I have many people to mention here. First, I want to thank the many amazing students who have taken the MA Political Communication at Goldsmiths. I have learnt a lot from our exchanges over the years. Many thanks are also owed to the colleagues and visiting lecturers who have taught with me on the course: James Curran, Natalie Fenton, Des Freedman, Paolo Gerbaudo, Vana Goblot, Mike Kaye, Gholam Khiabany, Jack Mosse, Emily Seymour, Jón Gunnar Ólafsson and Catherine Walsh.

Over the years, I have gained much-needed subject advice, inspiration and personal support from: Peter van Aelst, Olivier Baisnée, Mike Berry, Rod Benson, Lisa Blackman, Clea Bourne, Roger Burrows, Aditya Chakrabortty, Andy Chadwick, Jean Chalaby, Stephen Cushion, Lincoln Dahlberg, Will Davies, Will Dinan, Danny Dorling, Joe Earle, Bob Franklin, Lee Edwards, Becky Gardiner, Peter Golding, Dan Jackson, Jonathan Hardy, Dave Hesmondhalgh, Dan Hind, Sukhdev Johal, Anu Kantola, Bong-hyun Lee, Colin Leys, Jo Littler, Andrew McGettigan, David Miller, Tom Mills, Liz Moor, Mick Moran, Angela Phillips, Chris Roberts, Heather Savigny, Nick Sireau, Bev Skeggs, Peter Thompson, Daya Thussu, Polly Toynbee, Howard Tumber, Janine Wedel, Karel Williams, Dwayne Winseck, Simon Wren-Lewis and Kate Wright.

I’m also very grateful to John Thompson, Mary Savigar, Ellen MacDonald-Kramer and everyone at Polity who advised on this project.

Last of all, I must, of course, mention the love and support of my close family: Anne, Hannah, Miriam, Kezia, Kelly, Helen and Neville.

Aeron Davis

October 2018

The End of Old Certainties and Paradigms in Political Communication

They say that everyone remembered what they were doing the day John F. Kennedy was shot (22 November 1963). I wasn’t born yet but I do remember other such days: the day the Falklands/Malvinas conflict began (1982), images of the Berlin Wall being knocked down (1989), the multiple playbacks of two passenger airplanes crashing into New York’s Twin Towers (2001), the collapse of Lehman Brothers (2008), and the growing tide of protestors in Egypt’s Tahrir Square (2011). Each of these endlessly reported events left observers with a sense of shock and disbelief, and a feeling that things would never be the same again.

For me, as with many others, two such days stand out in 2016. The first was after the British went to the polls to vote on continuing membership of the European Union on 23 June. I woke up early in Amsterdam to get the result no one thought possible just a couple of months earlier. Geert Wilders was on the radio promising that the Dutch would soon follow the British out of the EU. No one in either the UK or continental Europe could predict what would follow. The second was the day US citizens voted for a new president on 8 November. I was chairing an event with Wolfgang Streeck on his new book (How Will Capitalism End?). He confidently predicted a Clinton victory to the three hundred or so in the audience, as had all but one of my one hundred students in the lecture hall the day before. Again, no one quite believed that the alternative of a Trump Presidency could ever happen. The same feelings of fear and the unknown quickly spread.

Both events did not simply produce freak outcomes. In multiple ways, they made the conventional wisdom about media and politics appear suddenly outdated. The large majority of academics, journalists, experts and pollsters all got it wrong. The winning campaigns tore up the tried and tested playbooks. The established parties were as much at war with each other as with their opponents. Electorates swung wildly and did not behave as they should. Mainstream media, now struggling for economic viability, was frequently distrusted or ignored by citizens. US and UK politics seemed to have suddenly fallen down a deep, dark rabbit hole.

The historical upheaval was not just an Anglo-American problem, to be linked to those nations’ neoliberal policy frameworks and first-past-the-post electoral systems. Countries across Europe, with different political and economic systems, were also throwing up erratic results. Parties that had dominated for decades were virtually wiped out. In 2015 the radical left party Syriza won power in Greece. In 2017, Macron’s fledgling En Marche! beat Marine Le Pen’s Front National, edging out France’s traditional main parties to win the Presidency in France. The 2018 Italian election resulted in a new governing coalition of the populist Northern League and Five Star Movement parties led by Giuseppe Conte, a lawyer without parliamentary experience. The Dutch and Germans experienced elections where mainstream parties lost substantial ground and took many months to form fragile, uneasy coalition governments. Far-right, populist and extremist parties have been on the rise across Europe, from the newer democracies of the East, to those seemingly more stable nations of Northern Europe and Scandinavia.

