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Political Communication fosters boundary breaking, interdisciplinary and innovative scholarship that deepens our understanding of the interactions between social, political and communication processes. Our reach is genuinely global and seeks to address issues surrounding political communication and major issues including conflict, inequality and environmental crisis and their consequences in all parts of the world.
Read moreIn the age of ubiquitous internet-based digital communication and substantial economic, social and political upheavals, understanding the relationships between political change and communication processes is essential to understanding, explaining and evaluating the world around us, as well as attempting to change it.
The Political Communication section fosters boundary breaking, interdisciplinary and innovative scholarship, both theoretical and empirical, that helps expand and deepen our understanding of the interactions between social, political and communication processes. Its express goal is to enable critical and progressive research, which challenges orthodoxies and expands intellectual inquiry by moving thinking beyond existing paradigms, ideological boundaries and status quo orientated research agendas.
This section draws particularly on the fields of media and communication studies, political science / international relations and sociology. It will provide space for scholars that explore the relationship between communication and class, race, gender and sexual identity, as well as how these intersect with government (at any level), the nation state, imperialism, international relations, corporate/capitalist power and indeed the activities of social movements – from both above and below. Our reach is genuinely global and seeks to address issues surrounding political communication and major issues including conflict, inequality and environmental crisis and their consequences in all parts of the world. We encourage all forms of critical and progressive political communication scholarship especially that which helps to expand the boundaries of existing mainstream political communication research.
We welcome ground-breaking scholarship in the following areas:
• the role of propaganda, persuasion and influence activities and their impact upon democracy;
• progressive normative theory which seeks better ethically grounded approaches to persuasion and influence;
• the role of communication in policy and political processes both via mass media and through direct communications – specifically through examinations of lobbying and associated processes;
• the politics and sociology of science, health and environmental communications and their interactions with expertise;
• the role of communication in social movements and the communicative and strategic activities of social movements;
• news media coverage of political affairs with a focus on identifying and explaining media performance and its relationship to power and the exercise of power;
• the impact of new media technologies, including the internet, social media and independent/alternative media on the public sphere, both at national and global levels;
• the political economies of media industries;
• political-economic and empirical work on marketing, advertising and related communicative industries, including on consumerism;
• progressive normative theory which seeks to improve political journalism and the capacity of news media industries to facilitate democracy;
• strategies to improve both media literacy amongst publics, in particular developing critical awareness of media bias and propaganda activities;
• considerations of methods in researching and analysing political communications processes and indeed how communication intersects with the material, the real and with extra-communicative / discursive actions and activities.
Indexed in: Google Scholar, DOAJ, CrossRef, CLOCKSS
PMCID: NA
Political Communication welcomes submissions of the following article types: Brief Research Report, Conceptual Analysis, Correction, Editorial, General Commentary, Hypothesis and Theory, Mini Review, Opinion, Original Research, Perspective, Policy Brief, Review and Specialty Grand Challenge.
All manuscripts must be submitted directly to the section Political Communication, where they are peer-reviewed by the Associate and Review Editors of the specialty section.
Articles published in the section Political Communication will benefit from the Frontiers impact and tiering system after online publication. Authors of published original research with the highest impact, as judged democratically by the readers, will be invited by the Chief Editor to write a Frontiers Focused Review - a tier-climbing article. This is referred to as "democratic tiering". The author selection is based on article impact analytics of original research published in all Frontiers specialty journals and sections. Focused Reviews are centered on the original discovery, place it into a broader context, and aim to address the wider community across all of Sociology and Communication.
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Avenue du Tribunal Fédéral 34
CH – 1005 Lausanne
Switzerland
Tel +41(0)21 510 17 40
Fax +41 (0)21 510 17 01
For all queries regarding manuscripts in Review and potential conflicts of interest, please contact sociology.editorial.office@frontiersin.org
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