The Interplay of Actors in Political Communication: The State of the Subfield

ABSTRACT

In this article, we systematically assess how recent political communication scholarship has empirically demonstrated the interactions of the three main actors: elites, citizens and media. We found that research has focused overwhelmingly on within-actor relationships involving citizens, to the exclusion of elites and media, and concentrated mostly on micro-level processes. Most inter-actor relationships also tended to be moderated than mediated, implying the nature of findings as more exploratory and conditional than confirmatory and causal, and that cases were overdrawn from Western countries. In discussing possible reasons and implications for these findings, we call on scholars to move beyond studying micro-processes related to citizens' cognitions, attitudes, and behaviors, and explicitly anchor them to higher-level societal ramifications; incorporate the investigation of causal processes of inter-actor relationships; and make concrete affirmative actions to de-Westernize political communication research.

KEYWORDS:

• Media effects
• mediation
• moderation
• political elites
• public opinion

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For moderation: IV x MV to DV. For mediation: IV to MV, MV to DV and IV to DV. We note that recent methodological advancements reject the precondition of significant direct effects in mediation analysis (Hayes, 2009). However, we deemed it best to use the criteria of Baron and Kenny’s (1986) causal steps approach, as this is the most established and widely used technique and allowed us to standardize our analysis. While we recognize that excluding insignificant paths may contribute to the “file drawer problem” (Rosenthal, 1979), we only analyzed significant paths for three main reasons. First, it was difficult to identify insignificant paths, as some studies only focused on presenting significant relationships. Second, we take off from the tradition of meta-analysis that only records significant effects (Borenstein et al., 2011). Finally, significant findings reveal the possible interplays among the three actors studied in political communication, which is the main interest of our study.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Omar O. Dumdum

Omar O. Dumdum is a PhD candidate in Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Levi Bankston

Levi Bankston is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.