Recursive Governance: Contemporary Political Communication and Public Policy

Abstract

This article investigates aspects of the new relationships that are emerging between contemporary trends in political communication and public policy. In particular, it identifies and analyzes how these relationships are extending beyond the traditional domain of political communication as information and persuasion. This is traced through a consideration of the notion of political communication as “recursive governance”—a form of governance that operates according to a generative informational logic. The article explores the impact of recursive processes on policy formation and on democratic practice more generally. It argues that the dramatic increase in the use of communications expertise and public relations by government (as well as business and the third sector) is part of what appears to be a far more fundamental systems shift in the very nature of governance in Western democracies.

Keywords:

• governance
• recursion
• communications management
• complexity
• systems theory

The author would like to thank Juliette Brodsky, Ann Capling, Mark Considine, Glyn Davis and the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. Research for this article was funded by the Australian Research Council (Grant DP0450924).

Notes

1. In regard to Australia, see the Senate Select Committee report A Certain Maritime Incident (Parliament of Australia, 2002, chaps. 3–6) on the “Children Overboard” scandal. Also see the Australian Parliamentary Library research note on federal government advertising (Parliamentary Library, 2004), which notes that the Australian federal government has been the top spending advertiser in the country since 2000. On Canada, see the 2003 official report of the Canadian auditor general to the House of Commons, Government-Wide Audit of Sponsorship, Advertising, and Public Opinion Research (Auditor General of Canada, 2003). While this report is primarily concerned with the improper contracting out of government PR activities, it does highlight the enormous sums of money devoted to government advertising and public relations. In relation to the United Kingdom, see the Phillis review of government communications (Phillis, 2004) and Gaber (2004). In relation to the United States and the recent Ketchum “paid punditry” scandal revealed by USA Today in January 2005, see O'Brien (2005) and the U.S. House of Representatives (2005) report on federal public relations spending.

2. The key reference is Hofstadter (2000). Aside from its comprehensive sweep, this work is notable for its recursive presentation of recursion.

3. See, for example, Stokey and Lucas (1989), and Ljungqvist and Sargent (2000).

4. See, for example, Cohen (2002, reflexive legal paradigm); Dorf and Sabel (1998; democratic experimentalism); Sirianni and Friedland (2001; civic innovation); McIntyre (2005a, 2005b) and Rothstein, Huber, and Gaskell (2006) (regulation); and Gross and Krohn (2005), Kelty (2005), and Platt (1989) (social life).

5. At the sociological level, this shift can be understood as symptomatic of a postindustrial or network form of society in which information is a key productive resource. In the older industrial era, the value of information resided in the capacity to operationalize knowledge into material processes. By contrast, in the current era the creation and circulation of information becomes an end in itself—information working on information. Moreover, flows of information are fundamental across all areas of social action in network society. These flows are structured in networks of connection that generate and diffuse power. Power tends to become delinked from older institutional forms and relocated in the shifting codes of information and images of representation and identity. In this sense, the new problematic of power revolves around the capacity to manage and control information flows (Castells, 2000; Graber, 2003; Melucci, 1996a; Urry, 2003; cf. Thompson, 2003). The proliferation and prominence of communications specialists and dedicated communications units within government, business, and the third sector are testament to this new problematic of power.

6. Morin refers specifically to the work of four theorists of self-organization: John von Neumann (theory of automata), Heinz von Foerster (principle of order from chaos), Henri Atlan (random organization), and Ilya Prigogine (auto-eco-organization).

7. See Nicholas O'shaughnessy's recent reevaulation of the concept of propaganda for contemporary analysis (O'shaughnessy, 2004).

8. One of the central debates in the scholarly literature revolves around the questions of whether policy is increasingly poll driven or not, whether politicians pander to public opinion, and if so how and to what degree (for an overview, see Manza et al., 2002; Manza & Cook, 2002). Robert Shapiro and Lawrence Jacobs mount a strong argument against the political pandering thesis, maintaining that policy is not fundamentally poll driven. However, they do not dismiss the use of polls in the policy process. Indeed, they argue that decision makers use “crafted talk” that draws on polling information to convince the public that policy is contiguous with their moods and needs, even when the policy has its origins elsewhere (Jacobs & Shapiro, 2000; Shapiro & Jacobs, 2001).

9. See, for instance, the 1997 report Consultation and Communications (OECD, 1997), where there is a concern with the integration of multiple interests into policy-making through greater citizen participation as well as with government management of media relations. The overriding theme is that public consultation is crucial for revitalizing citizens' sense of political efficacy and raising the quality of public debate. The report works with a notion of public communication based on a rational model of deliberation and governance. It assumes that communication is clear and rational unless there is interference and distortion generated by the media, especially in the form of sensationalism and trivialization. However it does not mention the changing dynamics involved in contemporary policymaking. For instance, it conveys a sense that if policymakers exert greater efforts to listen to the diverse concerns of the citizenry and properly explain and clearly articulate policy without media distortion, then the problem of citizen disaffection will begin to be redressed. In other words, the solution is a better informed public who will thus be able to better understand the merits of “expert” policy decisions (OECD, 1997, pp. 31–34). See a shift away from this older model in later OECD reports, for example OECD (2001).

10. The ongoing Indymedia alternative media project seems to work with something like this insight. For example, the Indymedia collective that formed for the Cancún (Mexico) meeting of the WTO in September 2003, the Hurakan Alternative Media and Tech Convergence, had as its motto “Don”t blame the media, become the media.” On the Indymedia project, see Ballvé (2004) and Beckerman (2003). In relation to pressure groups' and advocacy organizations' adoption and implementation of strategic communications approaches in Britain, see Kovacs (2004).