Political Communication

The term “Political communication” carries a number of definitions for both words “ are themselves open to a variety of definitions, more or less broad” (McNair, 1995, p. 3). But a good definition for political communication was brought by Denton and Woodward (1990) is the aspects and intentions of message senders to influence the political environment and creating an identity. Therefore, political communication is a process and the political organizations, media and citizens are the actors. Political organizations are made of political parties, pressure groups, public organization, governments and terrorist organizations that tend to use communication tactics like the media in its different outlets to reach their audience and others.

Thanks to the bourgeois critique of autocracy in early modern Europe we became familiar to the princibles of liberal democracy. According McNair (1995) to create a democratic regime 3 elements are strictly needed: constitutionality, participation and rational choice.

In democratic societies, McNair states the several roles of the media: Informing people of what’s the reality of things, being the link between the state and the citizens, educate people of the facts journalits/media outlets reach, offer publicity to governmental and political institutions and provide a medium for public political discourse and finally perform as an outlet for a certain political party.

For politics, the media has become a powerful tool for communication. However, the effects of this kind of communication is hard to observe but not impossible to do by research tools. As the selective-exposure-theory suggest, people tend to select specific aspects of exposed information which they incorporate into their mindset.Hence, political adversting won’t really affect the publics existing opinion. Moreover, a number of studies have concluded that few people actually change votes due to political advertising’ (1984, p. 351)(As cited in McNair, 1995)