Streamlining Political Communication Concepts: Updates, Changes, Normalcies (Springer Studies in Media and Political Communication) 3031453344, 9783031453342

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Springer Studies in Media and Political Communication

Susana Salgado Stylianos Papathanassopoulos   Editors

Streamlining Political Communication Concepts Updates, Changes, Normalcies

Springer Studies in Media and Political Communication Series Editors Stylianos Papathanassopoulos, Department of Communication and Media Studies, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece Susana Salgado, Instituto de Ciencias Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal

This book series offers an outlet for cutting-edge research on all areas at the nexus of politics, the media, and political communication. Springer Studies in Media and Political Communication (SSMPC) welcomes theoretically sound and empirically robust monographs, edited volumes and handbooks from various disciplines and approaches on topics such as the role and function of communication in the realm of politics including campaigns and elections, media, and political institutions; the relations between political actors, citizens, and the media; as well as research investigating the influence of media coverage on political behavior or attitudes, party communication strategies, political campaigns, agenda-setting, and political journalism. All books in this series are peer-reviewed.

Susana Salgado • Stylianos Papathanassopoulos Editors

Streamlining Political Communication Concepts Updates, Changes, Normalcies

Editors Susana Salgado Institute of Social Sciences University of Lisbon Lisbon, Portugal

Stylianos Papathanassopoulos Department of Communication and Media Studies National and Kapodistrian University of Athens Athens, Greece

ISSN 2731-4081 ISSN 2731-409X (electronic) Springer Studies in Media and Political Communication ISBN 978-3-031-45334-2 ISBN 978-3-031-45335-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45335-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Contents

The Old Meets the New: “Old” Political Communication Concepts in a “‘New” Social Media Era . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Susana Salgado, Afonso Biscaia, and Stylianos Papathanassopoulos

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Features of the Digital Era: Deinstitutionalization and Reinstitutionalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Paolo Mancini

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Ever More Dynamic, Complex, and Transnational: Comparing Political Communication Under the Conditions of Digital Environments and Disrupted Democracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Barbara Pfetsch, Vivien Benert, and David Schieferdecker A Brief History of the Disinformation Age: Information Wars and the Decline of Institutional Authority . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . W. Lance Bennett and Steven Livingston

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Media Populism Revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Benjamin Krämer

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Political Corruption Scandals in the (Social) Media Environment . . . . . Rosa Berganza, Marta Martín-Llaguno, and Azahara Ortiz-González

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Digital Election Campaigns: Does Professionalization Still Matter? . . . . 105 Lars Nord Political (Election) Advertising . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 Christina Holtz-Bacha Strategic Political Public Relations in the “Age of Populism” . . . . . . . . . 139 Brittany Shaughnessy and Spiro Kiousis

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The Old Meets the New: “Old” Political Communication Concepts in a “‘New” Social Media Era Susana Salgado

, Afonso Biscaia, and Stylianos Papathanassopoulos

Abstract In this introductory chapter, we explain the rationale of the edited book and delve into the changes that social media have been provoking in political communication and political communication research. The book brings together contributions of renowned scholars who look into some of the most pivotal political communication concepts and reflect on whether and how the new media environments and social media have affected these concepts. Potential changes in theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches are considered, as well as reflections on how to encompass such new realities (e.g., growing disruptive communication and incivility, disinformation, trans-national networks) in political communication research in an environment of further erosion of trust in institutional authorities. Keywords Political Communication Research · Social Media · Concepts · Methods

New Political Communication Environments The latest changes in media environments, particularly those caused by the emergence and widespread use of social media in politics, have been revealing new critical challenges not only to democratic politics, but also to political communication research. More than ever, it is important to understand the dynamics of information flows and the processes of contagion and exponential amplification caused by social media, but this complex task seems to be increasingly difficult. There is still no consensus about the (positive and negative) effects of social media platforms, but today few would deny their impact on political communication. There has been anxiety any time society deals with the emergence of new media S. Salgado (✉) · A. Biscaia Universidade de Lisboa, Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Lisbon, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] S. Papathanassopoulos Department of Communication and Media Studies of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Salgado, S. Papathanassopoulos (eds.), Streamlining Political Communication Concepts, Springer Studies in Media and Political Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45335-9_1

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(e.g., printing press, radio, television) and there are certainly problems that precede social media, and therefore research focused on the question whether social media platforms are an amplifier of pre-existing problems or a major independent driver is much needed. Nonetheless, and either as amplifier or driver, there are specific features of social media that have been raising more and more public concern, such as the so-called tools of virality (e.g., the Facebook like and share buttons and the retweet function on Twitter), the possibility to quickly and broadly disseminate fake news and all kinds of potentially harmful content, or their use to directly and narrowly target intended recipients with specific objectives (e.g., election campaigns, disinformation campaigns, etc.), which affect political communication at different levels: how actors communicate, whom they target, and what is said (see, e.g., Frankel & Hillygus, 2014). More sources of information producing and disseminating content represents (at least in theory) the possibility of more diversity overall, but it also means more low-quality, unfiltered content circulating. Alternative views can easily circumvent traditional information gatekeepers, who have thus been increasingly weakened. Political discussions are usually less civil online than offline and systemic trolling inhibits several individuals and groups from participating in online discussions. Radical and extreme views proliferate online much due to the social media platforms’ business model that promotes this type of content over any other, and often have significant contagions offline, as it has happened in several cases worldwide. Social media platforms’ logic and affordances have thus been pointed out as cause not only of further radicalization and polarization, but also of the uncontrolled proliferation of misinformation and disinformation, because any content can now be disseminated without any filters and there are new, quick, easy ways of fabricating, exaggerating, or simply promoting stories. The challenges in studying, understanding, and measuring these new environments, interactions, and contents, as well as their effects have increased immensely. As the context and the users’ profile are different from platform to platform, it is likely that different platforms do induce different types of effects. Previous political communication research does point in this direction: the process by which individuals obtain information about politics through the media has always been complex and multifaceted; the effects can vary by medium and the mix of sources that individuals use, as well as by the motivations, prior beliefs, and characteristics of the individuals (Eveland & Garrett, 2014). Simultaneously, the opacity of social media platforms has been increasing, as most of them—particularly Facebook, but not only—have created (unsurmountable in some cases) obstacles in the access to their data, including for research purposes. The tools that allow for the cross-platform and cross-national virality of messages have made these environments very difficult to fully apprehend both in terms of data collection and analysis. Moreover, the pace of change and the fragmentation of these new environments add to the difficulties. Scientific research is methodical, intensive, and therefore slow, but the social media platforms experience dramatic changes in rather short periods of time and thus potentially some of their effects could also change faster than research can actually document and understand. Just this

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discrepancy makes it difficult to study the changes occurring in and because of social media, as well as the impact of their effects on individuals, politics, and society in general. Moreover, it is likely that when specific empirical research is finally ready, it is already dated and thus no longer reflects reality or the most important effects in that moment. This means that research may not be able to timely document potential harmful effects on time in order to allow for effective preventive action or adequate response and mitigation measures. On the one hand, research is dealing with unprecedented amounts of data, but on the other hand, the tools available for big data analysis do not capture many key nuances of the content and of the actors involved in the production and dissemination of content (e.g., radicalization and polarization caused by algorithms and the platforms’ monetization logic or by real individuals and groups (organized or not) who were already interested in extremist positions and deliberately look for and spread radical and extreme contents). Research also needs to find the right tools to capture and assess the dynamics of current hybrid contexts, as social media platforms influence and are influenced by other media, including legacy media from different countries. We already know from research that different contexts and different issues do impact differently on the degree and type of effects (see, e.g., Salgado, 2019). Furthermore, effects are expectedly different in different individuals, as background, motivations, ideology, etc., vary and these will very likely moderate the impact of specific contents or situations. Finally, conceptualization is another key element to consider in these challenges facing political communication research. It is not uncommon to find contrasting results in research approaches on the same topic, which thus tend to lead to inconclusive findings, dragging debates out, and sometimes even polarizing academic discussions. And this is often caused by different conceptualizations or different operationalizations of the concepts. Considering these challenges, the purpose of the book is to contribute to the field with a discussion and updated reflections on how key political communication concepts are (or not) being adapted to the new media and political environments and particularly to the empirical study of the impact of social media on democratic politics. Current challenges have been increasing the need of updated, empirical research; however, for such research to be meaningful, it needs to be grounded on solid conceptualizations and operationalizations. This discussion is all the more important if we think that in order to measure recent changes in political communication and their effects, the tools employed have to be closely adjusted to reality. Furthermore, both comparative and longitudinal research approaches need to be considered in this equation and for those specifically clarity and accuracy in conceptualization and operationalization is paramount. Particularly noting that one of the reasons why researchers often reach opposing conclusions in studies on the same issue is because they conceptualize the issue differently and/or operationalize it differently in empirical research designs. More specifically, the contributions included in this edited book look into whether changes in political communication environments mean fresh perspectives and changes in this regard. These

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contributions will be briefly described at the end of this introductory chapter. Next, we look into more detail to some of the changes that were introduced in political communication research in recent years.

Changes in Political Communication Research As a field of study, political communication covers “all stages in the process by which issues emerge in the public sphere to be debated, negotiated around and, on occasion, resolved” (McNair, 2011: 227). In other words, political communication is interested in how ideas about how society is and should be organized, and how resources distributed among its members are circulated and brought to peoples’ attention, be it through the efforts of political actors, journalistic mediation, or common citizens who engage in political discussions. These communicative phenomena are intrinsic to modern societies and representative democracies where most citizens do not participate directly in political decision-making processes but are still expected to be able to make informed decisions which include choosing their representatives through elections. Nevertheless, one does not expect that attendant practices remain the same through profound societal changes, or that researchers resort to the same theoretical frameworks and methodologies to study them. Indeed, while some common threads have remained, the past recent decades have heralded very significant changes to political communication, both as a practice and a scholarly pursuit. Especially relevant are those concerning the development of hybrid media systems and the introduction and eventual pervasiveness of digital communication and social media, referred to in the previous section. The new paradigm impacts all the stages through which political ideas are produced, disseminated, and debated and is characterized by the collision and mutual influence of legacy media and new media logics (Chadwick, 2017) and the decrease in the former’s gatekeeping power as information flows from social media and digital networks gain visibility and political influence (Bennett & Pfetsch, 2018; Mancini, 2023). Consequently, it presents new challenges and opportunities, not only to media outlets but also to political actors who are increasingly forced to adapt and professionalize their operations to contend with new demands (Gibson & Römmele, 2009; Enli, 2017; Nord, 2023), and to citizens who are now afforded an unprecedentedly large and diverse amount of information and spaces to make their opinions known, but are also exposed to more content, disinformation, and sophisticated disinformation campaigns designed to undermine trust in institutions (Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017; Bennett & Livingston, 2023), even if their effectiveness is not a given (Boulianne & Humprecht, 2023). This sweeping technopolitical evolution is reflected in how scholars have chosen to address digital political communication. As an example, at the turn of the century, Gibson and Ward pioneered a systematic, comparative, empirical approach to party and candidate websites focused on their affordances (2000a, 2000b), i.e., the

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functions they fulfilled and how they were delivered, drawing from content analysis techniques and organized around the concept of information and communication flow (2000a: 306). Gibson and Ward’s framework proved influential and was widely applied (e.g., Gibson et al., 2003; Gulati & Williams, 2007; Vaccari, 2013), but it was not devised to take in the way parties and political actors communicate and campaign on social media, which would not become relevant until the mid- to lateaughts. Before the Internet, political communication empirical research employed mainly manual content analysis, discourse analysis, surveys, experiments, elite interviews, or, even though less commonly, also ethnographic methods. And the amount of data analyzed tended to be small when compared to the period postInternet. Moreover, as Bennett and Iyengar (2008) had already noted, in previous years theoretical advances have not kept pace with both social and technological changes. Even more than websites which are heavily dependent on the resources employed by parties and candidates, social media levels the political communication playing field in the sense that platforms provide roughly the same affordances to every user: ordinary voters, political actors, and media outlets could, at least in theory, attain similar levels of visibility and, potentially, engagement. Thus, political communication researchers sought to employ new methods and techniques that allow them to analyze an increasing volume of data, namely, by turning to digital means themselves. Especially during the last decade, scholars have adopted API (Application Programming Interface) data collection techniques, enabling them to get large amounts of textual and audiovisual data from social media platforms like Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, or TikTok, which can then be analyzed from a variety of frameworks, including those based on manifest content and style of political actors (e.g., Lewis, 2018; Ernst et al., 2019); or general trends in political communication on social media, such as polarization (e.g., Gaudette et al., 2020; Saveski et al., 2022), for instance. Additionally, studies focusing on how information flows between social media users, the networks they form among themselves, and how they can be strategically used have also flourished (e.g., MacDonald et al., 2019; MacDonald et al., 2022; Froio & Ganesh, 2019). Besides using digital means to collect data produced and published in social media platforms, scholars have also employed them to analyze that data. The so-called big data techniques, i.e., those using very large amounts of data and analyzing it, computationally, have been used to study a varied range of issues, such as disparate as affect in visual political communication (Hokka & Nelimarkka, 2020); how candidates and other political actors use digital communication and e-mail to influence potential voters and fundraise (Mathur et al., 2023); or how data voids may influence politics of exclusion (Norocel & Lewandowski, 2023). Language models, despite their relative recency, have also been growingly deployed in political communication research, although current literature still vehemently recommends its combination with other methods (Paullada et al., 2021; Jungherr, 2023). For example, Peeters et al. (2022) use language models to recognize different types of Facebook posts from political actors, and combine that with the use of an emotion lexicon and manual coding to analyze how politicians and citizens

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interact on that platform; Salgado et al. (2023) combine manual and automated text analysis with statistical methods to identify uncivil language and markers of populism; Gupta et al. (2020) developed a BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) language model specifically geared toward the analysis of political content. These new, powerful, tools allow researchers to more firmly grasp the evolving complexity of political communication phenomena, and account for developments such as the transnationalization of political discourse (e.g., Froio & Ganesh, 2019; Heft et al., 2021; Pfetsch et al., 2023), while retaining traditional interests such as exploring the role of political advertising (Holtz-Bacha, 2023), or the visibility and impact of political scandals (Berganza et al., 2023). Nevertheless, despite the vitality of political communication as a discipline and the important part it plays in understanding current political and social dynamics, it faces a constant need to adapt and evolve in tandem with its subject matter, which can sometimes be challenging. For instance, while social media giants like Twitter and Reddit used to provide researchers easy and inexpensive access to the large amounts of data created on their sites via their APIs, new platform policies have severely restricted access or made it unaffordable for most researchers, especially those located in lower-income contexts, thus increasing inequality of access to vital research tools, upending research practices (Trezza, 2023). However, this is not the first time social media platforms decided to roll back data access, impacting researchers; in fact, Freelon (2018) coined the expression “post API-age” after Facebook’s closure of its Pages API, which previously allowed access to a large amount of data, in 2018, underlining the “tenuousness of our access to digital data” (2018: 5). Despite these obstacles, political communication researchers kept on investigating social media platforms, especially focusing on Twitter which had for a long time been popular with politicians and journalists (Parmlee & Bichard, 2013). Now that Twitter, which recently and under Elon Musk leadership changed its name to X, looks set to lose that kind of influence and new platforms have been emerging, including the new Meta launch, Threads, and competitors including, but not restricted to, Mastodon, Bluesky, Spoutible, Post.news, Hive, and Spill, we may be headed toward a further fragmentation of social media environments, analogous with that of legacy media which contributed to the rise of hybrid media systems.

Thematic Overview of this Volume This volume looks at how the new digital environments have impacted some of the most pivotal concepts in political communication research. It thus approaches several central concepts in contemporary political communication research from diverse, enriching perspectives pointing to future avenues for research focused on how political actors and citizens reach and influence each other in today’s everchanging media systems, where the traditional legacy outlets’ gatekeeping role has

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been diminishing amid hybridization. We thus need to further understand how old concepts can be applied to new communication environments and practices, their potential to analyze such contexts and how these contexts reframe the traditional conceptualizations. Our choice of concepts included in this edited book was not meant to be fully comprehensive; even though several other concepts could have been included, our choice was intended to capture some of the most relevant concepts considering current political communication practices and challenges. These concepts and the authors’ approaches are briefly explained next. Pfetsch, Benert, and Schieferdecker’s chapter emphasizes how political communication research can flesh out the context wherein particular communication dynamics and processes unfold by employing comparative research designs. The method is especially suited to approach political communication in liberal democracies, since political actors and organizations are mostly free to choose their communication strategy according to their preferences and resources, while being constrained by macro-level factors, such as the specific features of national media and political systems. However, researchers should also face up to the profound and ongoing changes in the aforementioned systems in globalized societies, where “public spheres are now characterized by a dissonant polyvocality, a cacophony of heterogeneous and dispersed actors who speak synchronously and asynchronously on volatile issues in disconnected, disruptive, contradicting, erratic, and agonistic ways” (p.). The growing complexity and fragmentation of national media systems are compounded by increasing interconnectedness giving rise to translocal issue and relational networks—networked public spheres—which challenge scholars to shed the idea of neatly ordered and self-contained political communication systems and instead conceptualize communication ecosystems organized around communities and issues (Anderson, 2016), but also to endeavor to make their research take in more diverse settings, actors, and context factors, the complexity of their interaction, and the platforms where such interaction develops, which in turn impacts on the levels and units of analysis. Overcoming these challenges will enable political communication research to peer more deeply into phenomena currently afflicting Western democracies, such as populism or disinformation. Bennett and Livingston’s chapter focuses on the history of disinformation. The authors define it as “intentional falsehoods or distortions often spread as news to advance political goals” (p.), rejecting that the rise of social media, polarization, and or/foreign interference can squarely be blamed for the spread and buy-in of disinformation. Instead, these are conceptualized as symptoms of a dysfunctional public sphere, where authoritative institutions’ legitimacy is questioned due to their capture by moneyed private interests and compliant political elites. The chapter traces the evolution of the strategic spread of false information from the emergence of propaganda with Edward L. Bernays, to its rechristening as “public relations,” and its use by neoliberal and libertarian ideologues to push through unpopular agendas such as the privatization and deregulation of all sorts of activities, including the media. In recent decades, this was compounded by TINA rhetoric and the rise of “third way” politics, detaching politics from usual left-right cleavages and reducing the representational role of parties, particularly in economic issues, leading parties to resort to

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spin. This leads to unintended consequences, such as growing support for right wing populist political movements, who feed on voters’ growing discontent with the aforementioned status quo. Therefore, solutions to this “disinformation order” can only stem from “repairing the basic functioning of democratic institutions themselves” (p.), according to the authors. Shaughnessy and Kiousis look deeper into contemporary spin and public relations efforts in politics. They conceptualize political public relations as “centered around maintaining relationships and reputations with media organizations and practitioners, the public, and relevant stakeholders” (p.), and thus conclude its practitioners share a goal with populist politicians, especially when they engage in advocative messaging referring to allegedly homogeneous in-groups. The authors explain how recent technological innovations, particularly social media, allow populist politicians to remove barriers and communicate directly to the public, emphasizing the lower costs of engagement and communication as the public now has a “direct line” to politicians not yet seen throughout history (p.). Mancini’s chapter focuses on how the “digital revolution” changed social relations in the public arena, and the consequences of those changes, through the prism of deinstitutionalization and reinstitutionalization. Centering the analysis in the field of communication, the former is related to the downgrading of the media’s gatekeeping role in contexts where even single individuals can spread news and be part of conversations developing in the public sphere, but also to the fragmentation, volatility, and globalization of media markets, which preclude national government intervention, and result in polarization, hate speech, and incivility. Deinstitutionalization coexists with reinstitutionalization, namely, through the growing importance of large corporations, such as GAMA (Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon) in the media landscape, as well as with the enduring relevance of legacy media, namely, in recirculating content produced within deinstitutionalized frameworks. Krämer’s chapter revisits the influential conceptualization of media populism and reflects on some of its proposed expansions. It highlights how the original framework derived from observing how certain tabloid news outlets framed their relation to readers, presenting as representatives of the people and opposed to the elites, rather than how populist actors were portrayed in news coverage—although the two can sometimes coincide, both contributing to fuel the audience’s anti-elite sentiment, for instance. Therefore, there is no direct way to transfer this conceptualization of media populism to social media, since platforms do not usually overtly voice political positions, but these can be used to further disseminate specific views and news framings. Recent developments in the social media landscape, such as the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk, an outspoken billionaire who is frequently aligned with radical right-wing populist positions, could introduce further changes in the platform’s positioning, but thus far there has been no indication that Musk intends to present himself as a representative of the people. Nord’s chapter proposes a fresh look at the relevance and drivers of professionalization, a salient feature in campaigns since the twentieth century, in digital election campaigns. Professional-electoral parties employ experts and consultants to manage their communications according to structural conditions, strategic

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considerations, and party-specific factors. Communicating through social media or their own websites allows parties to reach larger audiences but also entails the need to professionalize further to campaign effectively. Professionalization implies the risks of downgrading internal democracy and flattening differences between competitors, but also allows parties to communicate more effectively, in novel ways, to larger audiences than before. Holtz-Bacha’s chapter looks more specifically into the content and effects of political advertising, and how its formats and effects were impacted by digital platforms in the United States and in Europe. The introduction of new channels to broadcast political content means advertisers can define a wider range of campaign goals (from mobilization and fundraising to straightforward persuasion) and more precisely target messaging, and tailor it to the sensibilities of different groups. HoltzBacha also highlights the difficulty in making generalizations regarding the effectiveness of political advertising, both due to being approached by research from different angles and methodologies and to the fact that political environments change drastically over time and space. Thus, political advertising is definitely important for campaigners, but its effects on voters “vary with the nature of the ads, the communication channels, and the recipients” (p.). Finally, Berganza, Martín-Llaguno, and Ortiz-González’s chapter focus on how the perception of political corruption scandals has changed in the mass media and social media environments, and how that relates with how political communication scholars should approach the topic, namely, by looking into how the issue is framed by the media, and into media systems themselves, including their hybrid characteristics, i.e., how mainstream media and social media logics interact in constructing public perceptions about matters related to scandals. Media environments have been changing and politicians have been adapting to these changes. This small sample of concepts shows that with them also political communication research has been changing. While in the recent past political communication research dealt with printed newspapers, radio, television, nowadays it also includes the Internet and social media, as well as artificial intelligence, etc. The advancements in technology have raised new questions and perspectives in the conceptualizations and operationalizations in political communication research and these developments have been adding new fields and directions to political communication research, which also deserve our reflection.

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the United States. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 26(2), 484–504. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/1940161220963670 Hokka, J., & Nelimarkka, M. (2020). Affective economy of national-populist images: Investigating national and transnational online networks through visual big data. New Media & Society, 22(5), 770–792. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819868686 Holtz-Bacha, C. (2023). Political (Election) advertising. In Streamlining political communication concepts: Updates, changes, normalcies. Springer. Jungherr, A. (2023). Using ChatGPT and other large language model (LLM) applications for academic paper assignments. SocArXiv, 2023. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/d84q6. Available at https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/d84q6/ Lewis, R. (2018). Alternative influence: Broadcasting the reactionary right on YouTube. Data & Society Research Institute. MacDonald, S., Grinnell, D., Kinzel, A., & Lorenzo-Dus, N. (2019). Daesh, twitter and the social media ecosystem. The RUSI Journal, 164(4), 60–72. https://doi.org/10.1080/03071847.2019. 1644775 MacDonald, S., Yilmaz, K., Herath, C., Berger, J. M; Lakhani, S., Nouri, L., Conway, M. (2022) The European far-right online: An exploratory twitter Outlink analysis of German and French online ecosystems. (research report may 2022). RESOLVE network. https://doi.org/10.37805/ remve2022.3. Available at: https://resolvenet.org/research/european-far-right-online-explor atory-twitter-outlink-analysis-german-french-far-right Mancini, P. (2023). Features of the digital era: Deinstitutionalization and reinstitutionalization. In Streamlining political communication concepts: Updates, changes, normalcies. Springer. Mathur, A., Wang, A., Schwemmer, C., Hamin, M., Stewart, B. M., & Narayanan, A. (2023). Manipulative tactics are the norm in political emails: Evidence from 300k emails from the 2020 US election cycle. Big Data & Society, 10(1), 205395172211453. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 20539517221145371 McNair, B. (2011). An introduction to political communication. Routledge. Nord, L. (2023). Digital election campaigns: Does professionalization still matter? In Streamlining political communication concepts: Updates, changes, normalcies. Springer. Norocel, O. C., & Lewandowski, D. (2023). Google, data voids, and the dynamics of the politics of exclusion. Big Data & Society, 10(1), 205395172211490. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 20539517221149099 Parmlee, J. H., & Bichard, S. L. (2013). Politics and the twitter revolution: How tweets influence the relationship between political leaders and the public. Lexington Books. Paullada, A., Raji, I. D., Bender, E. M., Denton, E., & Hanna, A. (2021). Data and its (dis)contents: A survey of dataset development and use in machine learning research. Patterns, 2(11), 100336. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patter.2021.100336 Peeters, J., Opgenhaffen, M., Kreutz, T., & Van Aelst, P. (2022). Understanding the online relationship between politicians and citizens. A study on the user engagement of politicians’ Facebook posts in election and routine periods. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 20(1), 44–59. https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2022.2029791 Pfetsch, B., Benert, V., & Schieferdecker, D. (2023). Ever more dynamic, complex, and transnationa: Comparing political communication under the conditions of digital environments and disrupted democracy. In Streamlining political communication concepts: Updates, changes, normalcies. Springer. Salgado, S. (2019). Never say never . . . or the value of context in political communication research. Political Communication, 36(4), 671–675. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2019.1670902 Salgado, S., Zuniga, H. G., da Silva, P. A., Biscaia, A., Coimbra, M. E., Martins, B., & Francisco, A. (2023). Assessing the prevalence and predictors of incivility in online news comments across six countries. Journalism Practice, 1. https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2023.2246431 Saveski, M., Beeferman, D., McClure, D., & Roy, D. (2022) Engaging politically diverse audiences on social media. Proceedings of the Sixteenth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM, 2022).

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Trezza, D. (2023). To scrape or not to scrape, this is dilemma. The post-API scenario and implications on digital research. Frontiers in Sociology, 8, 1145038. https://doi.org/10.3389/ fsoc.2023.1145038 Vaccari, C. (2013). Digital politics in Western democracies. Johns Hopkins University Press. Wardle, C., Derakhshan, H. (2017) Information Disorder: Toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policymaking (DGI (2017)09; Council of Europe Report). Council of Europe report. Available at: https://rm.coe.int/information-disorder-toward-an-interdisciplinary-frame work-for-researc/168076277c

Features of the Digital Era: Deinstitutionalization and Reinstitutionalization Paolo Mancini

Abstract The process of deinstitutionalization is one of the major consequences of digital revolution. Deinstitutionalization refers to the transfer of social functions from established institutions to single, dispersed citizens that is taking place both in the field of communication and in the field of politics. As to the field of communication, blogs, twits, posts replace the work of previous, formal institutions, while in the field of politics, single citizens are able to take an active role in the political life replacing the traditional role of mass parties. In this chapter the author discusses the consequences of this transfer that is dramatically affecting today democracy. In the meanwhile, new institutions, mainly of private nature, develop assuming some of the functions that were played by the old, weaker institutions. Keywords Digitalization · Institutions · Functions · Democracy

A Different Point of View In their introduction to the special issue of The International Journal of Press Politics devoted to “Digital Threats to Democracy,” Miller and Vaccari (2020) offers an exhaustive reading of the contrasting views that have accompanied, and are still accompanying the digital revolution. These views can be summarized with the pair “technoptimism” and “technopessimism” (Curran et al., 2016): on one side, there are all those scholars, intellectuals, journalists, etc. who see the Internet as a liberating force that will enable citizens to share news and culture and to increase their control over power holders. In their view, the Internet offers many opportunities for cultural A previous version of this chapter has been published in International Journal of Communication, 14 (2020), p. 5761–5774. P. Mancini (✉) Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche, Università di Perugia, Perugia, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Salgado, S. Papathanassopoulos (eds.), Streamlining Political Communication Concepts, Springer Studies in Media and Political Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45335-9_2

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and social participation enrichment (technoptimists). On the other side, there are all those who, mainly in the most recent period, underline all the risks and threats that are connected to the development of digital technology (technopessimists). Starting with the seminal work by Manuel Castells (2009) and many other seminal works on the topic (Rheingold, 2000), at its very beginning, the Internet was seen in a very positive way as it could empower citizens with more information and more opportunities for civic participation. In the view of these pioneering observers, digital age would bring more opportunities for information and knowledge, would circulate more news, would increase the possibilities for a larger and more powerful civil participation. Citizens would be able to take an active part in the life of the community as never before. Progressively, this initial view of the digital revolution has been replaced by a more pessimistic view. This gradual shift from optimism to pessimism as to the nature and the consequences of the digital revolution is convincingly discussed in one of the most recent books dealing with this question “The Digital Republic” (Susskind, 2022). Some essays and some real life events too (the Cambridge Analytica and the Capitol Hill attack, among the others) have pushed toward this direction. The book by Evgenj Morozov (2012) made clear, a few years ago, how the Internet could become a powerful instrument of manipulation challenging a vivid democracy; this book opened the way to many other criticisms of similar nature. More recently, the volume by Shoshana Zuboff (2019) has initiated a new wave of criticisms dealing with the economic nature and consequences of the digital revolution. As it is well known, the book of Zuboff speculated about the beginning of a new form of capitalism based on digital data. In this chapter, I want to foster a quite different view: the main question is not to be in favor of either a positive or negative evaluation of digital revolution. This seems to me a quite unproductive exercise; rather we need to understand the major modifications in the field of social interactions that the digital revolution implies and then to discuss the possible consequences. I want to argue about some of the consequences that are inherently implied to digital revolution and that are often underestimated. In particular, I will point my attention to the modifications that digital revolution is bringing to public arena and particularly to the frameworks of interactions that allow citizens to take an active part in it. Since the beginning of the digital era, many other authors have confronted this theme starting with pioneering work by Stephen Coleman and Jay Blumler to finish with the already quoted book by Jamie Susskind (2022). If I am allowed to use the following adjectives, I want to offer here a more “radical” and “extreme” point of view looking at the way in which Internet is changing the nature itself of public institutions and the distribution of power and functions. I am also well aware of the fact that many other changes pertain to the area of political economy of the institutions and the States and that these changes may be interpreted following different criteria (Schlesinger, 2020).

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A New Framework of Social Interactions Different words have been used to indicate the new framework of social interactions that digital revolution implies: in particular, many scholars have proposed the word “disintermediation” to indicate the more direct and immediate system of interactions that today allow citizens to interact with each other and with organized institutions without the intervention of intermediaries of different nature and mostly without the intervention of established media outlets (Chadwick, 2007; boyd & Ellison, 2007). In this chapter, such as I have done in other essays (Mancini, 2020), I propose to refer to the process of deinstitutionalization as a major consequence of digital revolution. The process of deinstitutionalization affects the realm of public institutions and that of private institutions as well. As already said, deinstitutionalization is seen as major feature of digital communication in a large part of the existing literature, even if this exact word is not used. In a way, the idea of deinstitutionalization was already highlighted in the 1996 already quoted, pioneering book by Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society. Manuel Castells used the idea of “network society” to indicate the dramatic transformations of traditional societies following the arrival and development of digital revolution: I believe that his idea has often been interpreted such as a catchword and its implications have been underestimated. This is what I want to challenge with this chapter. Since Castell’s book, most of the following literature, in large part in line with what I defined the techno-optimistic view, pointed out how digital communication was pushing forward a process of citizens’ empowerment stealing power and functions from already established institutions. Up to a few years ago, this was the dominant view of the changes brought about by digital revolution. The book by Bennett and Segerberg, The Logic of Connective Action, is another precursor of the idea of deinstitutionalization. In their 2013 book, they noticed a similar process of “personalization” of the actions in the public sphere that was made possible by digital revolution giving single persons the possibility to participate to public life and to interact each other without the support of any possible organization. The process of deinstitutionalization is also connected to the idea of “platform society” introduced by van Dijk, Poell, and de Wall (2018): discussing this idea, the authors write that “individual citizens or consumers organize themselves through online networks, so they are less dependent on legacy institutions and companies such as publishers, news organizations, hospitals, unions, brokers and so on. The Internet based utopian marketplace would allow individuals to offer products or services “directly” without having to rely on “offline” intermediaries, whether state or corporate” (van Dijck et al., 2018, p. 1). While the book by van Dijk, Poell, and de Wall focuses mainly, but not only, on services, business, and economic facilities, my idea of deinstitutionalization is here applied to the field of politics and news media. Related to these fields, deinstitutionalization thus means that today we observe the possibility for single citizens to spread information and news, to intervene actively in the public sphere with their

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comments, judgments, and even actions. Consequently, established institutions, both of public and private nature, transfer to single citizens a large number of functions that they were used to play. This transformation that I want to discuss in this chapter takes place both in the field of news media and in the field of politics.

Deinstitutionalization in the Field of News Media In the field of news media, we observe the dramatic development of opportunities of communication independently of formal organizations (if not those of the providers and platforms as we shall discuss later). Online platforms enable single and dispersed citizens to produce and circulate news, comments, and evaluations and then to take part in the public life without being part of any organization and without relying on established socialization structures. I am referring to the activity of social media, blogs, citizen journalism, and so on. Tweets and posts on Facebook are of the same nature. All these communication activities are not seated within stable organizations; single, dispersed citizens communicate and operate without being submitted to established hierarchy, rules, and proceedings. Hierarchical control is quite completely missing. Professional education for many of these sources of information does not exist. This is deinstitutionalization. Even if the just mentioned communication activities are produced by some sort of organizations (social groups, etc.), these are much less formal organizations if compared with the ones that existed until now. In most cases, these sources of communication are not restricted within fixed national borders and therefore they do not have to comply with specific legislations and cultural or ethical frameworks. In this way, single citizens can take an active part in the life of the public arena and may become important sources of news and opinion. They can interact with each other without being inserted within fixed proceedings. There is no doubt that this enrichment on the side of the citizens may be enlisted among the positive consequences of the digital revolution reinforcing the optimistic view on digitalization. In one of his last books, John Lloyd, mixing together his experience as a professional journalist and his scientific expertise, writes as to the new tendencies in journalism: “There is a new vision of journalism, call it the auteur school, in which the business shifts from being organized by institutions to being organized around single journalists with discrete following” (2018, p. 326). By deinstitutionalization in the field of news media, I mean exactly this shift from organized, hierarchically rigid institutions, such as the legacy media organizations were and still are, toward single individuals, more or less experienced in journalism, who produce and circulate news able to motivate and affect public debate. Digital communication offers many opportunities for such a shift: bloggers (either more or less experienced) and citizen journalists spread news that are then taken by legacy media and become major topics of public discussion. Twitter, Facebook, and now also Instagram and Tik Tok and other social media are other sources that are used by

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single citizens most often outside of any sort of institution: with either their short messages or long posts, with their photos and short videos they mobilize other citizens and, very often, set the main important topics of public discussion. The life of these sources of information depends on many different, specific, and temporary events and situations and this increases the volatility of the entire new media world, as many other scholars have already pointed out (Davis, 2019). Deinstitutionalization affects in the same way both private and public institutions: all the institutions that depend in different forms from the government or the State are affected by a progressive weakening of their functions. Very often the messages circulated by State or Government institutions (see the emergency situations, etc.) arrive only after those produced by private and personal sources. In the same way, the private ones (see news organizations, news room organizations, etc.) transfer to single persons their communication activities. In most cases this is not a voluntary transfer, rather it is imposed by technological innovation. To sum up, in the field of communication, deinstitutionalization implies: – A process of progressive individualization: single, often dispersed individuals, are able to spread news and to take active part in the public arena discussion, replacing in many cases the actions of well-established institutions. – Increased fragmentation: the number of sources of information is increasing dramatically while their power to affect, individually, the entire public debate decreases in front of the much stronger power “of voice” that single legacy media were entrusted; – Volatility: primary sources tend to disappear or become weaker and weaker in their ability to affect public debate while the life of the new born sources is very volatile. They appear and disappear in a very short span of time; – Absence of hierarchical organization: individualization goes together with an everyday activity that is played outside of any form of hierarchic organization; – Consequently, in most cases, these new sources act within a vacuum of formal control and legally established rules too as globalization, that addresses the entire process of deinstitutionalization, prevents the possible intervention of national governments. Polarization, hate speech, incivility are the most frequent consequences of the absence of control and mediation. Some of these consequences imply frequent negative effects. Fragmentation too, while it may offer the opportunity to give voice to many citizens who were voiceless in the era of legacy media, may still, nevertheless, present many challenges for a vivid democracy, as we shall discuss later.