Change and uncertainty could be seen everywhere else too. In 2017, moves began for the impeachment of presidents in South Korea, Brazil and South Africa. In 2018, Lopez Obrador won the Presidency in Mexico with another fledgling party. Jair Bolsonaro, an extreme far-right politician, was victorious in the Brazilian presidential elections. Populist leaders consolidated their holds on power in Japan, Turkey, China, India and Russia. A new world order was emerging as US power waned. Other nations, notably China and Russia, who offered their own brand of authoritarian capitalism, began challenging the liberal cosmopolitan vision of globalization. Democracy watchers recorded clear democratic declines across the globe for the first time in decades.

It is these various signs of historical upheaval that have given me the impetus to write this book. In early 2016, having taught political communication for the best part of two decades, I felt confident in engaging with a clear set of theories and debates. Suddenly, as I began teaching the new cohort that Autumn, the discussions and arguments I had set out and participated in now appeared increasingly redundant. The subject text books, even recently published ones, looked to be describing a past era (my own included). Debates around professionalized parties set against ideologically driven ones now seemed less relevant after Donald Trump’s victory. Discussions of the steady mediatization of politics appeared confused when mass, legacy news outlets were going bust everywhere. Traditional media effects research looked redundant when so much of the population got their news in scraps from social media and elsewhere.

The lectures were packed with new students wanting to work out what was happening and where it was all leading. Each week, they and I began charting new territories, still unsure as to what the final destination looked like.

What was becoming clear was that several long-prophesized tipping points had finally been reached. Traditional left–right political spectrums were no longer the clearest means of identifying or cohering a party. The legacy media of the public sphere was dying. Social media was rapidly reconfiguring the basis on which politics and journalism operated. Electorates were more volatile than they were aligned. Economics and economic policy-makers no longer seemed to be describing real economies. Parties began looking more like new social movements. Meanwhile, pollsters and forecasters appeared to be as reliable as astrologers. No one could tell the difference between an ‘expert’ and a propagandist. And all the while, national publics were increasingly fragmenting into ever more polarized echo chambers.

The Fourth Age of Political Communication and Democratic Crisis

In the 1990s, Jay Blumler published two prominent interventions in the field of political communication: one focusing on crisis and the other emphasizing fundamental change. In 1995, with Michael Gurevitch, he published The Crisis of Public Communication. This pulled together their decades of research on UK and US politics and media to identify a series of worrying trends. An ever more powerful media were reshaping politics to the detriment of democracy. Blumler followed this up in 1999 with an article co-authored with Dennis Kavanagh in the journal Political Communication, entitled: ‘The Third Age of Political Communication: Influences and Features’. This focused on change more than crisis. The first age, in the two decades after the Second World War, was the ‘golden age’ of parties and presses. Party memberships were large, citizens loyal and print media deferential. The second age, from the 1960s to 1990s, was driven by the introduction of limited-channel national television, taking politically interested audiences away from their partisan presses. While engaging more citizens, TV politics also created ‘an emptier and less nourishing communication diet’.

They then documented the features of what they saw as an emerging ‘third age’ at the turn of the century. This had developed, on the one hand, out of wider social shifts, such as individualization, secularization, economization, aestheticization and rationalization. On the other, it was also linked to the growing ‘media abundance, ubiquity, reach’ of the new 24-hour, multiple channel environment. The trends they tried to highlight were: the increased professionalization of parties which now prioritized media strategy in political policy-making; intensifying competition everywhere, both for parties and media; an anti-elitist and short-term populism replacing traditional political ideologies; a growing diversification of media outlets, topics and agendas, that now encompassed ‘identity politics’; and a less homogenous and more fragmented audience that could pick and choose its news sources. Two decades later, all those trends remain observable now. Some, like anti-elitist populism and audience fragmentation, have progressed considerably.

However, we have also been witnessing other distinct trends across politics, media and communication. The most obvious of these has been in the area of communication technologies. In the 1990s, multi-channel TV and a partisan press dominated in many wealthy countries. The internet was an interesting distraction. Smart phones, social media and many of the titans of today’s online age did not exist. Now, these digital tools are beginning to dominate political communication in much the way TV or the press did in earlier ages.

In a 2013 keynote address Blumler suggested that digital communication could be driving democracies towards a fourth age of political communication. The trends of the third age, such as communication abundance, audience selectivity and ‘centrifugal diversification’, had been spurred on by developments in the online world. He speculated that this could mean the end of the top-down, ‘pyramidical model’ of elite to mass communication. Instead, a new ‘two level political communication ecology’ of elites and masses was emerging. If so, such conclusions led him to believe that ‘the model of political communication process that dominated our scholarship in the past, my own included, is kaput’.

