Mode Of Political Communication Research Articles

"I always feel like somebody's watching me"

The practice of political micro-targeting (PMT) – tailoring messages for voters based on their personal data – has increased over the past two decades, particularly in the U.S. Studies of PMT have to date concentrated largely on its effects on voters, or its implications for democracy more broadly. Less attention has been given to answering basic descriptive questions about how people perceive, feel and care about this new mode of political communication. This paper fills that gap by reporting findings from an online survey (weighted to be nationally representative on age, gender, ethnicity, region and past vote) that measured public attitudes toward PMT during the 2020 U.S. Presidential campaign. Specifically, we measure voter orientations toward PMT in four key dimensions – awareness, aversion, knowledge, and acceptability at the aggregate level – and explore how these vary according to a range of individual characteristics. Key findings are that public understanding and acceptance of PMT may be higher than current studies indicate, particularly among certain sectors of the population. Such insights are important for academic research to cognize and also policy-makers, as they move toward greater regulation of voter targeting.

Democratization in the Digital Era: Experience from Southeast Asia

Southeast Asia is home to about 8.5% of the world’s total population and 10% of its internet users, yet it is also home to 12.7% of the world’s social media users. The exponential growth in internet and social media utilization poses both opportunities and challenges towards democratization. The research aims to examine how the digital sphere may or may not support inclusive and deliberative democracy in the region. Using elaboration on case studies from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam, the current study is reflecting on shared challenges and opportunities in preserving democracy amidst the rapid development of cyberspace as a mode of political communication. The findings suggest that digital space has been instrumental in harassing dissent or jailing opposition members in countries like the Philippines and Vietnam. On the other hand, the use of technology provides an opportunity to foster a more deliberative and inclusive democracy in Indonesia and Malaysia. The article contributes to the wider conversation on democracy and the digital sphere in Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) member countries.

Being a master of metaphors

Being a master of metaphors

Political Advertising by Big Business after Rubicon

IN South Africa political advertising as mode of political communication is now firmly established and even the Government used paid space to promote its post- Rubicon policy emphasis. While South Af- political parties are strongly refraining from using political advertising (with the qualified exception of the Labour Party of South Africa and the Progressive Federal Party), Big Business emerged as the major political advertiser. This can be explained by the interdependence between politics and economics. However, without being truly accountable to the public, this is a somewhat controversial trend. Therefore, for the future of democracy, political parties as the primary political actors cannot refrain from using all available communication techniques. The effective use of communication techniques in no way diminishes the need for realistic appraisals of the circumstances, sound policies, organisational efficiency and interpersonal contact P with the voters. Deeds still speak louder than words.

III. Zunft und Unordnung

Abstract Guilds between authority and opposition. This paper compares the legal status of guilds in two German towns of the late Middle Ages: Frankfurt am Main and Hamburg. Both cities represented commercial hubs, Frankfurt with its privilege to hold fairs, Hamburg as a port town and member of the Hanse. Both cities also witnessed unrest and public protest by guilds during the second half of the 14th century. This article argues that those conflicts erupted over the guilds’ attempts to formalise their legal status by having their statutes written and acknowledged by the city council. The council eventually pre-empted those attempts. This happened through a process of bargaining that can be subdivided into three different stages: production of written demands or statutes, destabilisation, escalation. Putting something into writing created a qualitative distinction to orality in a society that was predominantly communicating orally and in presence. Thus, the latter was still the mode of political communication, mainly by swearing an oath, that could settle these conflicts. Where this process failed, the conflict could erupt into open violence, which in turn could only be settled by outside intervention – as in the case of Frankfurt.

Mind the gaps: silences, political communication, and the role of expectations

ABSTRACT Predicated on a one-sided focus on political ‘voice’, analyses of political silences traditionally focused almost exclusively on their negative role as the harmful absence of participation or responsibility. More recently, a new appreciation for the wide spectrum of political functions of silence has gained ground, including forms of willful renitence and even active resistance. Yet this thematic expansion has also resulted in a loss of focus. Lacking a common analytical framework, research on political silences risks limiting itself to the purely additive: finding and filling in ever more minute ‘blank spots’ on the periphery of the map of political research. Building on the work of the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, this paper proposes a solution to this dilemma by means of a reconsideration of the political role of expectations. In political discourse, the expected distribution of moments of silence and articulation expresses established power structures, while unexpected silences and the breaking of expected silences conversely present a powerful means of calling these into question. Focusing on this ambivalence paves the way to a new systematic typology of political silences as a distinct mode of political communication. But above all, it points to the value of silence as an analytical probe, an instrument to fathom the expectations and constraints structuring political discourse in various contexts and spaces. Besides providing the study of silence with an overarching research focus, such an approach would thus build a bridge between the issue of political silence and wider debates on the structures of the political field as a whole.

