An Introduction to Political Communication

Brian McNair

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317611714
• Edition: 6
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

At a time of radical shifts in power across the globe, the sixth edition of An Introduction to Political Communication examines the role of the media in the political process. Brian McNair reflects on the role of communication in key events such as the referendum vote for the UK's withdrawal from the European Union, the rise of nationalist populism in Europe, and the victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election. He explores the use of communication as a weapon by Islamic State and other insurgent organisations, and by Putin's Russia in its dealings with the West, including the hacking of Democratic Party emails in 2016. McNair argues that an expanding globalised public sphere and digital media network have transformed political communication, allowing political actors, from politicians and pressure groups to trade unions and terrorist organisations, to bypass traditional, established media in communicating their messages.

This sixth edition of McNair's classic text has been comprehensively revised and updated to include:

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• the 2016 US presidential election and Donald Trump's rise to power;

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• the UK's EU referendum of 2016, the Scottish independence referendum of 2014 and the 'snap' UK general election of June 2017;

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• the growing role in political communication of the internet and social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, and their destabilising impact on the management of political crises all over the world including the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines MH17 and the disappearance of MH370, the Tianjin disaster in China and the Russian intervention in Ukraine;

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• Islamic State's global jihad, and the use of social media as an instrument of terror;
• the growing capacity of WikiLeaks and other online sources, such as the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, to challenge elite control of information.

Part I

POLITICS IN THE AGE OF MEDIATION

1

POLITICS IN THE AGE OF MEDIATION

This chapter:

• Introduces the concept of political communication

• Identifies the range of political actors involved in communication

• Examines the impact of digital media on political communication.

Any book about political communication should begin by acknowl­edging that the term has proved to be notoriously difficult to define with any precision, simply because both components of the phrase are themselves open to a variety of definitions, more or less broad. Denton and Woodward, for example, provide one definition of political communication as

pure discussion about the allocation of public resources (revenues), official authority (who is given the power to make legal, legislative and executive decision), and official sanctions (what the state rewards or punishes).

(1990, p. 14)

This definition includes verbal and written political rhetoric, but not symbolic communication acts which, as we shall see in this book, are of growing significance for an understanding of the political process as a whole.

The American writer Doris Graber advances a more all-encompassing definition of what she terms ‘political language’, suggesting that it comprises not only rhetoric but paralinguistic signs such as body language, and political acts such as boycotts and protests (1981).

Elsewhere in the work cited above, Denton and Woodward characterise political communication in terms of the intentions of its senders to influence the political environment. As they put it:

the crucial factor that makes communication ‘political’ is not the source of a message [or, we might add, referring back to their earlier emphasis on ‘public discussion’, its form], but its content and purpose.

(Ibid., p. 11)

This book will follow Denton and Woodward by stressing the intentionality of political communication, which I will define here simply as purposeful communication about politics. This incorporates:

1All forms of communication undertaken by politicians and other political actors for the purpose of achieving specific objectives.

2Communication addressed to these actors by non-politicians such as voters and activists.

3Communication about these actors and their activities, as contained in news reports, editorials and other forms of media discussion of politics, such as blogs and social media posts.

In short, all political discourse is included in our definition. By political communication, therefore, I, like Graber, have in mind not only verbal or written statements, but also visual means of signifi­cation such as dress, make-up, hairstyle and logo design, i.e. all those elements of communication which might be said to constitute a political ‘image’ or identity (McNair, 2016a).

Absent from the book (if not from our definition) is any substantial discussion of the subject of interpersonal political communication. It need hardly be stressed that the political discussions of people in public bars or at dinner parties, the behind-closed-doors negotiations of govern ments and the information gleaned by journalists from face-to-face meetings with high-level sources, are highly significant for the political process. By their nature, however, they have tended to be hidden from the analyst, requiring methodologically difficult and costly empirical research to uncover their secrets. Conducting and reporting such research is beyond the scope of this volume. Throughout, however, we should bear in mind the potential gap between the public and the private in political rhetoric.

We note, of course, that the ‘data dumping’ activities of WikiLeaks and similar whistle-blowing organisations has made it increasingly difficult for political and other elites to keep secrets. As we shall see below, the leaking of confidential political information to the globalised public sphere, be it US ‘war logs’ relating to the post-9/11 conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, Hillary Clinton’s private e-mails or the Panama Papers documenting tax avoidance by wealthy individuals and politicians in many countries, has been the cause of many political crises in recent times, and is a major driver of what I characterise as a movement from control to chaos in the political environment in recent years (McNair, 2016a).