Deinstitutionalization in the Field of Politics A similar process of deinstitutionalization takes place in the field of politics. This is a much “older” process that began decades ago with the gradual weakening of mass parties, while mass media, television in particular, were increasing their political

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socialization function. Digital communication, with its offer of immediate and direct opportunities of relation between political figures and citizens, and among citizens themselves has pushed the crisis of traditional mass parties and other public institutions, that began with the advent of television era, further. The expression that Mattoni and Ceccobelli (2018) use to highlight the process of deinstitutionalization in the field of politics seems appropriate. They talk of a dramatic shift from politics organized around stable and long-lasting institutions, such the mass parties, toward what they call “non-elite and more unconventional politics” (Mattoni & Ceccobelli, 2018). Traditional mass parties are disappearing or weakening because citizens can take an active role in political life through the different instruments offered by digital communication. Citizens do not have to go through any process of political socialization, do not need any sort of expertise in politics to circulate their voice and to take an active part in politics. Mainly, they do not have to be part of any organization to be politically active and to be inserted in some way within the formal decision making processes. They are able to give life to new forms of political engagement that many scholars have already underlined (Coleman & Blumler, 2009; Bennett & Segerberg, 2013). Social movements and other similar forms of connectivity with poor organization tend to replace the everyday activity of traditional mass parties. We can observe some consequences of deinstitutionalization in the field of politics. On one side, as already mentioned, the possibility of direct contact with the citizens has made superfluous the work of established organizations such as the mass parties were. Today, there is no need for party members and activists to communicate with the citizens through established means and organizations; Internet offers many possibilities for such direct contact. Obviously, television had already offered such a possibility. In 1996, David Farrel discussed the transformation from “labour intensive campaigns” (campaigns that were conducted essentially through the support of party activists) into “capital intensive campaigns” to indicate how television was offering the possibility of buying air time, therefore requiring a great amount of economic resources to communicate with the voters. In the meantime, television was replacing the work of thousands of political activists to spread the message of the party and its candidates (Farrel, 1996). In 2016, Daniel Kreiss added to the ones outlined by Farrel a new type of campaign, the “technology intensive” one, to highlight how technology experts are now replacing the work of activists requiring money but mainly technological competencies to use all the opportunities offered by digital communication. At the level of grassroots campaigns, not experienced or poorly technologically experienced citizens too can take active part in the political life of the community without being affiliated with any established institution. At the same time, digital communication, together with a number of other factors, has increased party volatility. Indeed, the possibility of direct communication between candidates and citizens has made possible the establishment of new parties or political organizations within a very short period of time replacing the much older and more established ones. In many cases, these are unconventional parties, such as the Five Stars Movement in Italy and Podemos in Spain. At the same time, new, even

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more conventional parties may be established in a short time; this is the case of En Marche, created in 2016 by Emmanuel Macron, who was able to win a presidential election the following year. The Blue and White Party in Israel has had an even shorter and more successful life. Very often the opportunities offered by the Internet are taken by single politicians who, thanks also to digital, direct communication with the citizens, are able to compete in the political arena. In this way, digital revolution has increased the process of political personalization. This vision gets another confirmation in the following statement taken from the last book by John Lloyd. He writes, quoting the historian Jill Lepore: The Internet, like all new communication technologies, has contributed to a period of political disequilibrium, one in which, as always, party followers have been revolving against party leaders. It is unlikely but not impossible that the accelerating and atomizing forces of this latest communication revolution will bring about the end of the party system and the beginning of a new and wobblier political institution . . . at some point does each of us become a party of one.

Deinstitutionalization implies a move from institutions with their framework of established procedures and routines, a fixed hierarchy, and rules toward an empowerment of single and dispersed citizens who can take an active role both in news media production and circulation and in politics. While, such as it has already been discussed, Bennett and Segerberg (2013) proposed the idea of “personalized, digitally mediated political engagement” (p. 5) as a new, possible form of political action, at the same time they recognized the possibility that through the opportunities offered by the Internet, dispersed citizens could get together, combine their interests, mobilize and act outside of any formal organizations. This is what they define as a new form of social connectivity: it is volatile and less hierarchically organized.

A List of Consequences It is now possible to summarize the consequences that deinstitutionalization produces both in the field of media and in the field of politics. Some of these consequences have already been mentioned. Such as many other scholars have pointed out, digitalization increases the tendency toward fragmentation (Van Aelst et al., 2017) that commercial television had already initiated several years before (Stroud, 2015). Today, a much larger number of citizens and poorly established groups have access to all digital communication opportunities; they can spread news, comments, and take an active part in the life of community. Communication fragmentation implies a process of power fragmentation too as the agenda setting process is now in the end of many, different, and often contrasting actors and the centralization of opinions that featured the era of legacy media seems to be missing today. The era of Walter Cronkite forecasting through television news the defeat of USA in the Vietnam war and convincing large part of American citizens of this seems to have arrived to an end (Hallin, 1994). Today

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fragmentation implies a continuous process of interaction, and possible contrast, among different sources. The fragmentation that features the process of deinstitutionalization implies other consequences as well. Among those is volatility; the digital public arena and politics are featured by a high level of volatility: citizens, groups and organizations too may be linked to single moments and occasions, may appear and disappear from the public arena within a very short span of time. As previously noted, these are poorly organized sources if not organized at all and therefore they may easily take life and equally may disappear. Most of these new formations do not share an established culture and proceedings that can last over time. Fragmentation and volatility produce a much higher level of social and political complexity. The public decision-making process is much more complex than before. Firstly, the number of actors that can intervene and have a voice in the decisionmaking process is very large and moreover, very often, a principal source with which to interact is missing. Different and contrasting sources do enrich the decisionmaking process, but mediation and consensus among them becomes more difficult and rare. Volatility increases the level of uncertainty of the entire process, as those who intervene at the very beginning of the process may not be the same that will last until the end. And then there many other implications depending on the absence of control (or much weaker control than before): incivility, fake news, hate speech are born within a vacuum of control or shared rules of speech and behavior. Every person or group that is active in the digital arena can circulate any content outside of any form of control, of any respect for shared ethical habits or proceedings. There is no doubt that deinstitutionalization implies a new landscape of contents where everyone is free to express their opinions and feelings without passing through a process of discussion and mediation such as it happens within a formal organization. In the same way, deinstitutionalization fosters social and political polarization: this increase depends both on the much larger number of actors who have access to public arena discussion and the already discussed absence of control. Even actors with a very small number of followers (if any) but with a strong and extreme point of view may contaminate public arena often by provoking reactions of similar tone. There is no doubt that the echo-chambers phenomenon is another cause of polarization, such as Cass Sunstein has convincingly suggested (Sunstein, 2017): the tendency to incapsulate ourselves withing close niches of persons sharing the same opinions and feelings produce a resulting reinforcement of the points of view circulating within that specific and close niche while increasing the distance from contrasting points of view. These consequences may be listed under either the optimistic or pessimistic view depending on the specific context and moments.

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Reinstitutionalization If, at the level of social relations, the digital revolution fosters a process of deinstitutionalization, it produces at the same time new reinstitutionalizations. New, mostly private organizations develop often taking the form of platforms and can influence society at whole in different ways (van Dijck et al., 2018). This is particularly clear in the field of news production and circulation with the development of gigantic corporations like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and more that seem to be able to undermine the power of public institutions and all the framework of rules that the public institutions produce. They act in the area of commercial intermediations as well such as Amazon and Uber show very clearly. These new institutions tend to replace the old corporations as well with particular regard to the area of communication (Moore and Tambini, 2018). The successful title of Shoshana Zuboff’s book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019) underlines how the production of capital is shifting from the “old,” traditional corporations toward new ones whose commercial logic is completely different from that of the previous corporations: it is no longer based on the exchange between producers and consumers; rather, the consumers themselves become the goods to be circulated. Reinstitutionalization also moves the power to set rules from the State and other public institutions toward newborn institutions. Without exaggeration, we observe how, in spite of all the criticisms and requests coming from governments all around the world and from other international organizations, Facebook and other new media platforms still maintain the power to set the ways and the limits of the circulation of content on their platforms and beyond, overcoming all the national borders too. It has been possible to observe such a move in the case of Donald Trump and Facebook. Two private institutions, Facebook and Twitter, decided to shut down the voice of the President of USA Donald Trump as he was breaking some of the standards of ethical nature fixed by these institutions themselves. In some way, a sort of reinstitutionalization may be observed in the present form of hybrid media system as well; very often, the messages of digital media, born and developed within a deinstitutionalized framework, are able to affect public debate when they are taken and recirculated by legacy media reaching in many cases a very large audience that is not seated just within the digital environment. In most cases, these messages are undergoing through a reshaping process: they assume new formats, they are submitted to existing and established proceedings and rules. Media systems thus become more complex and multifaceted going through deinstitutionalization and then reinstitutionalization.

References Bennett, L., & Segerberg, A. (2013). The logic of connective action. Digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. Cambridge University Press.

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boyd, D., & Ellison, N. (2007). Social network sites: Definition, history and scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), 210–230. Castells, M. (2009). The rise of network society. Blackwell. Chadwick, A. (2007). Disintermediation. In M. Bevir (Ed.), The encyclopedia of governance (p. 918). Sage. Coleman, S., & Blumler, J. (2009). Internet and democratic citizenship. Cambridge University Press. Curran, J., Fenton, N., & Freedman, D. (2016). Misunderstanding the internet. Routledge. Davis, A. (2019). Political communication. A new introduction for crisis times. Polity. Farrel, D. (1996). Campaigns strategies and tactics. In L. Le Duc, R. Niemi, & P. Norris (Eds.), Comparing democracies. Sage. Hallin, D. (1994). We keep America on top of the world. Television journalism and the public sphere. Routledge. Mancini, P. (2020). Comparing media systems and the digital age. International Journal of Communication, 14, 5761–5774. Mattoni, A., & Ceccobelli, D. (2018). Comparing hybrid media systems in the digital age: A theoretical framework for analysis. European Journal of Communication, 33(5), 540–557. Miller, M., & Vaccari, C. (2020). Digital threats to democracy: Comparative lessons and possible remedies. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 25(3), 333–357. Moore, M., & Tambini, D. (eds.) (2018). Digital Dominance. The Power of Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple. Oxford University Press. Morozov, E. (2012). The net delusion. Public Affairs. Rheingold, H. (2000). The virtual community: Homesteading on the electronic frontier. The MIT Press. Schlesinger, P. (2020). After the post-public sphere. Media Culture and Society, 4(7–8), 1545–1563. Stroud, N. J. (2015). Media fragmentation and its consequences for democracy. In J. Zielonka (Ed.), Media and democracy in new democracies. Oxford University Press. Sunstein, C. (2017). Republic. Divided democracy in the age of social media. Princeton University Press. Susskind, J. (2022). The Digital Republic. On freedom and democracy in the 21st century. Bloomsbury Publishing. Van Aelst, P., et al. (2017). Political communication in a high choice media environment: A challenge for democracy. Annals of the International Communication Association, 41(1), 3–27. van Dijck, J., Poell, T., & de Waal, M. (2018). The platform society. Public values in a connective world. Oxford University Press. Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. Public Affairs.

Ever More Dynamic, Complex, and Transnational: Comparing Political Communication Under the Conditions of Digital Environments and Disrupted Democracy Barbara Pfetsch

, Vivien Benert

, and David Schieferdecker

Abstract The conditions of digital communication environments, dissonant public spheres, the crisis of liberal democracy, and global problems of postmodern society fundamentally shape today’s public communication and political information flows. Therefore, in our essay we discuss the changes in political and media systems and how they challenge research questions, designs, and methods of comparative research in the field. We focus on the premises, concepts, and practices of comparative study and propose that researchers need to re-calibrate their essential point of view. It is necessary to move away from the idea of ordered political communication systems and focus instead on fluid ecosystems of message flows on different societal and geographical levels. Regarding the empirical study, we argue that such environments require the consideration of multiple levels of analysis to account for more contextualization and the use of innovative methods of data collection and analysis. Keywords Disrupted democracy · Dissonant public sphere · Comparative communication study · Fluid ecosystems of message flows · Approaches of computational communication science

Introduction Does right-wing populism threaten liberal democracy? In what ways do postfactual campaigns or political propaganda undermine the trust in the media and democracy? Is political participation enhanced by the use of online platforms for social movements? These questions are at the center of current political communication research. In a world that has been facing an increasing amount of political violence, war, and crises, such as the pandemic and climate change, understanding the flow of B. Pfetsch (✉) · V. Benert · D. Schieferdecker Institute for Media and Communication Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Salgado, S. Papathanassopoulos (eds.), Streamlining Political Communication Concepts, Springer Studies in Media and Political Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45335-9_3

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information between political actors, citizens, and communicators in online and offline media, digital platforms, and social media is of the utmost social relevance. Political communication scholarship does not only describe phenomena such as the rise of right-wing populism, the spread of false news and propaganda, or the volatility of trust in media and democracy. We also want to unravel the causes and conditions behind these developments. One of the best tools for social scientific explanation is comparative research designs, which allow for systematically varying conditions and contexts of political message flows and their effects. By doing this, we can detect the similarities and differences of political communication and public debate, linking them in a robust manner to the social, political, cultural, or historical features of contemporary society. Compared with the long tradition of comparative politics in political science, comparative political communication research has a relatively short history. However, within communication studies, political communication scholars were among the first to use comparative methods in the 1990s. These early studies mostly related to subjects such as comparisons of media systems (Hallin & Mancini, 2004), political journalism (Köcher, 1986), and election campaigns (Semetko et al., 1991). Since then, the number of original international data collections and research projects has significantly increased, with reviews speaking of “an explosion” of comparative studies (Volk, 2021, p. 41). At the same time, research questions and the conditions of political communication have become more complex and differentiated, and the field itself has become more plural and dynamic. Today, we can ask if and how we can still do meaningful comparative research. The paradigms and research subjects in political communication research have always been strongly tied to the developments in media systems. Since the early days of comparative studies 30 years ago, the communication environment of politics has changed fundamentally. Blumler (2016) pointedly spoke of the “fourth age of political communication”—an era, on the one hand, characterized by media abundance, internet, and social media, and a high volatility of communication venues, while, on the other hand, the former cornerstone of democratic communication—public media—suffers from declining political support and loss of audience. The conditions of the fourth age of political communication are the starting point of our inquiry into the state of comparative research today. With the essential changes in contemporary communication environments, the crisis of liberal democracy, and challenges of postmodern society through global problems, we need to ask how comparative research on communication processes and information flows has changed and must change in the light of dissonant public spheres, disrupted democracy, and global problems (Bimber & de Zúñiga, 2020; Klinger, 2021; Pfetsch, 2020). In this essay, we have approached these questions in two steps. First, we briefly survey the major changes in the political and media systems that have occurred within the last two decades. We do not aim for a comprehensive summary of how the world has changed, but instead, we introduce the essential developments that shape political orders, issues, and processes of communication and, therefore, instruct comparative communication research today. Second, we discuss how these changes

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in the political and media conditions have affected the premises, concepts, and practices of comparative research. In terms of theory and concepts, we establish the need to move from a focus on ordered systems to fluid ecosystems of political communication. Regarding the empirical analysis, we argue that such environments require consideration of multiple levels of analysis to account for more contextualization and to use innovative methods of data collection and analysis.

Major Changes in Political and Media Systems Since the onset of comparative political communication research three decades ago, neither media systems nor political systems nor the interplay between media and politics has remained the same. In this section, we lay the groundwork for our assessment of the field by discussing recent developments that have affected the core of political communication, provoking new questions and angles of comparative research.

Liberal Democracy, Party Systems, and Political Culture In the postwar period, the scholarship in comparative politics took it for granted that liberal democracy has been the default option of political systems in modern society (Almond & Verba, 1963; Lipset, 1960). Until the 1990s, observers could gain the impression that the political systems were following a teleology in which all systems eventually develop into liberal democracies. Francis Fukuyama’s (1992) highly popular The End of History and the Last Man is a genuine example of this time and thinking. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, however, liberal democracy no longer appeared as the paramount political system and natural twin of prosperous societies. The West has witnessed how China has risen to a political and economic superpower, despite being ruled by an autocratic government. Other countries such as Russia seem to survive economically, despite maintaining autocratic political regimes. Interestingly enough, the idea of the liberal democracy has been questioned even more by countries where democratic rule had been established but which, nevertheless, slide back toward authoritarianism (Inglehart & Norris, 2016). This phenomenon has been called de-democratization, the deconsolidation of democracy (Foa & Mounk, 2016, 2017), and crisis of representation (Perrineau, 2009). Importantly, it does not only happen in single and/or peripheral countries, but it also includes countries in the European Union and the US, which have been well integrated into the capitalist world economy and which have been central for the comparative study of political communication. A first explanation lies in the long-term transformation of the cleavage structures in postindustrial, globalized democracies. Cleavages describe how population

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segments that share similar sociocultural backgrounds develop akin political preferences that find expression in the party systems and representation of political positions (Hooghe & Marks, 2018; Lipset & Rokkan, 1967). For the past few decades, scholars have described the emergence of a new cleavage revolving around the cultural and economic questions of denation(al)ization (Bornschier, 2010; Hooghe & Marks, 2018; Kriesi et al., 2008; Kriesi et al., 2012). The argument is that globalization has affected segments of the population differently, producing winners and losers. In turn, political conflicts often fall in between citizens with higher civic resources and a more cosmopolitan value orientation and citizens with less civic and material resources and a more parochial orientation (Hutter & Kriesi, 2019; Inglehart & Norris, 2016, p. 15). In public debate, the crystallization point for this cleavage is the question of immigration, but it expands to other issues, usually foregrounding cultural divides over traditional left–right issues. The change in cleavage structures manifests itself in the party systems. The popularity of centrist parties has continuously declined. The established political parties find it increasingly harder to mobilize their voting base (Hutter & Kriesi, 2019; Mair, 2013). At the same time, antisystem parties and populist movements have gained momentum (Hutter & Kriesi, 2019). Particularly notable is the rise of an authoritarian right-wing populism in countries in Middle and Eastern Europe (Norris & Inglehart, 2019, pp. 9–12) that have fueled politicization and polarization and electoral campaigns of right parties around immigration and elite blaming (Heft et al., 2022). Importantly, these parties usually do not only challenge the established decision-making elite: they partly question the norms and conventions in democratic processes, as well as the rule of law and legitimacy of judicial institutions (Norris & Inglehart, 2019, pp. 409–442). Eventually, the reshuffling of the cleavage structure and party systems goes hand in hand with a growing skepticism of the functionality of democracy as a political order, declining levels of support for democratic institutions (Foa & Mounk, 2016, 2017; Lührmann & Lindberg, 2019), and eroding trust in national governments, parliaments, parties, and supranational organizations, a trend that has occurred in both the EU and USA (Inglehart et al., 2014; Mair, 2013).

Media Systems and Communication Infrastructures The crisis of liberal democracy has been co-occurring with the fundamental transformation of media systems. The infrastructure of communication and, with that, the institutional, normative, cultural, social, and behavioral aspects of the mediation of public debate has profoundly changed in the wake of digitalization. Now, public communication is engrained in network society (van Dijk & Hacker, 2018), and the venues of political communication have taken the form of “hybrid media systems” (Chadwick, 2011, 2013; Chadwick et al., 2016) that have promoted four major developments. First, the proliferation of digital media has allowed for an increase in the quantity of communication and the nature of information flows. The production of media

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messages has become cheaper and has allowed for upscaling. New modes and formats of presentation and channels of distribution have emerged. Communication is produced from all sides in networks with “multidirectional connections” (Benkler, 2006, p. 212). Moreover, the scope of communication has become increasingly transnational. Digital media is largely independent from territories, so issues can be negotiated by a larger number of citizens within cross-national and transnational publics. Second, digital media technologies have also allowed for a change in the ensemble of actors who appear in public spheres and the way they address their audiences. Professional political actors—for example, politicians, parties, governments, civil society organizations, and lobby groups—can all communicate directly to their audience, circumventing newsrooms. In addition, digital platforms and network media are opportunity structures for communication from the margins by actors who have previously been of little interest to journalists (Benkler et al., 2015). Audiences, consumers, and citizens can directly and publicly air their views and respond to the political content, allowing for new levels of participation (Neuberger, 2009, p. 39; Nuernbergk, 2013). Moreover, informal and decentralized social movements have appeared, following a logic of “connective action” (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012). Apart from the emergence of new actors, the proliferation of digital network media also changed the business models and working routines of journalists, who have lost their power in agenda setting and the representation of majority interests (Bruns, 2009; Neuberger, 2009). Third, the multidirectional flows of abundant information between connected new and old actors have created a fragmentation of publics. Empirical research has casted doubt about the existence of perfect filter bubbles and echo chambers of ideological camps (Bruns, 2019). Yet the emergence of “fluid communities of like-minded peers” (Volkmer, 2019, p. 240) around single issues, issue-specific counter-publics, and parallel information ecologies have been well documented (Downey & Fenton, 2003, p. 195; Haller et al., 2019; Häussler, 2019; Heft et al., 2021). With their new actors and infrastructure, these publics follow different structures of distribution and processing logic (Pfetsch et al., 2016; Waldherr, 2017). They can, for example, manifest in the form of transnational issue networks around global political problems, such as climate change (Schünemann et al., 2016). Finally, within these splintered networked publics, new types of discourses have manifested. Issues and perspectives that have been neglected by traditional agendasetters can find niche attention. However, the lack of standardization in the new modes and channels of communication also comes with a lack of epistemological authority. False information, disinformation, and conspiracy are pervasive within digital network media (Bennett & Livingston, 2018). Moreover, incivility, outrage, and shrill tones are an integral part of digital communication, which are often rewarded and amplified by the affordances of social media platforms and journalists (Carlson, 2018; Hanusch, 2017; Lee et al., 2014), fueling the polarization of fragmented niche publics (e.g., Marchal, 2022; Newman et al., 2018). Altogether, these changes in the media system suggest that public spheres are now characterized by a dissonant polyvocality, a cacophony of heterogeneous and

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dispersed actors who speak synchronously and asynchronously on volatile issues in disconnected, disruptive, contradicting, erratic, and agonistic ways (Pfetsch et al., 2018; Waisbord, 2016). Given the abundance of information, often of questionable factuality, and the lack of a central arena, journalists—the former gatekeepers—have an increasingly hard time integrating public discourses (Coleman & Freelon, 2015, pp. 4–7; Dahlgren, 2005, p. 151; Esser & Pfetsch, 2020; van Aelst et al., 2017). Moreover, governments have appeared largely unfit when it comes to the regulatory frameworks of the conduct and policies of digital platforms. Thus, paradoxically, the proliferation of the most powerful connective media has resulted in a disintermediation. The changes in political communication ecology and crisis of democracy take place simultaneously, thereby reinforcing the challenges within each sphere (Knüpfer et al., 2020; Pfetsch, 2020).

Implications for the Premises, Logic, Principles, and Practice of Comparative Political Communication Research The fundamental changes in political and media systems have altered the preconditions for comparative communication research that concentrated on the national comparison of liberal democracies and stable media systems. Now comparative research has become more complex, complicated, and volatile. In the next section, we argue how these macro trends have affected the premises, principles, and practice of comparative studies in political communication. We first revisit the basic notions and characteristics of the comparative approach in the field and then discuss the implications for the current research. Here, we focus on the change in perspective regarding theoretical concepts, units of analysis, role of contexts, and use of methods in comparative studies. Political communication research deals with the creation, production, dissemination, and processing of information among the various actors of the political system, the communication infrastructure, and the public, as well as the effects of such communication (Esser & Pfetsch, 2020, p. 337). Comparative research provides insights into the relevance of contextual environments when it comes to explaining political communication phenomena. It rests on the assumption that different parameters of political and communication arrangements differentially promote or constrain communication roles, behaviors of organizations and actors, messages, and their effects within those systems (Esser & Pfetsch, 2020). Hence, comparative designs work like field experiments, allowing us to vary the conditions of communication and carve out how macro-level factors shape communication and their effects differently in various settings. The objects of comparative research in political communication refer to many aspects of message production and its effects within systems, cultures, ecologies, spaces, spheres, or fields while also relating to specific situations such as elections or political crises. Because political communication usually refers to the dynamic processes of information flows, message

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creation, media effects, or political organizations, the spatial approach is supplemented by a comparison over time (Esser & Pfetsch, 2020, pp. 337–338). Notably, comparative communication research rests on the normative footing of a high level of freedom within the communication system, notwithstanding how it is organized or regulated in detail. The implicit condition is that communicators and media freely engage in the exchange of messages and that political intervention and censorship are absent. These prerequisites convey the study of comparative political communication to political conditions in the realm of liberal democracy and to actors within governments, parliaments, or courts, political parties, interest groups, civic movements, civil activism, and the citizenry. Therefore the current crisis of democracy directly affects comparative political communication research.

From Ordered Systems to Ecosystems For a long time, comparative political communication scholarship has focused almost exclusively on the interrelations between political actors and legacy mass media like the press, radio, and television. Scholars have studied phenomena from the perspective of an ordered political communication system that compares geographical units, usually nation states, and liberal democracies. Within these systems, political communication has been predominantly conceptualized and looked at from the logic of top-down-oriented mass communication. The interaction between media and political actors has been theorized as mediatization, which encompasses a pyramidal, linear top-down structure in transmission and is based on interinstitutional relationships between politicians and journalists vis-a-vis audience-voters (Blumler & Gurevitch, 1995). This approach has been further developed into a comparative study of political communication cultures (Pfetsch, 2014). Digitalization has provoked an explosion of new communication channels, such as online media, digital platforms, messenger services, social media, blogs, and legacy media offering their content online. In light of this radically different communication infrastructure, we need to dismiss the model of one ordered nationally contained stable political system with clearly delineated functions of communication. As a more adequate concept, we can adopt the notion of a political communication ecosystem (see also Esser & Pfetsch, 2020, pp. 338–340). Hereby, one can relate to Anderson’s (2016, p. 412) approach that a communication ecosystem refers to the “entire ensemble of individuals, organizations, and technologies within a particular geographic community or around a particular issue” engaged in the “production” and “consumption” of news and information. Within these ecosystems, traditional modes of operation still exist, yet more emphasis is placed on the decentralized participative logic of internet communication on the wide range of digital platforms and social media sites. Also, the mutual interaction with the traditional production of communication flows is included in this model: in the political communication ecosystem, the expansion of actors, the segmentation of

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communication practices, and the fragmentation of the discourse has created various new relationships between traditional and new actors, message flows from the grassroots level, and many other sources of information flows (Blumler, 2014). A mediatization model of vertical flows of communication must now be amended by horizontal flows of communication, which necessarily means conceiving of political communication as networked public spheres.

New Levels of Comparison Beyond and Above the Nation-State Speaking of communication ecosystems implies a second fundamental change of perspective. Comparative research of stable mass-mediated political communication systems have operated with clearly demarcated political and geographical units, such as the nation-state. In a way, the focus on information flows and public debate geared toward political decision making and power has aimed to implicitly buy into the model of the “Westphalian political imaginary,” that is, into “the frame of a bounded political community with its own territorial state” (Fraser, 2007, p. 8). Skepticism about the fixation on the nation-state as a “natural” unit of analysis increased when global communication gained importance and technical infrastructures allowed for information flows. All in all, under these new conditions, political communication ecosystems are not bound to specific levels and units of analysis, instead allowing the boundaries to be drawn depending on the analytical focus of the information exchange relations. For instance, the boundary of a communication ecosystem can be drawn thematically if the communication denotes issue spaces (Stoltenberg, 2021). In this case, communication in online issue publics may refer to topical spaces or issue networks. Here, the communication ecology denotes all political, media, and civic actors—regardless of their locality—who are involved in the creation, framing, dissemination, reception, and effect mechanisms of a particular issue (Wiard & Pereira, 2019). The political communication ecology has become a conceptual framework of analysis that not only implies multiple spatial boundaries and translocal issue networks, but it also includes new sets of actors, network relations, and more volatile processes of communication. This has three consequences for the designs, units of analysis, and methods of comparative studies. First, the inclusion of new types of actors, in addition to the established communicators in politics, means more diverse settings and actor constellations and immediate communication flows on digital platforms, social media, and other networks, here without the control of journalists as gatekeepers (Bruns, 2009). Research has already pointed toward the importance of social media platforms for the political action of individual politicians (e.g., Daniel & Obholzer, 2020; Enli & Simonsen, 2018; for an overview, see Jungherr, 2016). In addition, activists and movement actors (e.g., Bennett & Segerberg, 2012), influencers, bloggers, and citizen journalists have initiated campaigns and influenced issue agendas by networking with other actors online. For comparative research in political communication, this means that

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the role of individual users in digital networks and their political action has become a pressing research subject and must be studied at the micro-level of individual actors. On digital networks, political entrepreneurs appear as a relevant unit of comparative analysis, preferably within nested research designs. Second, the potential of network communication for political mobilization and debate is enormous. Networks allow for directly addressing other actors in the discussions on digital venues, linking contents from various websites, forwarding messages, and replying to other users’ contents. The emergence of networked public spheres (Benkler, 2006; van Dijk & Hacker, 2018) has not only increased the relevance of network theory in designing research questions of political communication, but it also instructs research designs in comparative communication research (e.g., Stier et al., 2021). Thus, networks and the communicative relations and interactions within them have emerged as a new perspective of comparative research. Networks can also be a unit of comparison themselves, for example, when investigating hyperlink issue networks and actors’ roles within them (e.g., Häussler et al., 2017). As a unit of analysis, issue networks may overlap with national boundaries, but they do not have to. For example, Häussler et al. (2017) focused on networks as the units of comparison in their study of climate change discourse networks of Germany and the USA. Even though they related to two national discourses, the comparison was based on the logic of networks, here accounting for the fact that “political conflict tends to transcend national boundaries” (Häussler et al., 2017, p. 3100). By integrating national political conditions, as well as actor characteristics as context factors in the analysis, the authors were able to explain the specific structures of the discourse network. Third, (social media) platforms themselves have become important new objects of analysis and comparison in today’s hybrid media system (e.g., Kreiss & McGregor, 2018). Platform comparisons have yielded interesting findings about political communications and campaigns because the functionality and the way in which different platforms operate shape the strategy of how political actors go public. For instance, parties exploit the digital architectures and affordances of different platforms in election campaigns and beyond (Bossetta, 2018, p. 474). Bossetta (2018) argued that network structure, functionality, algorithmic filtering, and the datafication of social media affect the kinds of political content posted, as well as their audience. For example, Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp differ regarding the directionality of ties between users: whereas Facebook allows only reciprocated ties for personal pages (exceptions are public pages), Twitter allows for unidirectional and reciprocated ties (Bossetta, 2018, p. 479; Yarchi et al., 2021, p. 105). WhatsApp groups constitute a special case because “any interaction requires a user to first gain access to the group” (Yarchi et al., 2021, p. 105), and ties between users are constituted as group memberships. Comparing political communication across different platforms has become a key approach to shed light on the processes of mobilization in the hybrid media system, helping understand how the specific algorithmic and social features of social media shape polarization dynamics (Yarchi et al., 2021, p. 99). For instance, Yarchi et al. (2021) researched how political polarization is built up on Facebook, Twitter, and

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WhatsApp in the context of an incident in 2016 related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The authors show that political polarization must be reconceptualized because it works quite differently on different platforms. For example, while Twitter shows patterns of interactional, positional, and affective polarization because of the publicness of its communication and unreciprocated ties, polarization on WhatsApp is interpreted as a result of the combination of platform structures, as well as actor constellations on the platforms (Yarchi et al., 2021, p. 113). Although the study by Yarchi et al. (2021) underlined the innovative potential of platform comparisons, it also pointed to the difficulties and constraints of this approach, for instance, regarding problems of data access and affordances of various platforms. The potential provided by the digital architectures is confounded with the group of political actors on the platform. As such, the specific political capacity of platforms is hard to isolate. On this, Van Dijck et al. stated, “Governments, incumbent (small and large) businesses, individual entrepreneurs, nongovernmental organizations, cooperatives, consumers, and citizens all participate in shaping the platform society’s economic and social practices. Evidently, clashes among actors who all have their own interests take place at various levels: local, national, supranational, and global” (Van Dijck et al., 2018, p. 4). This complexity is further increased because platforms and their architectures “are subject to rapid and transformative change” (Bossetta, 2018, p. 492), making it difficult to implement longitudinal comparative designs across platforms. Overall, the new quality of political communication ecosystems that makes comparative research ever more complex stems from the interaction effects between the various levels of analysis. For example, network approaches of communication and mobilization need to consider the actors (i.e., micro-level) involved in the network and the platforms that they use to communicate directly (e.g., social media) and to link with other actors strategically (i.e., meso level). At the same time, the resulting network structure is also subject to the digital architectures and affordances of the digital platforms (i.e., macro level) and determines the type and quality of communication that can be observed.

More Diverse Sets of Context Factors in Comparative Designs When the communication environments and the ensemble of potential communicators become more fluid and complex, it seems logical to expect more diverse context conditions. The “politics of contextualization” has become a pressing issue in the community of comparative scholars, triggering an epistemological conversation and debate about the power dynamics of knowledge making (Boczkowski & Mitchelstein, 2019; Esser, 2019; Rojas & Valenzuela, 2019). It is hard to contradict the argument “for the increasing need for contextualization” (Rojas & Valenzuela, 2019, p. 652) as we expand our cases and modes of communication. In addition, the choice of context to control for in comparative designs is indicative of normative assumptions about political power. In our view, this debate sheds light on the

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significance of the transformation of political communication and complexity of its implications. On a phenomenological level, the contexts of political communication vary according to (1) the characteristics of the actors involved in (online) debates regarding political beliefs, resources, and opportunity structures; (2) the time and time periods and the dynamics related to information flows, communication environments, and platform dynamics; and (3) the traditional context factors still operating on the level of the national political and media systems. This analytical complexity comes with some methodological and design challenges in comparative studies. First, actor characteristics become an (even more) important context condition in comparative studies of hybrid media systems because actors who are communicating directly on social media are plural and diverse. For example, in research designs relying on content-based information and sampling strategies (e.g., hashtag- or keyword-based sampling of tweets via the Twitter API), it is usually unclear which actors are included in the sample. Because social media analyses are often big data analyses, various studies have tried to infer actor characteristics based on computational methods (e.g., Barberá et al., 2015; Sayyadiharikandeh et al., 2016), hence posing their own questions of reliability or validity. Others have relied on manual coding of actor characteristics based on information from users’ profiles (e.g., Himelboim et al., 2013). However, this approach is limited in scope because only a small (random) sample of actors can be coded. In both cases, it is difficult— and can be impossible—to infer sufficient information because users’ disclosure of personal information is often scarce. Second, the importance of time as a context factor in comparative research designs has grown because communication has become more fluid and fast-moving because of digitalization. Although time has always been an important factor in comparative studies and might itself be a comparative dimension (e.g., in longitudinal panels or time series analysis; Yarchi et al., 2021), its effects on the findings of comparative research designs related to networks and online communication deserve special consideration. Millions of messages are posted on social media platforms every second and create communicative linkages; at the same time, millions of messages and communicative linkages are deleted. Under these circumstances, it is crucial to reflect on whether generalizations based on cross-sectional analyses can still be considered as valid or whether we need longitudinal analyses to account for the fast-changing nature of today’s communication ecosystems. Thus, more than ever, researchers need to consider the impact of cross-sectional versus longitudinal designs regarding their specific comparative research interest. Although the fluidity and complexity of these context conditions need to be considered in comparative political communication studies, the emergence of new levels of comparisons does not mean that the customary categories have become obsolete. For example, consider the role of national media systems as influencing factors in research designs focused on online communication and social media platforms. Although national media systems might not directly affect the contents posted on Twitter or Facebook by politicians or citizens, national media (particularly in their online formats) may still be relevant units of comparison of information

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flows and agenda-building models (Pfetsch et al., 2015). Depending on the focus of the research question, one might expect the opportunity structures provided by national media systems to affect which political actors turn to social media to address their issues online and in which situations they do so. Another challenge in comparative studies of political communication stems from the hybridity of conventional political opportunity structures in the mass media, specifically in their dynamic interaction with political venues on digital platforms. Although one part of the information ecology might be limited in their audience and reach, the other part may not be confined to these boundaries. For a comparison of political debates in different countries, the porosity of boundaries poses problems in defining the units of analysis and interpreting the findings.

