October, 2011 Volume 21, Issue 3 Newsletter Welcome Roundtable: Flow of Political Information Data Sources Announcements Archives Social Media	Roundtable The Flow of Political Information in the Digital Age: What's Better and What's Worse?
	Moving Beyond the Traditional Defaults of Political Communication Research Scott Althaus The digital revolution has introduced two broad changes in the nature of supply and demand for traditional news products that have been much talked-about in our subfield: - The shift within mainstream news outlets toward advocacy journalism and away from trustee journalism - The growth of segmented media audiences served by highly specialized informational products, leading to a fragmentation of the public sphere A common way of assessing whether these developments are good or bad is to reflect on how they affect the ability of citizens to fulfill their role in the democratic communication process. However, the default model of "the Good Citizen" (to borrow Michael Schudson's phrase) that has animated much research in our field since the 1940s will, I think, be of little help in placing these developments in a useful theoretical context. Although the origins of this default model are not entirely clear, its modern emergence into popular American discourse came during the Progressive Era of the late 19th century. Progressives advanced a normative model of citizenship in which citizens should be concerned with issues rather than parties, dispassionate, thoughtful, and willing to consider points of view that contrasted with their own. This Progressive-era vision of the "Good Citizen" later found its way into the 1947 Hutchins Commission Report on "A Free and Responsible Press" and Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm's Four Theories of the Press, which together ratified a top-down model of democratic communication in which social responsibility journalism served a mass audience with two sides to every conflict. Today, the professional authority of social responsibility journalism is in decline, the mass audience no longer exists except in times of extreme national emergency (or during the Super Bowl), and political psychology now confirms empirically what Walter Lippmann and John Stuart Mill knew instinctively, that the dispassionate consumer of balanced political perspectives is one of the least likely persons to darken a voting booth. The intellectual challenge of judging whether current trends are good or bad has, I think, less to do with the changes brought about by digital media than with the narrow range of default assumptions about "good" political communication that have occupied the mainstream of our subfield. We need new theories that can present us with different perspectives on whether the changing media environment hinders or enhances the project of democracy. The default model that has animated our field for several decades is too strongly rooted in the American experience of political communication; too narrowly focused on the top-down, centralized national news system that prevailed during the post-World War II era; too wedded to a model of journalism that was historically the odd one out, and too rooted in an ideal conception of the "Good Citizen" that does not survive empirical analysis. Identifying plausible alternative vantage points therefore requires four types of research that are currently undersupplied in the political communication literature. First, our theoretical horizons will be broadened by cross-national comparative research on the roles played by political culture and media structures. A large amount of political communication research has traditionally been conducted on America by Americans. But the cutting edge for the new media revolution is probably closer to Seoul, Korea than Seattle. And the advocacy press system recently embodied in Fox News and MSNBC has long been the norm in many countries around the world, particularly in the newspaper systems serving Europe. We have much to learn from the advocacy press system that those countries were already experiencing back when Walter Cronkhite was telling Americans the way it was. Second, our theoretical horizons will be broadened by historical research that provides a basis for comparing the present to the past at multiple points and in multiple eras. As a field, our historical starting point has often been the recent rather than distant past. But the distant past may be closer to the present than it used to be. The party press system of the 1840s served localized partisan audiences more highly segmented than today with a level of partisan polarization that has few equals in today's media environment. Consider this campaign song distributed nationally by papers supporting William "Tippecanoe" Harrison for president: Who rules with an iron rod, who moves at Satan's beck and nod, who heeds not man, who heeds not God? Van Buren! Who would his friend, his country sell, do other deeds too base to tell, deserves the lowest place in Hell? Van Buren! Van Buren! We could learn much about the contemporary emergence of highly-segmented partisan discourse systems by studying how such systems used to serve us in the past. Third, our theoretical horizons will be broadened by descriptive research on the nature of information flows in today's complex information environment. We need content analysis work to trace where political information originates, how it is disseminated, who gets it, and what happens along the way. We simply don't know how the communication system works any more. We don't know where news comes from, or where it's going. Descriptive research is needed to tell us what's going on. Right now, that work is more likely to be done by computer scientists than by political communication scholars. Finally, our theoretical horizons will be broadened by normative analysis that better clarifies the hidden philosophical assumptions animating our empirical literatures. Bringing those hidden assumptions to light can point to alternative theories of what democracies require of communication. For example, deliberative theories of democracy envision just the sort of political communication system that is so rapidly disappearing today. But the highly segmented and politically polarized media system that so threatens deliberative theories of democracy is precisely what pluralist theories of democracy like best. So our question shouldn't be "How is democracy going to work in this new media environment?" so much as "Which models of democracy are becoming advantaged in the new media environment, and which models are becoming disadvantaged?" Alternative models of democracy are increasingly becoming advantaged in the new media system, and we need to get up to speed on how they're supposed to work in theory so we can assess how well they're working in practice. Our subfield has a long history of doing comparative, historical, descriptive, and normative scholarship, but mostly by scholars from other countries and from disciplines other than political science. These types of research remain undersupplied at the present moment, in part because they are so difficult to do well. But the most exciting research questions I can think of require a broader set of theoretical starting points than our field currently supplies. Many prevailing assumptions about what's good and bad in political communication seem closely tied to a top-down, mass-audience, mainstream news system that no longer exists. The rapid emergence of the complex and extremely porous information exchange system now in place throughout the world demands new ways of thinking about what communication is supposed to do for democracies, how that communication is supposed to take place, and who is supposed to be communicating. Moving forward requires a new wave of political communication research that is comparative, historical, descriptive, and clearly rooted in normative theories of democracy.