Civic/Political Participation

Abstract

Whether in its deliberative aspect or other variants, democracy is in many ways a form of government fundamentally based on processes of communication and persuasion. As such, it is only natural that communications scholars should be interested in studying relationships between communication processes and civic or political engagement. These studies have traditionally drawn on scholarship in political science, which has an even longer standing engagement with concepts of political and civic engagement. More recently, the increasing significance of interactive communication technologies in the realm of politics and broader forces of sociotechnical change have opened the door for communications scholars to join in fundamental conceptual discussions concerning these topics. More often, however, communication scholarship, particularly through the interdisciplinary field of political communication, has focused on civic and political engagement as a set of outcome variables that, given their central place in democratic governance, provide opportunities for scholarship with particular relevance and value to the broader society. Along these lines, political communication research has investigated the effects of various kinds of communication and media on civic or political engagement, including interpersonal interactions, newspapers and television, political advertising, talk radio, and political entertainment programming as well as many communication phenomena related to the Internet.