W. Lance Bennett

The Personalization of Politics Political Identity, Social Media, and Changing Patterns of Participation

This article proposes a framework for understanding large-scale individualized collective action that is often coordinated through digital media technologies. Social fragmentation and the decline of group loyalties have given rise to an era of personalized politics in which individually expressive personal action frames displace collective action frames in many protest causes. This trend can be spotted in the rise of large-scale, rapidly forming political participation aimed at a variety of targets, ranging from parties and candidates, to corporations, brands, and transnational organizations. The group-based “identity politics” of the “new social movements” that arose after the 1960s still exist, but the recent period has seen more diverse mobilizations in which individuals are mobilized around personal lifestyle values to engage with multiple causes such as economic justice (fair trade, inequality, and development policies), environmental protection, and worker and human rights.

Social media and the organization of collective action : using Twitter to explore the ecology of two climate change protests

The Twitter Revolutions of 2009 reinvigorated the question of whether new social media have any real effect on contentious politics. In this article, the authors argue that evaluating the relation between transforming communication technologies and collective action demands recognizing how such technologies infuse specific protest ecologies. This includes looking beyond informational functions to the role of social media as organizing mechanisms and recognizing that traces of these media may reflect larger organizational schemes. Three points become salient in the case of Twitter against this background: (a) Twitter streams represent crosscutting networking mechanisms in a protest ecology, (b) they embed and are embedded in various kinds of gatekeeping processes, and (c) they reflect changing dynamics in the ecology over time. The authors illustrate their argument with reference to two hashtags used in the protests around the 2009 United Nations Climate Summit in Copenhagen.

Young citizens and civic learning: two paradigms of citizenship in the digital age

How can civic education keep pace with changing political identifications and practices of new generations of citizens? This paper examines research on school-based civic education in different post-industrial democracies with the aim of deriving a set of core learning categories that offer a starting point for thinking about how to address changing citizen identity styles and learning opportunities in various online and offline environments. The preponderance of school-based civic education programs reflects traditional paradigms of dutiful citizenship (DC) oriented to government through parties and voting, with citizens forming attentive publics who follow events in the news. The authors expand upon these conventional learning categories by identifying additional civic learning opportunities that reflect more self-actualizing (AC) styles of civic participation common among recent generations of youth who have been termed digital natives. Their AC learning styles favor interactive, networked activities often communicated through participatory media such as videos shared across online networks. The result is an expanded set of learning categories that recognize the value of different citizenship styles and emerging online environments that may supplement or supplant school civics.

An introduction to journalism norms and representations of politics

In addition to providing an overview of this special issue of Political Communication, this introduction identifies a preliminary set of rules that journalists use for representing politics in the news. These rules guide news decisions in keeping with underlying journalistic norms about the workings of politics and the role of the press in the political system. Such political norms must also be reconciled with professional journalism norms of fairness, and with the economic norms of efficiency and profit that increasingly drive the news business. Reconciling news content aimed at citizens in a democracy with traditional journalism standards and entertainment values has transformed the news itself. Increasingly sensationalistic narratives and dramatic production values both bridge and reflect the tensions among the various norms and practical rules that guide journalists in their daily representations of the political world.

Communication and Political Mobilization: Digital Media and the Organization of Anti-Iraq War Demonstrations in the U.S.

The speed and scale of mobilization in many contemporary protest events may reflect a transformation of movement organizations toward looser ties with members, enabling broader mobilization through the mechanism of dense individual-level political networks. This analysis explores the dynamics of this communication process in the case of U.S. protests against the Iraq war in 2003. We hypothesize that individual activists closest to the various sponsoring protest organizations were (a) disproportionately likely to affiliate with diverse political networks and (b) disproportionately likely to rely on digital communication media (lists, Web sites) for various types of information and action purposes. We test this model using a sample of demonstrators drawn from the United States protest sites of New York, San Francisco, and Seattle and find support for our hypotheses.

The One-Step Flow of Communication

This analysis explores the transformation of public communication in the United States from a two-step flow of messages passing from mass media through a social mediation process, to a one-step flow involving the refined targeting of messages directly to individuals. This one-step flow reflects both a transformation in communication technologies and fundamental changes in the relations between individuals and society. Opinion leaders who played a pivotal role in the two step paradigm are increasingly less likely to “lead” because they are more likely to reinforce latent opinions than to reframe them. And because the mass media in the one-step flow are increasingly fragmented and differentiated, they contribute to the individualizing process through shrinking audiences, demographically driven programming, and transmitting targeted political advertising and news spin.

