News Management as News

Abstract

This paper argues that the widely noticed increase in news reports about news management, government publicity and media relations must be seen as a logical outgrowth of a new, modernized and media-centred approach to policy-making and campaigning. It offers a systematic introduction to the concepts of media politics and metacoverage, develops a theoretical model to examine their relationship and applies it to the political communication dynamics of Great Britain. This paper breaks new ground in two respects: it broadens our understanding of what counter-measures media professionals take in response to political news management, and it lays out a comprehensive theoretical scheme of how the mediatization of politics leads to a mediatization of political coverage.     

Images of Labour

Abstract

This paper looks at the continuities and changes in the nature of election campaigns in Britain since 1900 by focusing on the way campaigning has changed and become more professional and marketing driven. The piece discusses the ramifications of these developments in relation to the Labour Party's ideological response to mass communication and the role now played by external media in the internal affairs of this organisation. The paper also seeks to assess how campaigns have historically developed in a country with an almost continuous, century long cycle of elections.     

Something Alien? The Limits of U.S. Influence in UK Campaigns

The campaign consulting business in the United States is the largest in the world and has had some success in globally exporting its expertise in terms of both personnel and technique. This paper reflects on the so-called “Americanization” of British elections and draws attention to some of the significant landmarks in the relationship between strategists in the two countries. The discussion does, however, identify the limitations of this idea as an organizing concept for understanding how election campaigning has developed in the United Kingdom.     

Forecasting the 2010 general election using aggregate local election data

The paper presents a revised method for estimating national vote shares using aggregate data from local government by-elections. The model was originally developed to forecast the annual outcome of local elections but was adapted in time to provide an accurate forecast of Labour’s landslide victory at the 1997 general election. However, over the past decade the changing pattern of party competition which has seen parties becoming more selective about which elections to contest has led to more elections being excluded from the modelling because they failed to meet the exacting criteria that all three major parties, Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrats, had contested both the by-election and the previous main election, normally held in May. Relaxing these criteria, although increasing the number of available cases would adversely affect the forecast, over- or under-estimating party votes. Instead, the revised method overcomes the problem of differential competition by estimating vote shares for parties that contest one but not both elections. A further innovation is the calculation of a weighted moving quarterly average which takes account of the number of days elapsed between the by-election date and the date of forecast. Using the new method we provide estimates for likely party shares for the 2010 general election.     

新形势下警察危机公关工作初探

警察危机公关是警察公共关系的重要组成部分。在我国经济社会快速发展和互联网等新媒体影响力与日俱增的新形势下,公众对公安机关的社会管理服务和自身素质形象高度关注并监督甚严,公安机关稍有不慎不当,极易形成警察危机事件。要认真研究警察危机事件的成因和特点,正确把握相关原则和方法,切实提高预防处置的能力和水平。     

Towards an organisational perspective on party funding: Explaining financial transfers from MEPs to their national parties

Which parties represented in the European Parliament (EP) are able to extract regular donations from their MEPs' salaries and, if they extract donations, how great are they? In the literature on party finances, there has been a lack of attention paid to the use of salaries of elected representatives as a source of funding. This is surprising given that the national headquarters of many parties in Europe regularly collect ‘party taxes’: a fixed (and often significant) share of their elected representatives' salaries. In filling this gap, this article theoretically specifies two sets of party characteristics that account for the presence of a taxing rule and the level of the tax, respectively. The presence of a tax depends on the basic ‘acceptability’ of such an internal obligation that rests on a mutually beneficial financial exchange between parties' campaign finance contributions to their MEPs and MEPs' salary donations to their parties. The level of the tax, in contrast, depends on the level of intra‐organisational compliance costs and parties' capacity to cope with these costs. Three factors are relevant to this second stage: MEPs' ideological position, the size of the parliamentary group and party control over candidate nomination. The framework is tested through a selection model applied to a unique dataset covering the taxing practices in parties across the European Union Member States.     

