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  3. Communication, Society and Politics

Communication, Society and Politics is a series that probes the political and social impacts of communication processes and systems in national, comparative, and global contexts. The series adopts a broad definition of politics as the exercise of power within and between nations, which includes the social, cultural, psychological, and institutional underpinnings of politically significant communication. The series includes a diversity of methods and views, with an emphasis on questions about democracy, equality, justice, and other normative concerns. In recent years, politics in societies across the world have been transformed by communication technologies that blur traditional definitions of news, the nature of citizenship, and the boundaries between public and private life. Many democracies face challenges due to disruptive communication processes operating in the context of declining levels of trust in public institutions, including legacy journalism. One result of these trends is the spread of disinformation by illiberal movements and parties that aim to undermine science, the press, civil society organizations, and other traditional public information sources. A related trend involves the growth of authoritarian regimes that rely on media systems and communication strategies to manage publics. Within these broad trends are many other important communication developments in which communication technologies and networked organization have impacted human rights, climate change, new forms of citizenship and inclusion, and personal political expression. Communication, Society, and Politics provides a platform to explore how people in different societies engage with the ideas that organize their lives.

  • General Editors: W. Lance Bennett, University of Washington, Regina Lawrence, University of Oregon
  • Founding Co-Editor, Emerituss: Robert M. Entman, George Washington University, Washington DC

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47 results in Communication, Society and Politics

Page 2 of 3

Comparing Media Systems
  • Three Models of Media and Politics
  • Daniel C. Hallin, Paolo Mancini
  • Published online:
    05 September 2012
    Print publication:
    12 April 2004
  • Building on a survey of media institutions in eighteen West European and North American democracies, Hallin and Mancini identify the principal dimensions of variation in media systems and the political variables which have shaped their evolution. They go on to identify three major models of media system development (the Polarized Pluralist, Democratic Corporatist and Liberal models) to explain why the media have played a different role in politics in each of these systems, and to explore the forces of change that are currently transforming them. It provides a key theoretical statement about the relation between media and political systems, a key statement about the methodology of comparative analysis in political communication and a clear overview of the variety of media institutions that have developed in the West, understood within their political and historical context.

Digital Media and Political Engagement Worldwide
  • A Comparative Study
  • Edited by Eva Anduiza, Michael James Jensen, Laia Jorba
  • Published online:
    05 July 2012
    Print publication:
    29 June 2012
  • This book focuses on the impact of digital media use for political engagement across varied geographic and political contexts, using a diversity of methodological approaches and datasets. The book addresses an important gap in the contemporary literature on digital politics, identifying context dependent and transcendent political consequences of digital media use. While the majority of the empirical work in this field has been based on studies from the United States and United Kingdom, this volume seeks to place those results into comparative relief with other regions of the world. It moves debates in this field of study forward by identifying system-level attributes that shape digital political engagement across a wide variety of contexts. The evidence analyzed across the fifteen cases considered in the book suggests that engagement with digital environments influences users' political orientations and that contextual features play a significant role in shaping digital politics.

Mediated Politics
  • Communication in the Future of Democracy
  • Edited by W. Lance Bennett, Robert M. Entman
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    20 November 2000
  • Mediated Politics explores the changing media environments in contemporary democracy: the internet, the decline of network news and the daily newspaper; the growing tendency to treat election campaigns as competing product advertisements; the blurring lines between news, ads, and entertainment. By combining new developments in political communication with core questions about politics and policy, a distinguished roster of international scholars offers new perspectives and directions for further study. Several broad questions emerge from the book: with ever-increasing media outlets creating more specialized segments, what happens to broader issues? Are there implications for a sense of community? Should media give people only what they want, or also what they need to be good citizens? These and other tensions created by the changing nature of political communication are covered in sections on the changing public sphere; shifts in the nature of political communication; the new shape of public opinion; transformations of political campaigns; and alterations in citizens' needs and involvement.

Cosmopolitan Communications
  • Cultural Diversity in a Globalized World
  • Pippa Norris, Ronald Inglehart
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    31 August 2009
  • Societies around the world have experienced a flood of information from diverse channels originating beyond local communities and even national borders, transmitted through the rapid expansion of cosmopolitan communications. For more than half a century, conventional interpretations, Norris and Inglehart argue, have commonly exaggerated the potential threats arising from this process. A series of firewalls protect national cultures. This book develops a new theoretical framework for understanding cosmopolitan communications and uses it to identify the conditions under which global communications are most likely to endanger cultural diversity. The authors analyze empirical evidence from both the societal level and the individual level, examining the outlook and beliefs of people in a wide range of societies. The study draws on evidence from the World Values Survey, covering 90 societies in all major regions worldwide from 1981 to 2007. The conclusion considers the implications of their findings for cultural policies.