Organization in the crowd: peer production in large-scale networked protests

How is crowd organization produced? How are crowd-enabled networks activated, structured, and maintained in the absence of recognized leaders, common goals, or conventional organization, issue framing, and action coordination? We develop an analytical framework for examining the organizational processes of crowd-enabled connective action such as was found in the Arab Spring, the 15-M in Spain, and Occupy Wall Street. The analysis points to three elemental modes of peer production that operate together to create organization in crowds: the production, curation, and dynamic integration of various types of information content and other resources that become distributed and utilized across the crowd. Whereas other peer-production communities such as open-source software developers or Wikipedia typically evolve more highly structured participation environments, crowds create organization through packaging these elemental peer-production mechanisms to achieve various kinds of work. The workings of these ‘production packages’ are illustrated with a theory-driven analysis of Twitter data from the 2011–2012 US Occupy movement, using an archive of some 60 million tweets. This analysis shows how the Occupy crowd produced various organizational routines, and how the different production mechanisms were nested in each other to create relatively complex organizational results.

Storytelling in criminal trials: A model of social judgment

Criminal trials require jurors to make sophisticated judgments about complex information. The absence of formal guidelines for making these judgments suggests that some more basic communication process must underlie the formal discourse of trial. Storytelling is the everyday practice that organizes information and guides the interpretation and judgment processses. A model of stories as judgment devices illustrates the communicational bases of justice and judgment and raises the possibility that there are common structural elements in cognition, communication, and forms of social action.

The Burglar Alarm That Just Keeps Ringing: A Response to Zaller

It is hard to disagree with John Zaller’s rhetorical formulation of two news standards: the useful “burglar alarm” that alerts busy citizens to important events in their public lives, versus the needlessly demanding Full News standard that issues detailed reports on matters of little consequence. Surely none could argue with the sensible burglar alarm or advocate the stultifying absurdity of the Full News standard when they are contrasted like this: “the news should provide information in the manner of attention-getting ‘burglar alarms’ about acute problems, rather than ‘police patrols’ over vast areas that pose no immediate problems.” The trouble with this new standard for news is that, when specified more fully, it turns out to be a nearly perfect account of what the news is already doing. Yet, Zaller implies that the news is currently turning off citizens because it still clings to the progressive-era notion of the full standard—patrolling vast areas that pose no immediate problems. In fact, the trouble with news is precisely the opposite. What has happened to the news in the past twenty years is that it has shifted in the direction of soft news and sensationalism, resulting in the continual sounding of burglar alarms on any number of issues—often just because they are shocking—and turning citizens off in the bargain. In short, the argument that Zaller offers to endorse his standard is almost perfectly backwards. The news, in fact, is sounding burglar alarms all the time. This incessant ringing of alarms about dubious problems, unseemly scandals, and daily threats to health and safety discourages citizens from taking the press, politicians, and public life seriously. For example, Patterson shows that people who have left the news arena in recent years do so not because news is covering too much barren ground, but because it is too negative, sensational, and alarming (Patterson, 2000). Beyond this fundamental flaw in the reasoning behind the burglar alarm standard, there are several core problems with the argument that take it away from its opening and fairly agreeable—but rhetorically loaded—formulation and into far less compelling terrain. The first problem develops from my opening point: Nearly all of Zaller’s examples of ideal, burglar alarm news involve news practices that already exist. The trouble is that a large volume of this alarming news is regarded by citizens, scholars, and journalists as

Editors' Introduction: A Semi-Independent Press: Government Control and Journalistic Autonomy in the Political Construction of News

This introduction to a special issue of Political Communication discusses changes in the political content of news and introduces the concerns of the three articles in this symposium regarding the autonomy of the press in setting the political agenda. While considerable agreement exists about the shrinking space for hard news and the rise of sensationalism and infotainment formats, there is less scholarly agreement about whether the remaining hard news space is less subject to the news management efforts of public officials and elites and more likely to be filled with narratives driven by events and journalistic initiatives. We propose looking at news construction as a negotiated process involving both routine high levels of official management and circumstances under which events offer journalists opportunities to write more independent political scripts.