The book also lacks, in the sections dealing with governmental com­munication, substantial discussion of local (i.e. city and district, regional and town) politics. As Bob Franklin and others have described, local government is a sphere of political activity in which communication is of growing importance (Franklin and Murphy, 1991; Franklin, 2004) and in which there are often serious gaps (Hess and Waller, 2016). I do not address the deficits of local political communication in detail in this book, but there are many parallels between the democratic role of the media in national and inter national politics on the one hand, and local politics on the other. In all spheres of democratic political activity, be it the city, the country town or nation state, a well-resourced, free and independent media are an essential foundation for the maintenance of an informed citizenry.

THE SCOPE OF THE BOOK

The study of political communication directs our attention to the relation­ship between three elements in the process by which political action is conceived and realised.

Political organisations

First, there are the political actors, narrowly defined: those individ­uals who aspire, through organisational and institutional means, to influence the decision-making process (see Figure 1.1). They may seek to do this by attain­ing institutional political power, in govern­ment or constituent assemblies, through which preferred policies can be implemented. If in opposition their objectives will be to obstruct existing power-holders, and have them replaced by alternatives.

Figure 1.1 Elements of political communication.

Political parties

This category of political actor includes, most obviously, the established political parties: aggregates of more or less like-minded individuals, who come together within an agreed organisational and ideological structure to pursue common goals. These goals will reflect the party’s underlying value system, or ideology, such as the British Conservative Party’s adherence to ‘individual freedom’ and the supremacy of the market; or their Labour opponents’ preference for ‘capitalism with a human face’ and the principles of social justice and equality. In the US the Democrats have historically been associated with relative liberalism in social policy, and an inter­ventionist approach to the economy, while the Republicans aspire to reduce state involvement in all aspects of socio-economic life. In every democratic society, similar distinctions exist. In recent times there has been a rise in nationalist parties in many countries, such as the Scottish Nationalist Party, and the National Front in France.

Despite the ideological differences which may exist between political parties in modern democracies they share a commitment to constitutional means of advancing their objectives, attempting to convince a population as a whole of their correctness, and putting their policies to the test of periodic elections. Once mandated (or rejected, as the case may be) they agree to abide by the consti­tutional rules of the political system in which they operate, respecting the limitations it puts on their power to implement or oppose policy, until such time as another electoral opportunity comes along.

For parties, clearly, the smooth functioning of the process described above is dependent primarily on their ability to communi­cate with those who will vote for and legitimise them. When, until relatively recently, voting rights in capitalist countries were restricted to small elites of propertied, educated men, it was enough for parties to use various forms of interpersonal com­munication, such as public meetings and rallies, aided by newspaper coverage, to reach their constituencies. But in an age of universal suffrage and a mass electorate parties must use mass media. The rise of the internet and social media platforms such as Facebook has augmented the resonance of political communication, enabling the targeting of democratic niches and subsections of the mass citizenry in ways which were not possible with the pre-digital top-down media of old. Chapters 6 and 7 examine the many communication strategies and tactics which have been developed by political parties in recognition of this. These include techniques which originated in the world of corporate and business affairs, such as marketing – the science of ‘influ­encing mass behaviour in competitive situations’ (Mauser, 1983, p. 5). Political marketing is analogous to commercial marketing in so far as political organ­isations, like those in the commercial sector, must target audiences from whom (electoral) support is sought, using appropriate channels of communication, in a competitive environment where the citizen / consumer has a choice between more than one ‘brand’ of product. While there are obvious differ­ences in the nature of the political and commercial marketplaces, and political parties measure success not in terms of profit but in voting share and effective power, political marketing employs many of the principles applied by the manu­facturers of goods and services as they strive for commercial success.

Political advertising, the subject of Chapter 6, is also founded on prin­ciples originally worked out by the business sector to exploit the presumed persuasive potential of mass media. This form of political communication uses media to ‘differentiate’ political products (i.e. parties and candi­dates) and give them meaning for the ‘consumer’, just as the soap manu­facturer seeks to distinguish a functionally similar brand of washing powder from another in a crowded marketplace.

