P Stands for Politics, But What Does Politics Stand For? Locating “The Political” in Political Communication[1]
Daniel S. Lane, UC Santa Barbara
Stewart M. Coles, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-98562-1, PDF
What political communication stands for depends on how we define what counts as “political.” More specifically, our theories, topics of study, and disciplinary debates make implicit assumptions about the nature and origins of “the political” that form the normative backdrop of our field (Phelan & Maeseele, 2023). In doing so, we expand or limit the relevance of our work to different groups who exist in different sociopolitical realities (Kreiss et al., 2024). As we reflect upon what “PolComm stands for” in this issue, we argue for studying the political as it is enacted by groups as they exist in the real world. Specifically, we advocate for understanding political communication as it unfolds in societies that are increasingly diverse in terms of groups and identities (Coles & Lane, 2023b).
In this essay, we interrogate how our field approaches the political, particularly in the current context of multiracial democracies in periods of acute crisis. We summarize a way of thinking about what “counts” as political that places groups at the center. This helps to reinforce existing research foci (e.g., electoral politics), while also making space for topics and ideas that have received relatively less attention from the subfield (e.g., entertainment; Coles, 2024; Delli Carpini, 2014; Harbin, 2023). Our framework offers normative grounding for which forms of communication are “politically meaningful” and thus what we stand for as a scholarly community.
From its early days, the field of political communication has been principally focused on the relationship between citizens and political institutions as understood through the mechanisms of voting/elections, public opinion, and political participation (e.g., Lazarsfeld et al., 1948). Another tradition positions deliberation as a key mechanism through which citizens reach informed opinions and seek consensus or middle ground with others. The normative story here is that political communication and media systems are functioning well when they provide high quality information and productive deliberation for citizens so they can develop informed opinions, then vote and participate in ways that align with their interests (Chambers, 2003; Ferree et al., 2002). This is well captured in the image of the “dutiful citizen,” whose worth is measured in active participation in the electoral process (Dalton, 2008). To be very clear, our field remains obligated to study these traditional modes of politics. Public opinion matters. Deliberation matters. Voting matters. However, it is increasingly obvious that there are other ways of understanding politics that demand our attention.
Here, it is important to recognize that this argument has been made many times before. The subfield of political communication has often reached beyond electoral politics as the locus of the political, to identify rich ways that politics is communicatively constituted. For example, literatures on participatory politics and “third spaces” illustrate that politics and political sensemaking unfolds in non-political spaces such as fan discussion groups and video game chats (Kligler-Vilenchik, 2015; Wright, 2012). Perhaps more prominently, work on networked counter-publics has argued that marginalized communities engage in vital political work within ingroup networks (Jackson et al., 2020). In all of these cases, the notion of “the political” is expanded beyond formation of opinions or engagement in elections. Normatively, this has been theorized as a shift from dutiful citizenship to other, more personalized modes of citizenship (e.g., engaged, self-actualizing, or expressive citizenship; Lane, 2020). These forms of citizenship can be also characterized as constructionist in nature, conceptualizing the political as a means of seeking recognition and inclusion (Ferree et al., 2002). Political communication research has increasingly adopted these wider understandings of politics.
Yet, in some ways there has also been a scholarly backlash to a broader definition of politics. For example, politically expressive behavior on social media has been conceptualized as unproductive political hobbyism, moral grandstanding, or senseless outrage (Crockett, 2017; Hersh, 2020; Krupnikov & Ryan, 2022). Incivility and polarization research similarly places value-neutral normative requirements on political communication (Freelon, 2015; Kreiss & McGregor, 2024). This work ignores the reality that politics is interwoven with pleasure and entertainment (Holbert et al., 2014), is fundamentally about signaling moral positions (Skitka et al., 2021), may result in polarization as marginalized groups battle reactionary forces in order to secure fundamental rights (Kreiss & McGregor, 2024), and may sometimes even benefit from hostility or incivility (Coles & Lane, 2023a).