Media Concentration and Democracy
  • Why Ownership Matters
  • C. Edwin Baker
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    11 December 2006
  • Firmly rooting its argument in democratic and economic theory, the book argues that a more democratic distribution of communicative power within the public sphere and a structure that provides safeguards against abuse of media power provide two of three primary arguments for ownership dispersal. It also shows that dispersal is likely to result in more owners who will reasonably pursue socially valuable journalistic or creative objectives rather than a socially dysfunctional focus on the 'bottom line'. The middle chapters answer those agents, including the Federal Communication Commission, who favor 'deregulation' and who argue that existing or foreseeable ownership concentration is not a problem. The final chapter evaluates the constitutionality and desirability of various policy responses to concentration, including strict limits on media mergers.

The Internet and Democratic Citizenship
  • Theory, Practice and Policy
  • Stephen Coleman, Jay G. Blumler
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    30 March 2009
  • Relations between the public and holders of political authority are in a period of transformative flux. On the one side, new expectations and meanings of citizenship are being entertained and occasionally acted upon. On the other, an inexorable impoverishment of mainstream political communication is taking place. This book argues that the Internet has the potential to improve public communications and enrich democracy, a project that requires imaginative policy-making. This argument is developed through three stages: first exploring the theoretical foundations for renewing democratic citizenship, then examining practical case studies of e-democracy, and finally, reviewing the limitations of recent policies designed to promote e-democracy and setting out a radical, but practical proposal for an online civic commons: a trusted public space where the dispersed energies, self-articulations and aspirations of citizens can be rehearsed, in public, within a process of ongoing feedback to the various levels and centers of governance: local, national and transnational.

The Making of a European Public Sphere
  • Media Discourse and Political Contention
  • Edited by Ruud Koopmans, Paul Statham
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    29 July 2010
  • This book investigates an important source of the European Union's recent legitimacy problems. It shows how European integration is debated in mass media, and how this affects democratic inclusiveness. Advancing integration implies a shift in power between governments, parliaments, and civil society. Behind debates over Europe's 'democratic deficit' is a deeper concern: whether democratic politics can perform effectively under conditions of Europeanization and globalization. This study is based on a wealth of unique data from seven European countries, combining newspaper content analyses, an innovative study of Internet communication structures, and hundreds of interviews with leading political and media representatives across Europe. It is by far the most far-reaching and empirically grounded study on the Europeanization of media discourse and political contention to date, and a must-read for anyone interested in how European integration changes democratic politics and why European integration has become increasingly contested.

Reality Television and Arab Politics
  • Contention in Public Life
  • Marwan M. Kraidy
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    26 October 2009
  • What does it mean to be modern outside the West? Based on a wealth of primary data collected over five years, Reality Television and Arab Politics analyzes how reality television stirred an explosive mix of religion, politics, and sexuality, fuelling heated polemics over cultural authenticity, gender relations, and political participation in the Arab world. The controversies, Kraidy argues, are best understood as a social laboratory in which actors experiment with various forms of modernity, continuing a long-standing Arab preoccupation with specifying terms of engagement with Western modernity. Women and youth take center stage in this process. Against the backdrop of dramatic upheaval in the Middle East, this book challenges the notion of a monolithic 'Arab Street' and offers an original perspective on Arab media, shifting attention away from a narrow focus on al-Jazeera, toward a vibrant media sphere that compels broad popular engagement and contentious political performance.

After Broadcast News
  • Media Regimes, Democracy, and the New Information Environment
  • Bruce A. Williams, Michael X. Delli Carpini
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    26 September 2011
  • The new media environment has challenged the role of professional journalists as the primary source of politically relevant information. After Broadcast News puts this challenge into historical context, arguing that it is the latest of several critical moments, driven by economic, political, cultural and technological changes, in which the relationship among citizens, political elites and the media has been contested. Out of these past moments, distinct 'media regimes' eventually emerged, each with its own seemingly natural rules and norms, and each the result of political struggle with clear winners and losers. The media regime in place for the latter half of the twentieth century has been dismantled, but a new regime has yet to emerge. Assuring this regime is a democratic one requires serious consideration of what was most beneficial and most problematic about past regimes and what is potentially most beneficial and most problematic about today's new information environment.

