Context Of Political Communication Research Articles

Democracy and digital disintegration: Platforms, actors, citizens

Abstract The digital transformations of contemporary media systems have had severe consequences for democracy and public debates. This introductory article addresses key challenges of what we refer to as varieties of “digital disintegration” within democratic societies. The eight contributions in the special issue are thematised in three parts. The first part explores disintegration within the context of political communication during elections, including data-driven campaigning, populism, and politicised forms of news production. The second part delves into the role of alternative news curators, audience polarisation, and issues of self-censorship in digital information environments. The third part centres on deliberative norms connected to content moderation of user comments within legacy media and the consequences digitalisation has had on journalistic sourcing practices and source diversity over time. The contributions offer valuable empirical insights, as well as new lines of thinking concerning democracy and digital and disintegrative transformations in the Nordic region and beyond.

Նոր մեդիան փոխակերպել է քաղաքական հաղորդակցությունը / New Media Have Transformed Political Communication

Social media have played an important role in political processes in recent years. The purpose of the study is to find out what changes have occurred in the context of political communication as a result of the development of new media. Our goal is to show the changes that have changed the dynamics of communication between political leaders and the public under the influence of social networks.

Who gets a say in this? Speaking security on social media

Can social media revert the top-down dynamics of securitization? Limited by the notion that ‘security is only articulated in an institutional voice by the elites’, the role of non-elite actors has remained understudied. Only recently has it been proposed that lay actors can become influential security agents through their online activity. However, social media’s capacity to revert the top-down dynamics of securitization remains contended. To explore this puzzle and seeking to update the theory of securitization to the modern context of political communication, this study employs a semi-supervised machine learning approach to analyse a novel dataset of over 10 million Twitter messages by five elite and non-elite actor groups discussing the Amazon rainforest fires in 2019. Finally, the study uses vector autoregression (VAR) models to explore who leads and who echoes the securitization process. The results show that both elite and lay actors behave as security agents and demonstrate the methodological contribution offered by the text-as-data approach developed in this analysis.

ИЗ ИСТОРИИ "АРЕСТОВАННЫХ" ФОЛЬКЛОРНЫХ ТЕКСТОВ В 1930-Е ГГ.: СЛУЧАЙ ПЕСНИ О ЧЕЛЮСКИНЦАХ (ПО МАТЕРИАЛАМ СЛЕДСТВЕННЫХ ДЕЛ НКВД)

The article analyzes the content of the song about Chelyuskintsy (sung to the tune of “Murka”) and how it spread among the people. The lyrics were kept in the investigation cases initiated by the NKVD Department of the Sverdlovsk Oblast’ in the 1930s. NKVD operatives considered that song to be “counterrevolutionary” and arrested people with the lyrics written down. Analyzing the results of folklore research during Stalin’s day, the author determines the importance of the found archival materials within both the context of political communication of the 1930s and the scientific discussion of the heroic topicality of the Soviet mythology. Comparing the text versions of the song with each other as well as with other versions published earlier, the author identifies both common elements and differences of situational and/or personal nature. The analysis of the style and handwriting, personal and other data of the arrested, the stories of the text “circulation” in the testimonies of both the accused and the witnesses, supplemented by facts from other studies, allows us to conclude about the space and social environment for the “counterrevolutionary” work.

Ekspresi Partai Politik Anggota Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat Daerah Provinsi Nusa Tenggara Timur

In realizing the role of political parties, legislative members had been faced with a battle of political discourse in the courtroom. The purpose of this study is to explore the political communication performance of legislators in the NTT provincial legislature in expressing party ideology. The research method that used is qualitative approach. The results shows that the expression of political party ideology verbally and nonverbally was carried out in accordance with the context and function of political communication politics, leading to the management of audience impressions that display positive emotions, politeness, and impression management and facework strategies. Besides that, the expression of the ideology of political parties by DPRD members is carried out in the form of political lobbying, political negotiations and political rhetoric which presents three political stages as a space for communication. The three forms of political communication have different political agendas communicated among DPRD members, between DPRD members and the government so that the context of political communication often experience message distortions and message inconsistencies which have implications for the quality of communication performance of DPRD members.

