. Jens Wolling (Ph.D. 1999, Technical University Dresden) is Professor for Media Research and Political Communication in the Department of Media and Communication Science at the University of Technology Ilmenau. Before that, he was a Professor for Online Communication and Visiting Professor in the Department of Communication Science and Media Research at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. His research focuses on political communication, media effects and media use, online communication, media quality, environmental communication and research on methods. He has published seven books and more than fifty book chapters and journal articles. Robert J. Zuercher (M.A., University of Kentucky) is a doctoral candidate in the College of Communication and Information at the University of Kentucky. He was contributing author to an article addressing community readiness for a smoke-free policy, which appeared in Nicotine & Tobacco Research. He has presented papers at conferences for the National Communication Association (NCA), the American Public Health Association, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), and the Midwest Political Science Association (MPSA). For his dissertation, he is studying judicial candidates’ experiences on the campaign trail.

Index Note. References in the index do refer to the text but not to the references of the chapters. Key pages are printed in bold. Most concepts and terms included in chapter titles are not included in the index. Readers are advised to consult the table of contents when they miss a concept or term in the index. 24/7 / 24-hour news 71, 195, 199, 300, 301, 307, 310, 316, 328, 410, 432, 444 accessibility (psychological) 508, 519–521, 548, 555, 558, 562, 563, 564, 592 adversarialism / hyperadversarialism 290, 295, 297, 337 advertising (political) 42–47, 53–55, 67, 78, 94, 117, 120, 123, 137, 183, 255, 280, 282, 362, 410, 411, 420, 495, 502, 552, 569, 570, 574, 575, 576, 579, 580, 583 affect /affective 255, 412, 418, 436, 538, 555, 557, 570–583, 591, 593, 598, 601 agenda building see political agenda-setting agenda-setting (public) 21, 65, 130, 155, 163, 236, 241, 254, 255, 258, 278, 283, 305, 314, 390, 431, 432, 478, 491, 547, 548, 556–559, 562–564, 600–602 agenda-setting (second level) 241, 255, 557, 558, 600 alternative media 167, 171, 175–177, 269, 271, 273, 275–278, 279, 364 Americanization 63, 68, 74, 76, 95, 109, 117– 120, 399 amplification 151, 157–163 anger 569, 571–573, 576, 577–582 anticipatory news media effect 233 Arab revolution / Arab spring 73, 80, 88, 98, 100, 168, 182, 199, 261, 273, 278, 299, 300, 319, 464 arousal 569, 570, 572, 574, 579–580, 581, 582 attack ad 552, 574, 580 attitude accessibility 507, 519, 592 attitude certainty 562 attitude consistency 521 attitude reinforcement 517, 520 attractiveness (physical) 216, 223, 599, 600 audience fragmentation see fragmentation authenticity 282, 389, 390, 394–395 authoritarian regime / government 1, 11, 72, 73, 199, 289, 291, 292, 293, 299, 301 autocracy / autocratic society 168, 170, 175, 182 availability (psychological) 547, 560, 563, 564

balance (media coverage) 21, 45–46, 140, 145, 279, 294, 333, 352, 355, 356, 360, 364, 391–393, 416, 508, 517 bandwagon effect 619 blogs / blogger 28, 74, 78, 114, 121, 173, 272, 273, 274, 282, 283, 299, 300, 319, 363, 369, 473, 479, 516 blogosphere 283, 284, 291, 298 bias (psychological) 337, 507, 511–515, 519, 521, 581 bias (media coverage) see media bias biased knowledge 494, 564 boycott 458–459 breaking news 315, 477 broadsheet newspaper 300, 327, 368, 396 campaign see election campaign campaign effects 4, 129, 130, 134, 137, 139, 140, 143, 144, 146, 470 campaign expenditures 49–51 campaign management 76, 78, 113–115 campaign manager / practitioner 94, 118, 141 campaign regulation 39, 40, 47–53, 54 campaign strategy 39, 54, 77, 78, 114, 117– 124, 130, 377, 379 candidate image 255, 591–592, 598, 599–601, 603 capitalism 191, 276, 289–293, 299 cascading activation model 197 celebrity 298, 300, 307, 381, 412, 439 censorship 168, 176, 182, 191, 277, 284, 299, 495, 498, 619 charisma 173, 211, 212, 216–223, 232, 599 citizen journalism 275, 299, 319 citizen initiative 27, 47, 129–132, 143 civic engagement / civic participation 79, 271, 362, 363, 364, 454, 530, 532, 614 civil rights 172–174, 178, 180, 417 civil society (incl. groups, organizations) 41, 46, 52, 99, 160, 360, 361, 363, 364, 366 civility 354, 356, 361, 362, 365, 367, 369

