Political Communication in Transitional and Non-Democratic Contexts: Challenges, Issues, and Directions for Research

This issue of the Political Communication Report highlights the growing occupation of researchers in our field with expanding the horizons of political communication beyond the study of established democracies, to the study of societies that are experiencing significant sociopolitical change and/or are characterized by social conditions that do not meet common minimum requirements of democratic governance. The study of such contexts in the past has often been relegated to a marginal role in our field, sometimes to the point of undue global generalizations from observations made exclusively in Western democratic contexts. Thankfully, however, with the growing recognition of such oversight, coupled with new technological possibilities of data collection, this state of affairs is quickly changing and a lot of activity in our field has recently been directed towards the study of political communication in transitional and non-democratic societies.

In this feature you will find no less than seven contributions from a stellar cast of political communication researchers at the forefront of these efforts. They introduce their most recent work and put a spotlight on some of the most promising developments in the study of political communciation under non-democratic and transitional political conditions:

1. Nils B. Weidmann gives an overview of state-of-the-art research on the interplay of information and communication technologies, political communication, and social and political conflict.

2. Matt Baum and Yuri Zhukov describe how and why differences between democracies and non-democracies emerge in the reporting of news about stability-relevant political events — and how reporting biases may shape collective perceptions of political unrest differently in different parts of the world.

3. Florian Toepfl makes the case for a “discourse approach” to the comparative study of media and politics in (semi-)authoritarian contexts like Russia that reintroduces ideology and meaning as key concepts in the analysis of political communication in semi-authoritarian societies.

4. Baogang He focuses on lessons political communciation research can learn from the specific context of China. He argues that political communication researchers need to abandon simplistic views of political communication under authoritarian conditions and instead develop a more nuanced understanding of how authoritarianism may interact with very deliberative forms of public communication.

5. Daniela Stockmann emphasizes an institutional approach to understanding the ambivalent processes by which authoritarian regimes in China and beyond attempt to control “free” commercial and new media and the major challenges that arise for doing comparative research in and on authoritarian political contexts.

6. Molly Roberts summarizes for us some of her fascinating recent work and shows how new types of data and data analysis allow insights into the inner workings of censorship in authoritarian regimes not previously within the reach of political communication researchers.

7. Katrin Voltmer, finally, highlights the fundamentally ambivalent nature of media democratization in today’s media landscapes, and challenges us to adequately account for such ambivalence in our work on social contexts in political transition.