Methodological Challenges in Comparative Designs The change from institutionally defined stable systems into fluid hybrid infrastructures of political communication does not only inform the units of analysis and context conditions in the setup of comparative studies: they also translate into methodological challenges. There is no standardized approach or customary solution to the use of methods in comparative political communication research. The methods depend on the research questions, regardless of the previous or current conditions of political communication. Yet in comparative studies of communication research in the digital age, we have usually seen a juxtaposition of traditional qualitative and quantitative methods, on the one hand, and the ambition to introduce computational social science into the designs, on the other hand. This poses new challenges that relate to three aspects: data access, measurements, and the boundaries and scopes of analyses. First, online communication and social media platforms allow for access to larger amounts of data (i.e., 'big data') because of web crawling and data sampling via social media’s application programming interfaces (APIs). The advantages and disadvantages of big data analyses in comparative research have already been discussed at great lengths (Theocharis & Jungherr, 2021). From a methodological point of view, large amounts of data also pose practical challenges related to measurement and coding: tens of thousands of user profiles, tweets, or websites cannot easily be analyzed by manual coding because of limited resources. Thus, various computational approaches to the analysis of contents, such as (structural) topic modeling, sentiment analysis, network analysis, exponential random graph models, or community detection, have received growing attention in political communication research. At the same time, scholars have just begun to establish the methodological standards and best practices for the application of computational methods in communication sciences that guarantee the comparability of designs and reproducibility of results (e.g., Maier et al., 2018; Maier et al., 2022; Stoltenberg et al., 2019).

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Second, challenges related to measurements emerge. For example, when comparing the communication of different actor groups on social media platforms in various countries, a major challenge is identifying the actors involved in the communication. Depending on the sampling technique, this might be pretty straightforward (e.g., actor-/account-based sampling with relevant accounts identified prior to sampling). However, in issue-based sampling strategies (e.g., based on hashtags or keywords on Twitter to analyze issue publics), identification of the actors and actor characteristics becomes a challenge (Benert, 2021). Finally, the boundaries of communication phenomena, such as issue networks or digital campaigning effects, are hard to define. For instance, there is no customary solution for defining when the density of ties or messages in a network may (no longer) indicate a meaningful contribution to the overall communication. In comparative network analysis, it is difficult to determine the cut-off points of the analysis and to match them with functionally equivalent units in other countries, political issues, or environments. The questions of boundaries and functionally equivalent units of comparison become even more complicated once we compare online communication in a national environment about transnational issues such as migration or climate change, for instance, on Twitter. In these debates, we may find actors from various countries engaged in the debate and transnational communicative interactions (e.g., mentions, retweets, quotes, replies) between actors from different countries. Thus, the combination of new context conditions and new qualities of political communication opens up a huge field of methodological reconsiderations in comparative research.

Conclusion Our assessment of comparative political communication research starts from the premise that it has been increasingly useful to provide the basic insights into the nature of political communication in many different societies. However, it has also become clear that comparative research in this field has been based on many implicit and explicit preconditions of politics, media, and society. It rests on the implicit or explicit assumption that liberal democracy is the role model of a political order and that nationally confined mass media systems provide for factual information flows, issue agendas, and democratic public debate. In the meantime, political developments have shaken the implicit consensus of many researchers that political development necessarily strives for democracy as an underlying principle of political culture, political participation, and public conversation. Because major social, political, and media changes have enhanced the disruptions in democracy and provoked dissonant public spheres, these preconditions of democracy and political debate are no longer valid: they have exacerbated the comparative study of political communication. It has become apparent that the changes in political and media environments have led to more complex preconditions for comparative communication research. For instance, in the light of

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digitalization, online media, social media, and networked communication, we may no longer speak of media systems and political systems that constitute stable political communication systems, but rather, we must consider more fluid, dynamic, and volatile political communication ecologies. These environments comprise hybrid media systems and communication infrastructures that are more complex, less tied to physical space and national politics, and are part of disrupted democracies that struggle with authoritarianism, right-wing populism, and a pandemic of institutional mistrust. The perspective of communication ecologies requires revisiting the basic premises of comparative communication. In the current chapter, we set out to discuss the implications for the levels and units of analysis, the role of contextualization, and the methods in comparative research. We have shown that online communication and social media platforms increase the range and constellations of actors in political communication (e.g., politicians, civil society, media, citizens) who directly communicate with each other and with citizens across national borders, all without having to rely on journalists as gatekeepers. Diverse ensembles and communication flows make it necessary to pay more attention in comparative studies to the actor roles of digital communities. For various reasons, in comparative research designs, the nation-state as the only level of comparison must be complemented by a variety of additional levels and context factors. Hybrid media systems, particularly the emergence of platforms and social media, which reverberate on the direction and audiences of information flows in legacy media, lead to complex information flows and the increasing importance of new perspectives regarding the level of analysis beyond and above the nation-state. They also require consideration of the qualities of network communication in comparative political studies. Potential levels of comparison refer to the individual actors in social media environments, online issue networks, particular platforms, or transnational online communities. More diverse groups of actors and levels of comparison also necessarily lead to new and more complex combinations of context variables that need to be recognized in comparative designs. We further argue that new dimensions, such as particular platform affordances and digital architectures, must be taken up in comparative communication research. This means that additional conceptual and methodological requirements emerge in addition to new actors and more complex information flows. For instance, the fluidity and fast-moving nature of political campaigns or protest dynamics in online communication pose the question of the temporal dynamic as an important factor in the outcome of comparative designs. Related to these changes are methodological challenges for comparative political communication research. The network structure of communication and sheer amount of data necessitate new methods of data sampling, analysis, and measurement. However, most general standard recommendations for the inclusion or exclusion of certain levels of comparison or context factors or methods are not useful. Comparative studies, like all research in the social sciences, should stick to concepts and designs that are tied to theoretical considerations and the research interest at hand. Given the changes in media and democracy, contemporary political

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communication scholarship operates at the hotspot of democratic public spheres: right-wing populism, the spread of false information, conspiracy narratives, and political propaganda have become common in many Western countries and continue to undermine political trust and confidence in media and liberal democracy. Eventually, there is no alternative to comparative studies if we want to observe not only the variations in the defects of political communication, but also explain its origins and understand its consequences.

References Almond, G. A., & Verba, S. (1963). The civic culture: Political attitudes and democracy in five nations. Princeton University Press. Anderson, C. W. (2016). News ecosystems. In T. Witschge, C. W. Anderson, & A. Hermida (Eds.), The sage handbook of digital journalism. Sage. Barberá, P., Jost, J. T., Nagler, J., Tucker, J. A., & Bonneau, R. (2015). Tweeting from left to right: Is online political communication more than an Echo chamber? Psychological Science, 26(10), 1531–1542. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797615594620 Benert, V. (2021, September 6). The Europeanization of networked public spheres: Towards an actor-centered approach: The example of the #EP2019 debate on twitter. European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA). Virtual Conference. Benkler, Y. (2006). The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom. Yale University Press. Benkler, Y., Roberts, H., Faris, R., Solow-Niederman, A., & Etling, B. (2015). Social mobilization and the networked public sphere: Mapping the SOPA-PIPA debate. Political Communication, 32(4), 594–624. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2014.986349 Bennett, W. L., & Livingston, S. (2018). The disinformation order: Disruptive communication and the decline of democratic institutions. European Journal of Communication, 33(2), 122–139. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323118760317 Bennett, W. L., & Segerberg, A. (2012). The logic of connective action. Information, Communication & Society, 15(5), 739–768. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2012.670661 Bimber, B., & de Zúñiga, G. H. (2020). The unedited public sphere. New Media & Society, 22(4), 700–715. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819893980 Blumler, J. G. (2014). Mediatization and democracy. In F. Esser & J. Strömbäck (Eds.), Mediatization of politics. Understanding the transformation of Western democracies (pp. 31–41). Palgrave Macmillan. Blumler, J. G. (2016). The fourth age of political communication. Politiques De Communication, 6, 19–30. https://doi.org/10.3917/pdc.006.0019 Blumler, J. G., & Gurevitch, M. (1995). The crisis of public communication. Routledge. https://doi. org/10.4324/9780203181775 Boczkowski, P. J., & Mitchelstein, E. (2019). The politics of contextualization in the contextualization of political communication research. Political Communication, 36(4), 676–679. https:// doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2019.1670903 Bornschier, S. (2010). Cleavage politics and the populist right: The new cultural conflict in Western Europe. The social logic of politics. Temple University Press. Bossetta, M. (2018). The digital architectures of social media: Comparing political campaigning on Facebook, twitter, Instagram, and snapchat in the 2016 U.S. Election. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 95(2), 471–496. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077699018763307

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A Brief History of the Disinformation Age: Information Wars and the Decline of Institutional Authority W. Lance Bennett and Steven Livingston

Much attention has been focused in recent years on growing levels of disruptive communication—“fake news,” disinformation, and misinformation—in contemporary democracies. Media organizations and social media platforms in many nations are circulating conspiracies, manufacturing “alternative facts,” inventing imagined incidents, or blaming political opponents for real ones. By the time President Donald Trump reached his 1055 day in office (December 10, 2019), he had misled or lied to the American people 15,413 times (Davies, 2016; Kessler et al., 2019). In one stretch prior the 2018 mid-term elections he averaged 30 false or misleading statements per day (Kessler et al., 2019). Undaunted, Trump greeted news reports of his habitual dissembling with the blanket retort of “fake news.” While Trump may be the “outliar-in chief,” the mainstream press in the USA could not do much more than keep a running tally of his daily mendacity. Such mainstreaming of disinformation

This chapter first appeared in The Disinformation Age: Politics, Technology and Disruptive Communication in the United States (Bennett & Livingston eds., Cambridge University Press, 2021). The interdisciplinary workshops from which that volume emerged were sponsored by the Social Science Research Council and appeared in the SSRC “Anxieties of Democracy” series. We want to thank our colleagues at the Social Science Research Council, past and present, especially Kris-Stella Trump, Michael Miller, and Jason Rhody. W. L. Bennett (✉) Center for Journalism, Media & Democracy, University of Washington, Seattle, USA e-mail: [email protected] S. Livingston Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics, School of Media and Public Affairs, The George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA Illiberal Studies Program, Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, George Washington University Washington, Washington, DC, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Salgado, S. Papathanassopoulos (eds.), Streamlining Political Communication Concepts, Springer Studies in Media and Political Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45335-9_4

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lends legitimacy to its proponents, and spreads confusion among the good burghers who cannot comprehend what is happening to their country. In the argument that follows, we define disinformation as intentional falsehoods or distortions often spread as news to advance political goals such as discrediting opponents, disrupting policy debates, influencing voters, inflaming existing social conflicts, or creating a general backdrop of confusion and informational paralysis.1 Different nations have their own versions of these problems, perhaps led by the USA and the Brexit-era UK, but versions of these problems exist in other democracies around the world. For example, large volumes of disruptive propaganda about immigrants and climate change have been produced by the Alternative für Deutschland party and its followers in Germany. There are also “illiberal” democracies, including Hungary, Poland, and Turkey, where disinformation supports a transition to more authoritarian regimes with overt press censorship and suspension of basic rights and legal processes. Though our account is focused on the USA, we sketch a framework based on declining institutional (including press) authority that invites comparisons to other national cases and traces the roots of disinformation through several historical eras. These ruptures in shared political reality undermine basic norms and communication processes on which democracies depend for policymaking, conflict resolution, acceptance of outcomes, and general civility. What explains these developments? How did facts become unhinged from important public policy debates and assessments of the worthiness of political leaders? Citizens still anchored by established democratic institutions often find these developments hard to fathom and more than a little unsettling. We argue that a crisis of legitimacy of authoritative institutions lies at the heart of our current disinformation disorder. In a well-functioning public sphere, institutions anchor public debate in a mix of competing political goals and values, authoritative evidence claims, and norms and processes for communicating and resolving disagreements. Yet, those norms of reasoned debate between competing viewpoints have given way to willful distortion and reckless prevarication that disrupts the basic functioning of democratic public spheres. For every fact that seems key to discussing

For development of this idea, see W. Lance Bennett and Steven Livingston. “The disinformation order: Disruptive communication and the decline of democratic institutions, “European Journal of Communication 33, no. 2 (2018): 122–139. A more extensive definition of disinformation involves the production and dissemination of intentionally distorted information for the purpose of deceiving an audience. Distortion might involve deliberate factual inaccuracies or amplified attention to persons, issues, or events, or both. Some disinformation campaigns seek to exacerbate existing social and political fissures by mimicking social protest movements and radicalizing and amplifying their narratives. Public discord and division can lead to moral panic—a feeling of fear spread among a large number of people that some evil threatens the well-being of society or of one’s immediate community. Another type of disinformation emerges around an event, such as the use of chemical weapons against civilian populations, the downing of a civilian airliner, or a botched assassination attempt. Here disinformation campaigns attempt to undermine the credibility of investigators and erode the probative value of information. We call this form of disinformationepistemic attacks. 1

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important issues such as immigration or climate change, opponents are ready with “alternative facts” that distort perceptions of problems and solutions. Institutional arenas designed to articulate and resolve political differences through reasoned debate based on evidence are disrupted and fail to provide the gatekeeping roles that once kept politics bounded by a more or less shared set of institutional norms and processes. How did this happen? First, we will examine some of the conventional explanations that are currently circulating in society, and then offer a broader model of democratic disruption.

Conventional Explanations for Disinformation The origins of these developments remain poorly understood, though several standards explanations are heard on talk shows and on the conference circuit. Many observers put the lion’s share of blame squarely on social media.2 There is of course good reason for this. Facebook and YouTube, perhaps more than other platforms, have gamed algorithms to monetize animus and rage (Confessore & Bank, 2019). Yet as reasonable as concerns about this are, this account does not explain why the demand for disinformation has grown, or how selected content circulating on social media often becomes amplified in legacy media despite fact checking and other flags raised by news organizations. While blaming social media addresses one element of a larger problem, this account misses the breakdown of institutional authority that undermines trusted official information. In particular, putting the spotlight on social media, alone, misses deeper erosions of institutional authority that involve elected officials—traditionally among the most prominent sources of authoritative information—becoming increasingly involved in the spread of disruptive communication. Despite these deeper issues, many suggestions about restoring reason and order in distressed public spheres emphasize fact checking, media literacy initiatives, or policies requiring media giants such as Facebook and YouTube to police content. Though generally well intentioned, these approaches are unlikely to produce the desired results, in part because growing numbers of citizens want to believe “alternative facts” that appeal to deeper emotional truths and feelings of political and economic marginalization. Moreover, it is unlikely that elected officials supported by such followers would regard efforts to regulate their communication on social media as anything but censorship. Indeed, Facebook has drawn a line by announcing that election communication will not be policed for accuracy. 2 David Z. Morris, “How YouTube Pushes Viewers Toward Extremism, Forbes, March 11, 2018, http://fortune.com/2018/03/11/youtube-extreme-content/; CraigTimberg and Tony Romm, “New report on Russian disinformation, prepared for the Senate, shows the operation’s scale and sweep” Washington Post, December 17, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/16/ new-report-russian-disinformation-prepared-senate-shows-operations-scale-sweep/?utm_term=. fd3bfdcdae1c

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Nonetheless, the common-sense focus on fact checking and correcting individual belief in improbable information, makes it understandable that many explanations focus on the individual demand-side of the problem. These studies attempt to explain disinformation in terms of individual-level psychological dynamics. Some people are understood to be particularly susceptible to disinformation. Indeed, for some there appears to be a demand for emotionally soothing, if factually unsound narratives. Conspiracy theories and vitriolic content engage those vulnerabilities and use them to manipulate and deceive receptive populations. Other observers claim that conservatives, who circulate more of this kind of content, are motivated by a primordial fear of disorder (Matthew MacWilliams, 2016). More circumspect claims suggest only that there are discernible patterns in individual responses to new information. Those patterns reveal the effects of different information processing styles, associated with varying demographic details (age, education, race, etc.) and contingent conditions (Porter et al., 2019). Many experiments have found a human tendency to privilege information aligned with prior beliefs. This is often referred to as confirmation bias. Disconfirmation bias or motivated skepticism describe the same concept from the other direction. Together, both tendencies lead to polarization. To protect existing beliefs, individuals tend to seek out reasons to dismiss or avoid engagement with information that is disconfirming of prior beliefs while seeking out emotionally soothing truths that confirm convictions. Some have even speculated that information at odds with existing beliefs is mentally reversed and understood in terms that are aligned with prior beliefs. Indeed, Nyhan and Reifler found that a perverse “backfire effect” occurs when efforts to correct factually unsound beliefs leads to a deepening of convictions (Nyhan & Reifler, 2010). As happens with laboratory-based experiments, this finding failed to find support in subsequent experiments. Porter and Wood, for example, found little evidence for the presumed deepening of convictions found by Nyhan and Reifler (Wood & Porter, 2018). Eventually, all four scholars came together around a single experiment that found that the backfire effect is indeed elusive, though people still stick with their deeper political convictions, irrespective of whether any given bit of information is factually sound. Trump supporters, as it turns out, take him seriously but not literally. As interesting as these evolving research insights might be, their focus on isolated individuals pressed by demands to discern truth from fact—in real time, on a broad range of topics—seems a poor fit with either the political nature or the scale of the problem. Looking at how individuals process (dis)information seems to fit better with fact-checking and media literacy approaches than with broader systemic explanations. Moreover, a key assumption of the individual effects research literature seems to be that people are operating in relative isolation. Yet even at the individual level in the social media age, people are not isolated information processors. They look for trusted information from their social networks and often participate in the production and distribution of large volumes of disruptive content. Our point here parallels similar criticisms of framing research offered decades ago. For example, Druckman and Nelson’s observations about the limitations of

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experimental research on framing effects applies equally well to individual-level research about disinformation. Analysts have documented framing effects for numerous issues in various contexts. Nearly all of this work uses surveys or laboratory experiments where individuals receive a single frame and then report their opinions, without any social interaction or access to alternative sources of information. Study participants thus find themselves in a social vacuum, receiving frames and reporting their opinions with no possibility to discuss the issue at hand (Druckman & Nelson, 2003).

The application of an experimental research paradigm that stretches back to mass media effects research a half-century ago seems out of synch with the current era of more interactive and differently cued and shared information. This seems a case of trying to fit old political communication models to a much different political, social, and technological era (Bennett & Pfetsch, 2018). And, as noted above, many of these demand-side approaches circle back to recommendations to simply educate people about detecting and avoiding disinformation. In addition to avoiding the question of why so many people easily exchange facts for deeper emotional truths, support for fact-checking also rests on the assumption that errors occur episodically in an otherwise functioning information order. This understanding simply does not square with the industrial-scale production of broad and sustained disinformation narratives that define so much of the global political landscape. The propagation of misleading content is not a bug, it is a feature, as Facebook’s refusal to correct willful lies in political ads underscores. In this environment, relying on fact-checking and media literacy campaigns seems rather futile, and is likely to appeal most to those who do not need them. Other popular explanations point to the well-documented efforts of the Russians and other foreign governments to disrupt elections and amplify social conflicts in Europe and the United States (Shane & Frenkel, 2018; Nimmo, 2015; Jamieson, 2018). Based on these concerns, international organizations from NATO to the EU have sought to uncover and counter various foreign sources of disinformation. In addition to international organizations, the recent period has witnessed an explosion in the number of research centers and institutes in Europe and the United States devoted to disinformation research. Each project maps episodes of foreign influence in Western democratic politics. Yet despite these concerted efforts, it remains unclear how hackers, bots, and sock puppets can be prevented from spreading fabrications, especially when they amplify broadly available state propaganda channels such as RT and Sputnik. Even more challenging is the fact that foreign disinformation often amplifies narratives promoted by prominent domestic sources (or the other way around), including Fox News in the USA, the most popular domestic 24-h news channel. For example, during the historic impeachment process in 2020, Trump and his defenders claimed—contrary to broadly available evidence from investigations by state security agencies—that the hacking of Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Clinton campaign emails in the 2016 election originated in Ukraine and not from Russia. This was an obvious lie that his Republican Party defenders in Congress certainly realized, along with his political advocates on Fox News. Trump and his disinformation chorus also claimed that a

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computer server at the heart of the DNC hack had been spirited away to Kyiv by a shady Ukrainian cybersecurity company. There was never a single server physically present at the party headquarters, and the security company was relocated from California to Ukraine in the conspiracy theory. This narrative paralleled Russian state propaganda designed to draw away critical attention to the Kremlin’s culpability in 2016 elections interference and, perhaps more importantly, drive a wedge between Ukraine and the United States (Benkler et al., 2018a; Graham, 2017). Our concern is that these and other popular understandings of disinformation problems, along with the related solutions, tend to focus on the symptoms and not on the causes of contemporary communication disorders. Locating the trouble in social media, confused citizens, or with foreign governments fails to explain the deeper origins of the problem. Our account draws on a broader examination of decades of capture and erosion of governing institutions by wealthy interests and aligned political elites who could never sell their actual agendas to the publics without increasing levels of propaganda and disinformation. This disruptive communication is spread through think tanks, corporate deception, partisan political organizations, election campaigns, and by government officials inclined to spin and distort their truth claims to promote otherwise unappealing policies and actions. Both legacy and social media communicate these alternative realities to and from publics, who complete the disinformation circuit by spreading it, and by voting for politicians who confirm it. In the process, growing numbers of citizens withdraw support and confidence in public institutions and more responsible officials who once produced more trustworthy information. This set of problems did not just happen suddenly. In the next sections we look at some of the historical origins.

A Deeper Institutional Explanation In this accounting, our current post-fact era is best explained by the systematic weakening of authoritative institutions of liberal democracy. For decades, conspiracy theories and hateful and crackpot ideas have circulated on the fringes of society. In most earlier cases, they were held in check by institutional vetting and gatekeeping. Even the McCarthy Red Scare during the 1950s in the USA seemed an episodic exception to the rule, but ended when the Senate censured the Republican Senator from Wisconsin after he attacked the Army. In the more recent impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump, the Senate trial did not even admit witnesses or evidence, as the Republican majority deemed additional evidence unnecessary for a pro-Trump verdict that was a foregone conclusion. In the past, more responsible parties, trusted press institutions, and more functional election and institutional processes resisted bringing conspiracies into the center of politics. When large majorities of the population trusted parties, governments, and institutions at higher levels, unhinged ideas were not given traction in mainstream media. The current information disorder is the result of the erosion of liberal democratic institutions, especially those involved in vetting political claims

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according to the authority of evidence and in accordance with established processes and norms. While there are few, if any, absolute truths in politics, assessing the plausibility and potential corruption of political actions is aided by such institutional gatekeepers as: independent judiciaries that adhere to rules of evidence and precedence in reaching decisions, peer-reviewed science, professional journalism that faces reputational costs for inaccurate reporting, and apolitical civil services that promulgate and enforce regulations according to best available practices and scientific evidence. Also among these institutions are political parties that are meant to organize and articulate collective demands and grievances according to the interests and goals of their constituencies. When these institutions operate with high levels of public confidence, they produce information that is generally trusted and kept within bounds of recognized social values, political norms, and conventional understandings about what is and what is not acceptable. However, decades of corrosive political and economic pressure has eroded public confidence in these institutions. For example, as ideologies and competing views about regulating markets, or the role of government in providing social welfare, have faded, once distinctive political parties have turned to branding, product marketing and strategic communication techniques to win votes (Blumler & Kavanagh, 1999). In Europe, even parties such as the German Greens have drifted in neoliberal (e.g., pro-growth and market-based policy) directions, favoring “green growth” and business-friendly policies in order to position themselves to enter government and gain shares of state support. Comparable disconnections between traditional party principles and voters also characterized the “Third Way” British Labor Party under Tony Blair, the Schroeder Social Democrats in Germany, and the Clinton Democrats in the USA in the 1990s. Similar changes in many nations have ushered in an era of what Crouch has called “post-democracy” (Crouch, 2004). Even greater institutional drift and values erosion has occurred in the US Republican Party. In the early 1960s, the party leadership soundly rejected fringe radicals like the John Birch Society and its mix of fervent anti-Communism and bizarre conspiracy theories (Felzenberg, 2017). In recent years, however, the party has embraced conspiracy theories and disinformation as a governing philosophy. They have even become tropes: Climate change is a hoax; tax breaks for billionaires produce trickledown benefits for the poor and middleclass; and deregulation spurs innovation. As one recent account of the resurgence of the John Birch Society noted, “The Society’s ideas, once on the fringe, are increasingly commonplace in today’s Republican Party” (Savage, 2017). As one contemporary Bircher in Texas noted, “State legislators are joining the group.” Furthermore, the John Birch Society was reported to have common cause with “powerful allies in Texas, including Senator Ted Cruz, Representative Louie Gohmert and a smattering of local officials.” This vignette illustrates a much broader phenomenon. Institutions once able to vet truth claims, institutions that once defined a more cohesive public sphere, have fractured, leaving an epistemological vacuum filled by citizens who feel lost in a world spinning—and being spun—out of control.

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From Spin to Disinformation In this view, much of the disruptive communication we witness in contemporary democracies began longer ago, in the growing emptiness, spin, or what Murray Edelman called the banality of mainstream political discourses (Edelman, 1985, 1988). The stretching of political credulity has grown over several decades as popular leverage over parties has shifted away from such mechanisms as labor movements on the left, and toward greater influences of corporate business interests over the economic and social policy. As a result of broad changes in both global and national economies over the last half-century, along with business pressures to shield economic choices from voters, the center left and center right parties in many democracies have lost touch with their traditional voters. In our view, information credibility in democracies depends on authoritative sources offering a resonant mix of value positions supported with varying degrees of evidence and reason about why those positions make sense and how they could actually happen. When public confidence erodes due to lying, deception and steady diets of spin and banal rhetoric from once credible authorities, the result is a decline in public trust in the information produced by those official sources and in the press that carries their messages. This rupture of communication spheres—bounded by the interplay of citizens, parties, press, and public institutions—opens communication spaces for ever-greater departures from conventional political reason and established civic norms. Put simply, as the legitimacy and credibility of authoritative institutions erodes, citizens are left adrift and in search of emotionally affirming alternative facts. The preponderance of this transgressive, reason-bending communication stems largely from the radical right. From the Tea Party and, later, the Trump-inflected Republicans in the USA, to the Alternative für Deutschland party in Germany, the Sweden Democrats, or the UK Independence Party (UKIP) in Britain that was displaced by the radicalized Conservative Party under Boris Johnson, a host of new or reinvented radical right parties have adopted nostalgic reactionary visions that support emotional nationalist agendas that attack elite “deep state” and “globalist” institutions with conspiracy theories, and widen social divisions with racism, religious hatred, alarming stories about migrants, and other exclusionary discourses. Later in the chapter, we discuss why disinformation tilts to the right, and why so many similar themes appear in different democracies. Media and communication technologies do, of course, play a role in the process. With today’s multimedia and international communication flows, there are ready supplies of such disruptive information to be had, and international political networks have developed to coordinate this communication. The rise of digital platforms and social media make it possible to reach large numbers of people, and to cross national borders with content that is far harder to monitor than that of legacy print and broadcast media. These flows of deception, propaganda and divisive speech are proving difficult to regulate within traditional norms and laws about free speech. The regulatory challenges stem, in part, from the volume, speed, and

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opacity of social media networks, and, in part due to the claims by movements and elected parties that such communication is legitimate. Such disruptive communication inevitably enters mainstream public spheres that were once more bounded by institutional gatekeepers. The dilemma is that when large publics become detached from conventional norms of reasonable discourse, and elected politicians abandon facts that prove inconvenient to policy objectives, the rising volume of disinformation becomes impossible for the conventional press to ignore. After all, the things that elected officials say must be reported, and the positions of prominent parties cannot be ignored. As a result, citizens in many democracies today have choices between large competing alternative public communication spheres that are engaged in struggles over defining the very norms of inclusion, rights, religion, and other protections that make liberal democracy different from other brands of politics. These struggles have become highly disruptive to the normative orders that make democracy a place where citizens can disagree reasonably and tolerate their differences.

Early Twentieth Century Origins: Public Relations and Democratic Management The turn of the twentieth Century witnessed the American empire facing a variety of political challenges, from radical labor movements pitted against ruthless robber barons, to the specter of socialism spreading from Europe. European elites and intellectuals such as Carl Schmidt and Friedrich Hayek were engaged with similar concerns from European perspectives. The fears on both sides of the Atlantic were amplified by the Russian Revolution and general political instability in Europe following World War I. In this period, elites discussed strategies for the responsible management of popular passions to prevent further disruptions of political and economic systems, particularly in the USA, which had escaped the worst ravages of World War I and its aftermath. The idea of “managing” public opinion emerged from communication strategies used to shape public impressions of events such as the Ludlow, Colorado massacre in which armed guards of mine owner John D. Rockefeller, Jr., along with national guard troops, fired into an encampment of striking miners and their families. Ivy Lee, who was hired to burnish Rockefeller’s grotesque public image presaged a much later era of “alternative facts” by asking, “What is a fact? The effort to state an absolute fact is simply an attempt to give you my interpretation of the facts” (Ewen, 1996). Perhaps the greatest communication success of all was selling the USA entry into World War I. Woodrow Wilson had been elected president on the promise to keep the USA out of the war, but the battlefield misfortunes of allies led Wilson to form the Committee on Public Information to develop a sweeping propaganda campaign to enter the war and “Make the World Safe for Democracy.” Credit is often given to

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Edward L. Bernays, a member of the CPI, for producing the formal justification of the uses of what was then called propaganda to manage unruly democratic societies. In his classic work Propaganda in 1928, Bernays reflected on the pioneering communication strategies used to pacify public protest against the war: “It was, of course, the astounding success of propaganda during the war that opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind.”3 No sooner had the idea of a democracy-friendly propaganda been born than the Nazis thoroughly discredited the concept. This prompted Bernays to practice his own art by renaming the field with his book Public Relations in 1945 (Ewen, 1996). He now called the fledgling science of opinion-molding the “engineering of consent” (Bernays, 1947). The creation of public impressions was, for Bernays, the heart of the democratic governing process: “Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. . . .The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society”(Bernays, 1928: 9). ((run this into above graf))Even for many elites who were party to it, the idea of engineering consent raised serious moral questions. For example, Walter Lippmann, who was a leading public intellectual and advisor to presidents, wrote classic works such as Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925), in which he worried about the fragile status of truth and transparency when power was often narrowly held and unwisely used. For the next century, major battles over the problem of power, public perception and deception centered around the balancing of business interests for open markets and minimum government regulation, against the public interests of workers, families, consumers, and other groups in society. In Europe, as early as the 1920s, the International Chamber of Commerce pioneered a multinational strategy for lifting government restrictions on markets, trade and capital flows. However, those efforts were disrupted by the rise of social democratic parties and the many post WWI instabilities associated with depression, fascism and war. Popular democratic movements and elections often challenged business agendas. The business excesses leading to the Great Depression in the USA were pushed back by social reform governments led by Franklin Roosevelt and the Democrats in the 1930s and 1940s. However, elite resistance to democratic regulation of business persisted even during the Great Depression, as discussed by Oreskes and Conway (2021). With the support of the DuPont fortune, for example, the American Liberty League was formed in 1934 with the aim of undermining the Roosevelt administration and the New Deal (Phillips-Fein & Hands, 2009). Among other New Deal policies, DuPont

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Bernays (1928), Chap. 2., That public communication campaign operated, of course, against the backdrop of jailing and deporting thousands of protesters, including Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs, under espionage and sedition acts.

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opposed child labor protections as violations of the sanctity of families to decide. Those were not popular ideas in an era of sweeping social and economic reforms, and Franklin Roosevelt was reelected president in 1936 with the largest landslide since 1820. Until the later decades of the twentieth century, the managed communication frameworks that supported, and were supported by, democratic institutions held up rather well. Between the end of World War II and the 1980s, relatively coherent communication flowed between parties and voters, aided by an emerging mass media carrying relatively authoritative political messages to a large “captive public” (Ginsberg, 1986) Trust in the institutions of press and politics was high, with the exception of episodes such as the Watergate scandal of the Nixon administration, which was rectified by journalistic and congressional investigations that produced rebounds in institutional trust levels. However, there were other strains in the credibility of official communication, including wars in Vietnam and Iraq, that were sold and conducted through official deceptions that strained the credibility of official government information. Adding to what became called a public “credibility gap” were various corporate deceptions such as tobacco company claims that cigarettes did not cause cancer, chemical company claims that pesticides and other toxics were safe, and other episodes of outright lying from businesses. A shift from such episodic to more systemic deception began to emerge as growing networks of neoliberal economists and libertarian business interests continued to promote free market economics and limited government but found conventional public relations and lobbying inadequate to the task. Those networks envisioned the production of ideas through think tanks and academic disciplines to sell otherwise unpopular programs to politicians, parties, journalists and voters. This neoliberal movement became organized during the 1950s and became operationally successful when a set of historical opportunities presented themselves during the 1970s.