642

Index

climate of opinion 34, 278, 279, 355, 495, 612, 618–620 CNN effect 187, 190, 195–196, 233, 316 coalition (campaigns, governments) 129, 138, 139, 168, 171, 183, 193, 514 cognitive dissonance 332, 430, 507, 512–514, 517 cognitive functional model 436 cognitive mobilization 75, 132–133, 137, 144, 272 collective action 48, 172 columnist 283, 333 comic book see graphic novel commercial broadcasting (TV, radio, Web) 28, 43, 46, 54, 92, 298, 328, 385, 396, 397, 399, 401 commercial media (organizations, system) 40, 41, 56, 269, 273, 279–280 commercialization (media) 40, 43, 70, 72, 74, 91, 92, 271, 312, 316, 394, 418, 440 communication mediation model 480 communication technology 88, 99, 116, 154, 195, 198, 199, 200, 201, 204, 272, 274, 276, 501 competition (between media) see media competition competition (between political actors) see political competition competition thesis (mass vs. interpersonal communication) 475 concentration (media ownership) see media concentration confirmation bias 507, 511–515, 518, 521 consensus (norms, values, opinions) 24, 33, 67, 162, 192, 278, 314, 340, 358, 596, 598 consonance (news factor) 155, 315 consonance (media coverage) 155, 158, 239, 278, 409, 553 consistency 156, 427–440, 499 constitution 50, 131, 137, 143, 144, 183, 291, 293, 296 contagion (emotional) 569, 573, 577 contextual factors (macro level) 15, 73–78, 88, 90–100, 116–125, 130, 133, 135–138, 144– 146, 325, 330, 389, 449 co-orientation (journalism) 151, 155–157, 159, 160, 163, 296, 309, 355, 416 correspondent 199, 292, 307, 308, 310, 312, 313 credibility (media, journalism) see media credibility

credibility (political actors) 219–220, 300 see also trust (political actors, institutions) crisis communication 250, 253, 258–259 critical theory 10, 11, 190–191, 340, 352, 262 cultivation (media effects) 64, 65, 418–419, 535, 547, 548, 552–556, 558, 563–565, 582, 601 cynicism (politics) see political cynicism and political alienation dealignment (parties) 75, 119, 272, 334, 454 deliberation 28, 31, 111, 220, 242, 293, 358– 362, 369, 475, 480, 518, 615 deliberative democracy 221, 293, 301, 302, 358–362, 470 democratic corporatist model/country 91, 96, 97, 339 democratic peace thesis 190 democratic theory 21–35, 47, 170, 351–369, 450, 451, 466, 507 democratization 4, 67, 73, 79, 91, 99, 100, 272, 274, 299, 439, 533 demonstrations 69, 178, 181, 183, 275, 277, 454, 457–462, 592, 611 depoliticization 40, 439 deregulation 70, 138 detachment (journalism) 96, 190, 291, 338, 340, 354, 356–357, 361–362, 365–367 diffusion (campaign practices) 118, 119 diffusion (innovations, media) 30, 65, 182, 453 diffusion (Internet) 98, 99, 274, 465 diffusion (news) 278, 477 digital campaign see online campaign digital divide 44, 79, 274, 449 direct democracy 129–136, 144–145, 261, 273 direct mail 52, 76, 117, 120, 619 discourse 22–24, 33, 68, 70, 74, 78, 90, 130, 132, 200–201, 215, 218, 220, 221, 255, 277, 293, 300, 352, 353–364, 369, 507, 515, 521, 575, 576 dissent 22, 25, 29–32, 168–171, 173–180, 193, 197, 204, 275, 291, 393 diversity (media, opinions, public sphere) 29, 41, 44–45, 53, 92, 203, 269, 270, 273, 275, 279, 280, 294, 335, 336, 351–369, 507, 516, 520–521 dramatization 67, 220, 362 e-campaigning see online campaign echo chamber 310–311, 432, 515

