An introduction to political communication part I Brian McNair, Sintesi del corso di Comunicazione Politica

Scarica An introduction to political communication part I Brian McNair e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Comunicazione Politica solo su Docsity! An introduction to political communication Political communication includes verbal, written and simbolic language. There are three elements on which political action is focused: 1. political actors, individuals who aspire, through organizational and institutional means to influence decision-making process 2. political parties: are the heart of democratic political process. aggregates of more or less like minded individuals, come together within an agreed organizational and ideological structure to pursue common goals. They agree to respect constitutional rules of the political system in which they operate. Parties use various forms of interpersonal communication such as public meeting, rallies etc. parties uses also element taken from the commercial sector such as political marketing rules (strategies, targeted audience), political advertising and public relations, to ensure that a party receives maximum favourable publicity and the minimum of negative. 3. Public organizations. There are 3 non-party actors: trade unions, consumer groups and professional associations defined as public organizations, they are united not by ideology but by some common feature of their members’ situation. Pressure groups, tend to campaign on single issues, they are concerned with such issues as the conservation of natural environment. Terrorist organizations, these organizations actively use media attention with the objective to make their target publics aware of their existence and their objectives. Often by illegal and violent means. The audience is a key element in the political communication process, without a audience, no political message can have any relevance. The purpose of all communication is to persuade and audience is the target of persuasion. Political actors must use the media in order to have their messages communicated to the desired audience. Political reality can be divided into three categories: 1) objective political reality, comprising political events as they actually occur. 2) subjective reality, the reality of political events as they are perceived by actors and citizens. 3) constructed reality, meaning events as covered by the media. in recent decades, the political arena has become more international. The XXI century media audiences are the targets of political communication not only from domestic sources, but foreign ones. The principles of liberal democracy grew out in early modern Europe, beginning in 16th century culminating in the French revolution in 1789. The emergence of the bourgeoisie or capitalist class as the dominant economic force in Europe and America, based on principles such as liberty and freedom. Bourgeois philosophers such as Lock and Milton worked out a critique of the autocratic power replacing it with the theory of representative democracy and individual or citizenship rights. Voting rights were enlarged and progressively become universal. The citizen right to choose was implemented to create a rationa, knowledgeable electorate capable of exercising its rights. The defining charactestics of a democratic regime are: 1. Constitutionality. There must be an agreed set of procedures and rules, that will take the form of a written or non written constitution or a bill of rights 2. Participation 3. Rational choice. Democratic politics must be pursued in the public arena, as distinct from the secrecy of autocratic regimes. But democratic policies are public in another sense too. Individuals act collectively in making decisions about who will govern them. Public opinion is formed in what Habermas called “public sphere” that developed in 18th century in Britain where the first newspapers begun to perform their modern function of supplying not only information but also opinion, comment and criticism, facilitating debate amongst the emerging burgeois and educated classes. Debate and political critiques became, for the first time, public property. Communication media play 5 functions in an ideal-type democratic societies: 1. They must inform citizens of what is happening around them, they play a role of surveillance and monitoring 2. They must educate as to the meaning and significance of the facts 3. The media must provide a platform for public political discourse, facilitating the formation of public opinion, and feeding that opinion back to the public from whence (da cui) it came. Expression of dissent 4. Publicity to governmental and political institutions the watchdog role of journalism. There must be as argued by MikHAIL Gorbechev, a degree of openness surrounding the activities od the political class. 5. The media in democratic societies serve as a channel for the advocacy of political viewpoint. Democracies presumes an open state in which people are allowed to participate in decision-making, and are given access to the media, and other information networks through which advocacy occurs’. Audience must be sufficiently educated and knowledgeable to make rational and effective use of the information circulating in the public sphere. It is argued that the normative assumption of rational citizenry is not realistic. For Bobbio, one of the great broken promises of liberal democracy is the failure of the education system to produce rational voters. When those who hace the right to vote decline to do so, democracy is clearly less than perfect. Political apathy is entirely rational, a cynical response to a political process in which it may appear to the individual that his or her vote does not matter. So there can be argued that democratic procedures contain anomalies which make less than fully democratic. The legitimacy of liberal democratic government is founded on the consent of the governed but consent as Walter Lippmann argued can be manufactured. In manufacturing consent politicians combined the techniques of social psychology with the immense reach of mass media. citizens are the subject to manipulation, rather than exposed to information. There are distinction between persuasion and manipulation. Persuasion, is universally recognized function of political actors in a democracy and manipulation which carries with it the negative connotations of propaganda. There can be made experiments to isolate the effects of particular elements of the communication process 1. Surveys. Public opinion polling depends for its accuracy on the application of sampling procedures which permit the survey to be representative. The question must be carefully