Lessons from Weibo: Media Convergence and Contemporary Chinese Politics

This paper focuses on the historical relationship between new media development and Chinese politics that led to the formation of the Chinese state’s strategy on media convergence in 2014. Specifically, it analyses a series of influential public controversies in China’s microblog or Weibo sphere in the formative years of Weibo’s development (2011–2012) to reveal the profound class biases, partisan excesses, as well as symbolic violence of Weibo as a platform for public deliberation on Chinese politics. The degeneration of Weibo politics and its anti-democratic nature foreshadowed the state’s intention to steer the direction of media convergence to ensure that the process will not be hijacked by elite interests so as to sustain some resemblance to the CCP’s traditional mass line mode of political communication. However, how to realize the state’s vision remains a formidable task.

The Coevolution of Media and Politics in Taiwan: Implications for Political Communications

Over the course of democratisation, Taiwan’s communications environment has experienced significant changes. Liberalisation and commercialisation of the media, and the emergence and popularisation of digital, have substantially altered the information environment and the expectations and behaviours of both citizens and political actors. This article explores the implications of these developments for political communications, and the vitality of Taiwan’s democracy. The article combines a conceptual framework rooted in mediatisation and hybrid media logics with empirical case studies on election campaigning, social movements, and other modes of political communication. It demonstrates how a new system of coevolving media, civil society, and political spheres is taking shape, characterised by complexity, heterogeneity, interdependence, and transition.

Blogging while Black, British and female: a critical study on discursive activism

ABSTRACTThis study explores Black British women's motivations for divulging racial and ethnic identity in the blogosphere (sometimes referred to as blogging while Black) and their use of blogs for discursive activism. It builds on previous research that gives voice to Black womens marginalized experiences through powerful counter narratives. The blogosphere is often perceived as a racially neutral space where shared interests across geographical and temporal boundaries limit the significance of racial and ethnic identity. However, the constructed narratives of Black British women in this study highlight their experiences of subtle forms of prejudice and discrimination perpetuated through dominant discourses in the mainstream media. The findings demonstrate how they use blogs as a medium for discursive activism to challenge stereotypical raced and gendered representation in the mainstream media. Much of the research on the blogosphere in Britain reflects its use by the White majority population. This study therefore extends understanding of the blogosphere and highlights alternative modes of political communication.

Twenty-first century cyborgs: cosmetic surgery and aesthetic nationalism in Colombia

In this article, I explore the institutional and symbolic construction of aesthetic nationalism in Colombia around a fetishization of women’s surgically exaggerated breasts and buttocks. While political scientists have focused almost exclusively on the internet and social media, other technological advancements have altered the relationships between state and society, public and private, and bodies and national inclusion. Combined with the transnational flow of ideas, goods, and people and a political economy that embraces cosmetic surgeries as a development model, this intersectional analysis suggests that aesthetic nationalism in Colombia has recentered the female body in the practice of nationalism, communicating political information, belonging, and power. Based on archival research, direct observation, and elite interviews, I argue that cosmetic interventions play a key role in conferring citizenship rights and defining the borders of the political community. This study contributes to our understanding of how intersectionality can help explain the ways in which technology shapes national body politics, disrupts conventional modes of political communication and representation, and positions the body at the center of contemporary citizenship practices.

The Invention of Hebrew (review)

