Lecture 3: Politicians, Democracy and the Media

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Lecture 3 Politicians, Democracy and the Media
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How to Gain (and Maintain) Power in Democracy
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• At the heart of the democratic process lies the
  rule-governed competition over gaining access to
  the positions of decision-making institutions
  (power), holding on to it and using it to achieve
  desired social outcomes (deciding who gets what,
  when and how).
• Power is sought because it enable power holders
  to ensure (through policy formulation) that
  resources are distributed

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• in accordance with the interests of the power
  holders and those of their supporters.
• And within the democratic context, this mean one
  gain access (and holding) to power by winning
  elections. This requires persuading large numbers
  of people to vote for politicians.

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Decide
Decision-making positions in the government
Politicians
Electorates
Compete to gain support
Determines who get what, when and how
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• Persuading people (electorates) to vote for them
  requires the art of impression management.
• Impression management can be defined as the
  process through which people try to control the
  impressions other people form of them.
• The aim is a conscious attempt to influence the
  perceptions of other people about a person,
  object or event by regulating and controlling
  information in social interaction.

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• For politicians in a democratic system,
  impression management forms a very important part
  of their political activity as they must convince
  a sufficient number of voters to give them the
  required votes to gain access and maintain power.
  
• As a result, the political activities of
  politicians in democracy can be separated into
  two aspects.

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• The first deals with the substantive aspect,
  i.e., making decisions on resource allocation
• The second deals with the image aspect, i.e.,
  creating images that is directed at a mass
  audience in order to gain their support.
• Therefore, successful politicians must be able to
  play the game of impression management (creating
  imagery) to garner the required votes to gain
  (and maintain) power (substantive politics).

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• Why is impression management so important for
  politicians in democracy?
• Democracy promotes the idea that citizens
  (voters) control the political system, i.e., a
  government of the people, by the people and for
  the people, which legitimates the political
  system through voting which in turn give
  authority to those elected into the government.

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The Logic of Impression Management in Democracy
Legitimizes politicians through voting
Government
Authority do decide on resource allocation
Electorate
Compete to get votes via impression management
Politicians
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• At the beginning of the last century, the
  mass-media began to make its influence felt in
  society where people became increasingly reliant
  on the media to inform them on the happenings of
  society.
• Given the belief of participatory nature of
  democracy, politicians are quick to realize the
  potential of democracy in helping them reach out
  to potential voters.

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To gain access
Decision-making positions in the government
Electorates
Politicians
Media
To influence
Uses
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• Given the need to influence voters using the
  media, politicians began to turn to a group of
  media expert who specialize in creating such
  imagery for the consumption of the mass-audience.
  
• We call such imagery as hype.

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Hype

• Hype is a colloquialism widely used within the
  context of the media industry.
• It is defined as stimulating an atmosphere of
  excitement or enthusiasm.
• This term has come to be understood as creating
  publicity using the media by a group of media
  experts. These experts are considered to be
  confidence tricksters who engage in the
  deliberate act of

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• deceiving audiences to the advantage of
  themselves or their employers.
• In the context of politics, the use of media
  experts in creating hype have become increasingly
  common in order to help politicians and political
  parties to gain access to power and maintain
  their hold to power.

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• Returning to our definition of politics, we can
  say that it is also the art of manufacturing and
  developing successful hype, apart from making
  decisions about resource allocation.
• In this course, our focus is on the creation of
  hype and legitimacy rather than on the
  substantive aspect of politics, i.e., the
  struggle to gain and maintain power.

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Political Practice and the Media

• In democracy, political practice can be divided
  into two types.
• The first centers around elite politics that
  focuses on decision-making practices (we will not
  be focusing on this type of politics).
• The second centers around mass-politics that
  involves practices geared towards addressing,
  steering, and cajoling voters.

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Political Practices of Politicians
Elite Politics
Concern with substantive politics
Politician
Concern with the politics of illusion
Mass Politics
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• Mass-politics visualize citizens as politically
  passive where they can be manipulated, directed
  and (if necessary) pacified and distracted.
• It does not take the belief of citizens
  participating actively in the business of
  decision-making seriously. Rather, it treats them
  as semi-involved outsiders who, instead of
  being consulted, are at most polled as a mass
  public and thereafter

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• addressed through carefully crafted messages
  aimed at influencing their votes.
• Lippmann view public opinion as the direct
  outcome of mass-politics. For him, the notion of
  a public opinion emerged spontaneously within
  democratic society is false. Instead, it was the
  outcome of cultivating images and messages
  designed to influence the masses by a group of
  communication specialist.

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• The end result is to manipulate and shut citizens
  out of the decision-making process while at the
  same time creating an illusion that they are
  involved. We will call this as the politics of
  illusion.