Digital Divide
  • Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the Internet Worldwide
  • Pippa Norris
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    24 September 2001
  • There is widespread concern that the growth of the Internet is exacerbating inequalities between the information rich and poor. Digital Divide examines access and use of the Internet in 179 nations world-wide. A global divide is evident between industrialized and developing societies. A social divide is apparent between rich and poor within each nation. Within the online community, evidence for a democratic divide is emerging between those who do and do not use Internet resources to engage and participate in public life. Part I outlines the theoretical debate between cyber-optimists who see the Internet as the great leveler. Part II examines the virtual political system and the way that representative institutions have responded to new opportunities on the Internet. Part III analyzes how the public has responded to these opportunities in Europe and the United States and develops the civic engagement model to explain patterns of participation via the Internet.

Democracy and the Media
  • A Comparative Perspective
  • Edited by Richard Gunther, Anthony Mughan
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    31 July 2000
  • This book presents a systematic overview and assessment of the impacts of politics on the media, and of the media on politics, in authoritarian, transitional and democratic regimes in Russia, Spain, Hungary, Chile, Italy, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, and the United States. Its analysis of the interactions between macro- and micro-level factors incorporates the disciplinary perspectives of political science, mass communications, sociology and social psychology. These essays show that media's effects on politics are the product of often complex and contingent interactions among various causal factors, including media technologies, the structure of the media market, the legal and regulatory framework, the nature of basic political institutions, and the characteristics of individual citizens. The authors' conclusions challenge a number of conventional wisdoms concerning the political roles and effects of the mass media on regime support and change, on the political behavior of citizens, and on the quality of democracy.

The Politics of Misinformation
  • Murray Edelman
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    16 April 2001
  • The Politics of Misinformation is an examination of how concentrations of social and economic power result in public languages of politics that are necessarily image-based, vague, and misleading in their denial of undemocratic tendencies. As a result, public discourses of democracy tend to be populistic, emotional, and likely to emphasize images of progress rather than structural inequalities in their formulations of public problems. Similarly, discourses of policy solutions to public problems emphasize assumptions about rationality in policy processes that are equally poor descriptions of most political outcomes. In short, neither typical problem definitions nor solutions invite critical popular understanding or involvement in democratic politics.

Collective Action in Organizations
  • Interaction and Engagement in an Era of Technological Change
  • Bruce Bimber, Andrew Flanagin, Cynthia Stohl
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    29 February 2012
  • Challenging the notion that digital media render traditional, formal organizations irrelevant, this book offers a new theory of collective action and organizing. Based on extensive surveys and interviews with members of three influential and distinctive organizations in the United States - The American Legion, AARP and MoveOn - the authors reconceptualize collective action as a phenomenon in which technology enhances people's ability to cross boundaries in order to interact with one another and engage with organizations. By developing a theory of Collective Action Space, Bimber, Flanagin and Stohl explore how people's attitudes, behaviors, motivations, goals and digital media use are related to their organizational involvement. They find that using technology does not necessarily make people more likely to act collectively, but contributes to a diversity of 'participatory styles', which hinge on people's interaction with one another and the extent to which they shape organizational agendas. In the digital media age, organizations do not simply recruit people into roles, they provide contexts in which people are able to construct their own collective experiences.

Comparing Media Systems Beyond the Western World
  • Edited by Daniel C. Hallin, Paolo Mancini
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    28 November 2011
  • Comparing Media Systems Beyond the Western World offers a broad exploration of the conceptual foundations for comparative analysis of media and politics globally. It takes as its point of departure the widely used framework of Hallin and Mancini's Comparing Media Systems, exploring how the concepts and methods of their analysis do and do not prove useful when applied beyond the original focus of their 'most similar systems' design and the West European and North American cases it encompassed. It is intended both to use a wider range of cases to interrogate and clarify the conceptual framework of Comparing Media Systems and to propose new models, concepts and approaches that will be useful for dealing with non-Western media systems and with processes of political transition. Comparing Media Systems Beyond the Western World covers, among other cases, Brazil, China, Israel, Lebanon, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Thailand.

When Politicians Attack
  • Party Cohesion in the Media
  • Tim Groeling
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    19 July 2010
  • Fostering a positive brand name is the chief benefit parties provide for their members. They do this both by coordinating their activities in the legislative process and by communicating with voters. Whereas political scientists have generally focused on the former, dismissing partisan communication as cheap talk, this book argues that a party's ability to coordinate its communication has important implications for the study of politics. The macro-level institutional setting of a party's communication heavily influences that party's prospects for cohesive communication. Paradoxically, unified government presents the greatest challenge to unified communication within the president's party. As this book argues, the challenge stems primarily from two sources: the constitutional separation of powers and the intervening role of the news media.