警察公关礼仪与警察形象的塑造

在现代社会中,任何一个社会组织都要处理好与自身发展密切相关的内外公众关系,树立良好的组织形象。充分重视和发挥公关礼仪的功能和作用是警察组织的形象塑造的一个重要方面。本文对警察公共关系工作中礼仪的功能、原则、意义和养成等方面进行了探讨。认为公共关系是一门塑造形象的艺术,人民警察外在的行为、举止等表现,在人民群众心目中形成的形象、地位、信任和支持程度构成了人民警察的形象。而公关礼仪正是塑造形象这一艺术的起点。     

The Role of Party Activists in the Evolution of the Abortion Issue

This article examines the role of party activists in the partisan evolution of the abortion issue. Previous research indicates that party elites—specifically members of Congress—and partisans in the mass public have become more differentiated in their abortion attitudes during the last several decades with Democrats becoming more pro-choice and Republicans becoming increasingly pro-life. The missing piece of the picture is the behavior of party activists. Accordingly, this research examines the changes in the abortion attitudes of two groups of party activists during the last three decades: campaign activists and national convention delegates. From 1972 to 1980 there were no significant differences in the abortion attitudes of Republican and Democratic campaign activists, and the mean positions of the two parties' national convention delegates did not differ greatly. However, since 1984 there has been a growing differentiation in the abortion positions of both groups of party activists. Now Democratic activists are consistently pro-choice while Republican activists are equally pro-life. This evidence indicates that the differentiation on the abortion issue that has only recently emerged among partisans in the mass public was predated by an earlier and much more dramatic polarization that had already developed among party activists and elites, thus supporting a model of issue evolution introduced by Carmines and Stimson in their study of racial issues. We also find that citizens' abortion attitudes have become increasingly correlated with party voting not just in presidential elections but also in House, Senate, and gubernatorial contests during this period as well as being more closely related to political ideology. All of this evidence points to the growing extent to which abortion has become a partisan issue in American politics and the key role that party activists have played in this process.     

Communicative Diplomacy for the 3rd Millennium

Abstract

In today's world of revolution in communications and information as well as of global interdependency, a medialised politics became a general reality. One can observe such a trend specifically in the field of international and foreign affairs where state and other actors use communication channels and public relations to a large extent to improve on the content and in particular, on the image of their policies. Here one can also argue that a major share of bilateral and multilateral relations among states is shaped by the international media, or vice versa, that all major “wars” are “fought” through the media.

This article explores the increasing inter-relation between state foreign affairs on one side, and media and public relations, on the other. The article starts off with basic concepts of a “new/democratic diplomacy” (Nicholson, 1988) and a “public diplomacy” (Signitzer in Combs, 1992), and compares them with definitions of “international public relations” (Kunczik, 1997). It attempts to build the general analytical framework on the basis of comparative case studies of developed countries with an established diplomatic tradition and of new democracies still proving themselves on the international fora. In this context, particular attention is given to communication in relation to international organisations like NATO and the EU.     

对树立警察公共关系理念的思考

当前,全国公安机关正在开展“贯彻十六大,全面建小康,公安怎么办”大讨论活动,本文试图通过对公安队伍建设的研究,对适应新形势,倡导警察公共关系理念进行分析,对警察行为和功能在公众中的心理影响、传播沟通的地位和作用,以及警察良好形象的树立等问题进行深入的阐述。     

How the Bush and Gore Campaigns Conceptualized and Used the Internet in 2000

Abstract

Political scientists and campaign professionals have been intrigued by the potential of the Internet as a tool for accessing and conveying political information since the mass marketing of the first Web browser in 1993. Optimists have pointed to the possibility for more expansive participation and more substantive, in-depth issue discussions. Pessimists have countered that universal access to the Internet is still years down the road, pointing out there is little reason to believe campaigns will use the Internet either to spice up or to elevate the national political conversation. Such long-term assessments are premature, but we can offer preliminary assessments of how candidates conceptualize and use the Internet. Relying on surveys of online registered voters and interviews with campaign operatives and Webmasters, I examine how the online electorate was perceived and approached by the Bush and Gore campaigns in 2000.1 find that (1) voters were unlikely to seek political information from candidate or party Web sites, (2) voters were skeptical of information presented on these sites, and (3) the campaigns understood this and therefore saw the Internet primarily as a vehicle for internal communication and grassroots activation.     