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Mass Politics
Policy making and implementation
Elite
Focuses on
affect through who gets what, when how
uses
Electorate/ mass
Give an illusion of control
Media
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Media-ized of Politics
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What is Media-ized Politics?

• Nimmo Combs (1990) in their book entitled
  Mediated Political Realities argued that politics
  for most Americans has become a second-hand
  reality because they do not encounter politics
  directly (first-hand reality) through active
  participation but rather as passive mass
  audiences experiencing mediated politics via the
  media.

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• It is now accepted by most Americans now accept
  as normal that they encounter politics as a set
  of second-hand media images. It was suggested
  that Americans are comfortable with being passive
  publics led by elites who manufacture images,
  hypes and myths they consume in the media. The
  same could be said about all developed nations
  (and advanced developing nations).

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produces second-hand reality of politics
Political Activities
Mass Audiences
Media
cover reality first-hand
Consume images of politics produced by media
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Democracy, Media and the Making of the Public
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The Public

• At the heart of contemporary democracies is the
  business of creating a public.
• By public, I mean a group of people interested or
  affected by an issue or a set of issues. It
  should be noted that there does not exist a
  single public but publics each with different
  interests and concerns.

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• Publics are assembled by professional public
  builders from atomized and isolated individuals
  that made up members of society (mass society
  theory).
• The media assembles these publics where it forms
  as a social glue, constructing and holding public
  opinion. But these publics (containing millions
  of individuals) do not involve actual human
  interaction or communication between these
  incorporated into these publics.

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• The members of these publics do not know each
  other, or communicate with each other. Yet
  publics can be brought together by the media
  and can even by guided (by the media), to carry
  out the same action (e.g., the mourning of the
  death of a celebrity they do not personally
  know).
• Such publics have no real presence because they
  are hyper-construct.

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• By hyper-construct, I mean that it is a
  second-hand reality because they do not have a
  material presence (but hyper presence
  constructed through media representation.
• Thus, we cannot find a public outside there in
  the physical world but rather public opinion
  which is created through a polling exercise
  conducted by the media on an aggregate of
  isolated and atomized

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• individuals on a given issue (given by the
  media) where the findings are then presented as
  representing the shared opinion of the public,
  or that which belong to the people or community.

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Presented as the public
Conducts opinion polls
Isolated and atomized individuals
Media
Creates based on findings
Public opinion
Consume accepted as reality
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Media-ization of Politics and the Consequences
for Democracy

• Because publics are assembled in, and through
  the media, by the demagoguery of professional
  media experts who know how to shift perceptions.
  The process involves agenda-setting, i.e.,
  creating perceptual frameworks through which
  publics experience the world from one perspective
  only. Such frameworks serve to guide the
  subsequent behavior of the mass

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• audience and so turn them into publics (who
  behave collectively despite being isolated)
• Such demagogic power drives from the widespread
  atomization (and hence isolation) of individuals
  in society. Instead of interacting with other
  people, isolated individuals now experience a
  form of manufactured substitute
  pseudo-interaction received through mass media

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• messages, i.e., they received media-ited
  experience.
• For the citizenry few possibilities exist for
  crosschecking and sharing alternative opinions
  because individuals are atomized and isolated
  from each other and the media is their primary
  vehicle for interacting with one another.

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Isolated atomized Individuals in society
Media as social glue
End- product
Media-ited experience of community
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• And the end result?
• Contemporary society is characterized by a
  media-ization of experience where individuals in
  society become a public of passive followers
  guided by the limited agendas presented by the
  media. Hence, the media as a resource for
  political manipulation is not only a possibility
  but a reality (the process of agenda-setting).

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• Who benefits from such media-ization of politics?
  There are three groups who gain from this
  phenomenon, they are
• a) Politicians (elites) who wishes to make
  policy without interference from the masses.
• b) Media experts who gain employment.
• c) Media owners who gain profit.

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• Entman (1989) in Democracy without Citizens
  argues that such manipulation has produced a
  democracy without citizens. In place of active
  citizens, we have publics who are herded and
  steered by skilled media experts.
• This steering process delivers the voters and
  provides politicians with as much freedom as
  possible from non-politician pressures.

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Media Experts

• Generally, there are two groups of media experts
  involved in this media-ization of politics
  phenomenon.
• To the first group belongs journalists whose
  function is to cover and report on politicians
  and political activities which is of importance
  to the citizenry.

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• And in the second group, PR practitioners who
  specialize in creating political hype as well as
  media techniques in manipulating mass-audiences.
• It should be noted that both groups are
  essentially ideal-types.

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Media Experts
PR Practitioners
Journalist
Watchdog
Dissimulation