A Virtuous Circle
  • Political Communications in Postindustrial Societies
  • Pippa Norris
  • Published online:
    26 February 2010
    Print publication:
    04 September 2000
  • Is the process of political communications by the news media and by parties responsible for civic malaise? A Virtuous Circle sets out to challenge the conventional wisdom that it is. Based on a comparative examination of the role of the news media and parties in 29 postindustrial societies, focusing in particular on Western Europe and the United States, this study argues that rather than mistakenly 'blaming the messenger' we need to understand and confront more deep-rooted flaws in systems of representative democracy. This 2000 book outlines appropriate standards for evaluating the performance of the news media and the methods available to study this issue. It also compares changes in the news media including the rise of the Internet and the development of post-modern election campaigns. Norris shows that although negative news can erode public support for specific policy issues, in general there is a consistently positive relationship between attention to the news media and political knowledge, trust and participation. For more information on the book, please visit the author's website at www.pippanorris.com.

Cycles of Spin
  • Strategic Communication in the U.S. Congress
  • Patrick Sellers
  • Published online:
    20 January 2010
    Print publication:
    26 October 2009
  • How do politicians try to shape their news coverage? Sellers examines strategic communication campaigns in the U.S. Congress. He argues that these campaigns create cycles of spin: leaders create messages, rank-and-file legislators decide whether to promote those messages, journalists decide whether to cover the messages, and any coverage feeds back to influence the policy process. These four stages are closely related; decisions at one stage influence those at another. Sellers uses diverse evidence, from participant observation and press secretary interviews, to computerized content analysis and vector auto regression. The result is a comprehensive and unprecedented examination of politicians' promotional campaigns and journalists' coverage of those campaigns. Countering numerous critics of spin, Sellers offers the provocative argument that the promotional messages have their origins in the actual policy preferences of members of Congress. The campaigns to promote these messages thus can help the public learn about policy debates in Congress.

Information and American Democracy
  • Technology in the Evolution of Political Power
  • Bruce Bimber
  • Published online:
    19 December 2009
    Print publication:
    24 February 2003
  • This book assesses the consequences of new information technologies for American democracy in a way that is theoretical and also historically grounded. The author argues that new technologies have produced the fourth in a series of 'information revolutions' in the US, stretching back to the founding. Each of these, he argues, led to important structural changes in politics. After re-interpreting historical American political development from the perspective of evolving characteristics of information and political communications, the author evaluates effects of the Internet and related new media. The analysis shows that the use of new technologies is contributing to 'post-bureaucratic' political organization and fundamental changes in the structure of political interests. The author's conclusions tie together scholarship on parties, interest groups, bureaucracy, collective action, and political behavior with new theory and evidence about politics in the information age.

Shaping Abortion Discourse
  • Democracy and the Public Sphere in Germany and the United States
  • Myra Marx Ferree, William Anthony Gamson, Jürgen Gerhards, Dieter Rucht
  • Published online:
    15 December 2009
    Print publication:
    16 September 2002
  • Using controversy over abortion as a lens through which to compare the political process and role of the media in these two very different democracies, this book examines the contest over meaning that is being waged by social movements, political parties, churches and other social actors. Abortion is a critical battleground for debates over social values in both countries, but the constitutional premises on which arguments rest differ, as do the strategies that movements and parties adopt and the opportunities for influence that are open to them. By examining how these debates are conducted and by whom in light of the normative claims made by democratic theorists, the book also offers a means of judging how well either country lives up to the ideals of democratic debate in practice.

New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen
  • Philip N. Howard
  • Published online:
    15 December 2009
    Print publication:
    17 October 2005
  • The political campaign is one of the most important organizations in a democracy, and whether issue or candidate specific, it is one of the least understood organizations in contemporary political life. This book is a critical assessment of the role that information technologies have come to play in contemporary campaigns. With evidence from ethnographic immersion, survey data, and social network analysis, Howard examines the evolving act of political campaigning and the changing organization of political campaigns over the last five election cycles, from 1996 to 2004. Over this time, both grassroots and elite political campaigns have gone online, built multimedia strategies, and constructed complex relational databases. The contemporary political campaign adopts digital technologies that improve reach and fundraising, and at the same time adapts their organizational behavior. The new system of producing political culture has immense implications for the meaning of citizenship and the basis of representation.

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