Mid-Twentieth Century: The Weaponization of Ideas for Limited Government Beginning after WWII, a network of prominent public intellectuals and economists from Europe and the USA gathered around the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek to explore the contemporary “crisis of civilization” created by oppressive government. The aim was to develop strategies to promote a utopian vision for reorganizing societies around free markets, which were thought to be arbiters of truth in the allocation of social values. The initial meeting in 1947 included Karl Popper, Michael Polanyi, Milton Friedman, and Ludwig von Mises (who stormed out of the meeting, proclaiming “you’re all a bunch of socialists”) (Rockwell, 1998). Much of the initial funding came from Credit Suisse. More recent funders include the Koch and DeVos foundations. That network named itself the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS)

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after its early Swiss meeting place overlooking Lake Geneva. Over the course of the two next decades the MPS developed plans to spread a utopian political and economic philosophy that is variously termed libertarian capitalism or “neoliberalism” (Mirowski & Plehwe, 2015). The core strategy involved the spread of aligned think tanks to promote limited government and free market thinking among publics, politicians, and in public policies. At the time of this writing, the MPS website explains that despite their differences in philosophy, most members “. . .see danger in the expansion of government, not least in state welfare, in the power of trade unions and business monopoly, and in the continuing threat and reality of inflation.”4 The core aim of this elite movement was to limit the capacity of government (and voters) to regulate business and markets. While this international network of academic, political and business elites remains relatively small in number, their agenda has been greatly amplified by thousands of affiliated think tanks and political organizations promoting the privatization of public assets and rolling back state regulation of markets. The first MPS aligned think tank was the still influential Institute of Economic Affairs founded in 1955 by MPS member Anthony Fraser, a wealthy businessman who went on to develop the international Atlas Network of aligned think tanks discussed below. IEA was influential in Margaret Thatcher’s rise to power, and in designing cuts in the UK public sector, while promoting public sector and labor wage austerity. More recently, IEA was active in the Brexit campaign, and in promoting the so-called hard Brexit option on grounds that it was the only way to break ties with the oppressive regulations of the European Union and create truly free markets via a kind of shock therapy.5 This emerging theory of the subordination of government to markets would eventually put this movement of academics, public intellectuals, politicians, and business elites squarely up against the challenge of popular democratic opposition that, as noted above, had defeated other pro-business agendas following the great depression. The evolved networks of national level think tanks, charitable foundations, and political organizations have developed accompanying political strategies to limit the counteractions of workers, consumers, environmentalists, and other democratic publics deemed hostile to business interests and market solutions. Indeed, a key area in which the neoliberals departed from earlier laizzez faire economics was in coming to accept the necessity of using government to engineer markets to benefit business competition, and then to limit the capacity of governments to reverse that engineering through popular democratic processes. To preview future developments in this history, we will see that after some initial successes during the 1980s and 1990s in selling voters on market freedoms, the gap between rhetoric and policy outcomes eventually became harder to sell. This eventually resulted in efforts by politicians and organizations aligned with the US variant of the neoliberal movement to deploy more direct strategies to undermine popular representation mechanisms, ranging from unbalanced voter redistricting, to

4 5

The Mont Pelerin Society, https://www.montpelerin.org/ Institute of Economic Affairs, “Brexit,” https://iea.org.uk/category/brexit/

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restrictive voter registration and identification laws. Those strategies added to the disinformation wars by being sold with fabricated evidence of voter fraud in the case of voter restrictions, while gerrymandering has been defended with dubious claims of preserving natural communities of interest or protecting state level political prerogatives. All along the way, increasingly implausible rationales became necessary to justify those policies. Disinformation became diffused by politicians whose election funding came from sponsoring interests, and thus entered the journalistic mainstream, echoed by the growing supply of “experts” from aligned think tanks and political organizations. While many and perhaps most business interests continued to play by the democratic rules, perhaps deploying influence or deception to gain advantage, the growing networks of organizations affiliated with MPS often saw democracy itself as a problem. As a result of the political organizations created to limit both popular understanding and participation within still existing democratic nations, disinformation became systematically produced and introduced by affiliated politicians into daily institutional life and reported in the mainstream press. The later day result has been to undermine the authority of those institutions and set in motion a series of unfortunate events such as the largely unintended rise of radical right wing movements with the attendant disinformation networks that have risen in recent years, and to which we will return later. Early signs of this reordering of democratic and economic priorities involved members of the MPS networks expressing high regard for the economic policies of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile in the 1970s. This was particularly true among key US advocates for placing markets above politics, including luminaries such as Nobel economists James Buchanan and Milton Friedman, and Hayek himself. The Chilean government received economic advice from various MPS aligned economists, including so-called Chicago Boys representing the University of Chicago brand of economics. Milton Friedman, himself, pronounced the new economy under the dictatorship “The Miracle of Chile.” The prescriptions advanced by neoliberal economists were baked into Chile’s constitution, something that remained true decades after Pinochet’s departure from power (Bartlett, 2019). This view made it clear that the freedom component of the neoliberal vision was concentrated in market relationships, not civil liberties, although the public rhetoric later produced by think tank networks in democratic nations promised that market solutions to public problems would deliver increased individual freedom from burdensome government.6 Milton Friedman attended the first meeting of the MPS in 1947 and became its first non-European president in 1970. He joined the advisory board of the American Enterprise Institute in 1956 and helped steer the venerable conservative think tank

6 This account has been documented in various sources, including Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (New York: Penguin/ Random House, 2017). See also, David Harvey, A Brief history of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

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toward a neoliberal agenda. He would go on to win a Nobel Prize, and advise leaders such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher on social and economic policy. While Friedman and the other Nobel Laureates associated with MPS were among the key influencers, it was Hayek who set the utopian vision on a political course that would eventually precipitate a clash between democratic institutions, economic policies and the credibility of related communication. As a young economist in Vienna, Hayek had watched the unmanageable chaos of democracy in Europe between the wars and concluded that it would be impossible sell his utopian vision on its own terms to broader publics. He counseled the core network to operate on the basis of a “double truth.” As described by Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plewhe, “Hayek hit upon the brilliant notion of developing the “double truth” doctrine of neoliberalism—namely, an elite would be tutored to understand the deliciously transgressive Schmittian necessity of repressing democracy, while the masses would be regaled with ripping tales of “rolling back the nanny state” and being set “free to choose” (Mirowski & Plewhe, 2015: 443). Over the next 70 years, this political idea network has grown through the funding of think tanks, academic schools of thought, and political organizations that served, in Hayek’s phrase, as “second hand dealers in ideas” to retail his utopian vision to publics through politicians and the press. Although this movement took different forms in different nations, much of the central vision in the USA can be found in an early strategy memo produced for industrialist Charles Koch by Richard Fink, then a young economics PhD student. Koch was the son of John Birch Society co-founder, Fred Koch, and at the time of this writing, ranked among the ten wealthiest individuals in the world. He was influenced early on by Hayek, and joined MPS in 1970, and has since provided funding for a number of affiliated MPS organizations, primarily in the USA. Among these, he co-founded the Cato Institute in 1977 as an early US branch of the Atlas Network of affiliated think tanks. Koch and Cato refer to their variant of the Hayek vision as libertarianism. Koch was thus receptive when Fink proposed funding an academic program in Austrian economics that would later become the Mercatus Center at George Mason University (MacLean, 2017: ch.5). Fink, who would later go on to become executive vice president of Koch Industries and President of the Koch foundation, wrote a memo titled “The Structure of Social Change,” which drew inspiration from Hayek, and treated the manufacturing of ideas and ideology like to production of commodities: Universities, think tanks, and citizen activist groups all present competing claims for being the best place to invest resources. As grant-makers, we hear the pros and cons of the different kinds of institutions seeking funding. . . . . Many of the arguments advanced for and against investing at the various levels are valid. Each type of institute at each stage has its strengths and weaknesses. But more importantly, we see that institutions at all stages are crucial to success. While they may compete with one another for funding and often belittle each other’s roles, we view them as complementary institutions, each critical for social transformation. . .. The higher stages represent investments and businesses involved in the enhanced production of some basic inputs we will call “raw materials.” The middle stages of production are involved in converting these raw materials into various types of products that add more value than these raw materials have if sold directly to consumers. In this model, the later stages of production are

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involved in the packaging, transformation, and distribution of the output of the middle stages to the ultimate consumers. Hayek’s theory of the structure of production can also help us understand how ideas are transformed into action in our society (Fink, 1976).

As Nancy Maclean points out (2017; 2021), free market libertarian policy preferences were never popular with broader publics. During the 1960s, many Americans embraced a vision of social and economic rights protected by government, albeit with divisive conflicts surrounding blacks and other minorities. This tide of support for government protections resulted in a crushing defeat of the first economic libertarian presidential candidate. In 1964, Barry Goldwater won only six states: his home state of Arizona and five states of the Deep South of the old Confederacy. As Maclean explains, “The regional concentration of his vote pointed to a larger truth about the Mont Pelerin Society worldview. As bright as some of the libertarian economists were, their ideas made the headway they did in the South because, in their essence, their stands were so familiar.” She continues, “White southerners who opposed racial equality and economic justice knew from their own region’s history that the only way they could protect their desired way of life was to keep federal power at bay, so that majoritarian democracy could not reach into the region” (MacLean, 2017: 92). While free market libertarians struggled to convince popular majorities to embrace anti-government economic policies, aligned politicians were more successful in promoting the belief that the federal government gave unearned advantages to domestic racial minorities, and later, to immigrants. In his first run for president in 1976, Ronald Reagan mixed libertarian anti-regulation rhetoric with racist dog whistles that included a tale about a “welfare queen” who took advantage of the hardworking American taxpayer. In speeches across the country, Reagan claimed that she “used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four nonexistent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare. Her tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year” (Black & Sprague, 2016). Reagan promoted images of bureaucrats who helped African American welfare queens cheat the system (Dan, 1999). Later on as president, he evoked howls of laughter and outrage among conservatives and the growing ranks of blue collar Republicans with famous lines such as his litany of the nine most terrifying words in the English language: “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” Racial dog whistles became all the more pronounced by the time Reagan’s vice president ran for the presidency himself in 1988. George H. W. Bush’s campaign manager Lee Atwater teamed up with Floyd Brown to make one of the most outrageous political commercials in US campaign history. The Willie Horton ad claimed Democratic candidate Governor Michael Dukakis had allowed a brutal killer out on a weekend furlough. While temporarily free, Horton raped a woman. If the same ad were produced by the Russian Internet Research Agency today it would be labelled disinformation. Even though Dukakis was not responsible for letting Horton out on a weekend furlough, voters believed he was. The

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disinformation skills honed in the 1980s were on display three decades later when Floyd Brown and his son were revealed to be running a series of extremist websites pumping out eye-grabbing, sometimes racist content, in part to engage the faithful and in part to generate ad revenue.7 While racial hostility powered by disinformation helped fuel white working- and middle-class anti-government sentiments, the volume was later ramped up by right wing talk radio, and, since the turn of the last century, Fox cable news. As Reece Peck has observed, Fox found rhetorical and performance formats that abandoned reason and evidence to selectively brand anti-government and pro-business thinking for working class audiences (Peck & Populism, 2019). Behind the scenes of Fox, the political operations of media mogul Rupert Murdoch also suggests that importance of forces well beyond the MPS have been involved in stirring populism born of confusion. Indeed, the rise of the radical right was in many ways an unintended or accidental outcome of MPS activities, but it appeared to be more part of the plan in Murdoch’s empire. Murdoch media operate on three continents and helped propagandize the early rise of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, while playing more recent roles in the Brexit disinformation campaign in the UK. In his native Australia, Murdoch media helped elect Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who pronounced climate science “crap” and led the overturning of the national carbon tax in 2014 (Mahler & Rutenberg, 2019). More recently, Murdoch media successfully promoted the rise of Scott Morrison to Prime Minister. Morrison once brought a piece of coal into parliament to denounce climate science and to advocate digging up more of the toxic fossil fuel (Rom, 2009). And Murdoch columnist Andrew Bolt attacked Greta Thunberg, a leader of the children’s movement Fridays For Future, as suffering mental disorders that intensified unnatural fears of climate change (Meade, 2019).

The Making of a Political Media Monster Fanning the flames of hatred and division in society has turned out to be a dangerous game, creating something akin to political Frankenstein monsters in many nations. Such results reflect the basic contradiction in the neoliberal project: people would not buy it on its own terms. But the growing uses of disinformation about race, religion, rights, climate science and other topics have resulted in large movements and parties that are not easily managed, and not sure to stay within the lines of the original political strategies. Indeed, Donald Trump was far from the preferred candidate of the US Koch brothers and their political organizations in the 2016 election, but they later managed to shape and to benefit from many of his policies, if not his trade wars.

7 Confessore and Bank, “In Trump Era, a Family’s Fight With Google and Facebook Over Disinformation.”

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Although surely not envisioned by many of the original libertarian MPS leaders, or perhaps even by later promoters such as the Koch brothers in the USA, the growing importance of right-wing populist media and the movements and parties it has mobilized have enabled at least partial alignment with the libertarian antigovernment agenda, with continuing areas of friction such as trade wars and government welfare for ethnic nationals, or so-called welfare nationalism. In its current forms, one can see the historical progression of media formats that offered popular voice to increasingly aggressive rightwing party politics. In the USA, politically divisive media have long fanned hatred of government, and attacked mainstream journalism as having a leftwing bias. Early rightwing stereotypes branded the establishment press as the “liberal media” and the “lamestream media.” From there, it is not much of a stretch to today’s charges that the mainstream press is the real source of “fake news,” and to “lying press” echoes from the past. Consistent with the underlying ideas that government should be limited, and markets should become the arbiters of truth and social justice, we also see the deregulation of the responsibilities of media as part of this story. For example, the development of partisan media with few obligations for veracity or civility was aided in the USA by Reagan era communication policies that killed the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. This essentially lifted the requirement for balance in political programming. A decade later, President Clinton supported telecommunications deregulation that further concentrated ownership, weakened community programming, and brought even more rightwing content into households. The fact that deregulation of media ownership and content guidelines gained bipartisan support is another indicator that the free market agenda increasingly captured politicians on both the left and right. To offer a sense of the audience reached by mass produced disinformation, rightwing media personality Rush Limbaugh had around 20 million listeners at his peak in the 1990s, and some 13 million at the time of this writing when he was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer (after years of denying the risks of smoking). More than a dozen websites producing a mix of partisan news and disinformation attract a million or more unique visitors each per month. The overall right wing US audience may be as large as 30–35 % of the adult population. It is also worth considering that Facebook may be the largest purveyor of rightwing media content and disinformation in the world today. Despite the social divisions and political outrage stirred by politicians on the so-called new right in the 1970s, it is not clear that leaders such as Reagan in the USA or Thatcher in the UK would have risen as far, or as fast had it not been for historic opportunities created by events well beyond their command. As noted above, the political tides of democracy in both the USA and Europe through the 1960s ran against the idea of subordinating government (and democracy) to business and markets. As often happens in history, the intervention of unexpected events created opportunities for once marginalized ideas to gain access to circles of power, and fundamentally change the character of public communication in the USA and other democratic societies.

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The Great Realignment: From Keynesian to Free Market Economics From the great depression through the 1960s, much of the democratic world embraced the ideas of Keynesian economics, which was often credited with reversing the catastrophic effects of the great depression. The post war era was a time of high economic growth and relatively equitable sharing of productivity compared to earlier and to more recent eras of capitalism. Government spending counted for relatively high proportions of GDP in most developed nations, and the risk of too much state deficit spending was held in check by a novel international monetary system agreed upon at meetings in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire in 1944. At the core of that system was the regulation of international financial exchange through a gold standard, with an International Monetary Fund set up to bridge short-term imbalances of payments. The world currency was the US dollar, and the USA participated in reconstructing much of the post war economy. Labor unions were strong, and interests of labor and business were balanced through various arrangements in different nations. Into this relatively prosperous picture intruded a number of unforeseen historical factors beginning in the late 1960s and into the 1970s. In particular, the USA fell into an international payments crisis due to heavy debt loads from the Vietnam War abroad, and a Great Society program at home, and ended up unable to redeem massive foreign debt at the set price of gold. In 1971, Richard Nixon pulled the USA out of the gold standard, and, following repeated runs on the dollar by currency speculators and creditors, the USA devalued the dollar, and the Bretton Woods system collapsed in 1973. On top of this, a perfect storm of economic crisis was created when a previously moribund Arab oil cartel sharply increased the price of petroleum, and embargoed sales to the USA and other allies of Israel during the Yom Kippur War of 1973, sending another shock through the world economy. This moment spelled opportunity for neoliberals who were positioned to feed new policy initiatives to rising conservative politicians such as Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the USA. Both were long fans of Hayek and were courted by MPS think tanks and idea peddlers such as Milton Friedman. It is ironic that Milton Friedman had quipped in 1965 that “we are all Keynesians now,” a line often attributed to Richard Nixon who later made a similar remark when removing the USA from the gold standard. Friedman’s quip was part of a more nuanced view that the old regime might be coming to an end. His star rose further with his explanation of the lethal economic combination of “stagflation” (stagnant growth and inflation) that burdened the world economy in the 1970s, a pairing not easily explained by Keynesian models. Key members of the neoliberal network were by that time well positioned to feed policies and public talking points to a new generation of politicians who would lead a great political realignment. As noted earlier, Thatcher drew on the Institute for Economic Affairs, the prototype MPS think tank created by Hayek associate Anthony Fisher, who started the rollout of the Atlas global network that at the

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time of this writing numbered 483 affiliates in 93 nations. Fisher later co-founded the Manhattan Institute in the USA in 1977 with William J. Casey, who managed Reagan’s successful 1980 presidential campaign, and later became his CIA director. The earlier blueprint of the Fink memo was now being realized in several ways: in the coordinated development of political strategies to guide policy agendas, in researching and drafting model legislation, and in packaging such products in communication terms that fit audience tastes for lower taxes and more consumer freedom. Early visions of managed democracy based on public relations were now joined with full-service policy design shops that fed experts to journalists and legislative hearings and helped with staffing government agencies and political offices. The creation of aligned political organizations, often chartered as tax exempt legal charities, enabled money to flow to advocacy causes and political campaigns, and to blur the sourcing of those funds, as Jane Mayer reveals in her discussion of the weaponization of philanthropy in her book Dark Money (Mayer, 2017). The mix of money, multi-leveled political organization, and strategic communication helped elect growing numbers of politicians who in the early period of the 1980s and 1990s sold the free market (and lower taxes) political agenda with variations of the simple and initially appealing utopian vision that “free markets make free people.” However, as the free market model spread beyond nations through international trade agreements, national labor markets were disrupted as manufacturing jobs moved to cheaper sites of production. Unions were weakened and wages stagnated. Fiscally conservative politicians used business downturns to impose austerity policies and public user fees as permanent conditions. Businesses with options to move elsewhere gained increasing influence in national politics. In this period dating from the 1990s, societies changed fundamentally as modern era federations of civic organizations that aggregated interests through parties and interest networks fell away, and more people were, in Robert Putnam’s classic phrase, “bowling alone” (Putnam & Alone, 2000). The academic literature of this era focused on the breakdown of modern social structure and the rise of personalized identity management in societies with less social support provided by traditional structures of class, religion, family, or profession (Beck, 1992; Giddens, 1991; Bennett, 1998). This was the brave new world of Margaret Thatcher’s proclamation “there is no such thing as society.” The civic structures of the modern era were replaced by more individualized market experiences entailing heightened personal risk, and different careers and lifestyles than earlier generations. So-called millennial citizens constructed flexible social identities and managed career mobility through the social networking technologies of the Internet. These social networks enabled information shared by trusted friends to compete directly with information from once more highly trusted public authorities. All of these changes led to greater voter instability and a more compressed political spectrum as traditional political parties, both left and right of center, were drawn toward market policies. These disruptions in traditional voter alignments— along with parties losing memberships and becoming more state agencies than civil society organizations—resulted in a hollowing out of parties and electoral politics (Mair, 2013). This precipitated a communication shift toward political marketing

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and spin that further weakened the meaningful public communication at the core of democracies.

The Hollowing of Politics and the Age of Spin Since the 1990s, parties and public officials across the mainstream in most of the developed OECD democracies have been pressured by a combination of global trade regimes and leveraged by domestic business interests to adhere to the tenets of privatization, market deregulation, welfare cuts and public sector austerity. As a result, there was a gradual rightward movement of center left parties under the leadership of Blair in the UK, Schroeder in Germany, and Clinton in the USA, among others. This limited government capacity—whether on the center left or center right—to solve growing domestic problems. The result was a dramatic disconnection between parties, elections, and meaningful voter representation on issues that majorities of citizens cared about, particularly in areas of health, education, social welfare and other public sector programs. The erosion of representative governance varies from country to country, but it has become pronounced in most OECD nations. Recent comparative research shows that electoral representation in the developed democracies declines dramatically moving down the economic ladder, particularly in areas of social welfare policies (Bartels, 2017; Page & Gilens, 2017). Given the diminishing levels of credible representation for growing numbers of citizens, it is not surprising that public confidence in political institutions such as parties (along with Congress and the Executive in the USA, and governments in many European nations) have declined steadily over this period. These declines in institutional trust have been accompanied by declining trust in the mainstream press, which carries the pronouncements of officials from those institutions (Gronke & Cook, 2007). At the time of this writing, trust in European governments and political parties averaged below 40%, according to Eurobarometer polls conducted by the European Union. This “hollowing out” of parties and elections has cut traditional voter blocks adrift and left them understandably skeptical about the political offers they receive (Mair, 2013). As a result, mainstream parties and neoliberal think tanks found it harder to sell their ideas to publics without resorting to saturation marketing, press spin, and invention of claims and attacks driven by political necessity.8 The levels of untruth and inflammatory content in political messages during this period varied from country to country depending on the relative health of party-voter relations, and national laws governing political and electoral speech, among other factors. In the U.S., the strange equation of money and free speech resulted in relentless and ever more expensive political marketing, with few of the restraints

8

Blumler and Kavanagh, “The third age of political communication: Influences and features.”

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found even in commercial product advertising (think: “swift boater” attacks on John Kerry in the 2004 election, the anti-Obama “birther” movement championed by talk radio, social media, and Donald Trump throughout much of the Obama presidency, or the decades of coordinated attacks on climate science by think tanks and the Republican Party). As officials adopted more extreme discourses to gain attention and damage opponents, mainstream journalists were hard pressed to ignore (or editorialize about) that content without being accused of liberal bias. In the USA, the professional press norm of balance often led to the inclusion of science skeptic views from politicians or “experts” provided by think tanks funded by the oil industry and related interests, resulting in growing bias in allegedly objective news reports (Boykoff & Boykoff, 2004). In this and other areas, the mainstream news gates opened to a flood of dubious information and shouting pundits. During this time one increasingly heard prominent elected officials proclaim that climate science was a hoax (e.g., US Senator James Inhofe, Chair of the Committee on Environment and Public Works), or that feeding poor children would create dependency on government (e.g., former US House Speaker Paul Ryan), among other positions inconsistent with known facts. More recently, the fire hose of lies from Donald Trump may have been bad for democracy, but it has been good for the news business. To their credit, many prominent news organizations began to document Trump’s lies, as they were too frequent and too blatant to overlook. However, such reporting simply produced volleys of fake news accusations from both sides. Although the political spectacle may be good for television ratings, the growing signs of institutional corruption have grown as rhetoric and political outcomes became harder to reconcile. This has further stigmatized government for many citizens, leading many on the right to blame the deep state and other conspiracies for the problems. At the same time, observers who point out the role of money, think tanks, or politically oriented “charitable organizations” as underlying sources of democratic corruption and related communication distortion have often been subject to political attacks from other elements of this political movement such as watchdog groups on the lookout for “liberal” biases in legacy media and the academy. Given the growing chaos and instability of everyday politics, it is clear that the volume of spin and disinformation has not worked well to convince citizens of much beyond the conclusion that politics seems broken. The idea of PR imagined a century earlier as a set of tools to manage the perceptions of publics led by responsible elites has crashed against the prospect of irresponsible elites determined to engineer democracy itself against unhappy majorities. Beyond the confusing communication that fills the news, radical right politicians and networks of political support organizations have begun redesigning government, at both state and federal levels, to limit the capacity of citizens to challenge austerity, welfare and public service cuts, and other aspects of the free market regime. The recent period in the USA has witnessed sweeping electoral redistricting and voter suppression laws, government bureaucracies populated with “public choice” advocates, and a pipeline of judicial nominees schooled in free market fundamentalist principles. The overall impact has been to

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undermine the capacity of citizens to use democracy to strike a better balance between business, markets, and social welfare.9

Attacks on the Institutional Foundations of Democracy Today there are a number of wealthy libertarians bidding for political influence, there is disagreement on goals and tactics, and there are many other actors such as the Murdoch family agitating from other directions. However, it is clear that in the USA, much of the vision, funding, and coordination for the democracy redesign project have come from the Koch network. The decades-long project of funding university research centers, think tanks, charitable foundations, astroturf political groups, training public servants, and screening and funding political candidates has consolidated into what journalist Jane Mayer calls “The Kochtopus.”10 This Kochtopus has been directly or indirectly involved with a variety of political initiatives, including (from Mayer, 2017: 160): • Killing restrictions on political spending by corporations and the rich. This was realized by the Citizens United decision in 2010. • Suppressing the voting rights of students, people of color, the elderly, and others who tend to oppose Republican policies and candidates. • Undermining labor unions, as furthered by the 2017 Janus 5–4 decision by the Supreme Court. • Eliminating the right of consumers, workers, and others to sue corporations, forcing them instead into corporate-controlled arbitration. • Eliminating the social safety net including food stamps, jobless benefits, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. • Eliminating regulations that protect people and the environment from corporate abuse. • Gerrymandering voting districts. • Packing courts with pro-corporate judges, and staffing executive agencies, particularly during and after the Trump transition. • Undermining confidence in science and sowing confusion about climate change, the environmental damage done by extractive industries, and the health effects of tobacco, sugar, and other consumer products. • Undermining the legacy and credibility of news media, from the now quaint nattering nabobs of negativism, to out-of-touch liberal elites, to purveyors of fake news.

9

We are indebted to the work of Jane Mayer and Nancy MacLean for developing this line of thought. See: Jane Mayer, Dark Money; Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains. 10 Mayer, Dark Money. See also the interactive graphic from the International Forum on Globalization, http://ifg.org/kochtopus/

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These developments have come a long way from Ronald Reagan’s symbolic attacks on big government. Indeed, these more recent impairment of democratic processes that have turned Reagan’s words into self-fulfilling prophecy. All of this has created understandable loss of trust in governing institutions and the press, and opened the gates to even higher volumes of disinformation that further threaten the democratic production of credible communication.

Disinformation and the Functioning of Democratic Institutions How would we know if all of these related political and communication strategies are having clear effects on the defining qualities of democracies? Sweeping corrosion of democratic institutional foundations are hard to summarize empirically, beyond specific elements such as the earlier-mentioned research on declining electoral representation. However, an international study by the research unit of The Economist magazine has been conducted annually since 2007. Using a broad set of 60 indicators, the 2018 report listed the USA in 25th position among 167 nations in the rankings of democratic health, down from 17th place in 2007. Over this period, the USA has been reclassified from “full” to “flawed” democracy.11 Among the challenges facing public communication in light of such developments is the problem of what to call democracies that no longer function properly. In particular, how do we reconcile even rudimentary definitions of democracy with outcomes that increasingly favor wealthy elites over average citizens? As daily spin becomes less credible, and the Internet ever more accessible, there is stiff competition over how to understand such matters. Few public authorities or journalistic information brokers are able to referee the information chaos as it often spills out of political bounds. These information dilemmas became more pronounced following the global financial collapse of 2008, in which deregulated banking and financial markets issued unstable loans and sold dubious financial products that resulted in a global crash in which millions of people lost homes, jobs, and retirement security. This crisis coincided with the rapid rise of social media, which provided platforms for the spread of disinformation that challenged official communication. Above all, an enormous unintended outcome of all of the careful political work that led to decades of sweeping government deregulation was the rapid rise of disruptive radical rightwing movements following the crisis. These developments included: The Tea Party in the USA (which, along with the election of Donald Trump have transformed

11 Laza Kekic, “The World in 2007: The Economist Intelligence Unit’s index of democracy,” The Economist, https://www.economist.com/media/pdf/DEMOCRACY_INDEX_2007_v3.pdf; “The democracy index 2018,” The Economist, https://www.eiu.com/public/topical_report.aspx? campaignid=Democracy2018

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the Republican Party), the Sweden Democrats, Alternative for Germany, and the Italian Five Star Movement, among others. In addition, a number of existing radical right parties grew in influence during this period, including: the Austrian Freedom Party, Geert Wilders Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, the UK Independence Party, the French National Front, Polish Law and Justice, and the Danish People’s Party. Those movements not only spread high volumes of disinformation, but they presented threats to the neoliberal order with populist, anti-globalist politics and interestingly selective attacks on elite economic rule.

A Legacy of Unintended Consequences: Right Wing Movements and Emotional Truths The questions of how the sweeping economic crisis at the end of the first decade of this century happened, and what to do about it, triggered global protest on both left and right. It is interesting to note that the left has taken a much different path than the right, and one not as fully associated with disinformation or democratic disruption.12 On the right, rapidly spreading digital and social media were filled with rumor and conspiracy theories. Those media spheres were not embedded in the traditional press systems that helped connect government and publics in modern post-war democracies. In particular, radical right media often attacked the mainstream press, and rejected official pronouncements and journalism in favor of rumor, conspiracy and “alternative facts.” These alternative media networks often acted as political organizations, mobilizing angry publics around emotionally charged themes, including: global economic (sometimes Jewish banking) conspiracies, the ills of globalization and multiculturalism, related threats to white nationalist identity and departures from traditional gender roles, fears of immigrants and refugees, the dangers of Islam, and the so-called deep state, among others. The financial crisis, coupled with the spread of

12

Why are we observing the development of such large, alternative public spheres primarily on the right, when the underlying political and economic conditions outlined above affected both left and right alike? Indeed, the pinch of double austerity (cuts in public services and stagnant wages in the private sector) and the frustrations of growing inequality have fueled anger about globalization starting in the 1990s on the radical left, and more recently on the right. The simple answer is that discontent on the left has taken very different paths of multi-issue and identity politics, joined around an ethos of diversity and inclusiveness. The occasional massive protests against austerity and a host of other issues are sustained by vast media networks, but grounded in an evolving political culture of direct, deliberative democracy that generally does not support unified movements, formal organizations, parties or elections. The left also tends toward pragmatism and evidence-based arguments, as witnessed in earnest entreaties on climate change, all of which continue to embed most left leaning partisan media in traditional democratic public spheres. See: W. Lance Bennett, Alexandra Segerberg, and Curd B. Knüpfer, “The democratic interface: Technology, political organization, and diverging patterns of electoral representation,” Information, Communication & Society 21, no. 11 (2017): 1–26.

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social media, helped bring these seemingly unrelated themes out from the social margins, endowed them with conspiratorial connectivity, and echoed them around the world, taking root in different national rightwing formations. Over the decade following the financial crisis, the number and size of radical right movements and parties in many democracies grew. As the movements grew, so did the media platforms that fed them a steady supply of disinformation. In the process, as discussed hereafter, those disinformation networks acted as mechanisms for separating the politics and communication of discontent from the more conventional partisan or oppositional exchanges and debates that define healthy democratic public spheres (Bennett & Pfetsch, 2018). The radical right in many nations has moved from counter publics trying to become part of the legitimate public sphere, to transgressive publics trying to transform those spheres into illiberal democracies. While the spread of radical right populism is not ideally aligned with the libertarian capitalist agenda that partly and inadvertently triggered it, there are some resemblances to earlier generation libertarian conservatives in terms of racism and exclusionary politics. As noted earlier, much of the nationalist right agenda is not cleanly aligned with ideals of the free market visionaries, but many “hard right” nationalist Brexit leaders opposed intrusive EU regulations in national markets, and received counsel from that venerable neoliberal think tank, the IEA. Another friction point involves many radical right populist movements and parties favoring “welfare nationalism,” with public benefits reserved for “real” or “true” citizens to the exclusion of immigrants. In another friction point, rightwing Italian government formed in 2017 proposed a national minimum income, which set it at odds with the European Central Bank over fiscal matters. Public welfare of any sort is not easy to reconcile with the economic libertarian doctrine. As a result, the current political challenge for elites trying to guide the neoliberal movement is to try to steer these fractured politics toward useful electoral outcomes, often with disruptive appeals based in conspiracy, hate and racism. Such efforts to manage right wing populism to advance the core free market, limited democracy agenda include such breathtaking stratagems as the Koch network’s successful support for the Tea Party merger with the Republican Party (Skocpol & Hertel-Fernandez, 2016). That movement continues to be mobilized by disinformation and emotional identity appeals from Facebook campaigns, Fox news programming, and many other media platforms. In the end, this eventually yielded the Trump presidency, which exposed new frictions between the neoliberal movement and the political monsters it has created. Those frictions, in turn, require more creative management of disinformation and democratic process. The idea of economic libertarian or neoliberal elites managing the political monster of radical right populism may seem both an unlikely prospect and an unholy alliance. However, racism, anti-immigrant sentiments, or Christian and traditional family values deliver votes, often resulting in few conflicts with the core economic agenda. Perhaps more importantly, there is also a convergence point: authoritarian or illiberal solutions for various social and political problems of democracy. For these and other reasons, it reveals little about contemporary radical right politics to call them “populist” (Parker & Barreto, 2014).

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Whether appealing to racism, threats to nationalist identities, or deep state conspiracies, disinformation feeds demand for hyper-partisan emotional truths. This demand for emotional rallying communication is met with a mix of volatile information produced online, often in interaction with politicians echoing and inserting politically coded language or “dog whistles” in mainstream news media. This logic of communication interfaces well with election campaign communication and enables resulting governments to implement the free-market state engineering discussed earlier. Some of the disinformation that feeds disjointed politics is produced by grass roots networks ranging from 4chan discussions to Alex Jones Infowars rants. More often, the amplification and strategic targeting of the disinformation comes from more prominent sites funded in some cases by the same wealthy elites who backed the think tanks, politicians, and deceptive political marketing operations discussed above. In the USA, well-produced information sites such as Breitbart (partly funded by Robert Mercer) stabilize the grass roots social networks and amplify weaponized information that is targeted to achieve various objectives. Other radical right media have attracted a host of wealthy political backers, including The Daily Caller (Foster Friess and the Koch Foundation), Fox (Rupert Murdoch), Sinclair Broadcasting (Julian Sinclair Smith), and YouTube’s PragerU (fracking billionaires Dan and Farris Wilks), just to mention a few. In this mix, broadcasting continues to be important, as local newspapers and television stations have atrophied or died as ad revenue has been siphoned off by online platforms, but media conglomerates like Sinclair Broadcasting distribute cookie cutter content with a conservative, pro-business spin to affiliate stations all over the country (Fortin & Bromwich, 2018). These media channels are not always in alignment, but in many cases, they operate as networked political organizations capable of responding to external threats or promoting shared interests. Shaping the flow of disinformation further guards against these movements or parties threatening business interests. And the drift toward authoritarianism promises a deeper subordination of democratic institutions. The turn toward “managed democracy” of the Russian variety, or “illiberal democracy” as in Hungary is emerging as a pattern developing cross-nationally on the right (Snyder, 2018). Given the disruption of traditional press and political institutions and the tilt toward hybrid models of authoritarian democracy, it is not surprising that foreign disinformation has entered national public spheres, either overtly in forms such as RT, or covertly via hackers, trolls, sock puppets, and bots. Although tracing the money is even more difficult in Europe than in the USA, investigations have variously linked US billionaire Robert Mercer and Russian funding to the UK Brexit campaign, along with a central role of IEA (Geohegen & Corderoy, 2019). Also in Europe, when successful parties gain seats in parliaments, state funding is produced that can go toward political information sites and party think tanks. And, so, lacking public support for more openly stated economic policy preferences, free market libertarians have again formed unholy alliances, much as they did in earlier eras when their support was thin. These alliances of convenience may include white nationalists who are also deeply antagonistic toward government,

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though for different reasons (Sides et al., 2018; Haney-Lopez, 2015). There is growing evidence that similar alliances are being forged in nations as diverse as the USA, the UK, Austria, Germany, and Sweden (Szombati et al., 2018). Perhaps the most important characteristic of these disinformation networks is that they attack the most basic communication logic of democracy: the principle of reasoned debate and engaged partisan opposition. These networks tend not to be located in the traditional left-center-right mainstream media sphere, as shown by Benkler, Faris, and Roberts in their analysis of the media flows in the 2016 US elections. What they term “network propaganda” on the right does not operate as an oppositional partisan sphere that is responsive to competing ideas, but as an asymmetrical sphere operating via different information logics in which more extreme information circulates more widely, with the result of disrupting conventional politics and communication (Benkler et al., 2018b). And so, the USA has developed a large alternative public sphere that is, at best, disruptive, and, at worst, hostile to the basic principles of liberal democracy and reasoned discourse. In many ways, this can be understood as an opportunistic extension of the discontents created by earlier efforts to limit democracy in pursuit of unpopular policies.

