The Societal Environment for Political Communication: Recent Trends

The relations of social change to media change are complex and reciprocal. Over the postwar period, political communication has been responsive (though also contributory) to the following chain of exogenous change:

• Modernization--that is, increased social differentiation and specialization, fragmenting social organization, interests, and identities; proliferating diverse lifestyles and moral stances; and fueling identity politics (Luhmann, 1975; Swanson & Mancini, 1996). This complicates tasks of political aggregation and communication, supports markets for minority media, and may explain the appeal of talk-show explorations of divergent personal and sexual behaviors, conflicts, and aberrations.

• Individualization--embracing the elevation of personal aspirations, consumerism, and reduced conformity to the traditions and demands of established institutions, notably political parties, the nuclear family, mainstream religion, the workplace, and neighborhood and social-class groupings. In approaches to politics, citizens have become more like consumers (instrumental, oriented to immediate gratifications, and potentially fickle) than believers. Politicians must work harder to retain their interest and support.

• Secularization--involving the loss of institutional avenues to the sacred and the reduced status of official politics, reflected initially in weaker party identifications but spreading subsequently to most other facets of political authority. The diminished parties face increased competition for media and public attention from the rise of hard-lobbying interest and cause groups. Relations of elites to masses are transformed by the evaporation of deference and increased skepticism about the credentials, claims, and credibility of authority holders in many walks of life. This supports political and media populism.

• Economization--the increasing influence of economic factors and values on the political agenda and other areas of society, including culture, arts, and sports (Martenson, 1998). The subordination of formerly more autonomous spheres (e.g., higher education, publishing and journalism) to economic criteria of performance is encouraged.

• Aestheticization--in Ulrich Beck's (1994) sense of people's increased preoccupation with stylishness, image, presentation, and appropriate tastes, especially in fashion and music. This encourages closer associations of politics with popular culture (Cloonan & Street, 1997).

• Increasing rationalization of all facets of purposive organization and administration. This favors arguments backed by systematically gathered evidence in forums of relatively sustained policy debate (conferences, quality press, signed columns, specialist political programs, analytical journalism, weekly magazines of news and comment). Policymakers, think tanks, and pressure groups are encouraged to commission pragmatically oriented research, strengthening the hands of experts whose claims to be able to conduct and interpret it are widely accepted. But it also supports the emergence of " the instrumental rationalization of persuasion, " based on the techniques, values, and personnel of (a) advertising, (b) market research, and (c) public relations (Mayhew, 1997).

• " Mediatization" --the media moving toward the center of the social process. This promotes the concept and practices of a " media-constructed public sphere, " [1] elevating the communication function and the role of communication experts in a wide range of institutions. The " modernization" of such institutions is often equated with tooling them up for sophisticated public relations (as latterly in Britain with the Monarchy and even the Church of England!).

Many problems of government have been exacerbated by these trends. Higher social expectations demand more of authorities whose abilities to cope have been reduced. With societal consensus fragmenting, there am more disparate constituencies for politicians to try to satisfy. Overall, the political arena has become more turbulent, less predictable, less structured, and more difficult to control.

Amidst numerous changes and problems, however, the persistence of cultural support for democratic values (admittedly diffuse, uneven, and difficult to measure) should also be noted. Its influence can be exerted through expectations of politicians to articulate their case convincingly in the face of challenges, receptivity to substantive news agendas when relevant and accessible, dislike and criticism of communication practices by politicians or journalists that fall below certain standards, and broad acceptance of a notion of the citizen's role as someone who aims to keep up with social and political affairs, to learn how proposed policies might affect his or her life, and to form a sense of what political leaders are really like.