Since then, others too have pointed towards the emergence of a possible new fourth age. Some, such as Magin et al. (2016) have limited their discussions to the impact of the digital on conventional politics. For them, the fourth age is about new communication rather than crisis. Others, such as Bennett and Pfetsch (2018), have looked to wider shifts in politics, institutions, democracy and the public sphere. They, like Blumler, insist changes to the political communication environment have been equally driven by larger social trends and are concerned about the larger threats to the public sphere. In addition to the social shifts observed by Blumler and Kavanagh in 1999, have emerged a powerful set of trends, each of which poses threats to contemporary democracies. These include: advanced neoliberalism, financialization, aspects of globalization, population growth and migration, inequality extremes, global warming and environmental devastation, and the instability of established national institutions.

All these trends, combined with the events of the last half decade, have led me towards three contentious conclusions. One, several core foundational elements of the scholarly field of political communication are in desperate need of a rethink (see also Davis, 2010a; Bennett and Iyengar, 2010; Bennett and Pfetsch, 2018). Two, modern democracy itself is in the midst of an existential crisis as weighty and disturbing as any since 1945. The trends of ‘post-democracy’, outlined by Crouch (2004) and others, are coming to fruition as the key institutions, norms and practices of politics and communication have become significantly eroded.

Three, whether seen as causing democratic crisis or not, the fourth age of political communication has well and truly arrived for mature democracies. The full impact of the changes and transitions has become clearer within the last half decade. Leaving aside the very valid objections to the idea of set ‘ages’, what are the defining features of today’s democratic crisis and fourth age of political communication? Those recorded and explored in the following chapters include:

• A significant weakening of state institutions’ ability to enact policy or operate accountably: as globalization and financialization spread, it becomes increasingly difficult for politicians and bureaucrats to manage economic, environmental and other policy areas, to collect corporate taxes, maintain regulations, etc.
• The development of large, complex policy areas and risks beyond the understanding of most leaders: key policy areas, such as those covering finance, new technologies, health and the environment, have become so complex that few, including those in charge, understand them and the risks involved.
• A pronounced break-down of faith in political institutions, experts and elites: not only have people become increasingly untrusting of politicians and political organizations, they are more critical of elites and experts of all kinds.
• Ideologically fragmented parties: Once large and stable political parties have either been wiped out or fractured into multiple factions, immobilizing them in the process.
• Cultural identity and nationalist challenges to traditional left–right politics: increasingly, issues of race, nation, gender, sexuality, immigration and the environment cut across established class divides and economic policy differences.
• Rapidly growing unstable new parties, interest groups and social movements: new parties and social movements can now grow rapidly to sizeable entities that challenge their opponents, but they can fade or become paralysed just as quickly.
• Hollowed-out legacy news media operations: the business model of many established news organizations, especially in the print press, has been broken, either bankrupting them or turning them into shadows of what they were.
• Unaccountable and untraceable news and information flows across social media networks: in many countries, and among specific audience demographics such as younger voters, a majority get their news and share political information and opinion using social media, not legacy news producers.
• Problems of information overload and ‘truth’: political information and opinion continue to grow exponentially, leaving individuals struggling to find valid sources and verifiable, objectives facts and information. This is exacerbated by the activities of internet bots and the deliberate dissemination of fake news and information on social media.
• Unaligned and very volatile electorates: numbers of strongly aligned voters are now outnumbered by undecideds, with election-period swings getting much larger and pollsters finding it hard to make accurate predictions.
• Audiences fragmented and polarized across multiple divides: as numbers and types of media have multiplied so audiences have increasingly been subject to both separation and intensification of exchanges. There are multiple areas of division, from age to education, wealth to political interest, race and gender to region.
• A growing divide between the world of public, visible, symbolic politics, on the one hand, and that of private politics, encompassing opaque policy-making, lobbyists and experts, on the other.

Each of these elements is transforming political communication systems substantially. They severely undermine the core foundational norms, values and institutions of established political systems everywhere, and democracies in particular. They present substantial challenges to political actors of all kinds and to scholars trying to observe and analyse what is happening.