Conclusion None of these historical developments follows neatly from any single causal source. However, there are common themes and currents running through the narrative, such as the historical bending of public communication to serve business imperatives that have grown increasingly at odds with public preferences and public interest standards of health, consumer safety, or environmental sustainability (Oreskes & Conway, 2011). These distortions of communication have grown greater as unpopular social and economic policies have been introduced in many democracies. Such distortions of domestic communication have been compounded by deceptions surrounding foreign entanglements, as in cases of USA lying about wars in Vietnam and Iraq, UK doctoring intelligence about Iraq, Dutch deceptions involving Afghanistan, or German governmental lack of transparency in the Balkan wars. Beyond these episodic factors, the role of systemic crises such as the breakdown of the world economic order in the 1970s created opportunities for the entry of radical ideas into national politics. These dynamics of disinformation have been further animated by recent economic, environmental, and refugee crises. All of these factors have created unintended consequences such as the growth of radical right movements and parties, with their own production of high volumes of dubious information that has further destabilized democratic communication. From this analysis, it follows that stemming the flood of contemporary disinformation is unlikely to be aided by regulating social media, fact checking, or improving media literacy. Our analysis suggests that solutions lie in repairing the basic functioning of democratic institutions themselves. This may be easier to imagine if we allow ourselves to think more critically about democracy in its present condition.

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All along the way as this historical story has unfolded, there has been a tendency to minimize, normalize, or otherwise fail to see the systemic nature of key developments, such as: allowing charity laws to be abused by partisan organizations (USA and UK); allowing obscene amounts money into politics through campaign finance and dark money political organizations (particularly in the USA); failures to monitor and address the disconnection between traditional parties and citizens (many nations); failures to monitor or address the declines of electoral representation (many nations); accepting stealthy and false political marketing as free speech (led by the USA, but of concern in many nations); allowing the micro targeting of citizens by social media companies using massive databases of highly personal information (many nations); lax reporting of lobbying and political finance (many nations); failures to innovate journalism formats that have lost public credibility (many nations); and difficulties regulating the basic business models of social media companies that enable the monetization of deceptive communication (most democratic nations). As this mix of intentional and collateral damages to democracies has grown, the number of unpleasant political, economic, and social side effects has also multiplied. This results in growing communication credibility problems. Beyond the myriad ground level examples such as climate change skepticism, or conflating crime, terrorism and immigration, we may also want to focus on big picture communication challenges, such as what do you call democracies that are no longer functioning as such? Although the name democracy continues to be applied to these variously diminished polities, the term “post-democracy” may be more appropriate, as developed in the analysis of Colin Crouch (2004). We do not wish to wax nostalgic about earlier democratic public spheres that have always privileged certain groups and values over others. However, the present situation involves formerly marginalized anti-democratic tendencies that are now attaining large-scale circulation. We propose that this is due, in part, to mainstream political parties and public officials becoming less authoritative sources of information and even abetting some of the problems, while the press that carries their messages has naturally lost credibility in the bargain. The erosion of institutional processes that offered better political representation and clearer communication, and the resulting corrosion of norms and boundaries on reasoned public debate, have left growing numbers of citizens angry, disillusioned, and seeking alternative information. This seems to us to be the crux of the current era of disinformation. In this view, the answers to restoring evidence, reason, and respect for various civic norms lie in repairing public institutions that have been damaged by information warfare intended to limit the ability of people to regulate their own social and economic affairs. The solutions involve finding ways to restore more representative and responsive parties, elections, and government, and to reinvent a press that may help develop and tell that story.

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Media Populism Revisited Benjamin Krämer

Abstract The concept of media populism originally assumes a relationship between the way journalistic media operate and populism, and in a more narrow sense, refers to the idea that media outlets and actors can convey a populist ideology or discourse. This contribution shortly reviews the history of the concept and reviews different understandings. It then discusses various challenges, both methodological and in terms of transferring the concept to social media and new political issues. The article concludes with some remarks on the problem of conceptual overstretching, ambiguity, and contestedness. Keywords Populism · Journalism · Social media · Ideology · Discourse · Complicity · Commercialization · Popular culture The concept of populism seems to encapsulate many political trends in democracies all over the world—even if it is debatable whether everything that has been called “populism” or “populist” should be lumped together and whether populism explains everything that it is supposed to. One aspect in the ongoing discussion about the rise of populism is whether the media have contributed to it, or in what relationship they stand with populism. One way of approaching this relationship is through the concept of “media populism.” The basic idea of the concept (at least in the understanding this contribution is based on; see Krämer, 2014) can be summarized in one sentence: The media can be populist. As simple as this diagnosis may seem, three parts of this claim require further elaboration. First, we must clarify what is meant by “the media.” The “media” in “media populism” initially referred to traditional journalistic news outlets. It may seem straightforward to extend the concept to social media. However, this may extend

B. Krämer (✉) Department of Media and Communication, LMU Munich, Munich, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Salgado, S. Papathanassopoulos (eds.), Streamlining Political Communication Concepts, Springer Studies in Media and Political Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45335-9_5

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the meaning of media populism in a way that renders it less useful as an analytical tool, as will be discussed below. Second, “populism” is defined in different ways. Some definitions logically do not permit the media to be populist, while others are easily compatible with the idea of certain media being populist. Therefore, populism will be defined briefly below without reviewing the large body of literature that has been produced to define and explicate the concept. Third, it is important that the above sentence contains the word “can.” It is tempting to draw a straight line from the idea that media outlets strive to be popular to their being populist. However, certain—and I would argue more fruitful—understandings of the concept of media populism do not assume that all media are inherently populist in a strict sense. Unless we extend the concept to include any kind of affinity between the way all (journalistic) media operate and the logic of populism, or unless we extend the concept of populism to include all kinds of orientations that have anything to do with “the people” or “the popular,” “media populism” remains something that is only to be identified in certain outlets, or in different degrees in different outlets. We will therefore have to discuss in what ways media can be populist and what would make this special in comparison to other actors being populist. After all, we could postulate all kinds of “populisms” in all kinds of social fields: religious, economic, cultural, academic, etc. (I have argued that it is particularly relevant to reflect on the affinities between certain “naive” theories of society circulating in academia and right-wing populist worldviews, see Krämer, 2020). If “X populism” simply referred to actors in a given field being populist, it would be of little interest to discuss each of these “populisms” separately, including media populism. However, the particular role of the media for society, politics, and democracy makes media populism a phenomenon of its own interest, as will be shown. This is not to say that the other “populisms” are less interesting, but their distinction only makes sense if there is something specific to each of them.

The Concept of Populism If populism were to be defined as a strategy to gain power, media actors could not be populist in the strict sense—or at least not in the same sense as politicians, actors, or parties, especially if the power of the media is not of the same kind as political power proper. Taken seriously, such a definition of populism as a strategy would also require an analysis of the strategic intentions and planning, at least as much as an analysis of the overt strategic actions. This also complicates the discussion of media populism: How can we know whether certain media outlets are intentionally populist, and if so, by conviction or because it serves other interests? If populism were to be defined as merely a personal attitude, then “the media” could be populist in the sense that certain communicators may be populist, but their messages would not be populist in the same sense because messages do not have but rather convey an attitude. It would be a sign of naive social theory to equate the

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media as institutionalized and organized structures with people fulfilling their roles, and to automatically assume that personal attitudes determine journalistic work and content. Both definitions, as strategy or personal attitude, still leave a lot of room for other relationships between populism and the media, but the concept of media populism must be based on a conception of populism as something also meant to be communicated (not primarily believed or intended, although this is, of course, not mutually exclusive). Many authors in research on political communication have settled on a definition of populism as an ideology (e.g., Elchardus & Spruyt, 2016; Mudde, 2004; Stanley, 2008). Such an ideology assumes an antagonism between ordinary people and a morally corrupt elite, and suggests this elite no longer represents the supposed will of the people and deprives it of its sovereignty. This implies there is such a more or less homogeneous and clear will, and it may also imply that it can and must be implemented most straightforwardly, rendering such types of populism illiberal in their disregard for formal procedures and minority rights. Understandings of populism as discourse (e.g., Laclau, 2005; Mouffe, 2018; Stavrakakis, 2004), in turn, emphasize its dynamic aspect, not a static system of propositions or beliefs. This approach captures how the antagonism is constituted by linking different issues and demands and by claiming they are equivalent regarding the same failure of the elite and opposition between them and the people. This understanding allows the study of how claims of representation constitute the group as represented and the legitimacy of this representation (of who claims to speak for whom and why). This more dynamic understanding will also have methodological implications that will be shortly mentioned below. Some authors not only include the antagonism between the people and the elite in their conception of populism, but also the exclusion of outgroups (for example, in political communication research, Reinemann et al., 2016, treat exclusion as part of populism, at least of “complete populism”—therein following Jagers & Walgrave, 2007). Surely, any type of populism must deal with those members of the population who do not fit into its understanding of “the people” and its will. However, we can either conceptualize populism based on relatively fixed categories of included parts of the populations and excluded minorities, or based on the ongoing articulation of demands and the construction of “the people” as an unfinished, open process. In some cases, relatively fixed populist ideologies have evolved, such as the somewhat different types of European right-wing populism. Yet, it would still be prudent not to treat them as completely unified systems, but instead to pay attention to how the “populism” part in right-wing populism and the “right-wing” conservative, nativist, or nationalist parts are discursively connected (De Cleen & Stavrakakis, 2017). This way we can avoid misattributing to “populism” in a strict sense what is the implication or consequence of other elements of ideologies or discourses, such as conservatism or nativism. Furthermore, it is particularly relevant how emerging issues such as the Covid-19 pandemic or the war in Ukraine have been newly framed in populist ways—including by certain media outlets—or how they add to the populist constitution of “the people” and to populist claims of representation.

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A Short History of the Concept of Media Populism Before discussing media populism in more detail, it may be relevant to contextualize the concept and give a hopefully not too egocentric or ethnocentric, and very short, history of the development and adoption of the concept. Included will be a few remarks on the observations and practices of theorizing that led to the idea (for certain aspects of the history of research on populism in political communication, see Krämer, n.d.). After a number of occurrences with varying meanings, Mazzoleni (2003, 2008) and Waisbord (2003) were probably first to use the term “media populism” in a way relevant to the present contribution. While earlier literature on populism often took a more global perspective or concentrated on Latin America (often without explicitly analyzing the role of the media, Waisbord, 2003 being one exception), the 2000s and early 2010s saw a number of publications on populism and the media focusing on Dutch and Belgian cases (e.g., Akkerman, 2011; Koopmans & Muis, 2009; Walgrave & de Swert, 2004). These publications sometimes used the term “media populism” with somewhat different, but related, meanings (e.g., Bos & Brants, 2014; Bos et al., 2011). My own interest in the concept (Krämer, 2014) departed from a specific observation. The German tabloid newspaper “Bild” often framed political issues in a certain way that did not seem unique to this specific outlet. The newspaper itself often appeared as an actor in its own coverage, speaking to the political elite and in the name of ordinary people. Articles often featured headlines or phrases in the text starting “Bild shows/asks/reveals. . .” or that were directly addressed at specific politicians: “How long do you/they want to continue. . .?,” “When will you. . .?,” or “{Politician X}, finally {do Y}!” The journalists also often referred to “we” or “us,” a community that seemed to include both them or the newspaper as an actor, and ordinary citizens, with changing connotations (e.g., German citizens, everyone living in Germany, taxpayers, all fans of popular culture, etc.). The framing of the media outlet as an actor representing the people, both being opposed to the elite, strongly resembled the general pattern of populist discourse described above. “Media populism” was then conceptualized by one of the simplest strategies of theory building and concept development: An existing concept (populism) was transferred to another object or field (from politics to journalism) by means of a point-to-point application and comparison. For example: Can media actors claim to represent the people, and if so, how? Can media actors claim to be opposed to an elite? Etc. In the later 2010s and into the 2020s, we saw a wave of research on populism and the media in Europe (Aalberg et al., 2017; Reinemann et al., 2019) and often with an emphasis on right-wing populism (sometimes equated with populism simpliciter by including ethnic or cultural exclusion into its definition). This was followed, in turn, by an increasing visibility of scholars outside Western Europe and the USA in outlets and debates otherwise dominated by researchers from the Global North (Chakravartty & Roy, 2017; Miao, 2020). For example, research on Hong Kong

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news media (Tang, 2017), editorials in the Philippines (Ragragio, 2020), or social media activism in China (Tai, 2015) referred to the concept of media populism and highlighted the tensions within the still somewhat ethnocentric concept and the challenges of its application in different contexts. For example, with regard to different relationships between the media and the state or the position of populist forces in a political system. However, we should also not neglect the interesting overlaps, for example, between European or North American right-wing populism and certain social media discourses in China (see Zhang, 2020). During the last few years, research on media populism adopted new perspectives; for example, putting it into a longer historical perspective (e.g., since the 1970s in Manucci & Weber, 2017), analyzing the attractiveness of media populism to audiences (Hameleers et al., 2017) and its effects (which should include hostile reactions to populist messages, Müller et al., 2017), or providing a more refined analysis of the stylistic aspect of populism (Ekström et al., 2018) that had been somewhat neglected in favor of populist ideology. In some previous research, even what some had called a populist communication “style” often rather referred to ideational or discursive aspects of populism. In other inversions of perspective, the concept of media populism might suggest there is an opposite to the media being populist or complicit with populism: mediated anti-populism (Goyvaerts & De Cleen, 2020); that populism might also be directed against the media: anti-media populism (Fawzi & Krämer, 2021; Krämer, 2020; Panievsky, 2021); or that journalists critically reflect on how they may be complicit with populism (Krämer & Langmann, 2020).

Relationships Between Populism and the Media and the Place for Media Populism “Media populism” can be understood in different ways. Mazzoleni (2014) distinguishes two of these understandings. The first refers to the popularization and commercialization of the media. He had already mentioned an understanding of media populism “as the different degrees of responsiveness to popular tastes and demands” in an earlier publication (Mazzoleni, 2003, p. 8). This commercialization or the logic of news media in general may then foster the rise of populism. “Media populism” thus stands for an affinity or complicity between populism and the media. The next understanding of media populism “relates to the ideological outlook and conduct of certain news channels which can be identified as ‘populist media’” (Mazzoleni, 2014, p. 47)—what I would consider media populism in the narrow sense (“journalists being populist themselves” as opposed to “the media being receptive to populism,” Bos & Brants, 2014, p. 707). Still another meaning may be populism that heavily relies on the media or that adapts to the media in order to be newsworthy; i.e., not populism in, of, or by the media, but populism by other actors appealing to the media (see, e.g., Bulut & Keskin, 2016). However, others, such as

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Mazzoleni, 2014, do not call this “media populism” but, for example, “mediatized populism”. Finally, Waisbord (2011) also uses the term “media populism” in his discussion of whether certain media policies are actually populist. The idea of a relationship between commercialization or popularization and populism (for a current overview of literature on the thesis, see Sorensen, 2021) is expressed in a very pointed way by Waisbord (2003, p. 214): “All commercial media-saturated societies nurture [. . .] populist discourse,” and “When popular culture reigns supreme, all politics become necessarily populist.” While etymology suggests an intimate relationship between popularity, popular culture, and populism, we should not jump to conclusions and automatically assume a close connection between the three (Krämer, 2014), but instead carefully explain the relationship between the commercial strategies, ideological positions, and stylistic choices of media actors and outlets in each individual case. Depending on the type and context, populism is not necessarily popular. Popular journalistic media can condemn the whole political elite, align themselves with populist forces, or celebrate leaders from established parties. Popular culture celebrates leaders who are close to the people and represent their interest, as well as leaders whose status is legitimized more by aristocracy, race, or inheritance, magical or divine characteristics, paternalistic charity, bravery, or mastery of the art of war. Popular culture can convey a kind of populist vision of society, emphasizing the wisdom and morality of ordinary people and the silliness of all kinds of experts and high-ranking officials, or rather elitist narratives of born leaders, geniuses, and the base instincts of the masses. Furthermore, can we attribute media populism to a rather superficial attempt to be popular by portraying politics as scandalous or as a dramatic fight between David and Goliath. However, is media populism an actual, sincerely held ideological position? To use the above example of the German tabloid “Bild,” an anecdote may bring clarity concerning the sometimes authentically ideological character of media populism. Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Axel Springer SE, which publishes Bild, is reported to have written a private message concerning the character and achievements of former Bild chief editor Julian Reichelt (dismissed after an investigation on sexual misconduct), calling him “the last and only journalist in Germany who still rebels against the new GDR authoritarian state [in today’s Germany, alluding to the anti-Covid measures]” (Smith, 2021). Ironically, this is one of the most powerful media managers in Germany praising the former chief editor of the most important tabloid in the country—if not Europe—for standing up against evil political elites (at the time, an arguably rather unambitious government based on a “grand coalition” of the conservative and the social democratic party, implementing measures that were well within the usual range of restrictions imposed in European countries). However, without a solid body of evidence based on self-disclosure by journalists and publishers or a sufficient number of good test cases (such as changes in ownership or political context), we will be unable to decide whether media populism is mostly motivated by economic strategy or ideological positions. This question is further complicated by the relationship between populism and other ideologies. Media actors may not be populists at heart as much as, for example, conservatives

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seeing in right-wing populism the best chance to push a conservative agenda. Many conservative actors, both in politics and the media, seem to be convinced that it is no longer expedient to position themselves as members of a trustworthy paternalistic or technocratic elite, but instead as outsiders to the system, fighting for the rights and traditional lifestyles of ordinary people against the transformations and increasing oppression by left-wing elites. To the above forms of media populism in the stricter sense, I would add another form of complicity between populism and the media: Instead of sensationalist private media companies or populist state media, public service media and broadsheets may cover populist actors and positions “neutrally” in order to be “balanced,” or provocatively advocate it in columns that are supposed to “stimulate debate” or question elite orthodoxy. Whether this is motivated by circulation and ratings or by an actual belief that debate is an end in itself and best animated by provocation and polemics, or that some kind of populism deserves representation, is up for debate. As indicated above, media populism in the narrow sense would be defined by explicitly populist communication by media outlets and actors, emphasizing the elements of a populist ideology and discourse, particularly the antagonism between the people and the elite. If stylistic aspects are included in the concept, they should be assumed to be inherently linked to the communication of the populist antagonism or claim to representation, not simply as devices to make media content more attractive (Krämer, 2014). Media organizations and actors are particular contributors to political discourse with a role that sets them apart from ordinary citizens, from politicians (because the organized media have an expressive or representative, but not a legislative or executive, political role and often act as a countervailing power to institutional politics), from civil-society actors and intellectuals (who lack the media’s role to continuously and publicly cover politics across many issues), or artists and celebrities (whose primary role is not, per definition, related to politics). To be fair, however, not all media content or even journalistic content is related to politics or explicitly to political ideology, which is why media populism would often be more adequately but awkwardly described as “(political-)journalistic populism” that would, however, be complemented by other media celebrities outside political journalism who may also claim a representative anti-elite role. The role of non-journalistic media celebrities for populism also definitely requires further analysis. One interesting aspect of media populism is that media outlets and actors cannot only demand representation of the popular will, but also claim to powerfully speak for the people and to represent the people, although they cannot actually implement this assumed will but only express it. They can also claim a particular authority or capability to represent political and social reality in general; for example, to clearly say what others feel but lack the ability to express. Another interesting aspect is that traditional media can be, to a certain degree and with certain nuances, counted as elite institutions. This means that media outlets and actors can, on the one hand, credibly claim a powerful representative and

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confrontative role, while on the other hand their possible anti-elite discourse will have structural limits or contradictions. Conceptualized in this way, media populism can be contextualized within a wide range of levels at which the media and populism can be connected. Several typologies of these levels have been proposed. For example, in addition to media actors using populist frames, Krämer (2021b) mentions coverage that is not intentionally populist but fuels anti-elitism; this coverage responds to the newsworthiness of populist actors and their actions or otherwise provides them with a platform or makes issues associated with them more salient. In the particular case of rightwing populism, patterns of reporting can also legitimize the exclusion of outgroups. Sorensen (2021) would probably classify these relationships as part of the institutional level of the relationship between populism and the media (next to anti-media populism), as opposed to the additional technological and audience-related levels. We may also add populist media policy and mediated anti-populism to the levels of relationship between populism and the media. If media populism is defined narrowly, it is a relatively precise conceptualization of only one of the many levels on which populism can be connected to the media. However, this definition allows for specific analyses that a broad understanding would not. For example, we may ask whether or how populist media complement or support populist political actors or act as a substitute (Krämer, 2014; Krämer, 2021a, 2021b). We can analyze the specific media structures, economic incentives, or journalistic roles that enable media populism, and we can analyze the reaction of different audiences to media populism in comparison to other ways in which populist messages can be present in the media. Finally, the concept of media populism also reminds us that political communication is more than the strategic communication or journalistic coverage of institutionalized, partisan politics, often focusing on campaigns, but also includes political messages by journalistic and non-professional actors.

Challenges To apply the concept of media populism empirically, and to apply it to social media and various highly relevant topics such as Covid-19 or climate change, should be straightforward. However, a number of caveats are in place. The concept is most fruitful when interpreted and applied somewhat more strictly, and this poses challenges in each of these cases. Coverage of populist parties is easy to locate once those have been identified (which, of course, poses its own challenges, but criteria and catalogs are readily available). Media populism, in contrast, cannot be sampled completely based on simple signifiers, such as names of parties or politicians, nor can we rely on fixed terms such as “the people” or “the elite.” Those will be used rather rarely and can take different, non-populist meanings. After all, “the people” as the sovereign in democratic systems can be mentioned in the context of the most different

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understandings of democracy and politics, not only populist ones. The “centrality” of the people as a frequently mentioned criterium for the identification of populism cannot simply mean that a term or concept is used very often in a text or is particularly relevant in the overall framing of a message. If we take the ideological definition of populism and the theoretical sources of this conceptualization seriously, political terms are always contested and their meaning is determined relationally (see Freeden, 1996, whose work was used as the foundation for the definition of populism as an ideology). The populist understanding of “the people” thus depends on its counterparts (the elite) and relationships (an antagonism with the elite), its ascribed properties (e.g., having a clear and, in principle, homogeneous will), and its implications in terms of democratic demands (e.g., how the popular must be represented or implemented). If we also consider the performative understanding of populism, we must be open to new articulations of the antagonism between the people and the elite, to new demands being defined and linked to old ones, or to new groups being constituted and claims to representation being established. Although a single newspaper article will hardly radically re-define “the people” in a given political context, we should always be able to decide whether a text or phrase is likely or intended to be read as yet another case of the antagonism or instead as a claim to representation that we would not have expected in our analysis. Searching for static signifiers or even claims will thus likely underestimate the prevalence of media populism in certain cases, while mistakenly counting, for example, instances of other appeals to the democratic sovereign as media populism in other cases. This should remind us of the need for careful interpretation in research on political communication and the need for interpretive research (Sorensen, 2021) in this field, which is often dominated by quantitative approaches (that, in turn, need to rely on a sound understanding of political ideologies, popular worldviews, or patterns of reporting in order to ensure the validity of its measurements). Can we transfer the concept of media populism to social media and simply coin the concept of “social media populism”? Nothing prevents us from doing so. However, if we stick to the narrower understanding of media populism related to claims of representation, we cannot easily postulate an equivalent on social media. As a convergent media environment, they can host all kinds of communication coming from a wide range of actors. “Media populism” on social media would have to be defined very widely, to the degree of almost becoming coextensive with populist communication as such, as almost any instance of populist communication can potentially be shared on social media. Yes, I can attack the ruling elite on Twitter and accuse them of betraying the people. I may also claim to be the ultimate mouthpiece of the people, the one leader to actually grasp its real will, and its most effective executive. However, I would feel this is a ridiculous claim to make, as would others. Media populism in the narrow sense that includes claims to representation requires an actor who sees themselves and can be accepted as a sufficiently credible voice of the people, as a person or institution with the authority to represent its will. This is not the case for a vast part of online or social media communication (cf. Tai, 2015). A social media celebrity, a

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politician, or even a journalist communicating on social media would need a particular role or status that other communicators on social media lack in order for their communication to qualify as an equivalent to media populism. For example, Bobba (2019) uses the term “social media populism” in an analysis of Facebook posts by the Lega Nord and its leader. Of course, there is no fundamental problem with this use of the term, but in another strict sense the party and/or Facebook are not in the same structural position as media outlets and actors when they practice media populism. In this case, “social media populism” is not simply an extension of media populism in the narrow sense to other channels (Bobba, 2021). Social media channels allow politicians, media actors, and ordinary citizens to communicate in a populist way, potentially circumventing or replacing each other in hopes for “unmediated” contact between leaders and citizens, “direct” representation via digital technologies, or alternative leaders seemingly standing outside the political elite (e.g., Engesser, Fawzi, & Larsson, 2017). However, technologies are subject to interpretation by political actors—their use is not only instrumental, but also symbolic, and their affinity with populism is based on ideology and established narratives of the democratic potential of social media as a platform for the underrepresented (Gerbaudo, 2018; Krämer, 2017; Sorensen, 2021). As a private citizen, I can communicate on social media in ways that would be categorized as populist. But lacking the status of a politician or prominent journalist (or intellectual), I can only express certain populist ideas (of an antagonism, of a lack of sovereignty, etc.), but I cannot credibly parallel the populist performance that constitutes demands, social groups requiring representation, and leadership. My communication can only contribute to the construction of a group as part of a mass that converges on similar demands, a communication that directly addresses the elite or is in search of a representative who can realistically embody the group or express the demands more aptly and forcefully. Of course, traditional organized media outlets can also limit themselves to a populist framing of political issues, but their communication can still be read as them claiming to be a voice with a particular power to represent, constitute, control, or change political reality.

New Issues Finally, populism has been connected to various recent issues, such as climate change and responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. It seems plausible that, in line with the concept of media populism, media outlets and actors can take populist positions on such issues. Still, we must reflect on whether the “populism” and “media populism” can carry the conceptual burden when trying to understand the debates and politics around these issues. Certainly, current anti-science sentiment can partly be traced back to populist ideologies (Mede & Schäfer, 2020). However, we must be sure to distinguish between genuinely populist criticisms of science and ideological elements only contingently related to populism (such as conservatism or nativism) or strategic alliances of other critics of science with populist actors (e.g.,

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other right-wing actors that have only joined forces with right-wing populist parties or movements in their fight against certain policies, see Krämer, 2021a). It would be particularly interesting to analyze whether media outlets, critical of certain measures to counter the climate or Covid crises, have done so based on a specifically populist framing of the issues (acting as a mouthpiece of the population and possibly also expressing ordinary peoples’ experience and wisdom that is supposed to be superior to scientific claims). Or whether they have done so from the position of yet another epistemic authority expected to check the claims and actions of those in political power or of prominent scientists (referring to alternative expertise, different interpretations of scientific data, or different political aims and values).

Conclusion Media populism is a rather simple concept. It captures the idea that the media can be populist (or, in the broader sense, contribute to populism). As with all concepts, even or particularly the simple ones, the risk is that overstretching or ambiguity make them unusable or require lengthy clarifications. Personally, I would argue that if we take media populism to mean “the media (maybe including social media) have something to do with populism,” it does not have much of an analytical value. At best, it is a label for a line of research and a mere starting point for a systematic analysis of the different levels at which media and populism are connected. One of these levels is the unique structural position of organized, professional media in society and in relationship to politics, and their role as actors with a power of representation in the broadest sense. This role may then be approached in a way that could qualify as populist, constituting media populism in a narrow sense. The ambiguity of media populism is aggravated by the ambiguity or contestedness of the concept of populism and its own overstretching as a buzzword in current research. If we allow “populism” to become a catch-all concept for all kinds of contestations (of established politics, science, the media, etc.) and only use the idea of liberal democracy and the legitimacy of epistemic authorities being threatened by populism and falsehoods as our analytical template for all analyses of political communication, much conceptual precision and potential for fruitful studies are lost. Our analysis of the relationship between populism and the media should therefore be based on theories of society that allow us to systematically describe the function and structural positions of different actors involved in that relationship. Furthermore, a more nuanced understanding of ideologies is needed to disentangle the actual role of populism, to make sense of populist appeals to liberal ideas and of the role of different left- and right-wing “host” or complementary ideologies, and to identify the fault lines between populist forces proper and other movements or actors that have only strategically or tactically aligned themselves with populist actors or discourses. Finally, in order to understand populist communication and its reception, we should

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not focus on static signifiers and pre-defined isolated ideas (such as someone focusing on “the people”), but instead differentiate between different types of claims (truth, authenticity, representation, legitimacy, normalcy, etc.) and be open to new types of performances and articulations of populist antagonisms and claims to representation.

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Political Corruption Scandals in the (Social) Media Environment Rosa Berganza , Marta Martín-Llaguno and Azahara Ortiz-González

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Abstract This chapter is focused on the concept of political corruption scandals and reviews the growing research production in this field. In the so-called political scandal era, there is an increasing concern about this topic within political communication studies, citizens, journalists, and politicians in every political and media system. The authors draw attention to one of the most common theoretical frameworks used to study political corruption scandals, the Framing theory, and the specific frames journalists employ. Looking at the characteristics of the coverage of political corruption scandals, the chapter explores the different types of scandal coverage considering the features of the media systems. Finally, the chapter concludes with a discussion about the changes that digital technologies have provoked, turning the classic mediated scandals into socio-mediated ones. Keywords Political scandals · Political corruption · Media · Journalism · Political communication

Introduction: The Political Corruption Scandal Era Research on political corruption scandals is a growing field in political communication research. Political corruption scandals have become a common phenomenon of contemporary politics (Von Sikorski et al., 2020; Zamora & Marín Albaladejo, 2010) in all societies, regardless of whether these are democratic or authoritarian (González Amuchastegui, 1999). So much so that certain authors speak of a political R. Berganza (✉) · A. Ortiz-González Department of Communication Sciences and Sociology, University Rey Juan Carlos, Camino del Molino s/n, Madrid, Spain e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] M. Martín-Llaguno Department of Communication and Social Psychology, University of Alicante, Carretera San Vicente del Raspeig s/n, Alicante, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Salgado, S. Papathanassopoulos (eds.), Streamlining Political Communication Concepts, Springer Studies in Media and Political Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45335-9_6

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culture of scandal (Balkin, 1999; Thompson, 2001) and of a “conspicuous characteristic of American democracy” (Zulli, 2021, p. 862) and many other democracies. Among the scandals that occupy the most time and space in the public debate are those related to political corruption (Mancini, 2019). The question arises as to whether the expansion of corruption cases has also led to an increase in media coverage of the issue. Some longitudinal studies confirm this, as for example the one carried out in four Nordic countries (Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark) between 1980 and 2010 by Allern and Pollack (2012). In the United States, from 1980 to 1996, the number of articles on corruption doubled (McCoy & Heckel, 2001), while coverage since then has remained constant (Grigorescu, 2006). In Eastern and Central Europe, coverage from the 1990s to the mid-2000s rose to an average of sevenfold (Grigorescu, 2006). This has also happened in countries such as Taiwan, Indonesia, or Nigeria (Fadairo et al., 2014; Fell, 2005; Kramer, 2013). This increase in the visibility of corruption is linked to the post-Cold War democratization processes, to the privatization trends that generated a more competitive information market, and to the increasingly important role played by intergovernmental organizations and NGOs (McCoy & Heckel, 2001). In other regions and countries, the thematic prominence of corruption declined from 1997 (Grigorescu, 2006). As Berganza et al. (2021, p. 3311) report, the amount and relevance of information on political corruption scandals correlate negatively with the levels of freedom of the press and economic autonomy (measured in terms of the amount of government advertising transferred to the media). This is also pointed out by Di Tella and Franceschelli (2011) and Stanig (2015). Moreover, higher levels of press circulation also correlate with greater coverage of political scandals (Puglisi & Snyder, 2009). In today’s political culture, does the reporting of corruption occupy a more relevant place for citizens than in the past? And what other factors favor the greater social visibility of political corruption? Is the greater visibility of political corruption in society related to a change in the news selection criteria of journalists, who tend to make this type of act increasingly visible? Regarding the first of these questions, Thompson (2000, pp. 46–47) responds affirmatively by pointing out that scandals have become a kind of test to the credibility of the political class with the establishment of what he calls “the politics of trust”. This is the only way to understand the social significance of those occasions when the credibility of political leaders is called into question. This has a cumulative effect, that is, some scandals feed others and these are incorporated into the electoral cycle and are taken as a basis for building the electoral campaigns. In addition to what Thompson (2000) posited, and as reported by Berganza et al. (2021, p. 3301), citizen perceptions (observed through surveys) also give political corruption a growing importance. Thus, the perception of corruption among the population as one of the most pressing social problems has become remarkable. According to data from the Eurobarometer (2020), 78% of European Union citizens consider corruption to be an extensive practice in their country. This percentage varies widely between Member States. In fact, in Croatia, Greece, Cyprus, Spain, Portugal, and Lithuania this percentage is above 90%, while only Finland is located

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below 30%. If, in addition, the focus is specifically on political corruption, the results reveal that half of the citizens consider that bribes and abuse of power for personal gain are widespread among political parties in general (53%) as well as among politicians (49%). Again, the differences between countries are relevant. In the Eurobarometer of 2020, the data of Spain (80%), Portugal (70%), and France (68%) stand out for an upward trend. On the other hand, the European Union’s Global Corruption Barometer (GCB) published on June 15, 2021, by Transparency International (2021) reveals that nearly two-thirds of European Union citizens think political corruption is a problem in their country. The results highlight some worrying trends across the region: during the COVID-19 pandemic, “almost three in ten EU residents reported directly experiencing corruption, as they paid a bribe or used a personal connection to access public services. This is equivalent to more than 106 million people.”. The survey also shows that “health care, in particular, has been a corruption hotspot as governments struggled to manage the COVID-19 pandemic.” Although just 6 % of people paid a bribe for health care, 29 % of EU residents relied on personal connections to get medical care. As Delia Ferreira Rubio, President of Transparency International, said: “During a health crisis, using personal connections to access public services can be as damaging as paying bribes. Lives can be lost when connected people get a COVID-19 vaccine or medical treatment before those with more urgent needs. It’s crucial that governments across the EU redouble their efforts to ensure a fair and equitable recovery from the ongoing pandemic”. The greater visibility of political corruption in society can be related to a change in the news selection criteria of journalists, Thompson (2000, pp. 57–59) argues that it is a fact that the media increase visibility to political corruption and that they do so for three main reasons: to attract larger audiences, compared to their competitors; the rise of investigative journalism; and the heyday of new media and communication technologies. With the emergence of new media and social media, the private activities of politicians are more exposed to public scrutiny. Thus, in the new digital scenario, political figures are no longer only observed and judged by traditional media but also by digital audiences (Vorberg & Zeitler, 2019). This produces what Thompson calls (2005, p. 48) “struggles for visibility in the media age”. As this author states, today “we live in an age of high media visibility”. This chapter first defines the concept of political corruption scandal. Second, it discusses the growing literature on corruption scandals in political communication research. Then, the Frame analysis approach is presented and the particularities of the political corruption scandals in the various media systems are set out. Finally, we conclude with the general characteristics of journalistic coverage on scandals in traditional and digital media.

