So what is political communication after all?

Posted on | November 16, 2010 | No Comments

I read this interesting paper the other day (available here) about the political communications landscape in Switzerland; besides its actual empirical contribution, what I find intriguing is to classify political communication into three “fields”:

• political PR
• “campaigning” of all sorts (election campaigns, institutional campaigns etc.)
• lobbying

These three fields can be associated with “horizontal mediation” (building trust between different political agents), “vertical mediation” (building trust between political agents and citizens) and “political advocation”, respectively. I find this a rather neat conceptual framework.

In addition, if you’ve ever wondered how to justify political consultancy to politicians you could claim:

• technical expertise, improved infrastructure, etc.: a question of ressources
• the “innovative and independent” point of view that outsiders (should) provide: a question of innovation
• the possibility to pseudo-legitimize admist others: a question of legitimization

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