Index

editorial bias / opinion / slant see media bias editorial control see newsroom control efficacy see political efficacy election campaign 4, 47, 49–51, 63, 64, 68, 69, 73, 76–78, 93–95, 109–125, 129–146, 152, 153, 234, 238, 259, 270, 271, 377, 381, 383, 385, 390, 396, 402, 465, 481, 514, 595, 601, 602 electioneering see campaign management electoral arena 113–115 electoral system 40, 135 elite disagreement 241 elite journalists 300–301, 308, 309, 312, 335 elites (citizens, parties, political actors) 32, 48, 79, 96, 114, 130, 135–137, 138–139, 142–144, 155, 160, 167–171, 174–176, 184, 187–204, 214, 232, 233, 234, 241, 255, 272, 283, 294, 298, 312, 314, 315, 320, 354, 360, 362–366, 380, 391, 500 emotionalization (of media coverage) 317, 357, 365, 367, 369 empathetic responses 573–575 empowerment 48, 51, 70, 75, 198–199, 203, 319, 352 engagement see civic engagement and political participation episodic framing 221, 375, 377, 381, 382 equality 22–25, 29–30, 47, 54, 124 ethics (journalism) 42, 45, 72, 300, 326, 339– 342 evaluation management 259–260 event-driven news 391–392 event management 250, 258, 262 expectancy-value theory 498 exemplar 576 extended parallel processing model 436 Facebook 173, 221, 260, 278, 282, 283, 319, 389, 465, 479, 501, 621 facial mimicry 576–577 family 141, 156, 332, 397, 420, 473–474, 529, 531–538, 540, 552, 613–615 fairness 45, 140, 356, 492 fear (content, media effect) 13, 409, 418–420, 553–554, 569, 571–572, 577–579, 582 fear (means of politics) 200–201, 554 first person perception 494 following media 269, 278–279 formal media features 509, 569, 572–573, 575–576, 579–580

643

fragmentation 14, 68, 79, 122, 269, 270–272, 351, 352, 357, 358, 368, 516 framing (media coverage) 56, 65, 72, 74, 130, 134, 139, 172, 202, 221, 232, 233, 240– 241, 255–256, 361, 375–386, 419, 481, 482, 491, 513, 577, 591, 597 framing (media effect) 547, 548, 557, 558, 561– 565, 574, 577, 601, 602, 609, 610, 618 free media 44, 280 freedom 22, 28, 47, 67, 293 freedom (expression, opinion, speech) 11, 15, 22, 25, 26, 29, 33, 34, 44, 47, 50, 70, 73, 284, 293 freedom (media, press) 21, 25, 28, 39, 40–42, 45, 96, 291, 293, 338, 341, 352, 353, 449, 456, 462, 464 fundraising 95, 124, 221, 250, 252, 258, 260, 262 game frame 377–385 gatekeeping see news decisions gender 332, 334–335, 552, 558, 593 generic frame 376–378 global media 195, 198–200 global public sphere 199, 300–301, 307 globalization 63, 67, 70, 73, 74, 90, 222, 278, 301, 340 Googlearchy 274 graphic novel 428, 436–439, 441 grass-roots activities / movements 48, 98, 275, 359 hard news 28, 31, 199, 356, 399, 411, 413, 434, 479–481, 496, 579 hedonism 435–436 heuristics 410, 435, 516, 555, 560, 598 horce race (media coverage) 45, 77, 318, 375, 378–385, 398–399 hostile media perception (HMP) 489–492, 498–502, 507, 517–518 humor 409, 412–414, 435, 440, 475 hybridization 95, 119, 124 ideology 111, 112, 123, 130, 133, 135, 140, 142, 168–170, 175, 177–178, 193, 195, 201, 341, 435, 520, 552, 598, 602 image bite 395, 601 impartiality (of journalism) 45, 72, 314, 334, 355, 356, 365–366 inadvertent audience see incidental exposure