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Conceptualizing Political Corruption Scandals Political Scandals In this section, we develop the concept following Berganza et al. (2021, pp. 3302–3305). First, it is important to point out that political corruption and a political scandal are not equivalent, although they can be related. A political scandal can occur without corruption and corruption can exist without becoming a scandal. For there to be a political corruption scandal, not only must such corruption exist, but it must also come to light and prompt a public response. Citizens’ condemnatory reactions must necessarily be mediated by intense public communication (Esser & Hartung, 2004). The media prove to be essential to the scandal phenomenon, because if deviant behaviors do not receive sufficient media attention, they are not known by the general public and, therefore, such behaviors do not become scandals (Canel & Sanders, 2005; Vorberg & Zeitler, 2019). The media are, therefore, “the barometer that indicates the existence (or absence) of a scandal” (Waisbord, 2004, p. 1079). A political scandal can be defined as “intense political communication about a real or imagined defect that is by consensus condemned and meets universal indignation or outrage” (Esser & Hartung, 2004, p.1041). Hence the main characteristic that shapes the scandal, which is that it must generate a reaction or negative response from the public (Thompson, 2001). There are three types of political scandals: those related to sex—in which the politician or his environment violates the moral codes on sex— those related to money—in which there is mismanagement or use of economic resources— and those related to power—which involves transgressions in the exercise of power Thompson (2001). Those related to political corruption (Mancini, 2019) are in the latter category (transgressions in the exercise of power).

Political Corruption The concept of corruption has generated discussions among researchers (Bratu & Kažoka, 2018; Mancini et al., 2017; Manoli & Bandura, 2020): corruption has not historically meant the same thing, nor have its expressions over time and space been identical. Thus, there are differences depending on cultures, attitudes, and environments (Bratu & Kažoka, 2018; Park, 2012). This is reflected in the existing inequalities between regulations on corruption in different countries (Matkevičienė, 2017). What is moderately permissible in one country—for example, gifts to officials and senior officials— it is illegal in other parts of the world. The definition given by Transparency International (2009) has achieved great consensus (Asomah, 2020b; Berti, 2018; Bratu & Kažoka, 2018; Mancini et al., 2017; Park, 2012). This organization sees corruption as the illegitimate exchange of

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resources that involves the abuse of people in positions of power for private purposes or benefits. A basic characteristic of corruption lies in the transgression of previous rules, whether they are ethical conventions or laws (Fadairo et al., 2014; Fell, 2005; Thompson, 2001). Transgressions may constitute crimes or lay the foundation for corrupt behaviors, such as favoritism or nepotism (Mancini et al., 2017). These can be individual events or standard practices in organizations, both public and private (Breit, 2010; Camaj, 2013; Park, 2012); and the benefit sought can be direct or indirect, material or immaterial (Matkevičienė, 2017). From the foregoing, it is observed that corruption is configured as an umbrella term that hosts many acts of different nature (Manoli & Bandura, 2020). Therefore, corruption “can be political, electoral, bureaucratic, institutional or cultural. Corruption can take different forms: accepting and granting bribes, theft, fraud, embezzlement, extortion, blackmail, favoritism, nepotism, accepting undue advantages, using influence or paying for it, abuse of power, falsifying documents, exploiting conflicting interests, embezzlement of funds even if they were legally obtained” (Fadairo et al., 2014, p. 53). Political corruption as emphasized by Berganza et al. (2021, p. 3303–4), must be understood as that in which the criminal actors are politicians and civil employees, which is why the abuse of power they exert is the publicly entrusted (Asomah, 2020b; Kramer, 2013). The difference with respect to another type of corruption is the cost that it has for the population they serve and who placed their trust in them (Ceresola, 2019). In political corruption, in the end, an abuse of the public function takes place by means of the manipulation of policies, institutions, and rules of procedure, usually in the concession of resources and financing. The objective is to obtain a private benefit, satisfying the interests of third parties and/or feeding one’s power or wealth (Ferin Cunha et al., 2015; Matkevičienė, 2017; Zamora & Marín Albaladejo, 2010). These actions have consequences on “the general interest or [on] what is considered socially as the proper functioning of the mentioned system” (Zamora & Marín Albaladejo, 2010). If political corruption is sustained over time, it can be configured as an obstacle to democratic stability as well as to sustainable collective development (Asomah, 2020b). Zamora and Marín Albaladejo (2010) defined political corruption as: The violation of law, or of the ethical principles on which the political system or a type of civic morality is based, in relation to what constitutes an abuse of the public service, in order to obtain a direct or indirect, material or immaterial private benefit, and may thus affect what is considered socially as the general interest or the proper functioning of that system.

Attempts to measure corruption have been made in the last decades. One of the most well-known indexes to check the levels of corruption is the one published by Transparency International, which is called Corruption Perceptions Index. This index establishes a level of corruption from 0 (highest level of corruption) to 100 (lowest level of corruption) for each country according to the perception of experts and businessmen from each country (Transparency International, 2022).

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Studying Political Corruption Scandals Research on corruption scandals is a growing field in political communication research. It has increased over time even though not many reviews of the published literature have been carried out so far. In a recent study, Navarro-Beltrá et al. (2023) conclude that although scientific interest in the subject began in the 1990s, the most prolific years have been the most recent ones. Navarro-Beltrá et al. (2023) carried out a bibliometric analysis of articles published in journals indexed in the main collection of Web of Science containing the key words “media,” “corruption,” and “political scandals”. These authors found that the journal that publishes the most articles is the International Journal of Communication and that the most frequent area of research is Communication. They concluded that there are several lines of research on the analysis of the concurrence of key words. In the first line of research, the most common term is “political scandal”, which is mainly linked to research using quantitative content analysis as research technique and Framing Theory as the main theoretical framework. The second most frequent line of research revolved around the key word “corruption” and, alongside this, there are numerous studies carried out using discourse analysis. Their main objects of research are the political class and the media, and the main field of knowledge is Political Science. According to Navarro-Beltrá et al. (2023), the country with the highest scientific production in the field of political corruption scandals is the United States and the most cited author is Thompson. Regarding the existing bibliography about the effects of political scandals, von Sikorski (2018) also found a steady increase in the number of articles, consistent with a more regular media coverage of political scandals. Of the 78 academic studies analyzed, 54.1% were conducted in North America and 33.8% in Europe. Methodologically, he observed great variability, with 58% of the reports using primary data and the other 41% secondary data. In the same analysis, von Sikorski (2018) concludes that the evaluation of politicians affected by a scandal worsens, but that there are some moderating factors. This author also identifies a lack of studies involving the long-term influences of political scandals. According to Berganza et al. (2021, pp. 3309–3310), many research studies have focused on democracies in transition (Mancini et al., 2017), developing countries, and authoritarian regimes. Thus, there are studies that analyze coverage in China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Nigeria, Mexico, or Lithuania (Chen & Zhang, 2016; Chikwendu, 2016; Dobryninas & Gialitis, 2017; Kramer, 2013; McKinley, 2008; Stanig, 2015). Berganza et al. (2021) also found research carried out on developed countries with more established democracies, such as the United States, Germany, Norway, Finland, Spain, or South Africa (Breit, 2010; Isotalus & Almonkari, 2014; Kepplinger et al., 2012; Motsaathebe, 2020; Park, 2012; Puglisi & Snyder, 2009; Tirado Pascual, 2016; Zulli, 2020). Likewise, comparative analyses have proliferated in recent years, for example, research between Italy and the United States or between Italy and New Zealand (Berti, 2018; Cervi, 2019). The latter studies work on the hypothesis that different

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media systems can lead to various types of journalistic coverage as will be explained later in this chapter. Studies that analyze the contrasts between countries in the same region, such as those of the European Union, have also emerged (Bratu & Kažoka, 2018; Canel & Sanders, 2005; Ferin Cunha et al., 2015; Hajdu et al., 2018; Mancini et al., 2017). Other works compare countries from different geographical regions, with the idea of locating points of agreement and disagreement, such as those carried out by Sola-Morales and Rivera Gallardo (2017) between Spain and Chile, or the countries of Central and Eastern Europe with other regions (Grigorescu, 2006, among others). The coverage of political corruption scandals has diverse characteristics depending on various factors. Therefore, different authors have focused on studying those conditioning the coverage of news on political scandals. The importance of media ownership—public or private—is one of the features debated in the academic discussion on the amount and depth of information disclosed (Berganza et al., 2021, pp. 3314–15). However, there is no clear consensus. Some studies find that private media contribute directly to corruption through partisan reporting and their own involvement in corrupt matters. Others consider them essential to carry out the role of watchdog, which is attributed to the media (for further development of this issue, see, for example, Asomah, 2020a). Physical distance from the central government has been perceived as key when studying the frames on political corruption (McKinley, 2008; Yan & Liu, 2016). Also, the type of media can affect the level of personalization and sensationalism of journalistic coverage (Just & Crigler, 2019). Finally, the sources used also influence the approaches and the depth with which the issues are addressed.

The Frame Analysis Approach A relevant part of the research carried out on political corruption scandals uses quantitative content analysis to study the coverage of the media (especially the press). One of the most common theoretical frameworks is Framing. And attribution of responsibility is one of the most frequent frames (Semetko & Valkenburg, 2000). Maier et al. (2019) and Herrero-Jiménez, Berganza and Gómez-Montero (2023) follow the model of Entman (1993), which points out the necessity of analyzing four elements when studying political scandals: problem definition, causal interpretation, evaluation, and treatment recommendation. Additionally, depending on the positive or negative attitude towards the accused politician, Maier et al. (2019) add an “attack frame” (if the media blame the accused person) and a “defense frame” (if the media show sympathy for the person or even defend him/her). Maier et al. (2019) referred to a second dimension of those frames considering that: an attack or defense frame was explicit when all four of Entman’s (1993) elements were present; implicit when two or three of them appeared; and there was no attack/defense frame if only one or none of these elements was in the text. Maier et al. (2019) concluded in their research

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that attack frames were much more common than defense frames and that, in both cases, the implicit ones were the predominant. The same theoretical framework and operationalization of variables carried out by Maier et al. (2019) have been applied by Herrero Jiménez et al. (2023). In this case, they researched the scandals related to the Emeritus King of Spain, Juan Carlos I. The results from five Spanish newspapers—three printed on paper and another two digital natives—also show more attack frames: 59.4% of the articles analyzed had only an attacking frame (Maier et al., 2019 found this frame in 88% of the articles), while, only 8.1% of the pieces contained only a defense frame of the Emeritus King Juan Carlos I and 11% had both at the same time. As Maier et al. (2019), Herrero Jiménez et al. (2023) conclude that most of the frames were implicit. Berti (2018) also used Framing Theory and Entman’s four elements (1993) to compare the coverage of corruption in New Zealand and Italy. After analyzing two cases in both countries, he found that the dominant frame in New Zealand showed corruption as a result of the action of individuals, without questioning the integrity of the system/country. In Italy, corruption was framed as a systemic problem and even as a personal entity, which caused the individual responsibility of the authors to remain in the background. Other researchers also used Framing Theory to conduct their research. Kepplinger et al. (2012) analyzed what they call a “guilt frame,” which is present when five components appear in a news item: high damage, human agency, selfish goals, prior knowledge, and freedom of action. They named the absence of all of these components an “excuse frame” and the appearance of only some of these elements was considered a “fragmentary guilt frame”. Using another technique, an audience survey, they found that the recipients of the information drew inferences after gathering information and that many of them adopted the “guilt frame” or the “excuse frame” despite the fragmentary content of the news. They also concluded that people who were more exposed to news containing a “guilt frame” would tend to develop a “guilt frame”. Other frames have been applied to measure political corruption scandals. For example, Park (2012) used Iyengar’s (1991) episodic/thematic frame. Also, Zamora and Marín Albaladejo (2011) apply Framing Theory to analyze the coverage of a scandal in the Spanish region of Murcia. They classified the different discourse frames as political, legal, moral, and reputational. Other techniques have also been used to analyze the coverage of corruption or its effects on the population, e.g., experiments. Maier (2011) proved that political scandals have a negative effect on political systems. In the experiments conducted, he found differences in the behavior and the perception of corruption of political scandals depending on the culture (as Barr & Serra, 2010), gender (like Frank et al., 2011), and type of scandal—moral or financial (as Doherty et al., 2011). Surveys have been also used to measure the perceptions of media coverage on political corruption scandals. Von Sikorski et al. (2020) conducted a two-wave panel in Austria which pointed out a spillover effect with negatively consequences in trust in other politicians different from the one being accused of the scandal.

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Political Corruption Scandals in the Different Media Systems Media systems and politicians are closely intertwined (Mancini, 2019, p. 157). As shown by Ortiz-González and Berganza (2022), there are three types of political corruption scandals: market-driven, which are directed by the premise of “scandals sell” (Thompson, 2000, p. 32) and that seek to monopolize large audiences; those that seek the defense of public virtue and morality; and politically oriented (Mancini, 2019, p. 157). The three typologies are always mixed according to the author. Each type of scandal, as Mancini (2019) indicates, occurs most frequently in a particular media and political system. In addition, it is framed differently and has a diverse effect on public opinion depending on the political culture of the country (De Miguel & Berganza, 2019, p. 467). Market-driven scandals display coverage driven by market logic and are seen as an opportunity to attract readers within a competitive media environment. In this type of scandal, the tone of the story and the language is exacerbated, and the details are often exaggerated. Due to the market competitors, it is common for stories to focus not only on law infringements but also on issues related to sex and adultery. Therefore, even when this kind of scandal surges in contexts with a high degree of professionalism, the reporters can be influenced by the commercialization logic and break journalistic standards. “Custodians of conscience” media scandals are intended to bring into light infringements committed by politicians. This type of scandal is related to the democratic-corporatist model of journalism (Hallin & Mancini, 2004), in a context that allows this kind of investigation, as these societies show a high level of rationallegal authority, and the prevalence of attitudes in which the general interest prevails. Therefore, journalists in this system defend the idea of general interest above a particular one. Generally, market-driven and “custodians of conscience” media scandals are close to each other. It is not always easy to determine which of them prevails, as business-driven media can also perform a watchdog function. Developing Mancini’s work (2019), Ortiz-González and Berganza (2022) refer to four closely related characteristics in politically oriented scandals. First, there is a political and strategic instrumentalization of the corruption scandal. This is understood as the use of scandal to defend positions and strategies of political parties. This instrumental use is observed “in the way the scandal is narrated, in the language that is used, and in the aspects and the frames that address the entire story and the aim to achieve the often-secret objectives of news stories” (Mancini, 2019, pp. 161–163). Second, politically oriented scandals occur in media systems that are not totally independent and that are characterized by a high level of partisanship with respect to the political organizations and/or the large companies and industries outside the media field. Third, the origin of these scandals often lies in investigations carried out by journalists following leaks, for example, of agents of the secret services. Finally, in the pursuit of private and not general interests, the coverage of politically oriented scandals offers, according to Mancini (2019), a high ideological polarization.

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General Characteristics of the Journalistic Coverage of Scandals Most studies agree to include seven broad features of journalistic coverage of political corruption scandals. In general, when covering political scandals, the media focus on corrupt actors, i.e., political figures; and thus, not so much on corruptors or clients, i.e., companies and the financing system (Hajdu et al., 2018; Kepplinger et al., 2012; Sola-Morales & Rivera Gallardo, 2017). Personalization is a common characteristic of the coverage of political corruption (Ortiz-González & Berganza, 2023). It involves a greater number of first-person quotes from the actors of the “drama”—with special attention to the reactions and statements of the accused politicians—but also a greater use of the opinions and perspectives of journalists and commentators on the scandal, which help keep it alive (Ekström & Johansson, 2019; Zulli, 2020). Second, the information given about damage, selfish goals, prior knowledge, or freedom of action is not usually comprehensively covered and varies from case to case (Kepplinger et al., 2012). Third, journalistic coverage often omits root causes of political corruption, and produces scarce contextualization—fewer references to other previous corruption cases and future actions (Kepplinger et al., 2012; SolaMorales & Rivera Gallardo, 2017; Zulli, 2020). Thus, there is a preponderance of episodic framing (Park, 2012). The public discourse on corruption, as it is framed by the episodic frame, entails a less in-depth discussion and does not encourage citizens to question the system itself (Sola-Morales & Rivera Gallardo, 2017; Zulli, 2020). A fourth characteristic is the regular use of metaphors. These frequently identify corruption with disease, natural disasters, or lexical domains related to animals, plants, war, or medicine. They often shape corruption as something inevitable and systemic in nature (Berti, 2018; Bratu & Kažoka, 2018), which can detract from the citizenry’s demand for responsibilities and reforms. This same meaning derives from other literary figures used, for example, by Italian journalists to talk about corruption, such as metonymies, which take actors for their acts, or the personification of corruption (Berti, 2018). Berti (2018) also describes how in New Zealand metaphors and metonymies frame corruption as a violation of rules of individual nature in contrast to the integrity possessed by most of the citizens of this country. Fifth, another frequent frame is the so-called human interest, whereby information is dramatized or given an emotional perspective (Semetko & Valkenburg, 2000). This implies humanizing stories by focusing on particular individuals (Thompson, 2001) and also serves to familiarize the audience with the aspects of the political and personal life of the case addressed (Kramer, 2013). Sixth, information processing of scandals by audiences can lead to a scheme of main actors in their roles as heroes and villains and a mystery to be solved: the guilt or not of the accused. This dramatization or soap-operafication (Kramer, 2013) deepens the conflict approach, which is common in news of political scandals (Semetko & Valkenburg, 2000). It is also based on a sensationalism that, although not uniform in all cases of corruption, does seem to correlate with the atrocity levels of the scandal (Just & Crigler, 2019). Finally, and related to the above, other studies

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show that the journalistic coverage of political corruption scandals is done in terms of trivialization and entertainment using dramatization, personalization, and the search for audience attention (Bennett, 1992; Just & Crigler, 2019; Kramer, 2013).

From Mediated to Socio-Mediated Scandals in the Digital Age Most of the political communication research on scandals analyzes the coverage of one or several cases of corruption in the written press, mainly national, but also regional (Park, 2012; Zamora & Marín Albaladejo, 2011) and international. Fewer studies focus on the representation of corruption on television (Berti, 2018; Just & Crigler, 2019; Kepplinger et al., 2012; Kramer, 2013; Zulli, 2020) and, even less, on digital media and networks (Chen & Zhang, 2016; Dobryninas & Gialitis, 2017; Tirado Pascual, 2016; Zamora & Marín Albaladejo, 2011). The digital age has changed the way scandals are interpreted and treated. This way, authors like Zulli (2021) consider that digital media have transformed mediated scandals into socio-mediated ones. The latter can be defined as “those facilitated by mediated communication and co-constructed by mainstream media, political elite discourse, and vernacular discourse across a range of media platforms” (Zulli, 2021, pp. 865–866) including niche news websites and various social media networks. Socio-mediated scandals have different characteristics compared to mediated scandals. They are built through a more collaborative, more personalized process and are subject to amplified partisanship. They are also characterized by their transience, dissipating after a quick and explosive beginning (Zulli, 2021, p. 862). Social networks have become a strategic political instrument in the fight between parties. In countries with a high tradition of political polarization (Hallin & Mancini, 2004), the partisan media (which support the positions of specific parties) conceive scandals affecting rival politicians as a source to establish their ideological positions. In this way, the partisan argument and its strategies are transferred to traditional media and social networks in the form of political polarization and echo-chambers on Twitter, for example. Thus, the editors’ and recipients’ bias toward one political party or another is one of the factors that affect both the frequency of the coverage of a corruption case and the way it is framed (Puglisi & Snyder, 2009). In relation to the predominance of traditional media in setting the prevailing frames, Ceron (2014) analyzes the discussion on social media about some political corruption scandals in Italy and the party funding reform which took place in 2012. The results indicate that mass media retain first-level of agenda setting, but the negativity shown by the news published by traditional media was very different from the anti-political sentiment that appeared on social media. The relationship between social networks and corruption is also a field of study. Some researchers have explored in recent years whether there is a relationship between the presence of social networks and the level of corruption. Enikolopov

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et al. (2018) conclude that social media can moderate corruption even in countries with traditional media censorship, as it is the case of Russia. Other studies compare social media penetration and corruption levels. Jha and Sarangi (2017) showed a negative correlation between Facebook penetration—used as a proxy for social media—and corruption levels in research involving more than 150 countries. The same result appeared in the relationship between Internet penetration and corruption. Also, Jha and Sarangi (2017) conclude that the relationship between Facebook penetration and corruption is stronger among the countries with lower press freedom.

Conclusions Research on political corruption scandals is a growing topic in the political communication field. Media nowadays give great visibility to political corruption, as it is now conceived as a test of the credibility of the political class. Academic research on political corruption scandals began to grow in the 1990s, although the most prolific years are the most recent ones. They have been analyzed from very different approaches. It is possible to find studies on developing countries or authoritarian regimes as well as on established democracies and comparative studies between different countries, platforms, or types of media ownership. A relevant part of the research carried out on political corruption scandals applies quantitative content analysis to the study of media coverage to reach conclusions, especially in the press. One of the most common theoretical frameworks is Framing and attribution of responsibility is one of the most frequent frames. Also, there is the so-called human-interest frame. Personalization is a common feature of the coverage of political corruption. The media also provides little information about damage, selfish goals, prior knowledge, or freedom of action. There is a preponderance of episodic framing and little contextualization. Scandal reporting regularly contains metaphors. The digital age has transformed traditional mediated scandals into socio-mediated scandals. Scandals are nowadays constructed across a wider range of platforms beyond the mainstream media, resulting in a more collaborative process.

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Digital Election Campaigns: Does Professionalization Still Matter? Lars Nord

Abstract The idea of professionalization of election campaigning has in recent times been challenged both by rapid digital and social media developments, and by the growth of populist campaign features, anti-establishment parties, and candidates. Still, most empirical evidence so far suggests that the most professionalized competitors also use social media most efficiently, and that populist parties often adapt to more professionalized campaigning when they become part of the political establishment. Professionalization should not be considered a permanent condition with a specific set of outstanding campaign activities for all times, but rather an ongoing process reshuffling campaign components to be able to achieve desired objectives at any given time. Thus, it is still a valid and relevant concept for the understanding of modern election campaigns in democratic states. Keywords Professionalization · Election campaigns · Social media · Digitalization · Populism

Politics Is About Winning Elections Political party and candidate competition during election campaigns is traditionally perceived from an ideological perspective, or as a battle between ideas and beliefs expressed by different political camps. Alternatively, party and candidate competition may be described as a political choice between diverging policy positions on salient political issues or important societal concerns among voters. In both perspectives, political parties are expected to try to campaign as successfully as possible to gain as many votes as possible and thus be able to reach the goal of implementing their political ideas and issue positions they have emphasized during the campaign.

L. Nord (✉) Center for Study of Democracy and Communication¸ Mid Sweden University, Sundsvall, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Salgado, S. Papathanassopoulos (eds.), Streamlining Political Communication Concepts, Springer Studies in Media and Political Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45335-9_7

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The idea that campaign outcome decides policy implementation may sound reasonable but does not exclude the possibility that the relation also can develop the other way around. It might be valuable to revisit the classical work of the American economist Anthony Downs An Economic Theory of Democracy where he states that “parties formulate policies in order to win elections, rather than win elections in order to formulate policies” (Downs, 1957: 28). This perspective may sound slightly cynical and too game-oriented to match democratic ideals but certainly adds an interesting dimension to election campaigning. It puts election success in focus, and raise the relevant question why political parties would refrain from adjusting their policy positions if they think this would pay off on Election Day. However, in reality, most election campaigns are probably a mixture of the two perspectives. Political parties in most democracies are partly driven by ideological convictions and issue-oriented policies and campaign on platforms or manifestos where they express what they will do if the come to power. At the same time, it would be naïve to assume that such important documents would have been produced completely without considering how they could contribute to electoral success. Consequently, it makes sense to assume that political parties and candidates do their best to try to match political positions and voter preferences in the most favorable way. Politics may still be a matter of diverse ideas and policy proposals but to implement these ideas and proposals electoral victories are necessary. Having said this, it is important to remember that winning elections is not an easy task today. Election campaigns in Western democracies in recent decades have been characterized by fundamental social changes in terms of increased electoral volatility and declining party identification among voters (Dalton, 2008; Ford & Jennings, 2020). Previous strong collective loyalties and ideological preferences among population segments in Western societies have to considerable extent been replaced by issue-voting and competing conflict dimensions, such as economy-ecology or the so-called GAL-TAN scale (contrasting global/alternative/liberal vs. traditional/ authoritarian/nationalist perspectives) (Hooghe et al., 2002).

Political Communication Changes Drive Professionalization Thus, there is very much at stake for political parties and political candidates during the entire campaign. In most contemporary democracies, campaigns matter and campaign moments can move voters in new directions (Taras, 2022). Due to the changing nature of political parties there are generally less individual and organizational connections between the political system and voters. Political parties and candidates are deeply depending on their ability to mobilize the volatile electorate with a more effective and better coordinated use of campaign communication strategies, methods, and tools at hand. Therefore, it is correct to claim that election campaign features in most democratic states are now transforming due to new communication technology and increased strategic considerations among political parties and political candidates (Russmann, 2022; Koc-Michalska et al., 2023).

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Digitalization and fragmentation of media landscapes (Davis, 2019; Newman et al., 2022) pose additional challenges for political competitors when they want to calibrate their political messages and successfully target segments of the electorate. The rapid expansion of digital and social media in recent decades offer citizens more individualized options for retrieving political information. This high choice media environment also risks creating increased information and knowledge gaps among citizens regarding political awareness and political interest (Prior, 2007). Contemporary party and candidate campaigning requires resources, skills, organizational flexibility, and effective use of new campaign tools to match ongoing fundamentally changes of political communication environments and the wavering political loyalties of the electorate. In the election campaign literature, it has commonly been held that these developments generally result in election campaigns becoming more professionalized (Farrell & Webb, 2000; Negrine et al., 2007; Mykkänen et al., 2021). It is highly relevant to characterize modern political campaigning as an increasingly professional activity, regarding staff and hired competences as well as regarding the use of tools and campaign practices. This trend towards professionalization of political campaigning is well documented in previous research and empirically supported by country studies and comparative studies (Gibson & Römmele, 2009; Strömbäck, 2009; Tenscher & Mykkänen, 2013; Lilleker, 2014; Mykkänen et al., 2021). This continuous evolution of party and candidate communications during election campaigns may be interesting to analyze as such but it is particularly important also to relate it to a democratic context. It is highly relevant to examine professional campaign activities from a democratic perspective (Davis, 2019). To what extent are principles and practices of professionalized campaigning related to intentions to strengthen democratic values such as mobilizing voters, increasing voter turnout, and encouraging citizens’ participation in public discussions? To what extent are more sophisticated ways of campaigning mainly appearing because of more narrow, strategic self-interest thinking? What are the main driving forces behind professionalized campaigning? Are new digital technology platforms mainly used for vertical/ one way-messages to voters or horizontal/interactive conversations with voters? Does digitalization strengthen or weaken election campaign professionalization trends? The objective of this chapter is to analyze and discuss the ongoing professionalization of campaigning and the impact of recent developments such as the increased role of social media platforms in campaigns and the way these platforms influence existing political communication patterns between voters, media, and political parties. The chapter is organized as follows: the next section focuses on the concept of campaign professionalization and established definitions of it in previous research. In the next sections, campaign professionalization is further addressed from theoretical and empirical perspectives. Then follows a section on campaign professionalization since the introduction of digital communication technologies and social media. The final section of the chapter discusses whether campaign professionalization is still a valid concept in contemporary democracies and analyses its democratic implications and role in future election campaigns.

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The Nature of Campaign Professionalization and Its Origin The overall structure of political parties’ and political candidates’ election campaign communications has fundamentally changed over the last decades. The changes go by many different names in political communication literature, including “Americanization,” “modernization,” “marketization,” “hybridization,” or “professionalization” (Lilleker & Negrine, 2002; Plasser & Plasser, 2002; Hallin & Mancini, 2004). The terms to describe transformation processes vary depending on whether they are mainly seen as a diffusion process simply transferring practices from one country to another, as logical adjustments to socioeconomic changes, as commercial techniques, focusing on their potential to mixture global trends and country-specific contexts, or addressing their tendencies to optimize campaign tool-boxes available within existing personal and economic resources (Gibson & Römmele, 2001, 2009; Plasser & Plasser, 2002; Hallin & Mancini, 2004; Howard, 2006). for a critique, see Tenscher, 2013). It is obvious that some of the above-mentioned terms are overlapping to some extent, for example supplementing political ads in television with social media ads can be perceived both as an effort to modernize the campaign, and as a good illustration of hybrid campaigning. When comparing the different terms used to describe campaign changes professionalization can’t simply be singled out as the most useful or outstanding approach. However, professionalization has a comparative advantage as the term has been thoroughly examined, both from theoretical perspectives and through empirical tests. Professionalization also allows for a comprehensive analysis of many linked campaign features such as the use of polls, the use of political consultants, and the use of data analysis. Finally, professionalization also draws attention to a cumulative process of continuous change and “improvement” (Negrine et al., 2007). There is a widespread consensus among political communication scholars that professionalization of election campaigns basically has its origin in fundamental social changes in terms of modernization influencing party-voter relations and election campaign contexts (cf. Holtz-Bacha, 2002; Ostrá, 2021). Professionalization of campaigning should then be considered as a process of adaptation to, and as a necessary consequence of changes in the political system and the media system and in the relationship of the two systems (Holtz-Bacha, 2007). In other words, professionalization could primarily be perceived as a response to cumulative transformations of campaign contexts in modern democracies that serve the parties’ or the candidates’ efforts to become more successful and gain more votes. Thus, professionalization may be understood within the context of general societal trends such as increasing mediatization and a more volatile electorate (Brants & Voltmer, 2011; Esser & Strömbäck, 2014). The mediatization of politics increases the demand for professional skills and competences within campaign organizations to take advantage of media exposure. A more volatile electorate makes the campaigns more crucial and decisive for election outcomes and underlines the importance of professional campaign performance (Moring et al., 2011). When a

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considerable number of voters are at stake during the campaign, parties cannot rely on predisposed ideological and policy positions only. They also need to frame their message to relevant groups of voters and spread it in the most appropriate mix of existing communication channels. Several political communication scholars have offered definitions of campaign professionalization. Strömbäck presents a comprehensive definition of professionalization and claims that professionalized campaigns are characterized "by being permanent, although with varying intensity; by the central campaign headquarters being able to coordinate the messages and the management of the campaign; and by using expertise in analyzing and reaching to members, target groups and stakeholders, in analyzing its own and the competitors’ weakness and strengths and making use of that knowledge in news management” (Strömbäck, 2007: 54). In an alternative definition of professionalization, Negrine offers a more generic approach and claims that campaign professionalization refers to “a process of change in the field of politics and communication that, either explicitly or implicitly, bring out a better and more efficient—and more reflective—organization of resources and skills in order to achieve desired objectives’ whatever they might be” (Negrine, 2007: 29). Negrine has also expressed criticism to communication technologydriven explanations for campaign professionalization and argued that political parties and candidates always have used existing communication technology for tailoring their messages (Negrine, 2008). An overview of previous research on campaign professionalization confirms that the use of external professional competencies is somewhat of a distinctive feature of the concept and the increased use of experts and consultants has often been central in the professionalization debate. The global trend of homogenous electioneering and development of professional-electoral parties is to a large extent characterized by their use of external experts with the main task to identify and target potential voters (Mancini, 1999). It is a general trend in political party communications during elections to recruit diverge political experts and consultants, specialized in fields such as PR, advertising, media relations, data processing, and polling (Plasser & Plasser, 2002; Karlsen, 2010). Beside of the increased use of campaign experts, professionalization has also been linked to the development of new communication technologies. It is relevant to characterize modern political campaigning as an increasingly professional activity, not only regarding staff and hired competences, but also due to the increased use of diverse campaign tools and more sophisticated communication technologies and voter feed-back instruments, such as polls and focus groups. Political campaign professionalization can be explained by the continuous development of communication technology. This trend toward professionalization of political campaigning is well documented in previous research and empirically supported by country studies and comparative studies (Gibson & Römmele, 2009; Strömbäck, 2009; Tenscher & Mykkänen, 2013; Lilleker, 2014). Tenscher contributes to the professionalization campaign conceptualization debate by arguing that the term is based on two main pillars during the campaign: structural conditions and strategic considerations. Structural conditions refer to both

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economic and personal resources that are available for the party or the candidate during the election campaign. Campaign budgets may be based on state contributions, private or corporate financing in accordance with national regulations, and on party membership fees and other sources of incomes. Personal resources include number of people involved in the campaign work, as well as their personal skills and expertise in different areas of campaign activities, such as polling, advertising, and social media management (Moring et al., 2011; Tenscher et al., 2012; Grusell & Nord, 2020). When defining the concept, it is important to note that the professionalization of political campaigning is not a uniform process. On the contrary, its implementation in different election campaign activities varies due to internal and external factors (Plasser & Plasser, 2002; Nord, 2007; Tenscher & Mykkänen, 2013). The study of professionalization of campaigning is based on party or candidate campaign processes related to structures and strategies. It is assumed that campaigns become more professionalized the more economic and personal resources there are available, and the more use there is of strategies and tools aimed at maximizing the number of voters (Moring et al., 2011; Tenscher et al., 2012; Mykkänen et al., 2021). Finally, it is worth to note that some scholars have argued that the concept of professionalization over time now has been so commonly used and stretched in political communication and election campaign studies that it has become somewhat of a catch all-term in lack of a clear definition (Lilleker & Negrine, 2002). Furthermore, definitions have seldom allowed for systemic comparisons between countries or across time and campaigns on the extent to which political campaigns have become professionalized or not (Strömbäck, 2009).

The Party-Centered Theory of Professionalized Campaigning If there have been diverse efforts to define the concept of professionalization in relation to election campaign contexts, less attention has been paid to the development of methodologies and possible measurements of the phenomenon as such. However, one important exception is the development of the party-centered theory of professionalized campaigning (Gibson & Römmele, 2001, 2009). The party-centered theory of professionalized campaigning is based on a causal model and emphasizes different organizational and internal aspects of political parties as the main forces driving the professionalization process. The theory argues that not only structural conditions on the system level, such as party system and electoral system, but also party-specific factors explain the degree of campaign professionalization (Gibson & Römmele, 2001). Thus, some parties are assumed to professionalize more easily than others in a similar systemic environment. Gibson and Römmele developed the additive and multidimensional “campprof” index to enable the measurement and comparison of the degree of professionalization based

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on political parties’ use of different campaign techniques during elections (Gibson & Römmele, 2009). The party-centered theory identifies some basic variables that are presumed to trigger more professionalized campaigning. The authors argue that a right-wing ideology, a catch-all orientation, material resources, a centralized organization, prior electoral loss, the loss of incumbency and a new party leader are factors that are more likely to result in professionalized campaigning. The arguments are based on the observation that conservative and liberal ideology are more in line with commercial and market-oriented campaign activities and that bigger political parties often need to reach large segments of the electorate with more sophisticated ways of campaigning. Parties with more resources and an effective organization are probably also keener on professionalized campaigning, as are parties with previous electoral defeats and new political leadership (Gibson & Römmele, 2001). The multidimensional “camprof” index has been tested in other studies with satisfying results. Empirical observations in countries such as Germany, Austria, Finland, and Sweden support the theory and have indicated that there is a correlation between the suggested basic variables and the degree of professionalized campaigning even if other factors like electoral system and level of elections have some explanatory value (Gibson & Römmele, 2009; Strömbäck, 2009; Moring et al., 2011; Tenscher et al., 2012; Mykkänen et al., 2021). Tendencies may not be as clear in newly democratized countries. A study of a more recent democracy in Southern Europe, Portugal, found a relatively low level of professionalization despite television-centered campaign communication and low levels of political partisanship. Overall, political and institutional factors had important effects for party organization and the use of communication tools (Lisi, 2013). It is important to remember that professionalization of party campaigning should not be perceived as a campaign objective as such and should not be referred to as a guarantee for electoral success (Tenscher & Mykkänen, 2013). The fact that professionalization studies have focused mainly on tools and tactics and not on whether professional parties perform better on Election Day has been referred to as somewhat of a “blind spot” in political communication research. Empirical studies supported to some extent that the use of paid campaign professionals correlated with electoral success in US elections, but the number of studies is limited and experiences from other countries—such as Finland, Germany, and Sweden—do not support the assumed relationship between professionalization and electoral success (Rayner, 2014). There is common understanding among political communication that indexes to measure the degree of professionalization needs to be adjusted and further elaborated, particularly regarding the continuous digitalization of electoral campaigning (Mykkänen et al., 2021). More recent research in the field has also been reflecting upon the fact that previous studies on professionalization of electoral campaigns primarily has focused on measurement of the index of professionalization, and a comparative and quantitative approach of analysis. Arguments have been raised for introducing more

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qualitative aspects of professionalization and focusing more in depth on casual mechanisms observing not only financial and personal resources but also considering political parties’ market-orientation and level of internal discipline (Ostrá, 2021).