Defining Political Communication and Defining My Approach

This book has several objectives, one of which is to challenge and broaden the boundaries of the discipline. But, to do that, one has to begin by clarifying what the discipline covers. Demarcating the boundaries of political communication is tricky because agreeing what constitutes ‘politics’ and communication around politics is tricky. McNair’s 6th edition (2017: 4) introduction to the subject offers the following definition:

McNair’s (2017) definition is as good a place to start as any and offers a degree of flexibility. But, he also acknowledges that what counts as a political actor or a politically relevant form of communication is open to debate. Like most writers on the topic, he makes selective choices about the actors, processes, communication forms and events he focuses on. A glance at Kenski and Hall Jamieson’s (2017) handbook suggests that the major actors and concerns of the discipline are elected politicians and parties, election campaigns and media effects on voters. This very much relates to formal politics and institutions in democracies. In contrast, Doris Graber’s 10th edition (with Dunaway, 2017) of Mass Media and American Politics, orients itself towards mass news media as it relates to a variety of formal political actors, processes and reporting conditions.

These well-regarded authors have made their own selective decisions about what counts. Their books offer relatively little on other types of political actor or process beyond governments, legislatures and legacy media. But, of course, politics involves many other types of participant, activity and type of communication. Political communication goes beyond election campaigns, and includes day-to-day party conflicts and compromises over policy, budgets and the ups and downs of politicians. Wars, disasters, demonstrations and technical debates around the environment or the economy all involve communication and media coverage that is political.

There are many additional kinds of political actor too. Governments and parliaments are supported by extensive bureaucracies and often unseen but influential civil servants. Corporations, interest groups, trade unions, religious institutions, think tanks and others all contribute to political parties with their ideas, funds and organizational support. They also lobby government ministers and civil servants. Politics is now full of professional communication intermediaries, in public relations, marketing, advocacy and so on. Citizens are not just voting fodder but frequently become political actors, when making financial contributions, demonstrating, organizing around local issues, or sharing alternative news stories through Facebook.

Communication in or about politics also takes many forms. Mass news media (print, broadcast, online) and the practices of journalism are the most obvious form. There are also the ever-growing plethora of specialist publications, political websites and social media networks. So too, we might consider interpersonal communication, of the kind that takes place between journalists and political sources, lobbyists and government bureaucrats or across social networks. We might also think more about political culture as politicians appear in entertainment programmes, celebrities become politicians, or social media spreads satirical memes across online networks.

The discipline has other forms of exclusion. Many scholars only count surveys and quantitative studies, while others prefer qualitative approaches or engage with complex social theory. Most cannot avoid national and cultural biases, often interpreting the wider world in relation to their own national norms, actors and institutions. Some attempt to separate the political from wider social, economic and technical changes and influences, while others insist on linking all these things, at times losing focus in the process.

These divides were very apparent in the early days of the discipline’s development and can still be seen. But there is also a wider appreciation of the various approaches, actors, theory and interdisciplinary nature of the subject. So too, there is now a greater understanding of difference and variation across nations and systems. This book attempts to reflect the plurality of the work now being produced but, of course, it makes its own selective choices, and can’t avoid its own Anglo-centric biases.

Bearing all this in mind, the book’s approach is guided by the following objectives. The first is to document the challenges to some of the established paradigms that have defined the field in recent decades. As the various chapters argue, evolving trends have now become tipping points, in some cases fatally undermining the institutions, organizations and democratic models which have sustained polities. In other words, a paradigm shift is required. If it becomes harder to establish and sustain political parties, news media operations, state institutions and public spheres, then the norms and ideals associated with them have to be rethought too. Intellectually, scholars must re-evaluate their models, assumptions and norms. Practically, nations must step in to either resuscitate these institutions and principles or replace them with something else.

Second, the book is presented as an advanced introduction to the subject of political communication. Each chapter offers a bridge between the old and the new. The old covers the debates, institutions and actors that have defined the field for some years. Key organizations, such as parties, news media, interest groups, voters and government institutions are introduced, as are long-running debates around, for example, professionalization, new technologies and mediatization. So too are ways of evaluating systems, such as public sphere theory or comparative systems research, as well as discussions of the larger disruptive forces undermining all this. Having set out the traditions, each chapter then explores how recent trends and tipping points are challenging our understanding of systems, actors and communication.

The final objective is to bring together diverse approaches and findings from a mix of disciplines. These are primarily from politics, media and journalism, drawing on a combination of theory, quantitative and qualitative studies. But, there are also attempts to stretch the subject boundaries, pushing into adjacent disciplines where appropriate. These include sociology, economics, international relations, cultural theory and political economy. At the same time, the book is, of necessity, more focused on Western democracies generally and the US and UK in particular. That does not mean to assume some form of crude universalism or that English-speaking democracies are ‘more advanced’.

Outline of the Book

Part I introduces the core concerns and parameters of the book. Chapter 2 sets out different ways through which we might think about what ‘good’ democratic political and media systems might look like. It skirts through philosophers and democratic theorists from the French Revolution, Dewey and Lippman to Jürgen Habermas, as well as setting out more recent comparative systems work. It asks: are the tensions inherent in democracies, between liberty and equality, representative and direct democracy, becoming too difficult to reconcile?