Feral Beasts: An Introduction to Tony Blair's Reuters Speech on the Media

One of Prime Minister Blair's last speeches was on his governments relationship to the media, and the at times damaging impact of the 'sensation hungry media' on every aspect of public life, many of whom were too frightened to take on the 'feral beasts'. He argued that his government had to attempt to deal with the media power, that 'spin' is an attempt to handle that power, that the media attack private life and that in the end the media must manage themselves. The piece includes his speech, the revealing questions and answers, and commentary on them by a series of distinguished journalists and academics.     

Public Opinion and the Depth of Labour's Crisis

Labour's current problems are the culmination of long‐term trends flowing from the rising cost of tax‐funded services and welfare and voters’ mounting resistance to higher taxes to pay for them. As a result of this, there is now a big gulf between the attitudes of Labour party members, and in particular the supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, and Labour voters—and an even wider gulf with the extra voters Labour needs to win a future election. This gulf is also wide in relation to a range of other issues, including immigration, education and economic ideology. For Labour to return to government, it needs not just to narrow the gulf in policy, but to persuade voters of its ‘valence’ virtues of trust and competence—qualities in relation to which Labour currently lags the Conservatives by large margins.     

Priming the Parish Pump

Abstract

In this article we argue that the almost exclusive focus of political communications research on national political actors and agencies has led to an inadequate understanding of the functioning, the relevance, and the influence of local political communications strategies. This paper seeks to redress this neglect through exploring political marketing strategies of national political actors and agencies which have implications for local political communications; and political marketing strategies of local political actors and agencies and their implications for local political communications, with specific reference to the local newspaper coverage of the local campaign in the 2001 UK General Election. Drawing on a unique and extensive analysis of local newspapers' election reporting, combined with detailed interviews with journalists, editors, politicians and their agents, we argue that news management strategies enacted at a local level were characterised by an exchange relationship in which, although parties traded information for editorial space, the local news media retained a dominant role. Thus, although parties were, to differing degrees, successful in securing coverage of their candidates and policies, this success was always achieved in the context of local newspapers setting the broader agenda.     

立法机构在公共政策制定中的功能与作用——韩国国会与中国全国人大的比较

国会的立法决策是公共政策的最基本形式之一。在议会政治中,政党、国会议员代表选民输入利益需求,经过立法活动的整合、调整,最终形成能够代表或反映特定利益诉求的、以法律或其他特定权威形式表现出来的公共政策。本文以韩国国会在公共政策制定中所扮演的角色、发挥的功能为参照,对比中国全国人大在公共政策制定中的作用和影响,通过总结韩国国会的经验和教训,试图为全国人大的制度建设提供有益的借鉴和启发。     

From the Wembley Conference to the ‘McDonnell Amendment’: Labour's Leadership Nomination Rules

A recent change to the Labour party's nomination rules for leadership elections was the eighth such major modification of this brief clause in the party's rule book since 1981. These changes have provided a barometer of factional conflict over this period and indicate the importance of gate‐keeping powers in leadership selection. This article recounts the history of these eight rule changes. It shows how the proportion of Labour MPs (and later MEPs) required to nominate candidates in leadership elections has oscillated markedly, as the left has tried to reduce it while centrists have sought to increase it. The most recent change in 2017, when the threshold was decreased to 10 per cent of Labour MPs and MEPs, was a victory for the left. The article argues that the changes to Labour's nomination rules, while lower‐key than the extension of voting rights from MPs to ordinary members, have been just as significant.