Redes sociales, inteligencia computacional y predicción electoral: el caso de las primarias presidenciales de Chile 2017

This article shows the results of an interdisciplinary research applied to the predictive capacity of social networks, specifically Twitter, in the legal primaries in Chile in 2017. Through the incorporation of computational intelligence, we monitored the interaction of all Chilean users who mentioned at least once some of the five candidates competing to design a forecast model that considered the context of political communication, which delivered results under 2% in the mean absolute error (MAE), with more precision than the electoral polls

Failures in Leadership

Abstract This paper examines how Japanese leading politicians deal with the communicative problems posed to them during broadcast political interviews. Based on data gathered during 14-month period in 2012–2013, the paper replicates and modifies the “Theory of Equivocation” to explore the extent to which national and local level politicians endeavor to affect the content of information distributed to the public and to influence the way people perceive events that take place in the public domain. Differentiating among selected groups of politicians, i.e., ruling and opposition parties’ members, Cabinet ministers and prime ministers, and local level politicians, the paper focuses on the ways Japanese politicians (and for comparison also nonpoliticians) equivocate during televised programs and the conditions underlying this equivocation, thereby also assesses the significance of these talk shows in the broader context of political communication in Japan.

‘Ducking and Diving’: How Political Issues Affect Equivocation in Japanese Political Interviews

AbstractThis paper examines how Japanese leading politicians cope with the communication problems posed during televised political interviews. Based on data gathered during the year 2012–13, the paper replicates and modifies the Theory of Equivocation to detail the responsiveness of national and local level politicians (and for comparison also of non-politicians) to interview questions. Its main focus is on the extent to which Japanese politicians equivocate during televised programs, and the reasons underlying this equivocation. Overall, the paper aims to identify the motives behind interviewees’ equivocation, thereby to also assess the significance of these talk shows in the broader context of political communication in Japan.

A New Era of Minimal Effects? The Changing Foundations of Political Communication

The great thinkers who influenced the contemporary field of political communication were preoccupied with understanding the political, social, psychological, and economic transformations in modern industrial society. But societies have changed so dramatically since the time of these landmark contributions that one must question the continuing relevance of paradigms drawn from them. To cite but a few examples, people have become increasingly detached from overarching institutions such as public schools, political parties, and civic groups, which at one time provided a shared context for receiving and interpreting messages. What are the implications of this detachment on how people respond to media messages? Information channels have proliferated and simultaneously become more individualized. Is it still relevant to conceive of ‘‘mass media’’ or has that concept been made obsolete by audience fragmentation and isolation from the public sphere? Does this new environment foreshadow a return to a time of minimal effects? If we are looking at a new minimal effects era, how can we distinguish it from the last such period? Retracing some of the intellectual origins of the field may help us identify the fundamental changes in society and communication technologies that are affecting the composition of audiences, the delivery of information, and the experience of politics itself. In particular, we are concerned with the growing disjuncture between the prevailing research strategies and the sociotechnological context of political communication, which may give rise to unproductive battles over findings (Donsbach, 2006). To the extent that research paradigms fail to reflect prevailing social and technological patterns, the validity of results will be in serious question. Consider just one case in point: the famous earlier era of ‘‘minimal effects’’ that emerged from studies done in the 1940s and early 1950s (Klapper, 1960). The underlying context for this scholarship consisted of a premass communication media system and relatively dense memberships in a group-based society networked through political parties, churches, unions, and service organizations (Putnam, 2000). At this time, scholars concluded that media messages were filtered through social reference processes as described in the two-step flow model proposed by Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955; Bennett & Manheim, 2006). Although the classic study by Lang

Fahrenheit 9-11, Need for Closure and the Priming of Affective Ambivalence: An Assessment of Intra-affective Structures by Party Identification

This study extends priming research in political communication by focusing on an alternative political information source (i.e., Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9-11), affect rather than cognitions, and the existence of intra-affective ambivalence. In addition, two moderator variables are analyzed: political party identification and need for closure. There is a statically significant three-way interaction between the viewing of F 9-11, political party identification, and need for closure relative to the dependent variable of affective ambivalence toward George W. Bush. High need for closure Republicans who viewed F 9-11 exhibited pronounced levels of Bush-affective ambivalence. In addition, high need for closure Independents who viewed F 9-11 exhibited far lower ambivalence toward Bush relative to their control group peers. The findings are discussed relative to the roles performed by emerging alternative political media and the expansion of the theory of priming within the context of political communication.

Political Communication Research and the Mutations of Democracy

In recent years many political communication researchers have attempted to relate the attributes of political messages to the circumstances of the generative institutions of political communication, political institutions and media institutions. This mode of analysis helps reveal why the political messages produced by actors within these institutions have the attributes that define them and lead to their civic consequences. As its generative institutions undergo fundamental changes in response to altered circumstances, raising the possibility of corresponding but not yet known changes in democratic processes and practices, the study of political communication has taken on particular urgency. This essay describes some of the current research that endeavors to appreciate the wider context of political communication and illustrates some of the main themes of political communication study.