The danger of these narrower views of the political (i.e., as limited to dutiful modes of citizenship) is that they leave us unable to understand powerful forces shaping contemporary politics. Take for example the rise of the alt-right and populist movements, which have disrupted democratic politics globally. As we watch these movements manifest in electoral politics, it is easy to forget that many have their roots in online message boards and other digital spaces, where the politics is happening amidst everyday talk and culture (Ma, 2021; Phillips, 2016). The far-right’s rise in democracies around the world can be helpfully understood as resulting from a set of identities and ideologies nurtured by communication that is seemingly distant from electoral politics (Knüpfer et al., 2024).
Similarly, the 2024 U.S. presidential election highlighted the political implications of podcasts as an understudied medium for specific groups to speak to each other (Klinger, 2024). Take for example the decision of Vice President Kamala Harris to sit down for an interview with Call Her Daddy, a podcast popular among young women (e.g., Quah, 2024). Political candidates have long hit the talk and late-night comedy show circuit to reach potential voters, particularly those who may not pay attention to news and politics (Baum, 2005). Yet rather than these media being irrelevant to politics—unless and until a candidate makes an appearance—they are frequently spaces in which people discuss the political as it manifests in their daily lives (Coles, 2024). In each of these cases, we are witnessing the transformation of political forces that have roots in communicative phenomena that our subfield may not even consider as politics.
As we have outlined in past (Coles & Lane, 2023b) and ongoing (Coles et al., 2024) work, one fruitful approach for addressing this issue lies in a group-centric perspective on the political. It is not simply that, as the old saying goes, all politics is identity politics. Instead, this perspective argues that group identification and categorization are actually endogenous to the political. Groups are formed as a result of asking political questions: those related to collective concerns, for which collective decisions could be made, that may bear collective consequences (Coles, 2024; Coles et al., 2024). This core argument provides two benefits for how we study political communication. First, it allows for a recognition for how communication and politics themselves shape group identity and categorization, rather than these being exogenous variables that can be “controlled” for or, at best, used as moderating variables. Second, we can attend to the various political questions that a) lead to group formation or, b) that existing groups ask as they make claims to power. Doing so allows us to identify the political in places that might otherwise be dismissed as “not really about politics.”
We are encouraged by a blossoming of work in political communication that has expanded “the political” from a group-centric perspective (Clark, 2024; Grover & Kuo, 2023; Harbin, 2021; Kreiss et al., 2024). Importantly, this research has moved beyond thinking about identity as something that only affects the political communication of marginalized groups (e.g., via “counter-publics”), to consider how dominant groups also engage in political communication to preserve their status and power (e.g., “defensive-publics”; Jackson & Kreiss, 2023). Yet, the re-election of Donald Trump in 2024 and the rise of authoritarian and right-wing populists around the world should prompt further reflection of what counts as political in our scholarship. We may be missing the kind of politics that matter because we are inevitably viewing the world through the political questions that accompany our own groups and social identities (e.g., as Americans, as academics, as members of privileged social groups), without acknowledging their implicit influence. Or perhaps it is that our training as social scientists prevents us from saying what we know to be true: that the political work of groups is not value-neutral or equivalent.
The political communication of some groups has the goal of dominance and exclusion and is contributing to the erosion of Democracy. Here, our traditional objects of analysis (e.g., news consumption, political participation) are failing in helping us understand the political order in which we live. Our simple argument is that if we trace politics upstream, from the questions that are asked during group life, we may more clearly see the role of communication as a tool of dominance or resistance, exclusion or emancipation. In the end, how we individually and collectively imagine what counts as “political” will answer the question of what we stand for.
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Daniel S. Lane (Ph.D., University of Michigan) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication, UC Santa Barbara, where he studies how individuals and groups use communication technology to create social and political change.
Stewart M. Coles (Ph.D., University of Michigan) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research examines how individuals’ identities and media use, and the identities of mediated subjects, influence people’s political attitudes and behaviors.
[1] Copyright © 2024 (Daniel S. Lane & Stewart M. Coles). Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd). Available at https://politicalcommunication.org.