644

Index

incidental exposure 357, 451, 508–509 incivility 417 incumbency bonus 392 indexing theory 187, 192, 194, 195, 199, 233, 255, 391, 393 individualization 118, 119, 123, 389, 397, 401 informed citizen 23, 26, 56, 79, 133, 144, 301, 450, 451, 616 information environment see political information environment information processing 235, 236, 415, 511, 518–520, 531, 558, 581, 591, 594–595, 603 informational utility 507, 514–521 infotainment 74, 87, 199, 369, 411, 439–440, 621 intermedia agenda-setting 155, 160 interventionism (journalism) 40, 96, 338, 395 issue-attention cycle 151 issue framing 74, 139, 241, 255, 377, 379, 382, 383 issue ownership 138, 390 issues management 249, 256–257 journalism culture 95–96, 327–328, 340 journalism ethics see ethics (journalism) journalistic coorientation see coorientation (journalism) journalistic genres 269, 281 key event 64, 151, 154, 155–161, 162, 163, 533 knowledge 413, 415, 509, 530, 548–552, 570– 573, 581–582 knowledge gap 28, 31, 65, 79, 92, 274, 548– 552 late-night comedy / show / talk 409, 411, 413, 433, 549 learning see knowledge and knowledge gap liberal model / country 91, 338–340, 351, 352–358, 366–369 limited capacity model 420 lobbying 55, 56, 183 lobby journalism 309–310 local media 305, 320 localization 11, 63, 74 mainstream media 78, 156, 176, 199, 269, 271, 275–278, 283–284, 364–365, 491, 499 mainstreaming 65, 553, 601

market-orientation 72, 113, 123, 338, 417 marketplace of ideas 41, 260, 272, 273, 351, 353 mass audience 70, 174, 298, 352, 357 mass society 64, 353 materialism 188, 201 media abundance 68, 75, 272 media access 28, 31, 91 media arena 113–115 media autonomy 119, 204, 305, 308, 312, 320, 329, 333, 337, 381, 394 media bias 194, 233, 291, 294, 327, 329, 330, 336, 344, 356, 479, 492, 493, 517, 518 media competition 41, 44, 72, 79, 92, 122, 279, 394 media concentration 41–44, 53, 193, 271 media consultant 75, 76, 120, 212 media credibility 77, 282, 290, 415, 489, 490– 492, 499, 502, 507, 516–521, 562, 591, 593–595, 600 media-dealignment 334 media ecology 199–200 media event 69, 121, 152–155, 159, 163, 390, 480 media expansion 63, 75, 269–272, 351, 357– 358, 592 media freedom see freedom (media, press) media logic 63, 67, 71, 117, 211–213, 219, 220, 222 media malaise hypothesis 306, 417, 591, 595– 596 media markets 41, 43, 44, 70, 71, 74, 91, 92, 197, 279, 300, 308, 338, 417 media ownership 40–44, 93, 279–280, 313 media performance 41, 44, 351–369 media quality see media performance mediated access 298 mediatization 63, 67–71, 211–223, 233, 244, 270, 308, 317–318, 500 meta-coverage 379–380, 385 microtargeting 122–123 minorities 29, 144, 279, 356, 574–575, 582 mobile phone 198, 199, 275, 299 mobilization (cognitive) 75, 132–133, 137, 144, 272 mobilization (political) 88, 93, 98, 138, 143, 169, 221, 252, 282, 339, 535, 541, 595– 596, 619–620 modernization (society, campaigning) 31, 63, 67, 76, 93, 109, 117–120, 124

