Scope

In the age of ubiquitous internet-based digital communication and substantial political upheavals, understanding the relationships between political processes and communication processes is essential if we are to fully understand, explain and evaluate the world around us. The section Political Communication aims to foster boundary breaking and innovative scholarship, both theoretical and empirical, that helps expand and deepen our understanding of the interactions between 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. 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. In particular, we aim to 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 aim to publish 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; 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 social media and independent/alternative media on the public sphere, both at national and global levels; the political economies of media industries; 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.

Submission

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