Reviewed by: The Invention of Hebrew Robert S. Kawashima The Invention of Hebrew, by Seth L. Sanders. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. 258 pp. $50.00. The very title of Seth L. Sanders's audacious book is already a bit startling, inasmuch as natural languages—as opposed to, say, Esperanto and Fortran—cannot be said to be "inventions." What Sanders actually has in mind is the invention of vernacular literature, specifically, ancient Israel's creation of a standard written Hebrew that could serve as its language of culture and administration. In the Late Bronze Age, writing in one or another imperial dialect (using cuneiform, naturally) was de rigueur among scribal circles of the Ancient Near East. Why, then, did Israelite writers suddenly adopt the alphabet and turn to their native Hebrew in the ninth century B.C.E.? What in particular is the social significance of this linguistic displacement? To answer such questions, this prodigiously researched and wide-ranging study focuses not so much on the Bible as on the epigraphical data. The result is a thought-provoking social history of writing, combining philology, anthropology, and political theory. Sanders's overarching claim is that the rise of written vernacular forms in the Iron Age Levant—ultimately, the Bible itself—signals a new mode of political communication, one that introduced a new actor into history, namely, the people. The book consists of four central chapters framed by a brief introduction and conclusion. In Chapter One, Sanders traces in broad strokes the development of modern biblical studies in relation to general intellectual history, in an attempt to explain why the field has "lost sight of . . . the socially creative dimension of how a text speaks, not just what it says" (p. 14). He places particular emphasis on two pairs of intellectual figures: Hobbes and Spinoza, Lowth and Herder. Invoking the first pair establishes a first major premise: that the Bible is a specimen of "political communication." Invoking the second establishes a second major premise: that this political communication must be related to a people and a place. Chapter Two begins by surveying the early history of the alphabet and its first tentative uses, but the main goal here is to explore the significance of the first two known instances of vernacular literature, that of Ugarit and, later, Israel. It culminates in a fascinating comparison of the Ugaritic "ritual for national atonement and unity" (p. 59) and the biblical Day of Atonement (Leviticus 16). In both, one witnesses the appearance [End Page 150] of a new political entity, namely, the people as a collective participant in history; in both, this entity is addressed as "you." The kin-based political model of West Semitic cultures—versus the monarchic model of Mesopotamia and Egypt—he finally argues, provides the proper context for understanding this social-linguistic development. Chapters Three and Four trace the historical transition itself. Chapter Three describes how, under Egyptian rule of the Late Bronze Age Levant, cosmopolitan cuneiform dominated the realm of writing, leaving little to no room for local dialects. The Amarna Letters are noteworthy for recording the linguistic interference of West Semitic grammar. Otherwise, local languages enjoyed a furtive textual existence as mere snatches of alphabetic writing in the interstices of imperial power: abecedaries, objects scribbled with indications of private ownership, etc. (It was against this backdrop that Ugarit managed to express some level of local cultural autonomy.) Chapter Four finally focuses on the burgeoning of alphabetic vernacular writing in the Iron Age Levant, of which Israel was merely one, albeit major, instance. Sanders shrewdly interprets it as a West Semitic response to the rise of Assyria in the wake of Egyptian rule. Ironically, it was the voice of the Assyrian king, "speaking" to his vassal states through imperial cuneiform monuments, that constituted these as subjects, as they "recognized" themselves as objects of foreign power. By "imitating," in turn, these cosmopolitan literary forms, local peoples began to write in their own languages (pp. 120-22), as evidenced in the roughly contemporary monumental inscriptions in Moabite, Ammonite, and Aramaic, not to mention later Hebrew inscriptions. Sanders's central thesis is compelling and important, but aspects of his argument need clarifying. What...

Nonviolence and Communication

Communication is central to the effectiveness of nonviolent action: methods of protest and persuasion are essentially means of communication, while methods of non-cooperation and nonviolent intervention have crucial communicative dimensions. As a mode of political communication, nonviolence can be contrasted with rational dialogue, electoral politics and violence, and stands out from them in combining high transformative potential with dialogue and participation. The more well-studied dimensions of nonviolence as communication are dialogue with opponents, power equalization to prepare for dialogue and mobilization of third parties. To these should be added two further dimensions, collective and individual empowerment. Two cases of nonviolent resistance in the Soviet Union - the 1991 coup and the 1953 prison camp strikes at Norilsk and Vorkuta - are used to illustrate the dimensions of nonviolence as communication in practice. These examples reveal the importance of communication in nonviolent action. They also suggest the difficulty in gaining information on empowerment, especially individual empowerment, which may be one reason why these dimensions have been neglected. The five-dimension framework of nonviolence as communication has the limitation that many actions mix two or more dimensions. Examining the communicative dimensions of nonviolence can alert both activists and researchers to the fact that nonviolent actions do not `speak for themselves'.

The Dynamics of Factions and Consensus in Chinese Politics. A Model and Some Propositions.

Abstract : A Study of the dynamic of factionalism in Chinese politics: the tension between the imperative of upholding consensus, and the need of officials to seek the security of networks of personal relationships that create counterconsensus factions. These networks are more sensitive to career and power considerations than to ideology, geography, or policy issues. The psychological and cultural roots of factional behavior affect styles of decisionmaking and implementation (causing exaggerated cycles of bureaucratic paralysis, compulsive activity, and again paralysis), modes of political communication (the powerful must use code words, while the weak can be explicit), and a widespread, self-fulfilling belief that any form of intra-elite disagreement will endanger the stability of the political system. (Author)