Index

mood management 496 multi-party system 135, 239, 356, 382, 599 negative campaigning 46, 597 negativism / negativity 40, 72, 155, 295, 327, 365–367, 369, 380, 389, 395–396, 401– 402, 409, 416–418, 596 neutrality 291, 295, 356, 357 news agency 69, 71, 307, 310 news bias see media bias news consumption 92, 402, 449–466, 471, 482, 496, 515, 534–537, 539, 596, 599, 613–614 news decisions / news-making / news production 13, 40, 71, 78, 96, 159, 243, 244, 305–307, 315–316, 325, 327–333, 336–343, 376, 367, 498 news factor / news values / newsworthiness 77, 155, 163, 212, 217, 278, 305, 313–315, 325, 327–328, 336, 355, 375– 376, 380, 393, 416, 513 news management 119, 233, 249–250, 254– 256, 262, 384, 395 news media use see news consumption newsroom control 326, 328, 330, 333, 342, 343 newsroom socialization 331–333 non-governmental organizations (NGO) 251, 391, 393 objectivity (journalism) 72, 96, 193, 355, 367, 381, 392, 431, 492 online media 114, 184, 270, 273–275, 282, 291, 369, 451, 453, 457, 465, 473, 483, 515, 534 online campaign 94–95, 122, 283, 318-319, 465 opinion expression 453, 609–612 opinion formation 32, 45, 100, 130, 135, 141, 451, 513 opinion leader 33, 451, 453, 469, 477–479, 592 opinion-leading media 151, 269, 278–279, 305, 310 pack journalism see co-orientation (journalism) paid media 45, 280 parliamentary arena 113–115 participatory media 275, 365

645

party identification / partisanship 75, 119, 123, 130, 398, 482, 520–521, 538, 591–592, 598–599 party leader 117, 121, 217, 392, 397, 417 party member / membership 47, 48, 77, 115, 182, 250, 251, 451, 459, 462, 464 party system 39, 47, 72, 118, 129, 135, 215, 239, 272, 356, 382, 400, 452, 599 patriotism 189, 193–194, 204, 575 peers 213–214, 478, 529–533, 537–538, 540– 542 perception management 187, 188, 198–203 personalization 40, 68, 77, 211, 212, 214–223, 300, 317, 318, 362, 365–369, 394, 396– 398, 401 persuasion 3, 7, 169, 173, 218–221, 428, 431, 492, 499, 519, 556, 562–563 petition 131, 178, 458, 461–462, 475, 534, 609, 613 pluralism 44–45, 55, 91–92, 187–188, 195– 198, 203–204, 279, 294, 360, 367, 450 pluralistic ignorance 619 polarization 14, 68, 72, 132, 143, 318, 362, 365, 479, 491, 515, 516, 518–519 polarized pluralist model / country 91, 97, 312, 339 policy agenda-setting see political agendasetting policy-media interaction model 197 political agenda-setting 231–244, 249, 253– 255, 262, 400 political alienation 133, 137, 496, 535 political communication culture 87, 95, 97–98, 308, 382 political competition 22, 47, 71, 124, 144, 145, 168, 169, 176, 182, 211, 214, 217, 284, 294, 306, 343, 359, 365, 378, 420, 597 political consultant 2, 94, 118, 120 political contest model 193 political culture 73, 97, 98, 118, 124, 297, 299, 301, 306, 317, 449, 451–452, 455, 458, 462–464, 532 political cynicism 48, 54, 72, 78, 97, 98, 142– 143, 306, 337, 385, 417, 591, 595–598 political disaffection see political alienation political economy 6, 193, 313 political efficacy 132, 143, 481, 538, 595, 596, 609, 616–617 political information environment 87, 90, 92, 109

