Search

This essay reviews and analyzes from the perspective of political communication, the scope and effects achieved by the performance “Un violador en tu camino”, created by the feminist collective LASTESIS. The rhetoric of signs, languages and movements, released a few weeks after the social outbreak in Chile, is reviewed and understood from the literature based on the definition and dynamics of political communication, the media system and its effects, the citizen response and the impact on social networks, including digital activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An editorial is presented on the relationship between media , politics and society. It expresses the view that how structural, organizational, cultural, and individual factors shape the ways in which citizens, journalists, and politicians interact across a variety of media. It also mentions impact of political communication through media on Social science research.

We use a two-wave panel survey of parent-child dyads in the United States to connect online democratic divides with the unequal socialization of political interest in the home. We test a model connecting parent socioeconomic status to the amount of political communication in the home and the subsequent development of youth political interest over the course of an election cycle. We develop the theoretical concept of online civic infrastructure to foreground how interest-driven social media use in adolescence may shape future opportunities for civic and political engagement by building network connections and opening up flows of communication that carry news, political information, and opportunities for mobilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diversity of opinion can be understood as a fundamental condition of public debate in politics and civil society. It always has been a typical feature of pluralist societies. However, as we witness ever-more-fiercely negative campaigns, increasing political polarisation, and public debates filled with prejudices and false assumptions, dissonance and disconnection have evolved as characteristic features of contemporary mediatised public spheres. In this article, it is argued that the Internet is a driver of this development. Therefore, analysis of political communications demands an analytical shift—from the study of consonance to the study of dissonance, and from the study of connections to the study of disconnections and their consequences for democracy. Scholars should investigate online and offline dissonant public spheres and ask how they relate to inclusion demands and counterpublics and when they eventually shift into populism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the social media has facilitated interactive communications between the political elites and public. In the 2016 UK Referendum, the social media became a vehicle for contested political arguments and post-truth positions defined the Remain and Leave camps. For instance, it was claimed that the United Kingdom Independence Party former leader Nigel Farage’s anti-migrant tweets influenced many voters. In the 2016 US Presidential election, the victorious celebrity property tycoon Donald Trump maintained a controversial online presence. He posted tweets about his campaign and engaged in a blatantly hateful online discourse aimed at his political opponents. Therefore, does such a usage of the social media aid democratic representation or contribute to a greater destabilisation of modern politics? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As both a fact of complex modern society and a normative principle of democratic communication, pluralism is often framed as a paradox: mysterious, self-contradictory or potentially self-defeating. Does the paradox of pluralism undermine its normative potential? The essay proceeds from an empirical look at the paradox of pluralism as it appears in practical discourses of faith, politics and institutions, to a theoretical exploration of pluralism in philosophy and communication theory. Arguing that paradox is a framing problem, I deploy pluralistic communication theory to reframe the paradox of pluralism as a practical communication problem. I distinguish four theoretical ideals of pluralistic communication and explore the dialectic tensions among them for their heuristic potential to inform pluralistic praxis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article asks where stands the notion of a crisis of public communication, first promulgated by Blumler and Gurevitch in 1995, in the new communications ecology of 2017. Its focus is a “crisis of communication for citizenship.” It maintains that the sources of that crisis, spotted in 1995, still apply and have been joined by others. However, today’s political communication system has been radically transformed by digitisation, social media and the Internet, allied to accelerating and multi-faceted currents of social change. Its pluses and minuses for effective citizenship are canvassed in detail. Despite the opening up of many constructive avenues, in two fundamental respects, the prevailing system is still enmeshed in crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have long observed that presidential communication about a marginalized group can help shape that group's reality. Yet most analyses of such communication focus on a relatively small number of texts, making it difficult to identify important changes over time and analyze factors that might explain those changes. The present study proposes an analytic framework that specifies 4 measurable parameters of presidential communication about marginalized groups, as well as 4 explanatory factors. We use this framework to analyze the census of presidents' formal communications about the LGBT community. Results highlight presidents' limited communicative engagement with the LGBT community and the roles that political party, rhetorical context, public opinion, and sociocultural touchstones play in explaining presidential communication about this important group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies in psychology have shown that the framing of a message affects judgments about its truth, as negatively framed statements are perceived as more trustworthy than formally equivalent, positively framed statements. The current work examines this effect in the contexts of political communication and public opinion. The results of three experiments show that equivalence framing affects both the perceived truth of political messages and the trustworthiness of its source, and that one cause of this effect is that recipients have learned to associate negativity with news and positivity with persuasive communication through media exposure. Consequently, we find that positively framing statements can lead recipients to feel that the source is trying to persuade them, which triggers reactance, reducing the perceived truth of the message and the trustworthiness of the source. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pervasive use of multiple technological tools to engage with media and political content (i.e., TV sets, laptops, tablets, smartphones, etc.) has deeply altered the way citizens around the world consume information and discuss public affair issues. Many are using 2, or even several “screens” at the same time to do so, a phenomenon known as second or dual screening. The goal of this article is twofold. First, it introduces a set of novel studies published as a special section devoted to second screening. Second, based on nationally representative original survey data collected in twenty societies (N = 22.033), the study depicts a snapshot of second screening habits for news and politics around the world. Findings reveal that young people tend to second screen more than older counterparts. Similarly, there are also differences in political behaviors between groups of high and low frequency second screen users. More intensive users tend to politically express themselves in social media, and participate more often in offline political activities. On the other hand, results indicate little or no differences between these two groups in terms of their voting behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study investigates how social factors affect Taiwanese Internet users’ dual screening use and its impact on online and offline political participation. The Web survey recruits 961 dual screen users. Structural equation modeling results show that bridging social capital and perceived social presence are significantly associated with dual screening use. Dual screening is positively related to online and offline political participation. Dual screening use strongly influences offline political participation when mediated by online political participation. Moreover, alternative media trust is positively related to online political participation, whereas mainstream media trust shows a negative association. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines second screeners’ conversations during the 2016 U.S. election primaries. Over a 2-week period, we collected Twitter mentions of 3 top cable news shows (N = 49,568) posted while these shows were broadcast. Using social network analysis, we reconstructed the social network of second screeners (N = 27,811) and found that the network exhibits ideological homophily with few cross-camp interactions. Our findings strongly indicate the existence of echo chambers in the second screen realm, with more confined echo chambers identified in networks of Twitter followers in comparison to second screeners. The study provides one of the most comprehensive mappings of the second screening phenomenon during an election campaign to date. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite public awareness of their role, speechwriters occupy an anxiously liminal position within the political process. As the ongoing dispute between former Australian prime minister Paul Keating and Don Watson over the Redfern Speech suggests, the authorship and ownership of speeches can be a fraught proposition, no matter the professional codes. Crafting and re-crafting identity places speechwriter and speechmaker in a relation of intense intimacy, one in which neither party may be comfortable and from which both may well emerge changed. Having written speeches for Jack Layton, former leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada, I know just how complex, uncertain and productive that relation can be. This article conceives of identity as transindividual, formed in the intensity and flux of encounter, and weaves together the personal and the critical to examine politics' speechwriting ghost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the extent to which young people are able to comprehend the political messages contained in satirical videos that circulate online. We do so through an analysis of responses to videos embedded within an online survey of 15- to 25-year-olds (N=2070) conducted in 2011. Respondents were randomly assigned to view one of two short, humorous YouTube videos relating to immigration policy and were then asked questions that tested their comprehension of what they had seen. Substantial proportions of our sample were unable to answer these correctly. Further analysis indicates that individuals' levels of political knowledge and their predisposition to agree with the message contained in the video are strong predictors of comprehension. These findings indicate that the potential impact of incidental exposure to online political communications is smaller than many scholars have assumed, particularly when the message is inconsistent with the viewer's prior beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SMS have become an important source of infotainment besides being only a channel for communication. Youth especially is an active consumer of this communication technology. This study was planned to explore whether there is any relation between the exposure to the political communication and propaganda messages and attitudinal change in college students of graduate and undergraduate level. It was also aimed to investigate the perception of college students regarding change in political attitudes caused by exposure to political SMS texts. This study was designed to accomplish the objectives such as "to explore the relation between political SMS propaganda texts and the attitudinal change in the college students" and "to verify if SMS prove to be an effective tool of political communication, persuasion and propaganda". The study was carried out using a questionnaire