A third commercially influenced category of political communi­cation activity is that of public relations – media and information management tactics designed to ensure that a party receives maximum favourable publicity, and the minimum of negative. Activities covered by the rubric of ‘public relations’ include pro-active devices such as party conferences which, as we shall see, are in contemporary politics designed principally to attract positive media coverage of an organisation; news conferences, which permit parties to (attempt to) set political agendas, particularly during election campaigns; and the employment of image managers to design a party’s (and its public leaders’) ‘look’.

Actors also employ reactive political public relations techniques, in which parties strive for damage-limitation, include the lobbying of journalists, the ‘spinning’ of potentially damaging stories and the suppressing of potentially damaging information.

The design and execution of these forms of political communi­cation is the province of that new professional class referred to in the Preface – nowadays known variously as media advisers, or political consultants, image managers, ‘spin doctors’ and ‘gurus’ – which has emerged in the course of the twentieth century and is now routinely employed by political parties all over the world.

Public organisations

If parties are at the constitutional heart of the democratic political process they are not, of course, the only political actors. Surrounding the established institu­tions of politics are a host of non-party organisations with political objectives. Some, like the British and Australian trade unions, have clear organisational links with one or more of the parties (the trade unions, indeed, gave birth to the UK’s Labour Party as the organised political expression of workers’ interests).

Others, such as consumers’ associations, NGOs and corporate lobby groups, will be more peripheral, dealing as they do with relatively narrow constituencies and issues. Others will, by virtue of the tactics which they adopt, be excluded from constitutional politics altogether, and may have the status of criminal organisations.

We may divide these non-party actors into three categories. First, trade unions, consumer groups, professional associations and oth­ers may be defined as public organisations. They are united not by ideology but by some common feature of their members’ situation which makes it advantageous to combine, such as work problems (trade unions), or the weakness of the individual citizen in the face of large corporations (consumer groups). Corporations themselves engage regularly in political communication, or lobbying, designed to influence governmental decision-makers.

In such organisations individuals come together not just to help each other in the resolution of practical problems associated with their common situation, but to campaign for change or to raise the public profile of a particular problem, often through enlisting the help of elected politicians. These organisations have, to a greater or lesser degree, institutional status and public legitimacy, as reflected in their access to policy-makers and media, receipt of charitable donations and official funding. Chapter 8 will examine the tech­niques used by such organisations to influence the political process, such as lobbying, advertising and the organisation of public demon­strations.

Pressure groups

Chapter 8 will also consider the political communication practices of a second category of non-party actor: the pressure group. Pressure groups (or single-issue groups, as they are also known) may be distinguished from the public organisations listed above in that they are typically less institu­tionalised and more overtly ‘political’ in their objectives, concerned with such issues as the conservation of the natural environment, and the prevention of cruelty to animals being reared for human food consumption or for use in the testing of drugs and cosmetics. They tend to campaign around single issues, such as the anti-nuclear movement in the early 1980s, the British anti-poll tax campaign of the late 1980s and early 1990s (Deacon and Golding, 1994) and global warming in the twenty-first century. The environmental lobby exemplifies the growth of global lobbies focused on the resolution of problems which transcend national boundaries. Other notable actions of this type include the anti-war Stop the War movement, and Occupy Wall Street (campaigning against global financial domination of national economies).

Pressure groups are unlike the established parties, however, in drawing their support and membership from a more diverse social base. While the Labour and Conservative parties in Britain (and the Democratic and Republican parties in the US) are traditionally associated with ‘labour’ and ‘business’ respectively (given that these associations are much looser now than was once the case) an organisation such as the Stop the War coalition at the height of its influence after the 2003 allied invasion of Iraq drew support and active membership from the entire spectrum of social classes. The environmental movement likewise, has found support across classes, age groups and religious and ideological affiliations.

The environmental movement, it should be noted, is an example of a pressure group which sought to break into the mainstream of the political process by establishing ‘Green’ parties. As a political party the Greens have many elected representatives in Germany and other European countries, Australia and Japan (85 Green parties are listed on the Global Greens website, www.globalgreens.org). Even in Britain, where the Green Party has only one MP, re-elected in 2015, the environmental movement has had a major impact on the political agenda, requiring parties to develop at least the appearance of pro-environmental policies.¹

Pressure-group politics, like that of parties and public organis­ations, are largely about communication, using the variety of advertising and public relations techniques now available. Some groups, like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, have proved themselves to be skilled exponents of these techniques. But because of their non-institutional, more or less marginal character, they are frequently deprived of the financial and status resources which accrue to more established political actors, and m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Preface to sixth edition
• Part I Politics in the age of mediation
• Part II Communicating politics
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index