646

Index

political involvement see political interest political interest 26, 27, 28, 72, 75, 79, 99, 143, 191, 306, 363, 434, 451, 466, 509, 510, 514, 517, 521, 594, 613, 616 political knowledge see knowledge and knowledge gap political legitimacy 211, 213, 216 political marketing 109–111, 249, 251 political parallelism see press-party parallelism political slant see media bias political sophistication see knowledge political tolerance 476, 617 political trust 491, 582, 596–597, 609, 615– 616 politicization 40, 97, 137, 359, 363, 439 politics of fear see fear (means of politics) polling 76, 120, 381, 385, 392, 393, 411, 497, 619 popular press see tabloid journalism populism 47, 132, 144, 272, 334 poster 53, 78, 117, 173, 175–177, 282 power distance (journalism) 96, 338 presidential debate see televised debate presidentialization 397 press conference 153, 177, 202, 219, 222, 316, 318–319 press-party parallelism 334, 356 press release 183, 202, 238, 251, 361, 389 presumed media influence 213, 235, 453, 493–496 priming 130, 137, 141, 492, 519, 520, 547, 548, 558–565, 601 private media see commercial media privatization (media coverage) 73, 397 professional role / value (journalism) see role conception / perception (journalism) professionalization (campaigning) 48, 63, 67, 75, 76, 117, 119–121, 123, 271, 312 professionalization (journalism) 72, 91, 312 propaganda 4–8, 70, 76–77, 168, 170, 172, 174–177, 182–188, 193, 202, 282–283, 483 protest 63, 75, 79, 98, 169, 173, 178–181, 274, 275, 299–301, 377, 383, 451, 454–466, 475, 495, 592, 611 pseudo-event 152, 318, 381 public diplomacy 188, 201, 202, 214, 222, 257, 270 public interest 32, 41, 43, 50, 55, 56, 279, 338

public service media 28, 42–46, 53–54, 92, 269, 279–280, 291 publisher 6, 175, 176, 283, 330, 336, 415 quality newspaper see broadsheet newspaper rationality 21, 25–29, 314, 353, 501 realism 187, 188, 189–193 reality TV 271, 439 reciprocal effects 231, 234 relationship management 251, 252, 253, 258 religion 75, 77, 140, 538 reputation 139, 177, 250, 252–253, 262, 290, 296–297 rhetoric 3, 9, 12, 169, 172, 176, 183, 184, 193, 211–212, 216–223, 238, 256, 367, 427, 601 role conception / perception (journalism) 95–96, 307, 329–339, 358, 364, 366 satire 412, 433–435, 438, 440 scandal 48, 151–153, 158, 259, 292, 295–296, 306, 317, 317, 395, 417, 512, 597 school 25, 457, 529–534, 537–540 search engine 274, 509, 516 secularization of politics 75 segmentation 120, 122, 123 selective exposure 402, 432–434, 480, 500, 507–508, 510, 512–521, 621 sensationalism 179, 180, 239, 411, 414, 439, 479 simplification (media coverage) 318, 362, 365, 367, 370 situational theory of publics 251, 252, 262 social capital 92, 465, 535 social control 168, 201, 328, 419, 554 social cognitive / social learning theory 436, 532, 535–536 social media 73, 78, 114–115, 169, 173, 182, 199, 214, 221, 222, 260–261, 272–275, 299, 300, 307, 318, 319, 389, 409, 410, 416, 465, 619, 621 social movement 47, 167–184, 261, 275, 465 social networking sites (SNS) see social media soft news 300, 317, 399, 411, 413, 433, 439– 440, 496, 579, 621 soft power 201 sound bite 77, 117, 202, 213, 389, 394–396, 399, 401 source credibility 490–492, 499, 516–517

