Editor’s Essay: Political Tolerance Versus Tolerant Politics

To be honest, I worry a lot about public relations, and I worry a lot about politics. And frankly, editing this special issue on political public relations has done little to assuage my worries. Let me explain.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary (2017) offers one definition of politics as “competition between competing interest groups or individuals for power and leadership” (n.p.). The implication of this definition is that politics is a zero-sum game, wherein one party wins at the expense of the other party. In perhaps the most obvious example, only one winner can emerge in any electoral contest; the other candidates are by definition losers.

Strömbäck and Kiousis (2011) have defined political public relations as:

the management process by which an organization or individual for political purposes, through purposeful communication and action, seeks to influence and to establish, build, and maintain beneficial relationships and reputations with its key publics to help support its mission and achieve its goals. (p. 8; emphasis added)

The politics of public relations

What troubles me about both of these definitions (however realistic and pragmatic they may be) is that neither supports the (perhaps idealized) notion of public relations as being inherently symmetrical in nature (cf. J. Grunig, 1992), seeking to build mutually beneficial relationships (cf. Broom & Sha, 2013; Cutlip & Center, 1952), in a “win-win zone” (cf. Dozier, Grunig, & Grunig, 1995).

What worries me about political public relations, then, is the question of whose mission and whose goals will be served by our efforts.

Historically, we know that Edward Bernays (1965) ran a successful campaign to encourage women to smoke cigarettes (seen in the 1930s as an assertion of feminist independence, not an invitation to lung cancer). With help from Atlanta publicists Edward Young Clarke and Elizabeth Tyler, membership in the White supremacist Ku Klux Klan went from “only a few thousand” in 1920 to “nearly 100,000” just one year later (Baudouin, 2011, p. 17). At the time of his death in 1934, public relations pioneer Ivy Ledbetter Lee was under fire for his connections to a German company affiliated with the Nazi government (Hiebert, 1966). More recently, the efforts of public relations firm Hill & Knowlton on behalf of Citizens for a Free Kuwait led to US Congressional support for the Persian Gulf War (Lee, 1990). As these examples show, the historical record of our discipline demonstrates that what we now call political public relations has long (if not always) been part of our profession, despite the contemporary, idealized definition of public relations.

Indeed, Guth and Marsh (2003) noted that “some historians believe that the development of public relations is a direct result of Western civilization’s first true democracy: the city-state of Athens led by Pericles from 461 to 429 B.C.” (p. 57). Although the definitive resource on public relations history remains Cutlip (1994, 1995), the history chapters of textbooks in our field typically trace the development of public relations-like activities from ancient democracies and the growth of the Roman Catholic Church (which functioned in many respects as its own nation-state) through the American Revolution and subsequent Civil War. (For examples, see chapter 2 in Grunig & Hunt, 1984; chapter 3 in Guth & Marsh, 2003; chapter 4 in Broom & Sha, 2013; chapter 2 in Wilcox, Cameron, & Reber, 2015). In short, the history of public relations has always been political.

The marketplace of ideas

Several textbooks also note the connection between public relations (historical or current; political or otherwise) and rhetorical traditions, which include public communications designed specifically to persuade (for examples, see chapter 4 in Crable & Vibbert, 1986; chapter 1 in Heath & Coombs, 2006). Along these lines, some have argued that all parties deserve public relations advocacy in the court of public opinion, much like all defendants deserve representation in the court of law (e.g., Fitzpatrick, 2006; see also Heath, 2000). The Public Relations Society of America specifically stated that practitioners “serve the public interest by acting as responsible advocates for those we represent … [and] provide a voice in the marketplace of ideas, facts, and viewpoints to aid informed public debate” (Public Relations Society of America, 2017).

Yet, if public relations is truly about both actions and words (e.g., The Page Principles, 2017), an ethical and professional public relations counselor would not only help the client determine what to say, but also recommend corrective actions internal to the organization. Nevertheless, this only works in cases where the mission of the organization is amenable to change. In cases where the very existence of the organization depends on its mission, that mission may always be conserved or maintained (Sha, 2004). For example, no amount of public relations counsel regarding organizational words and actions is likely to result in a prochoice or a prolife organization yielding ground on its fundamental purpose to defend its respective position.

How, then, might public relations professionals determine which ideas in the marketplace merit defending more or less than other ideas?

The paradox of tolerance

I believe that one answer to this challenging question lies in Popper’s (1945) Paradox of Tolerance:

Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. … We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal. (p. 226)

Viewed in Popper’s light, the question of which ideas in the marketplace merit defending by public relations becomes the question of whether public relations should defend criminality or promote intolerance. Unlike in the court of law, criminals are not entitled to defense in the court of public opinion. Under this scenario, and given the win-lose definition of political public relations, the losers would be those organizations, people, and viewpoints for which public relations practitioners refuse to work.

And the ultimate winner would be our collective civil society that tolerates a greater diversity of viewpoints or that encourages, as Taylor (2013) explained, “an orientation to others that enables collective action that creates a common good” (p. 122).

Credibility or credulity? Examining political organization-public relationships in an election of interloping candidates

Kaye Sweetser and Nicholas Browning examine the political success of candidates they define as interlopers or intruders in a space or activity, with the key finding that respondents’ dissatisfaction with their own political party did NOT drive support for interloping candidates in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Using Kelleher’s (2009) definition of communicated commitment as “communication in which members of an organization work to express their commitment to building and maintaining a relationship” (p. 176), Sweetser and Browning found that communicated commitment was related to higher satisfaction perceived by voters with both their own political party and the opposing party. Furthermore, as the authors note on page 213, “Across the board, individuals appear satisfied with their relationship with the Democratic Party and dissatisfied with their relationship with the Republican Party, regardless of party affiliation.”