to be filled by the respondents selected by randomization technique. Independent and dependent variables were defined adequately and demographic variables were also taken into consideration. On the basis of the results and findings, it is concluded that the exposure to SMS based political texts has the capability to change the political attitudes of young college students. Students are heavily relying on SMS based information and they believe in it as to be their personal medium of expression. This heavy reliance is leading to cause change in their political mindsets, conceptions and attitudes. Still it cannot be predicted that such campaigns can change the voting behavior too because of so many other social, economical and religious factors in Pakistan. So it is concluded that exposure of SMS based political information causes change in political attitudes of college students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is impartiality possible or desirable within the conduct of political judgment? Many philosophers and democratic theorists have answered this question with a resounding "no." This article provides an affirmative answer to this question based upon the empirical study of deliberative democracy within "mini-publics." Through a reconstruction of the phenomenology of deliberative democracy within groups, this article offers an alternative conception of impartiality that can overcome many of the political and philosophical challenges that have been raised about this quality. "Deliberative impartiality" is a group-mediated orientation born from reflective civic collaborations within deliberative processes that prioritize free, equal, and inclusive communicative participation. This process-dependent form of mutually enacted deliberative impartiality differs from the individual, cognitive "standpoint" model of impartiality that still informs much of the theoretical literature, and it is for this same reason an intriguing and overlooked approach to impartiality that is worthy of empirical and theoretical consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we analyze the role of the economic rationale in modern cultural policy decision communication and ask why it remains such an important factor, even though research has argued against it. Based on Luhmann’s system theory, we show how the economic rationale manifests itself in the cultural political communication as parasitic and complementary couplings, and how different communication forms are in play: the indirect, direct, and the both-and form. The point is to construct communicative positions in cultural policy. The positions involve the economic rationale in their own particular way and each of them offers themselves as a communicative platform which the culture politician can optionally step into and out of. The arts system stands out from other systems by not distinguishing itself in one single distinction and coding. In exactly this issue lies the communicative complexity which the communicating cultural politician faces and must handle. As our analysis shows, this complexity is handled by communicating within the economic rationale and coding, with the result that complexity is reduced. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There is extensive research dedicated to civility in online deliberation, but empirical studies on mutual respect are still scarce. By adopting a systemic approach to deliberation, this study identifies different targets of disrespect (conversation partners, arguments, actors and groups involved in a certain conflict, profanity without a clear target), and investigates their relations with deliberation in different online contexts. This paper argues that the nature of digital affordances related to anonymity and homophily influences the expression of foul language, but not as significantly as was originally assumed. Analysis reveals that online social norms help to explain the configuration of interactions and practices of reasoning together in YouTube, blogs, and Facebook; and the extent to which profanity affects justification and reciprocity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Patterns found in digital trace data are increasingly used as evidence of social phenomena. Still, the role of digital services not as mirrors but instead as mediators of social reality has been neglected. We identify characteristics of this mediation process by analyzing Twitter messages referring to politics during the campaign for the German federal election 2013 and comparing the thus emerging image of political reality with established measurements of political reality. We focus on the relationship between temporal dynamics in politically relevant Twitter messages and crucial campaign events, comparing dominant topics in politically relevant tweets with topics prominent in surveys and in television news, and by comparing mention shares of political actors with their election results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young people's engagement in political discussions with parents and friends represents a significant component of the political socialization process and can be seen as an activity where they learn some very basic democratic skills. Based on data from qualitative interviews and a questionnaire survey, this article explores how young people experience political discussions in their everyday life. Our data indicate that young people who feel that their father, mother or friends, respectively, hold more distant political views are less likely to engage in political discussions with each of them. These findings support previous studies in political communication suggesting that people tend to avoid social situations where political disagreements are likely to appear. Furthermore, the results show that there are significant gender differences when analysing the role of the parents as political discussion partners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the history of communication in Wales and the role of bilingual elites such as the clergy and gentry in shaping the dynamics of political culture. Emphasis is given to topics such as the vertical integration of political opinion in public politics, the socials statuses of the English and Welsh languages, and the oral transmission of news and gossip.