Campaign Professionalization and Social Media Diverging perspectives on digital media democratic potentials have so far mainly been expressed regarding their probable general effects on public deliberation and participation in public affairs (Hindman, 2008; Morozov, 2011; Curran et al., 2012). However, there is also an increasing interest in political communication studies of the actual role and effectiveness of digital media in strategic political communications during election campaigns (Lilleker et al., 2014; Taras & Davis, 2022). Internet and social media have created new channels of political communication that allows for increased interactivity and rapid dissemination of political messages and opinions (Chadwick, 2013). Research in this area indicates that digital platforms in fact have been the key tool for a range of campaign contexts (Veneti et al., 2019). As previously noted, the conditions for political party communication during elections campaigns are rapidly changing due to communication technology developments (Johnson, 2011; Blumler, 2013; Russmann, 2022; Koc-Michalska et al., 2023). Digital technology offers radically new opportunities for political parties and candidates to successfully coordinate their campaign activities in more systematic and efficient ways. The comprehensive use of diverse campaign tools such as big data bases, voter segment analysis, and micro targeting increases the possibilities to reach relevant subgroups of the electorate during the campaign (Erickson & Lilleker, 2012; Towner & Dulio, 2012; Jungherr, 2016; Grusell & Nord, 2020). Internet and particularly social media have created new channels of political communication that allows for increased interactivity and rapid dissemination of political messages and opinions (Chadwick & Stromer-Galley, 2016). Contemporary election campaigns are thus becoming more “digitalized”. Digital media have many important credentials in an election campaign perspective: they interact with citizens/voters, facilitate digital networking with supporters, reach new parts of electorate outside mainstream media, adjust views expressed by filtering mainstream media and boost independent political agenda, reinforce campaigns’ core messages and they increase commitment of active party supporters. Thus, social media has been perceived as “a feature of modern campaigning that cannot be ignored” (Panagopoulos, 2009: 9). This is particularly noticeable in the research literature, which contains a wide range not only of Anglo-American research but also of research from other countries, such as Taiwan, Romania, Australia, and Brazil (Lin, 2015; Momoc, 2014; Bruns & Burgess, 2011; Gilmore, 2011). The perspectives examined are mainly the content of social media sites, such as Twitter and Facebook (Jungherr, 2014; Aharony, 2012; Tumasjan et al., 2010; Sweetser & Lariscy, 2008) and the way in which the content is perceived (Ceron et al., 2014; Conroy et al., 2012). However, fewer studies have focused on how political parties

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work strategically with social media. The lack is mainly because, in most countries, it is difficult to gain access to political parties. In almost every political election in the world, the role and importance of the Internet and social media grow election by election. The introduction of social media in the form of blogs, YouTube, Facebook, X (former Twitter), Instagram, and Tiktok has meant that the channels for communication and interaction with the voters have increased dramatically. Using social media to reach the voters in election campaigns is, on the other hand, not easy. Politicians must think about which audience they are targeting, which arguments they should use, and what media habits the target group has. Finally, they must have knowledge of digital marketing (Leppäniemi et al., 2010). It is unlikely that their target audience will have a uniform view of what makes a political site interesting (Lupia & Philpot, 2005). Therefore, it is important to send the right message to the right audience through the right channel. Early on in their work with social media, it was clear for the political parties that the social media channels had distinctive personas. On X, the primary target groups are journalists and opinion makers. It operates at a high pace and can best be described as an “intense” debate forum. On Facebook, the target group is the core voters, and the pace is slower than on X. It remains an open question whether increased professionalization of campaigning is a relevant factor for understanding of the increased implementation of digital communications during election campaigns. Do existing campaign structure and strategy trends uphold when digital technology is introduced, or does the general availability of this new technology radically change overall campaign conditions? Are the two trends of professionalization and digitalization mainly favorable for the existing party power structures, or are these developments to some extent adjusting unequal campaigns prerequisites among political parties? Contemporary election campaigns are characterized by both digitalization and professionalization and can be perceived as a result of an evolutionary development of campaigns communications in different stages. Generally, in literature of political communication, an interpretative framework of three stages is discussed where premodern campaigns dominated by party press, personal communication, and voters with strong party preferences are gradually replaced by modern campaigns where mass media and especially television become more important, and voters are less loyal to specific parties. In a third, postmodern stage, mediated communication becomes more fragmented with the introduction of digital media platforms and greater possibilities of direct communication between voters and politicians (Norris, 2000). This third stage of campaigning has also been referred to as “hypermedia” campaigning as political messages are communicated and re-composed across diverse channels simultaneously (Howard, 2006). In recent years, communication scholars have discussed a “fourth age” of data-driven campaigning where the digital tools and infrastructure enable more personalized communication and networking with voters (Römmele & Gibson, 2020). However, successful use of social media platforms is not always linked to previous experiences of professionalized campaigning. In some cases, marginalized and extreme political parties have been able to develop the most advanced digital campaign features (Lilleker et al., 2014).

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A more general discussion is centered around the possibility of social media to be a potential game-changer in campaign communication. While some scholars argue that new media have the opportunity to promote a more “fair” campaign competition between smaller and bigger—or poorer and richer—parties and give ordinary party members increased influence in party activities, other observers predict that previous inequalities in campaign conditions will prevail, or even increase further with the increased use of more advanced digital platforms and tools (Towner & Dulio, 2012; Chadwick & Stromer-Galley, 2016; Margolis & Resnick, 2000; Grusell & Nord, 2020). Theoretically, the increasing number of social media platforms and campaign related material offered on parties’ web sites could be perceived as a new opportunity for the not-so-rich and not-so-professional political parties to compensate for traditional campaign shortcomings by effectively reaching voters in new ways on digital media platforms (Lilleker et al., 2014). But it is also reasonable to assume that the most skilled campaign organizations in traditional areas will be the most effective producers of digital media content, not at least since digital communications may increase the need for specific professional competences (Karlsen, 2010; cf. Margolis & Resnick, 2000). In principle, it is plausible to believe that the most professional parties in other aspects are most keen on implementing digital communications, but it is also possible to assume that digital technology gives smaller and hitherto less professional parties an opportunity to reduce existing gaps in campaign professionalization (Towner & Dulio, 2012; Lilleker et al., 2014). Previous comparative studies of professionalization of campaigning have showed that parties’ size seems to influence campaign structures, but not campaign strategies (Tenscher et al., 2012). Despite the growing interest in studies of campaign structures and campaign strategies in general, the introduction and rapid development of digital campaign communications has not been systematically integrated in the analysis of professionalization theories in multiparty political systems. Thus, it remains an open question whether the inclusion of such communications reinforces or changes existing party campaign features. In an empirical test of the relations between digitalization and professionalization on Swedish political parties, authors found that all parties tried to combine traditional campaign tools with digital methods in order to be able to target specific groups of voters and integrate digital communications in their campaigns. However, the most professionalized parties, the biggest catch-all parties also had the best opportunities to develop success digital campaign strategies. Money mattered as a driving force for digitalization in different ways: big parties took the opportunity to stay ahead in campaign professionalization while smaller parties discovered alternative and not-so-costly ways of campaigning (Grusell & Nord, 2020). Finally, a general problem with a majority of studies of digital campaigning is that they have focused too much on simple analyses of single social media content and posts and paid too little attention to studies of how digital tools are embedded in political parties’ organizational structures and practices and how different social

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media platforms have supplemented each other in communicating with different actors in society (Jungherr, 2016).

Campaign Professionalization, Democracy, and Populism While campaign professionalization developments are frequently analyzed and confirmed in both country-specific and comparative studies, there are surprisingly little research on the democratic consequences of professionalized campaigning. While there is widespread support for the thesis that party campaign professionalization has taken place, very diverse perceptions of its democratic implications in terms of risks and opportunities exist (Davis, 2019: 61). One of the main risks addressed in these discussions is the consequences professionalized campaigning is supposed to have for internal party democracy as it tends to downgrade the value of party membership and party work as party strategies and issue positions are increasingly influenced by hired expertise and consultants (Scammell, 2014; cf. Mair, 1997). Another risk is related to the fact that professionalized—and mainstream—campaigning makes political parties look more alike and makes it more difficult for voters to make informed decisions about policy positions. Fear has also been expressed that too converging campaign approaches among established political parties may fuel public distrust and the rise of populist, anti-establishment parties (Norris & Inglehart, 2019). On the other hand, some scholars have focused on the opportunities linked to professionalized campaigning. It has been referred to as a natural response to societal developments such as individualization, fragmentation, and digitalization (Norris, 2000). The potential of digital media to make public communication less costly and more interactive has also been underlined (Coleman, 2017). Finally, the introduction of new technology has been perceived as an opportunity for effective political marketing, where political parties to an increased extent are able to adjust their campaigns in line with existing voter needs and preferences (Newman, 1994; LeesMarshment, 2001). Obviously, professionalized campaigns may involve both risks and opportunities from a democratic perspective, but the topic has so far mostly been discussed among academics. Party rationales on professionalization are less explored, and party perceptions of risks and opportunities with further steps towards professionalized campaigns remain unclear. To some extent, the lack of knowledge in this area depends on restricted access to party headquarters, and party unwillingness to discuss internal strategic campaign considerations in public. Social media pose challenges for established campaign philosophies, but so do also recent changes of party systems and the introduction of new party models in contemporary democracies. The global growth of populist parties influences practices for analyzing electoral communications. The global mean vote share for “populist right” parties doubled from less than 7 % in the 1960s to almost 14 % in

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the 2010s (Norris & Inglehart, 2019). Centrist mainstream political parties and candidates conducting the most professionalized campaigns have faced remarkable and unpredicted electoral losses against less professionalized competitors—but with strong charismatic leaders with populist messages (Davis, 2019). The Donald Trump victory over Hillary Clinton in USA presidential elections in 2016 is the most wellknown example of the trend where the most professionalized campaign results in electoral defeat (Allen & Parnes, 2017). This development has raised a debate about the possible end of the domination of centrist professional-electoral parties where campaign experts and technocrats have become too influential and detached from ordinary citizens. It has been argued that professionalized parties have become unable “to cope with fragmented, fast-moving media environments and diverse sets of voters and ideological concerns” (Davis, 2019: 72–73). Social media have been described as tailored for more emotional and dramatic populist messages, and as they allow for an effective by-pass of legacy media that are normally more critical toward populist parties. In a longer perspective, such development has been referred to as a potential threat to democracy itself, and populism and social media have been descried as a “lethal combination” for democracy (Davis, 2022: 313). However, such gloomy forecasts are not shared by everyone. The systematic use of new media to disseminate underdog rhetoric, make anti-establishment attacks and strike anti-political chords have certainly shaken a political establishment that has left its flanks open to exactly this type of attack. However, for the populist newcomers to engage not only their immediate followers but also the mainstream media system in spreading the word apparently requires communication strategies with the same basic aims as in other parties, that is, to establish an agenda for political influence. It is reasonable to assume that over time—and with increasing financial resources—the newcomers will develop both their professionalized structures and their distinctive use of professional strategies (Mykkänen et al., 2021).

The Future of Campaign Professionalization As noted in previous research, contemporary election campaigns are characterized by becoming both more professionalized and more digitalized (Grusell & Nord, 2020). Professionalization goes on by continuous developing of campaign strategies and use of experts and new technology. Digitalization and the increased use of online communications has been referred to as a “fourth stage” of political communication (Blumler, 2013; cf. Römmele & Gibson, 2020). The development and growing importance of digital media in political communication is partly triggered by the digital infra structure and the rapid expansion of broad band connections, and partly by the increased possibilities to interact with voters on individual level. Digital media certainly make it easier for political parties and candidates to implement campaign strategies to reach specific segments of the electorate, inform,

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and mobilize them. As contemporary elections campaigns take place on many different platforms and in several communication channels, there is a need to coordinate political messages carefully which requires digital skills and coherent communication strategies (Grusell & Nord, 2020). The role of social media in elections campaigns seems to differ between countries but more than dramatically changing the outcome of elections they may have a more subtle effect as they are becoming more integrated into campaign strategies and alter the way parties and candidates communicate with voters. Social media messages during the campaign are becoming more important for more voters, even in countries where traditional media dominate the communication process. (Davis, 2022). For further studies of political communication and election campaigns, it is necessary to discuss and develop relevant theoretical frameworks for better understanding of current transformation processes. The previously described and widely used party-centered theory may require more of a revision than a total rejection. One reason for such a revision of the theory is that even if most parties can be expected to become more professionalized in campaigning, such processes may develop differently depending on party characteristics. Traditional, mainstream parties and candidates will probably move in a more rational and issue-oriented direction in their professionalization process while populist and more extreme parties tend to emphasize their political leader, visual communications, and emotional messages when they go in the same direction (Römmele & Gibson, 2020). Consequently, a further development of the party-centered theory would benefit from considering new items of importance for measuring campaign professionalization, and in particular political forms of expression in non-traditional political communication formats (Mykkänen et al., 2021). The trick would then be to validly redefine professionalization and to develop new operationalizations that will allow for studying these new trends more adequately. This may—at least sometime in the future—require a new approach that finally leaves the concept of professionalization behind. Then new conceptualizations will have to be developed, albeit with the same basic aim, to structurally study the features of all types of parties and other relevant social movements and their contribution to the election process. However, until now diverging perceptions and interpretations of professionalization have proved to be very useful and facilitated the understanding of election campaigning in political communication studies. The idea of professionalization has in recent times been challenged both by rapid digital and social media developments, and by the growth of populist campaign features, anti-establishment parties, and candidates. In principle, these processes could change everything. Social media open possibilities for less costly, direct interaction with voters. Populist communication relies more on emotional than rational considerations for voter decisions. At the same time, most empirical evidence so far suggests that the most professionalized competitors also use social media most efficiently, and that populist parties often adapt to more professionalized campaigning when they become part of the political establishment and need to expand their voter base.

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To conclude, professionalization is not a permanent condition with a specific set of outstanding campaign activities for all times, but an ongoing process reshuffling campaign components to be able to achieve desired objectives at any given time. Thus, it is probably still a valid and relevant concept for the understanding of modern election campaigns in democratic states.

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Political (Election) Advertising Christina Holtz-Bacha

Abstract Individual and collective political actors use advertising to strategically influence political attitudes, perceptions, behavior, and emotions mostly in the context of elections. Thus, the advertising primarily aims at affecting vote choice and turnout. Due to the long tradition and the importance of ads in election campaigns, research on political advertising is dominated by the USA and focuses on audiovisual advertising on television and, more recently, social media. However, since political advertising, just as any commercial advertising, is strongly linked to the (political) culture of a country, findings from US research are difficult to generalize and transfer to other political cultures. Until now, there is a lack of international comparative studies, which would be necessary to identify what are generic political advertising formats and strategies in contrast to national specifics that reflect the characteristics of a political culture. Keywords Political advertising · Elections · Election broadcasts · Campaigning · Targeting

Introduction Political advertising is defined as any message controlled by individual or collective political actors and designed for promoting their interests (cf. Holtz-Bacha & Kaid, 2006, p. 4). Its obvious function is to strategically influence political attitudes, perceptions, behavior, and emotions in favor of political actors. As is generally the case for political communication, election campaigns are considered the heyday of political advertising and therefore provide the best opportunity to explore its use, verbal and visual design, and effects. However, the focus on the struggle for political power makes one forget that political advertising can have effects that go beyond the electoral context. These are C. Holtz-Bacha (✉) Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Nürnberg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Salgado, S. Papathanassopoulos (eds.), Streamlining Political Communication Concepts, Springer Studies in Media and Political Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45335-9_8

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secondary effects which, as Borchers (2017, p. 3) points out, are usually not attributable to individual spots or individual campaigns, but to the advertising as a whole. These secondary advertising effects can be distinguished according to whether they are intended or unintended and whether they are functional or dysfunctional for society. However, the literature shows that such secondary effects are predominantly deemed dysfunctional and therefore often make advertising an object of criticism as for instance, has long been the case with the use of gender stereotypes (Borchers, 2017, p. 4). All advertising, commercial or political, offers a certain image of reality, shaped by the logic of strategic communication and reflecting the cultural environment from which it originates and where it is produced. To generate resonance with its audience (consumers, voters), advertising must adapt to the cultural patterns, values, ideas, and convictions of its audience in order to appeal to them and allow them to identify with the situations and characters shown in the advertising (Schmidt, 1995). What is true for commercial advertising is equally true for political advertising. Regardless of its primary purpose of influencing attitudes, perceptions, and behavior in the interest of its clients, political advertising represents an expression of political culture and an indicator of its change over time (Holtz-Bacha, 2003). This is also what Combs (1979) refers to when he writes about political advertising: “[. . .]; perhaps archaeologists of the 27th century will be able to fathom trends in American culture by looking at changes in their ads.” (1979, p. 333). In this role as a representation of a certain political culture the advertising at the same time contributes to the construction of political reality. As Lester (1994) puts it, “Advertising as a consciousness industry is involved in both creating culture and reflecting it” (p. 7). Advertising thus also assumes a socialization function for its audience. Therefore, the analysis of political advertising should take into account this dual role in reflecting society and in turn reflecting back on it, and also consider the secondary effects on political attitudes, ideas, knowledge, and behavior. Due to the predominant use of political advertising in elections, the interest of campaigners, i.e., the parties and candidates commissioning the advertising, focuses on the effects that are relevant for voter turnout and voting decision. Similarly, research also concentrates on the advertising used in the context of elections. Few studies analyzed political advertising against the backdrop of political culture and examined its contribution to the construction of political reality. Therefore, a review of the research must also be largely limited to election-related political advertising. In addition, since most of the research on political advertising comes from the USA and relates to television, this chapter focuses on audiovisual advertising and also involves a discussion of the transferability of the findings to European countries. In a further step, this chapter looks at the opportunities provided by technological advancements and the spread of the Internet and social networks, which recently raised new questions of legal regulation. While the term “ads” is commonly used for political audiovisual advertising in the US, thus emphasizing its commercial character, other terms are also common in European countries, which distinguish it from commercial advertising and take account of the fact that election campaigners there often do not have to pay for

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airtime. In the UK, for example, the electoral broadcasts are called “party election broadcasts” disguising thus their promotional character (Cross & Wring, 2017). Translated into English, the Italian term is “independently produced political messages” (Mazzoleni, 2006, p. 247). With the use of the English word “spot” for electoral advertising on radio and television, the distinction from commercial advertising in German is less clear, while the Greek literature (Samaras & Papathanassopoulos, 2006), refers to “polispots” and thus points to the political purpose of the advertising. Since the aim of such broadcasts is to promote a party or candidate, this chapter uses “ads” also for such political broadcasts for which airtime is available free of charge, as in many European countries.

Content Aspects of Political Advertising Quantitative and qualitative content analyses are the method of choice to study the design of political advertising. It aims to assess their verbal and visual elements and thus also establishes the strategies that the election campaigners pursue with the ads. Even if the findings of content analyses do not allow for conclusions about the effectiveness of the advertising, the identified strategies often serve as a basis for assumptions about their effects. Due to the long tradition and relevance of television advertising in US election campaigns, most of the research on the content of political advertising comes from the United States. There are several overviews summarizing US research on content aspects of electoral advertising (e.g., Fowler et al., 2022, Chap. 3; Just & Crigler, 2017; Kaid, 2004; West, 2017, Chap. 4). Content analyses from other countries are usually more recent and cannot present as long a time series as the studies from the USA. In addition, they are often published in the national language, which means they also receive less international attention. All in all, there is a lack of international comparative studies, which are necessary to identify generic formats and advertising strategies in contrast to national specifics that reflect the characteristics of a political culture. In addition, comparisons across countries would also be the approach to assess the peculiarities of US style campaign advertising and to determine whether it serves as a model for other countries and it is therefore justified to speak of an Americanization of campaigning worldwide. A prerequisite for such comparisons is the use of a uniform analytical tool, which is, however, subject to the problems associated with translations into different languages and agreement on their meaning. One such analytical tool is the videostyle concept (Kaid & Johnston, 2001), developed for the analysis of formal, verbal, and nonverbal aspects of US candidate advertising. The videostyle categories have been used for the analysis of electoral spots in other countries as well (cf. Holtz-Bacha et al., 1994; Kaid et al., 2011; Kaid & Holtz-Bacha, 2006). While the employment of the same codebook for content analyses allows to bring the findings into international comparisons, caution is recommended because of different political contexts.

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It is common to differentiate between issue and candidate ads, which appear in different formats. Popular formats for issue ads are montages with a sequence of images that are intended to visualize the text, trigger a certain mood, and appeal to emotions. A classic form of candidate ads is the so-called talking head format, in which candidates speak directly into the camera. Longer television spots also combine the discussion of issues with appearances of the candidate making it difficult to retain the dichotomous distinction between issue ads and candidate ads. In order to infer a personalization of election campaigns from the number of candidate ads, however, a definition is needed that goes beyond the simple appearance of a candidate in the visuals and possibly takes into account whether a candidate is indeed active and, for example, discusses issues or presents the party platform or whether the candidate talks about her- or himself (e.g., biographical facts). Reflecting the important role that attack advertising plays in the USA, the analysis of negative campaigning received special attention in US research (Belt, 2017; Just & Crigler, 2017). More recently, negative advertising has also become a research topic in other parts of the world (e.g., Elmelund-Præstekær, 2008, 2010; Gerstlé & Nai, 2019; Nai & Walter, 2015a; Walter & Vliegenthart, 2010). With more and more women making it to the top level of the political business, content analyses also examined whether and how female and male candidates differ in their political advertising strategies (Bystrom, 2017; Ennser-Jedenastik, 2017). This question is particularly important with regard to negative advertising, as women may be subject to a double bind in their advertising strategies. On the one hand, they have to prove that they are “tough enough for the job” and attacks on the opponent can serve to demonstrate their resoluteness, but on the other hand, negative attacks may not be seen as fitting the female stereotype und may therefore be damaging for their image (e.g., Bauer & Santia, 2021; Banwart & Bystrom, 2022; Jamieson, 1995).

Effects of Political Advertising For those who commission the electoral broadcasts, political advertising is all about effects. As an important part of campaigners’ toolbox, ads are ultimately aimed at influencing turnout and the voting decision. However, if at all, and as it is the case with commercial advertising, direct persuasive effects of exposure to political advertising can usually not be expected. Instead, an effect on voting intention is contingent on mediating factors such as the attitude toward the candidate or issue involvement. Research on the impact of electoral advertising therefore examines a broad spectrum of variables that may be relevant for the voting decision. Such variables relate to the electoral level, characteristics of the sponsor of the ad (candidate, party, third party organization), the channel (e.g., television, radio), the formal features (e.g., length) and the verbal and visual content of an ad, as well as variables on the part of the viewers (e.g., socio-demographic variables, political interest, party identification).

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Methodologically, research on the ads’ impact is usually based on surveys, qualitative interviews, experiments, real-time analyses, or focus groups (Johnston, 2006; Kearney & Banwart, 2017). In most cases, these studies only capture shortterm effects and leave open whether and how long these effects persist. Moreover, many studies rely on small and specific samples and thus make generalizations difficult or impossible, especially across borders. Finally, the mediating variables may depend on the respective political culture, which also limits generalization. Due to the electoral system, US research on the effects of political advertising eminently focuses on candidate evaluations with the expectation that reinforcement or changes in perceptions of and attitudes toward the candidate have an impact on vote choice (cf. Fowler et al., 2022, Chap. 7; Kaid, 2004; Ridout & Holland, 2017; West, 2017, Chap. 6). But even in parliamentary systems where parties play a larger role, election campaigns and political advertising center on individual candidates, contributing to the discussion of the presidentialization and personalization of politics and campaigning (Holtz-Bacha et al., 1998; Poguntke & Webb, 2005). Ultimately, the goal of any election advertising is to influence the voting decision. Since this goal can only be successful if citizens also turn out to cast their vote, the mobilization function is just as important as persuading people to vote in favor of a particular candidate or party. However, the results of research on whether and to what extent election advertising succeeds in influencing election decisions and voter turnout are inconsistent. Some studies suggest that the effect of electoral advertising rather lies in persuasion than in mobilization (e.g., Law, 2021; Sides et al., 2021; Spenkuch & Toniatti, 2018). Findings from the 2016 US presidential campaign demonstrate that electoral advertising can also be employed for demobilizing voters to keep them from voting for the opponent (Magleby, 2020, p. 369). Findings on the persuasive success of campaign advertising differ. Some research assesses substantial effects (e.g., Huber & Arceneaux, 2007). Other authors conclude that the persuasive impact of political advertising is only small (Coppock et al., 2020; Kalla & Broockman, 2018) but can make a difference in elections where voters have little information about candidates and issues and are therefore more receptive to persuasive messages (Broockman & Kalla, 2021; Sides et al., 2021). Only a few studies provide information about the duration of the effects if they occur. Based on the persuasion decay concept Gerber et al. (2011) assume that persuasive effects decrease over time and a large part deteriorates quickly. However, this process does not seem to apply in the same way to elections at all levels, the different phases of the campaign, and for all groups of voters (Bartels, 2014; Hill et al., 2013; Magleby, 2020). Although as old as any kind of advertising, strategies that rely on appealing to emotions and aim for striking the “responsive chord” (Schwartz, 1973) have recently received increased attention regarding political advertising (Brader, 2006; MarmorLavie & Weimann, 2005). Since the use of negative advertising is contentious, but nevertheless plays a significant role in election campaigns, much of the research on emotional effects relates to negative strategies and to fear arousing strategies in particular.

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Negative advertising in the USA is often equated with attacks on the political opponent or with contrast advertising that juxtaposes the personal characteristics and political positions of the competitors. It is considered unpopular with the electorate, but still effective in the sense that voters may change their attitudes or beliefs because they learn something about the characteristics and political positions of the attacked candidate and also about the attacking candidate. Attacks on an opponent are risky because of a possible backlash effect, whereby the attack reflects negatively on the sponsor of the ad because it is seen as unfair (e.g., Fridkin & Kenney, 2004; Garramone, 1984; Pinkleton, 1997). In order to avoid that an attack on the attacking candidate backfires, third groups take over the negative advertising (Dowling & Wichowsky, 2015). In addition to direct attacks on opponents and their issues, negative advertising employs fear appeals for targeting voters’ emotions (Brader, 2005; Scheller, 2019). Auditorily and visually, they build up scenarios that are meant to spread fear and anxiety and are thus intended to discourage people from voting for a candidate or party associated with these scenarios. A famous example of such fear appeals is the 1964 Daisy spot, in which the campaign for Lyndon B. Johnson used a threatening scenario to warn voters against supporting his competitor, Barry Goldwater. Even though the ad was only aired once, it is still widely known today and is used as an instructive case in every book on election advertising. It also shows that media coverage can increase the reach of an ad considerably. With the reporting, the ads are described or shown again and, even if the comments are critical, they may spark interest in the ad and thus influence its potential impact. This kind of free media exposure is suited to generate indirect persuasive effects (Konitzer et al., 2019). On the other hand, adwatches that check an ad’s claims, can reduce the impact of ads, or even trigger a boomerang effect (e.g., Milburn & Brown, 1995; Pfau & Louden, 1994). With their studies that suggested demobilizing effects, a weakening of political efficacy, and further polarization of the electorate, Ansolabehere et al. (1994, 1999); Ansolabehere and Iyengar (1995) spurred the debate about the detrimental impact of negative advertising and thus pointed to effects beyond the immediate electoral context. However, other research did not support these findings. Based on their meta-analyses of studies on negative campaigning, Lau and his collaborators (Lau & Rovner, 2007; Lau et al., 2007) concluded that negative ads do not have pernicious effects on turnout and attitudes toward politics. At the same time, they concluded from their research that negative campaign messages are also not very successful in attracting votes. In contrast to the purported demobilizing effects, other authors discuss the possibility that negative advertising could even encourage participation in the political process (Brooks & Geer, 2007; Goldstein & Freedman, 2002; Wattenberg & Brians, 1999). Again, mediating variables such as the emotions the ads arouse, or their format may influence the mobilizing effect (Crigler et al., 2006).

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Political Advertising Through Digital Channels The emergence of the internet and digital media provided campaigners with new channels for addressing the electorate. Online advertising developed from candidate websites and banner ads to the employment of digital platforms for personalized advertising. Because digital communication channels are less expensive than television, they are particularly interesting for those candidates and parties that are not so well equipped financially and also have fewer chances of generating free media. In addition, ads for social media can be produced and distributed faster than those for television and can therefore be better used for reactions to the campaign of the opponents for instance for countering attacks or as an inoculation strategy in anticipation of an attack. However, the high amounts of money still invested in television advertising in the USA and the enormous number of traditional campaign ads demonstrate that digital media did not (yet) replace but rather complement television and thus expanded the possibilities for campaign communication. For the 2019–2020 election cycle, which was marked by the onset of the pandemic in early 2020 and therefore led to a reduction in personal candidate appearances, Ridout et al. (2021, p. 467) recorded 2.35 million airings on television. The period between early September 2020, when party conventions nominated the presidential candidates, and Election Day on 3 November accounted for 804,000 airings. Compared to the 2016 presidential election, the number of airings on television has doubled and at the same time indicates that the candidates’ significant increase in online advertising has not (yet) come at the expense of traditional television advertising (Fowler et al., 2020, p. 57; Franz, 2020). In contrast to the USA, the development in European countries may look different. Since election advertising on television is usually significantly restricted in Europe and digital platforms give campaigners greater freedom, online election advertising is likely to become more important than television soon. Unlike television that reaches a broad and, at best, roughly defined audience, digital media allow for targeting specific groups of voters with advertising tailored to their political leaning and their interests. Therefore, the real treasure for election campaigners is big data, which forms the basis for defining narrow target groups and addressing them with specific issues. However, in spite of micro-targeting being not particularly popular with the electorate, privacy concerns, and an ongoing discussion about the necessity of its regulation, campaigners are betting on the benefits of the personalized approach. The uncertainties regarding micro-targeting can also be explained by the proximity to neuromarketing techniques (Hegazy, 2021) as well as phenomena such as dark ads (Odzuck & Günther, 2021) and deepfakes (Diakopoulos & Johnson, 2021; Galston, 2020; Kietzmann et al., 2020; Madrigal, 2017), which easily escape public scrutiny. Research on digital election advertising unfolded along with the spread and differentiation of the internet and social networks. Numerous studies looked at the increasing use of the new media for election campaign communication, initially mainly YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, and then also the newer platforms such as

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Instagram and Snapchat (e.g., Chester & Montgomery, 2017; Fowler et al., 2022, Chap. 4; Gueorguieva, 2008; Jungherr, 2016; Kaid, 2006; Ridout et al., 2012). How the different platforms are used, depends also on their digital architectures (Bossetta, 2018). It quickly became apparent that the digital platforms do not serve simply as additional channels for the distribution of television ads but contain other content because of their different production methods and the more precisely defined target groups (e.g., Crigler et al., 2011; Fowler et al., 2021). In addition, electoral advertising posted on social media reaches users in a different reception situation than television advertising, so the effects are also likely to differ too. In fact, digital ads serve other campaign goals than traditional television ads. Research in the USA has shown that TV advertising is preferably employed for persuasion, whereas online ads manifest a wider range of functions, but primarily aim at the mobilization of partisans and support the candidates’ fundraising campaign (Ballard et al., 2016; Fowler et al., 2020; Motta & Fowler, 2016). With the growing use of social media by campaigners, one might expect negativity to increase as well, because online ads are less subject to public scrutiny than ads on television, and through targeting, they also encounter a more inclined audience. However, while some studies assessed reduced negativity, lower issue content, and increased partisanship for Facebook ads (Fowler et al., 2020, 2021), others found more attack themes in web-only than in television ads (Roberts, 2013). And not all candidates seem to count on negative strategies in the same way. A large international study (Valli & Nai, 2020) concluded that challengers, extreme candidates, and right-wing candidates are more prone to negative campaigning others call negative advertising on Facebook a “desperation strategy” (Auter & Fine, 2016, p. 999) preferably used by underdog candidates to launch issue attacks in less competitive races. Research on the impact of digital ads on the audience yielded mixed results. While some authors doubt that online ads have substantial impact (e.g., Broockman & Green, 2014, p. 281), others ascribe ads targeted on various variables significant effects on voter behavior (Liberini et al., 2020). The mobilizing function that targets supporters and followers, also acts as an amplifier for political polarization (Fowler et al., 2021). However, if the advertising is mistargeted and gives voters the impression that the candidate has issue priorities different from their own, the ads may have negative consequences for the ad sponsor (Hersh & Schaffner, 2013). By sharing ads on social media, users increase the ads’ reach and, in addition, appear as a trusted source for what appears as a recommendation rather than advertising and thus disguise the strategic character of an ad. At the same time, since users leave digital traces, they provide advertisers with data that can be exploited for further planning of the ad campaign (Brodnax & Sapiezynski, 2020). Feedback mechanisms such as retweets and likes deliver campaigners information about the popularity of their posts and can, for example, be an incentive for the use of negativity (Mueller & Saeltzer, 2020). Since the Brexit campaign, the US 2015–2016 election cycle, and the dubious activities of Cambridge Analytica, digital political advertising became subject of a controversial debate and technology companies are facing demands for regulation

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and sharper scrutiny of paid advertising on their platforms. This discussion relates to privacy concerns regarding the collection and use of data, to questionable forms of online ads, a lack of transparency, and the dissemination of mis- and disinformation and possible outside intervention (Zeng et al., 2021). In order to pre-empt legal regulations, the tech companies reacted with various rules for paid political content on the platforms as well as measures for transparency (Fowler et al., 2020) and some banned political ads completely or temporarily (Zeng et al., 2021). However, this again raises questions about their definition of political content and the selection processes (Kreiss & McGregor, 2018, 2019).