Studying relationships between a voter and his/her own political party makes sense, from the political party’s strategic standpoint of trying to increase proparty identification or to encourage proparty voting behaviors. Yet, of broader significance for society is studying relationships between a voter and the opposing political party, as election winners in democratic systems are supposed to govern for the good of all regardless of party affiliation, not merely to govern for the good of their own partisan affiliates and interests. This study underscores the complex interplay of relationships (measured as communicated commitment and conversational voice), credibility (including trust), and political information efficacy.

What’s not to like? a qualitative study of young women politicians’ self-framing on twitter

Politics is gendered (cf. Celis, Kantola, Waylen, & Weldon, 2016); gender is political and politicized (de Beauvoir, 1953/1989). For example, much has been made elsewhere regarding the 2016 US presidential election in which a man with no prior experience in political office won an electoral victory over a woman described as the “most qualified presidential candidate in history” (Reuters, 2016, n.p.). And really, that entire electoral spectacle reminded me that “No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility” (de Beauvoir, 1953/1989, p. xxxi).

But, what about electoral contests in which gender may not be a variable, simply because both candidates are of the same gender? Does gender still matter then? Apparently, yes.

In her study of how two women candidates for New Zealand’s parliament used Twitter to promote both their own electoral campaigns and their respective party’s political platforms, Susan Fontaine investigates the gendered dimensions of social media use. Her analysis furthers our conceptual and practical understanding of the equalization theory of social media (see Vergeer, 2015), i.e., the notion that social media platforms have leveled the playing field for diverse groups of political actors. The study’s implication for public relations theory—indeed, for any social science discipline’s theory-building efforts—is that gendered dimensions of scholarship and practice cannot be ignored.¹

Agenda-building role of state-owned media around the world: 2014 hongkong protest case

The article by Tianduo Zhang, Ji Young Kim, Tiffany Mohr, Barbara Myslik, Liudmila Khalitova, Guy Golan, and Spiro Kiousis explicitly articulates the conceptual connection between public relations and public diplomacy by connecting public relations scholarship on agenda setting and agenda building to a wider research stream on intermedia agenda-building efforts, which are important for public diplomacy purposes. This study’s findings point to the importance of dyadic government relationships for intermedia agenda-building, and they contradict previous research (e.g., Sheafer, Shenhav, Takens, & van Atteveldt, 2014) regarding the impact of state-level homophily on the three levels of agenda building.

This study advances public relations theory by distinguishing conceptually between intermedia agenda building and intermedia agenda setting, by conceptualizing state-owned media as an information subsidy, and by empirically testing the impact on agenda building of variables from international and intercultural relations. The latter include the homophily-related variables of culture, democracy, and press freedom, as well as the relationship-history variables of diplomatic ties and historical militarized dispute.

I believe future scholars will appreciate the article’s transparency of method, with detailed information on coding criteria and content analysis procedures. And I hope the study’s focus on state-owned Chinese media helps to reduce the ethnocentrism often found in US-based academic journals, in which the United States is the central lens through which scholarly phenomena are viewed, which is in and of itself a problem of academic politics.

In the political realm of academic journal production, editors are assisted by reviewers, whose evaluations of competing manuscript submissions ultimately help to determine which ones get published. I am indebted to all the reviewers² for this special issue on political public relations:

Linda Aldoory, University of Maryland

Kati Berg, Marquette University (Wisconsin)

Pamela Bourland-Davis, Georgia Southern University

John Brummette, Radford University (Virginia)

Ni Chen, University of Macau (CHINA)

Kristin English, Georgia College & State University

Denise Ferguson, Azusa Pacific University (California)

Kathy Fitzpatrick, American University (Washington, D.C.)

Thomas Gaither, Elon University (North Carolina)

Karla Gower, University of Alabama

Linda Hon, University of Florida

Melissa Janoske, University of Memphis (Tennessee)

Hua Jiang, Syracuse University (New York)

Young Kim, Marquette University (Wisconsin)

Emily Kinsky*, West Texas A&M University

Dean Kruckeberg*, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Heather LaMarre*, Temple University (Pennsylvania)

Greg Leichty, University of Louisville (Kentucky)

Cong Li, University of Miami (Florida)

Brooke Liu, University of Maryland

Stephanie Madden*, University of Memphis (Tennessee)

Tina McCorkindale*, Institute for Public Relations (UNITED STATES)

Bitt Moon, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (KOREA)

Karen Russell, University of Georgia

Theresa Russell-Loretz, Millersville University (Pennsylvania)

Arthur Santana, San Diego State University (California)

Jae-Hwa Shin*, University of Southern Mississippi

Maureen Taylor, University of Tennessee

Jennifer Vardeman-Winter, University of Houston (Texas)

Kay Weaver, University of Waikato (NEW ZEALAND)

Candace White, University of Tennessee

John Wirtz, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Juyan Zhang, University of Texas at San Antonio

Yue Zheng, California State University, Northridge

In the spirit of transparency, I also offer here the statistics for this special issue of the Journal of Public Relations Research: Of the 20 manuscripts submitted to the special issue, three were accepted, 16 were rejected, and one was invited to resubmit to the journal’s regular process after execution of revisions deemed too extensive to meet the timeline for the special issue. Thus, the journal’s acceptance ratio for this special issue is 15.0%.

Notes

¹ I acknowledge the complicity of academic journals in the (mis-)presentation of scholarship as somehow being gender-neutral, simply by our adherence to citation styles (including the style of the American Psychological Association, used by this journal) that mask author first names, which are one typical indicator (however imperfect) of the gender identities of scholars.

² *denotes reviewers of articles published in this issue.