Although issue ownership theory – the idea that voters consider specific parties to be better able to deal with some issues – had already emerged in the 1980s, it is only in the past 10 years that the theory has gained prominence in the study of voter and party behaviour. Despite the steep increase in scholarly attention, there is still no consensus regarding the impact of issue ownership on parties and voters. This special issue makes two key contributions: firstly, it provides state of the art contemporary issue ownership research, by focusing on the historical roots as well on recent conceptual, theoretical and methodological developments in the field. Secondly, by focusing on new aspects and effects of issue ownership, the special issue offers a look forward and outlines a research agenda for future work on issue ownership. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite the difficulty of communicating with adversaries, scholars have described a variety of signaling mechanisms that relate to bilateral negotiations between states. This article demonstrates that when more than two states are involved, states have additional, costless means of communicating their intentions. In particular, statements of a third party to a dispute on behalf of a "protégé" are credible because of the effect these statements have on the protégé's conduct. Protégés that are emboldened by support will sometimes be more likely to take actions that risk conflict, causing the third party to be more likely to have to intervene. Thus, commitments to fight on behalf of other states can convey information to potential adversaries. This form of signaling requires that the interests of the third party and protégé be sufficiently aligned and that the third party be powerful enough, but also not too powerful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that Jeffrey Alexander’s magnum opus, The Civil Sphere, presents a valuable but curiously narrow account of how political power works in American society, especially the power of interest groups. Alexander neglects the extensive literature on the “faces of power” in political science and the classic, critical literature on “source reporting” in journalism studies, both of which offer analyses of interest-group activity and discourse that are more compelling than Alexander’s analysis. Using the example of religious interest-group politics, the essay suggests that the language a group employs is not so much a marker of membership in a “civil sphere,” as it is a strategic discourse of ordinary politics. The essay concludes by suggesting that Alexander’s civil sphere may be simply a particular vocabulary of politics rather than a separate and independent social realm. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Some terrorist acts are meant to communicate something beyond the violence they cause. They are a form of political communication that should be studied as such. To identify the acts we consider politically communicative, we develop a typology of primary objectives that ranges from strategic goals to such communicative statements as moral condemnation. We examine why, as a form of political communication, terrorist acts typically fail. Terrorism fails as political communication because it is violent; because targeted audiences often have little prior awareness of the group's grievances; because it is sometimes a complex communication; and because governments and media frame issues in a way that sidelines the act's communicative content. In promoting a better understanding of the message, and why it fails, we hope to make this component of terrorism a more robust subject of study for political communication scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perception Analyzer dial-meter technology has been increasingly deployed to track and display aggregate plots of focus group members' real-time responses to argumentation in televised political debates convened in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States, and elsewhere. This article examines data cited to establish the Perception Analyzer's reliability and validity; traces the tool's historical roots to a Cold War machine nicknamed "Little Annie"; explores recent public controversies surrounding the tool's use; and reflects on how real-time dial metering shapes the political terrain through a hidden curriculum that teaches contestable notions of public debate spectatorship and citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A participatory action research study of anti-authoritarian activist media practices in Quebec, Canada was carried out by the Collectif de Recherche sur l'Autonomie Collective. Analysing interviews from 117 participants in nine activist groups and networks, we have found that grassroots anti-authoritarian and anarchist activists engage in a diversity of media tactics, choosing tools consistent with their desired goals and audiences. These goals can be grouped into four categories: developing affinity, creating social movement spaces, mass mobilizations and global solidarity. These communicative tactics in the activist ‘repertoire of communication’ are informed by several important commitments to alternative content and processes, including collective self-representation, prefigurative politics and accessibility. We conclude that grassroots autonomous activists sometimes limit the reach of their media to create safer spaces, or to deepen and extend their political analysis, and they sometimes produce media for wider audiences, for local mass mobilizations or to develop global relationships of solidarity. This deepens our understanding of the specific diversity of tactics developed by grassroots autonomous media activists in their repertories of communicative action, challenging received notions that anarchist or anti-authoritarian media only ever reach a limited audience. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Blogging is an increasingly important practice in election campaigns, showing interesting variations across contexts. Recent research has shown that the adoption and use of blogs is strongly shaped by national institutional settings, that is, the different roles given to parties within political systems. However, intra-national differences in the practice of political blogging are yet to be explained. This article investigates the variation in usage of blogs in electoral campaigns in Sweden, a country characterized by strong political parties and a party-centered form of representative democracy. The central argument is that different parties utilize blogging in different ways. Just as blogging is shaped by how institutions support persons or parties, we propose that political blogging is shaped by party affiliation and ideological positions on individualism and collectivism. The empirical analysis, based on a survey among over 600 blogging politicians, confirms that ideological positions towards individualism and collectivism have a great impact on the uptake and usage of political blogs, portraying political blogging as a strongly ideologically situated practice of political communication. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Direct-democratic processes have won popular support but fall far short of the standards of deliberative democracy. Initiative and referendum processes furnish citizens with insufficient information about policy problems, inadequate choices among policy solutions, flawed criteria for choosing among such solutions, and few opportunities for reflection on those choices prior to decision making. We suggest a way to make direct democracy more deliberative by grafting randomly selected citizen assemblies onto existing institutions and practices. After reviewing the problems that beset modern direct-democratic elections and the long history of randomly selected citizen assemblies, we propose five different varieties of randomly constituted citizen bodies—Priority Conferences, Design Panels, Citizens’ Assemblies, Citizens’ Initiative Reviews, and Policy Juries. After selecting members through stratified random sampling of citizens, each of these assemblies would operate at a different stage of the legislative process, from initial problem identification through approval of a finished ballot measure. Highly structured procedures guided by professional moderators and featuring expert testimony on policy and legal matters would help to ensure deliberative quality, and careful institutional designs would make each body politically powerful. In the end, these citizen bodies would be likely to address the deliberative deficit of direct democracy and better achieve the public’s desired policy objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Zimbabwean journalists and civil society activists in the diaspora have employed humour not merely to mock or ridicule but to conscientize people, and to raise attention for and awareness of the situation in Zimbabwe, including the social, economic and political realities and everyday life concerns and hardships experienced by ordinary people in the country. This article explores how diasporic Zimbabweans have made use of the freedoms in their current locations and of new media and other means to express their dissatisfaction with the Zimbabwean government and the state of affairs in their home country through satire and related forms of political humour. This article focuses particularly on the dissemination of cartoons and satirical messages from liberal host countries through the Internet. It is argued that political humour in the Zimbabwean diaspora has a counter-discursive function and serves as a 'medium of communicating dissent'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prince William County, Virginia received national attention when county lawmakers voted in July 2007 to enact one of the nation's most sweeping anti-immigrant resolutions. Help Save Manassas, a local anti-immigration group, assumed a prominent role in the county's immigration debate and in leading the charge for local government action. An analysis of Help Save Manassas’ newsletters reveals the role of extreme speech in social change. By linking patriotism to an anti-immigration stance, many of the perspectives expressed in the newsletters achieved legitimacy in the public sphere, ultimately influencing public policy. This case study reveals one strategy by which extremist groups make their views mainstream and in so doing underscores the importance of attending to the vernacular of conservative counterpublics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the techniques used in the propaganda of Sub-Saharan Africa. It mentions the specific techniques used by the Sub-Saharan Africans in their message delivery, which include glittering generality, name calling, and frustration scape-goat. It says that the effectiveness of propaganda in Sub-Saharan Africa as a way of influencing others is based on the nature or the circumstances of the issue. It suggests that besides from the traditional techniques, some strategies like songs, public trials, and mass-government have become acknowledged as devices in the states of Sub-Saharan Africa.

The article focuses on the use of persuasive communications used by communist during Cultural Revolution in China. It mentions that Chinese Communists during the ideological war after 1968 are good presenters of ambitious political propagandas written in slogans. It states that persuasive communication is the simple formula for the establishments of propaganda groups. It says that Maoists, people who follow the ideology of political leader Mao Zedong, during this time uses a four word formula as form of communication, tu shih, pi shu, which means fight self, repudiate revisionism.