How About Generalizations and Comparability? Following from the long tradition and ongoing importance of audiovisual advertising in US campaigns there is a large body of research on the employment, contents, and effects of ads broadcast on television and more recently posted on social media. However, general statements about whether political advertising achieves its ultimate goal are difficult to make. This is due, first of all, to the heterogeneity of methodological approaches, specific and often small samples, different dependent and independent variables, and, not least, the changing political environments that make each election campaign special. Effects studies are dominated by all kinds of experimental settings, which not only raises the usual question about the impact of ads under real conditions and in competition with all other campaign channels but also contributes to a lack of evidence on the long-term effects of ads. Generalizations of the findings from content analyses that capture formal and content elements of the ads, are less problematic. The comparability is given if the categories match and are understood and applied in the same way by coders. The enormous amounts spent on political advertising in the USA suggest that electoral ads matter—for the campaigners. All in all, the many studies on the effects of election advertising seem to indicate that they also matter for voters. However, these are complex processes that vary with the nature of the ads, the communication channels, and the recipients, which contributes to the fact that it is difficult to make generally valid statements. To paraphrase Bernard Berelson (1960, p. 345) with his legendary statement on the state of media effects research from 1948, one could therefore say: Some kinds of ads brought to the attention to some kind of people under some kinds of conditions have some kinds of effects. Even more problematic than national comparability is the transferability of research designs and findings from the USA to other countries because the USA represents an exceptional case in terms of political advertising. As stated in the introduction, political advertising is to be understood against the background of the respective political culture. This means that the general and current political context of a country at the time of the election plays a role for campaign communication. It is also significant for the specific context of electoral advertising and the comparison between the USA and European countries that the latter have predominantly

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parliamentary systems in which parties play a more important role than is the case in the US candidate-oriented system. In addition, the mostly strict rules for election advertising in European countries are of particular relevance. Regulation can take various forms ranging from a total ban of the electoral advertising on television, restrictions for the permissible amount to specifications for the visual and verbal content of the ads (cf. Holtz-Bacha, 2017a, 2017b). While political advertising in the USA can claim the broadly defined right of freedom of expression, European countries tend to display more of a social responsibility attitude toward political advertising. They usually make a distinction between political advertising and election advertising, with the former often prohibited, the latter only allowed in the last weeks before the election date. The restrictions on election advertising are explained by the concern for its effects, especially negative campaigning, on the individual voter as well as the general image of politics. Certain rules are intended to ensure the fair distribution of airtime for all election campaigners. Methodologically, comparative studies between election advertising in the USA and European or Latin American countries are also a challenge. This applies equally to content analyses and effects research. Because of the differences in the ads’ length and style, systematic comparisons require an agreement on coding units. The purchase of broadcast time in the USA is expensive and therefore most ads are very short and often comprise only one presentational style (format). Thus, for instance, a negative spot is dominantly or completely negative and can be coded as such. In other countries and particularly where broadcast time for the individual spot is fixed and allocated without charge, electoral spots are often much longer and are therefore composed of more than just one format (e.g., talking head, montage, endorsement, interview). Agreement on common categories is another challenge for international studies because the meaning and operationalization of concepts vary according to political culture. Negative advertising is a case in point which can serve to exemplify the challenges for international comparisons. Negative advertising is common in US campaigns but is not equally acceptable in other countries and, if used at all, negativity is less aggressive than what we know from the USA and often rather implicit than explicit. So, whereas negative advertising may be “a universal phenomenon” (Nai & Walter, 2015b, p. 2) definitions vary to a large extent (Nai & Walter, 2015b, pp. 10–12) and complicate comparative content analysis. Differences in the amount, intensity, and target of negativism also stem from a country’s electoral system. In contrast to candidate-dominated systems, attacks on individual candidates are less common in campaigns that are run by parties. At the same time, this refers to the difficulty of comparing electoral advertising from presidential and parliamentary systems which comes along with the problem to decide whether differences in strategies are due to cultural background or to the systemic features. In an international context, effects research is even more difficult than the comparison of contents because the stimulus differs from one country to another. The stimulus in this case is electoral advertising and, as argued above, very much rooted in the national (political) culture. This affects the design of spots and their

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verbal and visual contents as well as their role in election campaigning. As it is known from commercial advertising, there are considerable differences in advertising styles and reception habits across cultures such as direct/less direct address of the viewers, display of the product, or presentation of arguments (De Mooij, 1998, pp. 228–231). Therefore, even if the methodological conditions are similar, international comparisons of reception and effects of political advertising have to be done with caution. Although the USA dominates research on political advertising, the last two or three decades have seen the emergence of an increasing number of studies in the European and Latin American democracies (cf. Holtz-Bacha & Just, 2017). This has also led to a differentiation in that, in addition to audiovisual advertising, other forms of election advertising such as electoral posters (Holtz-Bacha & Johansson, 2017) are also receiving attention. Given the methodological difficulties mentioned above, the lack of systematic international comparisons does not come as a surprise. First attempts to comparative studies exist (Holtz-Bacha et al., 2017; Kaid et al., 2011), but this is far from enough to answer the question of what generic advertising strategies are or where we are dealing with national peculiarities.

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Strategic Political Public Relations in the “Age of Populism” Brittany Shaughnessy

and Spiro Kiousis

Abstract Scholars tout today as the “age of populism” (Ricci, D.M., Cambridge University Press., 2020) following worldwide electoral success for populist politicians. Populist politicians seem to utilize an atypical formula for managing relationships with media, public, and other relevant stakeholders. Notably, they are more digitally savvy than their non-populist counterparts, maintaining direct communication with niche publics. This political environment has sparked a great deal of research within political science and political communication scholarship. To keep with the times, political public relations research must be reexamined to adjust strategies and tactics accordingly for ensuring electoral success. In this chapter, we argue that the populist politician creates a unique approach by merging political marketing and political public relations tactics. Specifically, this shift emerges in their use of emotional appeals, reactive communication, digital communication, and overall social media presence. Keywords Political public relations · Social media · Populism · Political strategy

Introduction An increasingly interconnected academy and world begets interdisciplinary research that is imperative in maintaining rigorous literature. Populism and political public relations scholarship exemplify this notion. While the former merges scholars from political science (Akkerman et al., 2014; Mudde, 2004), political communication (Hameleers, 2018; Uscinski et al., 2021), among others, the latter considers political marketing, persuasion, public diplomacy, political science, public affairs, public relations, and political communication perspectives (Strömbäck & Kiousis, 2019). Ricci (2020, p. 1) touted today as the “age of populism” following the election of Donald Trump and other populist politicians worldwide. This notion stresses the B. Shaughnessy (✉) · S. Kiousis Department of Public Relations, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA e-mail: bshaughnessy1@ufl.edu; [email protected]fl.edu © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Salgado, S. Papathanassopoulos (eds.), Streamlining Political Communication Concepts, Springer Studies in Media and Political Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45335-9_9

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need to merge political public relations and populism research. Independently, each discipline already provides unique, interdisciplinary scholarship; their convergence will enhance theory and applied practice. As a field, political public relations is centered around maintaining relationships and reputations with media organizations and practitioners, the public, and relevant stakeholders. Extant research has highlighted the digital transformation that social media has brought to the discipline (Schweickart et al., 2016; Sweetser, 2019), yet populism is scantly mentioned (Alaimo, 2019). Populist politicians are considered more technologically savvy than traditional politicians, managing their reputations, short-term, and long-term relationships with relevant stakeholders, media, and the public (Aalberg et al., 2017; Mazzoleni et al., 2003) digitally. Digital communication breaks traditional barriers between candidates and constituents, allowing the politician to distance themselves from the privilege that initially brought them to prominence (Busby, 2009). This perceived distance from the establishment may attract populist voters, a niche electorate unified by their distrust in elites (Mudde, 2004). Recent electoral success of populist politicians worldwide is indicative that this voting bloc’s power cannot be underestimated. Rather than speculating on what makes their communication and relationship management process unique, empirical research should examine how populist politicians are able to achieve success. Therefore, political public relations must be reexamined considering the growing influence of populism in political communication worldwide. In this chapter, we assert that the populist politician merges political marketing and political public relations strategies in a way that sets them apart from the traditional establishment politician. Specifically, this shift is exemplified through their emotional appeals, reactive communication, media relations, and digital communication tactics, highlighting a strategic form of populist politics.

Populism Though populist politicians have experienced recent electoral success worldwide, populism is not a recent concept. In fact, Converse (1964) noted a distinct group in his seminal work on public opinion—survey participants that did not align with a political party, but instead emphasized societal divides and differences between “big business” or “rich people” and “labor” or “working men” abandoned by the elite (Converse, 1964, p. 14). In analyzing his data, Converse did not classify these participants as ideologues, as they did not perceive siloed political parties to encompass their beliefs. Following this publication, early academic exploration culminated in a 1967 conference with the goal of defining populism across disciplines. The opposite occurred—scholars left claiming that populism could be considered several concepts: an ideology, a mentality brought about by recurring societal shifts, a political philosophy, an “anti” phenomenon, a pro-people phenomenon, or a mentality within socialism and nationalism (Ionescu & Gellner, 1969). Scholarship subsequently remained in contention, with literature stalled in a conceptual debate rather than empirical research.

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Ongoing scholarly debate in this realm has resulted in a literature filled with varying conceptualizations and propositions rather than empirical findings (Aslanidis, 2016). As solid theory requires support and falsifiability (Krcmar et al., 2016), empirical research is imperative within the field. Today’s scholars typically fall firmly into one of three conceptual camps (Gidron & Bonikowski, 2013): populism as political ideology (Akkerman et al., 2014; Mudde, 2004), populism as discourse (Aslanidis, 2016; Hameleers, 2018; Jagers & Walgrave, 2007), or populism as a political strategy (Stavrakakis et al., 2017). The purpose of this chapter is to emphasize populism’s politically strategic components that will benefit political public relations practitioners. Though contentious literature may not agree on a universal definition, Mudde’s (2004) is widely cited and largely uncontroversial. As such, this chapter adopts the following definition: Populism [is] an ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, “the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite” and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people. (p. 543)

This definition’s utility lies within the notion of a split society, a component core to populist beliefs. Those with populist attitudes perceive society as divided into two homogenous groups: the “good-willed” people and the “corrupt” elite (Canovan, 1999; Taggart, 2000). In the populist’s eyes, the people are well-intentioned but have been left behind by their self-serving opponents: the elite. As such, the people feel animosity toward and are distrusting of the elite and their institutions, whether they be media (Hameleers et al., 2017; Krämer, 2014), bureaucratic (Uscinski et al., 2021; van Prooijen, 2018; van Prooijen & Acker, 2015), financial (Lacatus, 2019), academic (Oliver & Rahn, 2016), or scientific (Stecula & Pickup, 2021). Coupled with paranoia, this widespread distrust makes populism unique from other political or economic ideologies. While the elite occupy their institutions, the people reside in an imagined “heartland,” a term coined by Taggart (2000) to represent the homogenous nature of the people. This name may imply a welcoming environment to all but it is important to note that it is inclusive only of those with shared values (Canovan, 1999; Hameleers, 2018). Hitstorically, some scholars contended that populism existed only on the political right (Canovan, 1999) but recent research has revealed that distinct populist attitudes exist on both the far-left and far-right ends of the ideological spectrum (Inglehart & Norris, 2016; Lacatus, 2019; Lowndes, 2017; Oliver & Rahn, 2016; Uscinski et al., 2021). Indeed, right-wing populists are more likely to distrust media (Hameleers, 2018; Manucci, 2017; Mazzoleni et al., 2003), bureaucratic (Akkerman et al., 2014; Mudde, 2004), and academic (Oliver & Rahn, 2016; Stecula & Pickup, 2021; van Prooijen, 2018; van Prooijen & Acker, 2015) elites. Conversely, left-wing populists distrust economic elites (Lowndes, 2017; Oliver & Rahn, 2016; Uscinski et al., 2021), particularly those who comprise the “one percent” (Lacatus, 2019, p. 224). Interestingly, right-wing populists have seen more electoral success than their leftwing counterparts in Western society (Inglehart & Norris, 2016).

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Populism as a Political Strategy While populism takes a variety of forms through ideological and discursive approaches (Gidron & Bonikowski, 2013), a perspective of populism as a political strategy has gained recent notoriety (Barr, 2018). This notion highlights a shared goal between political public relations practitioners and populist politicians. Indeed, Resnick (2015) defines populism as “an electoral strategy aimed at mobilizing voters to support a political party” that “relies on a charismatic leader who fosters unmediated linkages with a mass of unorganized, marginalized constituents” (p. 317). As you will read below, political public relations and a strategic view of populism share several objectives. As such, utilizing populism as a political strategy should prove advantageous in shaping political behavior (Barr, 2018), despite antagonistic views of populism flooding academia and media coverage (Frank, 2020). To increase electability, a politician may employ populist messaging or align with a populist party. But such a unique ideology requires unique political public relations tactics to maintain relationships with the public, media, and relevant stakeholders. This task is all the more arduous when the target population perceives traditional media organizations or the financially affluent as elites. How does a political actor appeal to people who hold disdain toward the very things that allowed them the ability to run for public office? At face value, these considerations greatly complicate matters, as traditional media were once crucial in spreading campaign messaging and, consequently, public prominence brought about name recognition for candidates. Recent technological innovations, particularly social media, allow populist politicians to remove barriers and communicate directly to the public. The internet provides a platform for campaigns to independently share information subsidies rather than relying on media coverage. In turn, livestream videos, speeches, question and answer sessions, press releases, and other materials are released in a streamlined manner. These objects, denoted “information subsidies” by Gandy Jr. (1982), are made quickly and inexpensively, allowing an organization to spread their message far and wide. Expanding this idea, Turk (1985) asserted that subsidies can be proactive or reactive, where the former anticipates coverage and the latter responds to it. In the digital age, information subsidies exist through social media posts, livestreams, and in digitally native content (Schweickart et al., 2016). As a result, both long- and short-term relationships are easily maintained at a lower cost. Similarly, the public now has a “direct line” to the candidate not yet seen throughout history. This drastic shift would seemingly eliminate media’s place in the political process. Indeed, media practitioners have been forced to re-evaluate their typical formula. Rather than the traditional, direct relationship between political actors and media (Kiousis et al., 2015), scholars now speculate a more complex configuration has arisen (Hameleers, 2018; Krämer, 2014; Manucci, 2017). Despite streamlined communication, scholarship has revealed that social media can contribute to reinforcing spirals (Hutchens et al., 2019). This behavior subsequently strengthens political polarization (Stroud, 2010). Indeed, scholars suggest that populism thrives

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in a polarized political environment (Mudde & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017). To keep pace with a rapidly changing political environment, political public relations research must consider additional perspectives.

Political Public Relations In an ideal world, a political actor or organization successfully recognizes the power of others, manages short- and long-term reputations and relationships with relevant stakeholders, media, and the public, all while mobilizing voters to win elections. At its core, political public relations is an interdisciplinary academic and applied venture, cognizant of public relations, political communication, political science, persuasion, political marketing, and public diplomacy, among other disciplines (Strömbäck & Kiousis, 2019). As the name indicates, political communication and public relations fundamentally construct political public relations. A review of public relations literature provides insight into several items of conceptual consensus (Strömbäck & Kiousis, 2019). Public relations should be understood as a management function. Specifically, public relations is defined by the communication management between an organization and its publics. Perhaps the most obvious definition of public relations is managing relationships with publics (Strömbäck & Kiousis, 2019). Indeed, public relations would not be possible without a public. Acknowledging the public importance, Grunig (2003) conceptualized the situational theory of publics (STP), explicating four unique publics: a nonpublic, latent public, aware public, and active public. Those holding populist beliefs likely fall into aware and active publics, recognizing a shared distrust toward the elite. While populists are less politically active than other groups (Zaslove et al., 2021), they may attend rallies or political protests. Conversely, stakeholders hold a unique role distinct from that of a public (Strömbäck & Kiousis, 2019). While publics independently exist, an organization identifies relevant stakeholders (Rawlins, 2006) as those who “can affect or is affected by the achievement of the organization’s objectives” (Freeman, 1984, p. 46). In the political realm (Hughes & Dann, 2009), stakeholders ebb and flow with each election cycle as issues, circumstances, and technology evolve. A stakeholder can be anyone with a stake in affecting a campaign; they may not even be a political actor but peripherally politically related. In sum, a publicly savvy public relations practitioner attends to each public and relevant stakeholder, recognizing their unique roles in the political process. Political communication is another imperative consideration in political public relations research. Jamieson and Kenski (2017) define political communication as “the presentation and interpretation of information, messages, or signals with potential consequences for the exercise of shared power” (p. 3). It is noteworthy that both public relations and political communication focus in part on interdependent relationships between various actors. Relational benchmarks are typically set by structural and semi-structural factors such as institutions, cultural values and norms, and

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the existing political and media systems (Hallin & Mancini, 2004). It is important to note that in explicating both public relations and political communication, scholars cannot afford to ignore the cultural, social, political, institutional, or systemic contexts that exist within the fields. Further, both concepts address the crucial role media play throughout the process. Political actors, corporations, and other organizations cannot afford to disregard media, the issues they underscore, and how they present various actors, issues, and processes (Strömbäck & Kiousis, 2019; Sweetser, 2019). Indeed, agenda-building, a prominent political public relations theory, underscores the shared influence between media and political actors (Kiousis, 2006; Kiousis et al., 2015). Considering the recent scholarly advances, a rapidly changing political environment, and international governance, Strömbäck and Kiousis (2019) define political public relations as: the management process by which an actor for political purposes, through communication and action, seeks to influence and to establish, build, and maintain beneficial relationships and reputations with key publics and stakeholders to help support its mission and achieve its goals. (p. 11)

This definition was revised not only for brevity but also to reflect political public relations’ digital transformation. In an age scholars describe as one of “Twitter diplomacy” or “Twiplomacy” (Chhabra, 2020, p. 2), the internet is essential in running a successful campaign. According to a report from the Pew Research Center (2021), over 70% of Americans utilize some form of social media. Social media and Web 2.0 have transformed everything from foreign relations to local governance (Graham et al., 2015), allowing citizens to interact with a smaller bureaucracy. Additionally, political participation has been redefined (Sweetser, 2019), with social media movements sparking systemic change throughout Hollywood and in the private sector, giving voice to those typically silenced. Political parties are fundamental to the political process across international governmental systems. Though party strength differs by country, political parties simplify voting choices, mobilize citizen participation, recruit and train political leaders both locally and nationally, organize oppositions, and ensure responsibility for government actions (Webb, 2002). To bolster electability in the United States, the candidate typically aligns with one of two major parties, armed with name recognition and privilege that allow them to fund a successful campaign. However, research has shown that the United States’ two-party system contributes to polarization among voters compared to Norway’s multiparty system (Knudsen, 2020). Polarization is not limited to the United States (Castanho Silva et al., 2020), as the internet creates reinforcing spirals (Hutchens et al., 2019) and difficult terrain for traditional politicians to navigate. Merging a candidate-centered system with a polarized environment creates a space for populist politicians worldwide (Aalberg et al., 2017; Akkerman et al., 2014; Wirz, 2018). A rapidly changing political environment magnifies political public relations’ role in ensuring electoral success. The importance, scope, and impact of political public relations has only increased in recent years as a result of electoral volatility, populist attitudes, complex media environments, increasing international dependency, and mobility of organizations

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and people worldwide (Strömbäck & Kiousis, 2019). Indeed, the digital transformation has amplified the public voice beyond what was historically possible (Hameleers, 2018). Navigating a vocal public can pose difficulties for political public relations managers, as multiple social movements enacting systemic change were born online (Sweetser, 2019). Indeed, the populist politician is likely appealing to niche groups often comprised of active or aware publics. Those with high populist attitudes recognize a separation between the people and the elite (Mudde, 2004). Though recent research reveals that populist citizens participate politically at lower rates than their non-populist counterparts (Zaslove et al., 2021), they are active in spreading messages via social media (Hameleers et al., 2021). Successfully elected populist politicians have demonstrated digital prowess in mobilizing voters.

Political Marketing Where political public relations tactics emphasize long-term, multiway relationships, political marketing emphasizes one-way, top-down communication (Kiousis & Strömbäck, 2014). As such, political marketing strategies are typically concerned with short-term goals like electoral success and fundraising (Walker & Nowlin, 2021). Based in business and marketing literature, political marketing strategy is often procedural and formulaic in creating political success. Drawing from consumer behavior research, political marketing treats political communication similarly to businesses selling products to customers (e.g., Cwalina et al., 2010). Considering the important role of parties in political public relations, political marketing scholarship asserts that there are three major political parties: product-, sales-, and marketingoriented parties (Lees-Marshment, 2001). First, a product-oriented party relies on individuals appreciating its ideas and policies, resulting in eventual votes. A productoriented party’s efforts are focused on developing a political product based in members’ attitudes and beliefs, with the hope that representation will mobilize a given base. A marketing-oriented party is the most cognizant of this need, using marketing intelligence to identify expressed latent voter needs and demands, therefore designing a product to meet those needs (Lees-Marshment, 2001; Strömbäck & Kiousis, 2019). The goal is voter satisfaction in providing them with a product that they already want, hopefully lending itself to mobilization. Perhaps the recent populist boon is due to their ability to utilize market intelligence, listening to populist self-mass communication through social media (Hameleers, 2018). In turn, their campaigns’ “products” are emotional appeals via charismatic candidates (Canovan, 1999), acknowledging their voters’ plights while managing relationships with relevant stakeholders and media practitioners. Candidate-centered politics complicate matters, especially when campaigns are marketing to niche audiences. For a populist politician, the target voting bloc is typically one which feels forgotten by the elite. However, political candidates are often products of privilege that brought them to the public stage. This raises an important question: how does a candidate with means market him or herself to a

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public disdainful of elites? By populist politicians selecting a group feeling downtrodden and forgotten by a progressing society, their campaigns must bring forth unique techniques through their charisma and messaging to hook the target audience. To ensure electoral success, these politicians must separate themselves from the distrusted establishment and privilege which afforded them their candidacy. The candidacy of Donald Trump in 2016 exemplifies this notion. Though he was a political outsider promising to “drain the swamp,” Trump simultaneously distanced himself from the financial and celebrity prominence that funded and provided name recognition early on during his campaign (Oliver & Rahn, 2016). While it is too early to know if Trump’s campaigning will transform political practices, the writing is on the wall, and it is noteworthy that he followed Busby’s (2009) populist political strategy almost exactly. Busby (2009) stated that modern voters alienate candidates who showcase conspicuous wealth and prominence. In response, politicians began portraying themselves as members of an imaginary social class, creating faux social and emotional ties with the working class. Though traditional political marketing tactics emphasized one-way targeted communication through legacy media (O'Shaughnessy, 1990), the digital transformation has allowed politicians to utilize marketing intelligence in listening to voters’ needs, crafting their product around voter frustrations. With the internet normalizing multiway communication, legacy media’s role has been reduced (Hameleers, 2018). Instead, political actors can listen and respond directly to voters, de-classing themselves by using terms like “we” and “us” (Hameleers et al., 2021). One-way tactics have subsequently become outdated. The populist politician uniquely merges political marketing and political public relations strategies to ensure electoral success while managing stakeholder and media relationships in the longterm, recognizing a networked public sphere. We are inclined to reference network theory in concluding our political marketing discussion. According to Borgatti and Halgin (2011), a network “consists of a set of actors or nodes along with a set of ties of a specified type (such as friendship) that link them” (p. 1169). Shared endpoints interconnect each tie to form paths, indirectly linking nodes that may not be directly tied to one another. This notion gleans insight into the role of stakeholders (Strömbäck & Kiousis, 2019) who may be peripherally involved but can still affect or be affected by an organization’s failures and achievements. Technology has afforded the public a relevant node in the political web, of which organizations must be cognizant (Yang & Saffer, 2018). Taken together, these notions emphasize the network agenda-setting model (NAS; Guo et al., 2012; Kiousis et al., 2016), which asserts that bundling objects and attributes across media is advantageous to a successful campaign. Though technology increases the likelihood of a “tangled” network, a successful grasp of it can ensure an organization maintains long-term relationships with media, public, and stakeholders.

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Populism, Political Public Relations, and Political Marketing It is essential to mark populist actors as unique from traditional political actors, as their techniques have prompted unprecedented electoral success (Ricci, 2020). The populist politician merges political public relations tactics with political marketing, where traditional political public relations strategies may have historically sufficed for their non-populist counterparts. These innovative campaigning and relationship management strategies are likely a result of social media and subsequent polarization. Indeed, the internet allows people to organize around shared messages, while the political actor can de-class and communicate directly with his or her constituents. This is not to say that non-populist politicians are not utilizing similar strategies, but their recent international electoral success reveals an approach that non-populist politicians have not yet replicated successfully. Populism, political marketing, and political public relations converge to reveal strategic differences through the use of emotional appeals, communication styles, media relations, and digital communication (Fig. 1).

Emotional Appeals Scholars have long speculated that charisma is crucial to a candidate in ensuring electoral success and connecting with voters. In fact, it has been widely theorized that a charming personality coupled with an emotional appeal to their base is what differentiates populist politicians from their more traditional counterparts (Canovan, 1999; Converse, 1964; Krämer, 2014; Manucci, 2017). Though grounded solely in speculation, scholars have surmised that there are several emotional appeals a populist politician can make (Aalberg et al., 2017; Wirth et al., 2016), but this was not tested empirically until recently (Hameleers et al., 2021; Wirz, 2018). In their work, Wirth et al. (2016) denoted emotional appeals or messaging as falling into one of two camps: “advocative” or “conflictive.”

Fig. 1 Populist politicians’ deviations in relationship/reputation management

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Advocative messages favor the in-group, often defending the good-natured and capable common people. Indeed, advocative messages “refer to a monolithic people, stressing the people’s values and achievements, demonstrating closeness with the people, or demanding sovereignty for the people” (Wirz, 2018, p. 1116). In referring to a monolithic people, the politician recognizes the existence of a homogenous common people with shared beliefs and goals (Taggart, 2000). When stressing the people’s virtues and achievements, the politician adopts a Manichean approach, one which divides society into “good versus evil” (Castanho Silva et al., 2020) and emphasizes the people’s good nature (Jagers & Walgrave, 2007). By distancing themselves from the elite and privilege which afforded them their public status, the politician can demonstrate closeness to the people (Block & Negrine, 2017). While advocative messages favor the in-group, those which discredit out-groups are conflictive. As for conflictive populist messages, appeals might distinguish “others from the people, discrediting others, blaming the elite, or denying sovereignty to the elite” (Wirz, 2018, p. 1116). The first, “distinguishing others from the people,” exemplifies horizontal populism, wherein members of the heartland exclude horizontal out-groups (Hameleers, 2018; Jagers & Walgrave, 2007; Taggart, 2000). Finally, while promoting popular sovereignty, populist messaging often denies elite sovereignty, demanding an end to a powerful elite (Cranmer, 2011). Research has shown that blame attributes (Krämer, 2014) and negative valence mobilize voters (Hameleers et al., 2017). Scholarship has utilized these appeals in an experimental setting; to our knowledge, Wirz’s (2018) work serves as the first empirical test of populist emotionality. Indeed, her model revealed that populist emotional appeals, whether advocative or conflictive, elicited greater emotion than non-populist messaging. Consequently, this emotionality resulted in increased persuasive power of the advertised message (Wirz, 2018). While populist emotionality has been tested against non-populist appeals, such as pluralistic (Wirz, 2018) and elitist appeals (Akkerman et al., 2014), research is housed largely in a European context.

Proactive and Reactive Communication Shifting from populist style to content, we turn next to proactive and reactive communication, an area with limited populist research. Smith (2020) differentiated between the two, asserting that proactive communication may include organizational performance, audience participation, special events, alliances and coalitions, sponsorships, activism, and transparent communication. Conversely, reactive communication may include attacks, embarrassment, threat, denial, excuse, justification, concession, ingratiation, disassociation, relabeling, concern, condolence, regret, apology, investigation, corrective action, restitution, repentance, and silence. In other words, proactive communication is an offensive tactic while reactive communication is a defensive tactic. Indeed, reactive communication tactics bear resemblance to crisis communication; populist politicians treat political issues as

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“emergencies” (Canovan, 1999) that necessitate a crisis response (Bene & Boda, 2021). Scholarship (Mazzoleni, 2014) has revealed that populist politicians utilize more reactive communication. Contradictory to this finding, populist politicians are often perceived as more authentic than their non-populist counterparts (Enli & Rosenberg, 2018), possibly due in part to their simple and sometimes derogatory language (Alaimo, 2019). Similarly, Baker (1997) posited that some politicians “wing it,” in their communication tactics, where perceptions supersede facts (Mudde, 2004). This may be exemplified today by a politician straying from the teleprompter, going off script, or exhibiting erratic social media communication during non-business hours (Khan et al., 2021). While this behavior may appear unprofessional, it makes for good television, highlighting a conflictive relationship between populist politicians and media actors.

Media Relations & Digital Communication Diplomatic relations, news media, politics, and communication-at-large have undergone a digital transformation in recent years. Paid, earned, owned, and shared media may be unrecognizable (Golan et al., 2019), with mediated public diplomacy (Entman, 2008) and digital diplomacy superseding traditional strategies. Shifting to a highly electronic world, digital diplomacy refers to the use of technology in advancing diplomatic relations (e.g., smartphones, email, social media; Cassidy & Manor, 2016). This notion can be expanded throughout politics today, as political actors must be digitally savvy to stay current and ultimately ensure electoral success. Earned media (Colicev et al., 2018), or the traditional agenda-building assumption that news media will pick up content from information subsidies, has transformed. While the classic hierarchical structure was sound for centuries, technology has given organizations agency in spreading their messages. To maintain relevance, paid media is becoming increasingly digital, though campaigns remain steadfast in their reliance on newspaper and mail advertisements (Golan, 2014). Uncommon in the United States, government-owned media is especially relevant in non-democratic institutions (Rawnsley, 2015) as influencing agendas. Furthermore, shared media is most salient in a digital society, encompassing any information shared via social media sites (Golan & Himelboim, 2016). Each aforementioned facet merges to create a digitally dominant media and political environment. Populist politicians have been attuned to this transformation while traditional politicians have been slower to adapt, highlighted especially through differing media relations strategies. While the relationship between a non-populist politician and news media can accurately be described through agenda-building theory (Kiousis et al., 2015), the relationship between a populist politician and news media is inherently contradictory (Hameleers & de Vreese, 2021). If media organizations are considered elite, how do campaigns navigate mediated environment essential for communicating messages to voters (Hameleers, 2018)? Though traditional media’s role looks different than it

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once did, they are still essential to political public relations strategy (Sweetser, 2019), undergoing a transition themselves. A populist’s charismatic personality combined with reactive emotional appeals makes for excellent ratings (Manucci, 2017). Considering their charismatic personalities and flamboyant style, populists can easily become protagonists on talk shows, in the news media, or garner general media attention (Manucci, 2017). Their campaign style is atypical and therefore newsworthy (Krämer, 2014). Populist politicians are generally considered more media savvy than their non-populist counterparts, which is exemplified by their skillful navigation of an everchanging media environment. In his “political communication ecosystem,” Manucci (2017) depicts three distinct classes of interaction that might occur between political and media actors: direct, indirect, and mixed. While not formally based in agenda-building, these interactions reflect the theory’s core tenets (Kiousis et al., 2015). In a direct interaction, the populist politician utilizes media to spread their message by sending direct subsidies (Gandy Jr., 1982) to media. Media then cover these subsidies through positive, neutral, or negative reporting. In an indirect interaction, the political actor uses their own platform to spread unfiltered populist messages (denoted an indirect subsidy by Gandy Jr. (1982)). This is simplified through social media, party press, or state or private television. Media can choose whether to cover these messages, but the information is already publicly available via the politician’s communication channels. In a mixed interaction, media may become populist actors themselves by giving a voice to the people while opposing elites, opposing non-populist views, or making a non-populist sentence populist (Manucci, 2017). Indirect interactions are best explicated in Krämer’s (2014) notion of media populism, in which media view themselves as surrogates for the downtrodden people. In fact, some cable news hosts denounce mainstream media, separating themselves from media elites (Peck, 2021) and identifying instead with the people. Hameleers (2018) described the relationship between populism, social media, and news media through his theoretical framework. The first prong denotes “(journalistic) media populism,” wherein media utilize populist attributes or logic while amplifying voices of both the people and populist politicians. Further, they may antagonize the elite while serving as a surrogate for public opinion. This idea is similar to Krämer’s (2014) notion of media populism and Manucci’s (2017) mixed interaction. After consuming news, the people may utilize social media to publicly spread populist messages. This behavior, classified as “populism mass self-communication,” was not possible before the internet, as common people did not have the means necessary for spreading messages to a large audience (Kiousis, 2006). Finally, these posts are interpreted by relevant stakeholders, such as politicians, media actors, interest groups, and the public, in a process denoted as “populist interpretation frames” (Hameleers, 2018). These interpretations may result in media coverage or public response to populist messaging, thus continuing the cycle. A networked public sphere (Reese & Shoemaker, 2016) considers the role of social media, political norms (Yang & Saffer, 2018), and the public in agenda influence. Central to this idea is third-level or network agenda-building, wherein

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objects and their attributes co-occur, creating a web of salience (Guo et al., 2012; Neil et al., 2018; for further explication see “future research” section). Indeed, the co-occurrence of these agenda objects and/or attributes can increase the likelihood that they will be perceived as salient together (Ragas & Kiousis, 2013). These conceptualizations ground Hameleers’ (2018) framework in considering the media and public while allowing for mass interpretation. Understanding the communication cycle is essential for comprehending the populist politician’s tactics for maintaining relationships with key publics (political public relations) while creating products for niche audiences (political marketing).

Different Strategies for Different Politicians Faced with a transforming political landscape, political public relations research has reached a crossroads. Albeit a significant shift, this should not be detrimental to scholarship, as researchers have pivoted before to meet the demands of a growing digital world (Sweetser, 2019). Following recent voter trends worldwide, it is essential to consider ideologies beyond the traditional left-right political spectrum to understand the tactics that bring about electoral success. While research on populism is beginning to highlight the communication strategies and styles utilized by populist actors, empirical examinations in this area are in their infancy. However, extant political public relations research highlights the strategies used by traditional politicians in maintaining long-term relationships (Seltzer, 2019). Merging ideas from each discipline, we assert that significant differences between populist politicians and their non-populist counterparts arise in their use of emotional appeals, largely reactive communication, media relations, and social media use. Figure 2 provides an overview of literature highlighting this notion. Future political public relations research can keep up with a quickly evolving political environment by considering the populist politician’s political strategies, noting their contrast with traditional political strategies. Indeed, scholarship proves that synergy between disciplines only enhances research.

Future Research: Continuing Agenda Building Work Agenda-building posits that relevant actors and organizations (e.g., political parties, interest groups, etc.) utilize public relations strategies to influence the press and public agenda (Lan et al., 2020) through earned, owned, shared, and paid media and subsidies (Golan et al., 2019), such as press releases, speeches, interviews, social media, email, websites, and advertisements, various entities attempt to transfer salience. While agenda-setting emphasizes passive salience transfer, agendabuilding emphasizes intentional, proactive efforts to influence the press’, publics’, and relevant stakeholders’ agendas (Kiousis & Ragas, 2015).

Fig. 2 Political public relations, political marketing, & populist strategies

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Agenda-building’s expansion is categorized into three levels: salience transfer, subsidy valence, and network agenda-building. At the first-level, scholars analyze the formation and transfer of object salience (Zhang et al., 2017). Specifically, firstlevel agenda-building examines salience transfer of issues and stakeholders from organizational subsidies to the press and public. Issues may be political or corporate. American political issues often deal with the economy, healthcare, foreign affairs, education, etc. Stakeholders are typically those peripherally involved with political or corporate campaigns, including political opponents, interest groups, parties, government agencies, and other organizations spanning the public, private, and non-profit sectors (Kiousis et al., 2015). Extending this logic, second-level agendabuilding examines the subsidy valence, tone, or slant, exemplified through descriptions, qualities, characteristics, or value judgements assigned to an object (Kiousis et al., 2015). Borrowing from agenda-setting, second-level agenda-building asserts that organizations not only tell the press and public what to think about but also tell them how to think about it. Underscoring emotion is crucial when considering future research in the realms of populist communication and Moral Foundations Theory. Finally, third-level agenda-building attempts to map salience while identifying patterns and clusters of co-occurrences (Kiousis & Ragas, 2015; Kiousis et al., 2016). Organizations may utilize a system of subsidies (Neil et al., 2018) built upon co-occurring objects and/or attributes of salience intended to influence media, public, or stakeholder interpretations (Kiousis & Ragas, 2015). Theory is improved by continuous expansion, with future agenda-building opportunities offering rigorous additions.

Concluding Thoughts The political environment has clearly transformed across borders and institutions with reverberating effects. To ensure electoral success, political actors must pivot from traditional strategies in acknowledging this shift. Populist politicians pose a unique circumstance following recent worldwide electoral success, evident through their emotional appeals, reactive communication, digital communication, and media relations. They appear to merge political marketing and political public relations strategy, recognizing the interconnected network essential to today’s politics. For political public relations research to keep pace, scholars must acknowledge the populist politicians’ deviation from the norm and reassess traditional research patterns. Scholars studying populism can only enrich theoretical and methodological rigor, thus advancing interdisciplinary research.

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