Strategic Political Communication: Mobilizing Public Opinion in “Audience Democracies”

Abstract

The democratic systems of government are changing profoundly because the form of representation is fundamentally changing. This is the position defended by Bernard Manin (1995, 247–303) in his influential book on the principles of representative government , the term he uses for the form of government of Western liberal democracies. After the classical parliamentarianism of the nineteenth century and the party democracy that was established at the beginning of the twentieth century, according to Manin, representative government currently takes the form of an “ audience democracy .” The characteristics of this new form of government include personalization of elections and the rise of experts in political communication, increasing importance of political offers formulated so vaguely that the governing elites possess a large maneuvering space, the omnipresence of public opinion, and the transfer of the political debate from the backrooms of parliamentary committees and the central offices of parties and associations to the public sphere. Manin has formulated concisely what party and media experts have observed for quite a while. Party researchers point to the decline of the ideologically oriented and structurally rooted mass party and the rise of the “electoral professional party” (Panebianco 1988) or the “cartel party” (Mair 1997). This transformation has led, on the one hand, to the declining importance of the traditional party apparatus and of party militants, and, on the other hand, it has reinforced the importance of the party leaders and of the much more independent electoral audience.