Chapter 3 looks at the question of crisis in politics and media in twenty-first century democracies. As with previous periods of such talk the discussion becomes one of whether we are experiencing a worrying break-down in democracy or merely a period of unnerving change. Should we frame what’s happening now in terms of Blumler’s 1995 ‘crisis’ book or his 1999 new ‘age’ article? How are the great disrupters of globalization, neoliberalism and new ICTs, reconfiguring democratic governance and, perhaps, making it untenable?

Part II focuses on the formal institutions and actors of political systems: parties, news media and government institutions. Chapter 4 traces the evolution of political parties and election campaigning, as ideologically driven parties first became mass, catch-all organizations and then electoral-professional entities. In this shift, ideological direction and clearly aligned constituents were balanced off against professional campaigning and technocratic governance. Are such debates still important when traditional ideologies are riven with fault lines and professionalized parties neither trusted nor stable?

Chapter 5 turns to traditional news media operations. Even though the internet has powerfully disrupted the legacy news environment, it still plays a major role in institutional politics. Thus, long-running debates between political economists and liberal sociologists, about whether or not legacy news media have retained their autonomy, fourth estate and ‘truth’-seeking values, remain important. However, as the business model of national news production collapses, do both positions still hold any relevancy?

Chapter 6 explores the evolving literature on media–source relations. Such dynamics are fundamental to political communication, whether politicians and journalists are cooperative or in conflict, and whether media is overly managed by states or, vice versa, politics is becoming overly mediatized. However, what happens to such relations when both parties and media have become increasingly precarious, fragmented and populist in nature?

Part III turns away from formal politics and institutions to cover media effects, public engagement, interest groups and new social movements. Chapter 7 looks at citizens, unpacking two related discussions on political participation and media influence. The first re-evaluates the literature on why publics are participating less in formal politics. The second, skips through varied phases of effects research alternating between ‘strong’ and ‘limited’ paradigms. Both discussions find their way to a similar conclusion. That is that in the UK and US, publics are gravitating towards three general groups: two polarized and ghettoized but engaged factions, and a third increasingly disaffected and disengaged group that has turned its back on mainstream media and formal politics altogether.

Chapter 8 moves on to civil society, interest groups and the policy process. It asks what kind of groups and organizations are able to influence government legislation and media content most often and why. Long-term debates have focused on conflicting accounts of insiders and outsiders, resource-rich and poor, and varying opportunity structures. These perspectives have now become overlain by two key developments: the rise of fast-emerging and moving new social movements, and the growth of powerful elite intermediary professions (lobbyists, accountants and lawyers). Together, they are expanding the gap between public, visible politics and private, shadowy policy and regulation.

Part IV explores the big disrupters of democratic political communication. Chapter 9 begins with the economy, often regarded as the most important voting issue and point of ideological division between left and right parties. Since the 1980s neoclassical economics and neoliberalism have increasingly come to dominate systems of national economic management and global governance. However, a series of problems for developed economies have been exacerbated by the financial crash of 2007–8. Hard economic realities now suggest such forms of capitalism are threatening democracy itself, yet few alternatives are emerging.

Chapter 10 concentrates on the latest waves of digitally facilitated political communication. Classic fault lines, between techno-optimists and pessimists, technological determinist and social-shaping approaches have been played out in investigations of parties, news organizations, interest groups and individual participation. While optimists have been confronted with a harsh reality check, pessimists have been forced to admit the depth of the changes confronting the political communication environment. The anarchic, wild west of a public sphere emerging suggests that democratic media theory needs an urgent rethink.

Chapter 11 introduces and melds diverse literatures on globalization and international political communication. In recent decades, advocates have argued that globalization has stabilized and improved the economic fortunes of nation states, more than making up for the losses of state sovereignty. Likewise, enthusiasts have linked the new international communication infrastructure to an ideal vision of cosmopolitanism and an emerging global civil society. However, while transnational communication continues to expand in multiple ways, social, economic and political trends have not followed the expectations of the global elite. As a consequence, there is a public backlash against globalization, a lack of faith in Western-style free-market capitalism and democracy, a new cold war and a breakdown of international cooperation.

Chapter 12 pulls together the findings of the previous chapters. It concludes that we have both entered into a new age of political communication, and that democratic systems are indeed in a state of crisis rather than simply change. Too many key institutions of democracy – in theory and practice – are struggling to survive and fulfil their basic functions. In which case philosophers, scholars and political actors need to go back to first principles, rethinking the norms, institutions and practices of modern, representative democracies.