Index

speeches (political actors) 53, 69, 70, 117, 156, 179, 202, 215, 216–223, 238, 251, 255, 256, 258, 261, 283, 290, 295–296, 315, 380, 502, 576, 579, 612 spin doctor 74, 97, 139, 233, 234, 297, 312, 380, 389, 394 spiral of silence 21, 34, 65, 619 staged event 152, 154, 392 see also pseudo event stereotype 160, 315, 420, 491, 494, 552, 558 strategic communication 24, 109, 111, 115, 168, 202, 233, 251, 574 strategy frame / strategic game frame 377– 386 style (media, discourse) 40, 317, 335, 355–357, 360, 364–369, 379, 395, 414, 575–576, 579–580, 593–594 subsidies (media) 39–40, 42–43, 48 subsidies (political actors) 46, 48–49, 52–55 symbolic politics 71, 179–180, 238–239, 242 tabloid journalism 40, 156, 358, 376, 396, 414, 415 tabloidization 68, 74, 317, 327, 331, 332, 369, 385, 397, 398, 409, 411, 555, 580 talk show 45, 69, 280, 301, 355, 360–364, 369, 411, 413, 418, 420, 433, 435, 440, 554, 600, 601 talk radio 298, 300, 432, 453, 491 televised debate 121, 152, 153, 218, 220, 258, 280, 385, 397, 414, 550, 600, 601 terrorism 155, 159, 181, 200–201, 269, 381, 419, 574, 577, 578 text-bite 394 thematic framing 375, 377–378, 381–382, 576 think tank 249–251 third person effect / perception (TPP) 489– 502 trigger event see key event trust (in media) see media credibility trust (in political actors, institutions) 329, 417, 462–464, 516, 538, 552, 582, 595–598 turnout (elections) 129, 130, 137, 138, 142, 260, 417, 451, 454, 475, 539, 540, 616, 619 TV debate see televised debate

647

Twitter 162, 173, 221, 260, 277, 282, 301, 318– 319, 389, 465, 479, 480, 501, 621 two-step flow hypothesis 453, 469, 477–479, 482, 492 user-generated content 289, 299–300, 319, 439, 441, 516, 517 uses and gratifications approach (U&G) 14, 412, 431, 434, 489, 496–502, 618 values (citizens, society) 1, 30, 31, 55, 56, 67, 75, 89, 99, 138, 143, 152, 156, 167, 190, 213, 254, 279, 326, 332, 364, 365, 410, 449, 450, 464, 511, 519, 529, 536, 538– 539, 547, 555, 592, 601 verbal intelligence 217, 219 videomalaise 417, 596 Vietnam Syndrome 191 violence 156–161, 174, 178–181, 192, 200, 221, 419, 495, 552–554, 558, 559, 564, 574, 577–578 virtuous circle 79, 596 visibility (in media coverage) 34, 71, 114, 119, 145, 270, 275, 277, 279, 280, 298, 317, 390–393, 402 visualization 416 visuals / visual message elements 77, 344, 365, 414–416, 453, 516, 573, 575, 579– 580, 601 volatility (electoral) 75, 77, 119, 122, 130, 134, 140, 540 voting behavior 4, 66, 129–130, 136, 140–143, 145, 282, 306, 353, 359, 396, 398, 430– 431, 450–451, 454, 457, 459, 460, 475– 476, 478, 489, 491, 495, 501, 514, 520, 541, 555, 592, 598–602, 609–612, 614, 619 war on terror 187–189, 198, 200–201 watchdog (journalism) 96, 295, 305, 318, 338 Web 2.0 see social media web campaign see online campaign well-informed citizen see informed citizen Wikileaks 199, 299, 319 YouTube 73, 78, 122, 260, 261, 282, 301, 439