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11 1 Systems and methods for political communication in post-war Italy The ‘Press and Propaganda’ sections of the large mass membership parties It has long been thought that during Italy’s immediate post-war period the systems in place for projecting party identities were rudimentary and amateurish; this was the almost unanimous view of advertising staff from the major Italian companies in 1953, when they were interviewed for a survey published in the newspaper La Notte during the general election campaign. ‘The parties’ campaigns are being run by amateurs
This book offers a new interpretation of the Conservative party’s revival and adaptation to democratic politics in the early twentieth century, a period in which the British electorate more than tripled in size.
We cannot appreciate the Conservatives’ unique success in British politics without exploring the dramatic cultural transformation which occurred within the party during the early decades of the century. This was a seminal period in which key features of the modern Conservative party emerged: a mass women’s organisation, a focus on addressing the voter as a consumer, targeted electioneering strategies, and the use of modern media to speak to a mass audience. New insights are provided into how the Conservatives met the challenges provided by class, gender and regional identities and the means by which the party adapted to innovations made by their opponents. Rather than offering a conventional party political history, this book provides the first substantial attempt to assess the Conservatives’ adaptation to democracy across the early twentieth century from a cultural perspective.
This book will appeal to academics and students with an interest in the history of political communication, gender and class in modern Britain.
This collection of essays is set up to explore the dynamics of local/national political culture in seventeenth-century Britain, with particular reference to political communication. It examines the degree to which connections were forged between politics in London, Whitehall and Westminster, and politics in the localities, and the patterns and processes that can be recovered. The fundamental goal is to foster a dialogue between two prominent strands within recent historiography, and between the work of social and political historians of the early modern period. Chapters by leading historians of Stuart Britain examine how the state worked to communicate with its people and how local communities, often far from the metropole, opened their own lines of communication with the centre. The volume then is not meant to be an exhaustive study of all forms of political communication but it nevertheless highlights a variety of ways this agenda can be addressed. At present there is ongoing work on subscriptional culture across the nation from petitioning to Protestation, loyal addresses, lobbying and litigation to name but a few. It is hoped that this volume will provide a reminder of the gains to be made by placing political communication at the heart of both social and political history and to provide an impetus for further scholarship.
This book analyses the evolving Anglo-American counter-terror propaganda strategies that spanned the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as reconstruction, between 2001 and 2008. It offers insights into the transformation beyond this period, tracking many key developments as much as possible up to the time of writing (2013) and providing a retrospective on the 'war on terror'. Using empirical data located within multiple spheres, the book draws on sociology, political science and international relations, developing an interdisciplinary analysis of political communication in the international system. It shows how media technologies presented legal, structural and cultural problems for what were seen as rigid propaganda systems defined by their emergence in an old media system of sovereign states with stable target audiences. Propaganda successes and advances were an inconsistent by-product both of malfunction and of relationships, cultures and rivalries, both domestically and between the partners. The differing social relations of planners and propagandists to wider society create tensions within the 'machine', however leaders may want it to function. The book demonstrates that the 'messy' nature of bureaucracy and international systems as well as the increasingly fluid media environment are all important in shaping what actually happens. In a context of initial failures in formal coordination, the book stresses the importance of informal relationships to planners in the propaganda war. This situated Britain in an important yet precarious position within the Anglo-American propaganda effort, particularly in Iraq.
New Labour came to power in 1997 promising to modernize Britain and make it fit for the twenty-first century. This book studies Tony Blair and Gordon Brown's combined attempt to sell the idea of a European future to the British people. It is about the art of rhetoric, persuasion and the techniques of modern political communication, and the 'Europe question' in British politics. It traces the progressivist elements of New Labour's discourse on British European policy with reference to the place perceptions of history occupied in Blair and Brown's speeches on foreign policy. The book explains the idea of 'norm entrepreneurship' and how it can be adapted to help us think through New Labour's handling of British European policy. It focuses on various aspects of the politics, language and decision-making style of New Labour. Theoretical approaches to Euroscepticism to help us understand, through the empirical data in the speeches, how Blair and Brown constructed their identity as 'Europeans' against their perceived 'sceptical' opponents. The method of discourse analysis used to study the strategies Blair and Brown put in place to realize their goals, is discussed. The book presents the evidence on the ways in which the Prime Minister and Chancellor discursively constructed the Europe question as a matter of protecting and/or advancing vital British national interests. Trapped between a broadly hostile media and an apathetic public, Blair and Brown failed to provide the necessary leadership to see Britain to a European future.
This book discusses the framing of referendum campaigns in the news media, focusing particularly on the case of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. Using a comprehensive content analysis of print and broadcast coverage as well as in-depth interviews with broadcast journalists and their sources during this campaign, it provides an account of how journalists construct the frames that define their coverage of contested political campaigns. It views the mediation process from the perspective of those who participate directly in it, namely journalists and political communicators. It puts forward an original theoretical model to account more broadly for frame building in the context of referendums in Western media systems, using insights from this and from other cases. The book makes an original contribution to the study of media frames during referendums.
How do leading Conservative figures strive to communicate with and influence the electorate? Why have some proven more effective than others in advancing their personal positions and ideological agendas? How do they seek to connect with their audience in different settings, such as the party conference, House of Commons, and through the media?
This book draws analytical inspiration from the Aristotelian modes of persuasion to shine new and insightful light upon the articulation of British conservatism, examining the oratory and rhetoric of twelve key figures from Conservative Party politics. The individual orators featured are Stanley Baldwin, Winston Churchill, Harold Macmillan, Iain Macleod, Enoch Powell, Keith Joseph, Margaret Thatcher, Michael Heseltine, John Major, William Hague, Boris Johnson, and David Cameron. Each chapter is written by an expert in the field and explores how its subject attempted to use oratory to advance their agenda within the party and beyond.
This is the first book to analyse Conservative Party politics in this way, and along with its companion volume, Labour Orators from Bevan to Miliband, marks an important new departure in the analysis of British politics. It will be of particular interest to students of Conservative Party politics, conservatism more broadly, British political history, ideologies and party politics, and communication studies.
On 25 January 1474, in Dijon, Charles the bold, robed in silk, gold and precious jewels, wearing a headpiece giving the illusion of a crown, expressed cryptically in front of his subjects his desire to become a king. Three years later, the battle of Nancy, taking Charles to his death, plunged the Great Principality of Burgundy into the drama of its split. This book, innovative and essential, not only explores Burgundian historiography and history but offers a complete synthesis about the nature of politics in this space considered from both the north and the south. Focusing on political ideologies, the book’s scope is wide-ranging and raises a number of important issues about the nature of the medieval state, the signification of the nation under the Ancien Regime, the role of warfare in the creation of political power, the impact of political loyalties in the exercise of government and even the place of symbolic communication and geographical knowledge in a wide territory lying from northern county of Holland to the southern grapevines of Mâcon. In examining all these issues, the book challenges a number of existing ideas about the Burgundian state. Questioning the means to create a viable political community, it offers a completely new interpretation of Burgundian history in the later Middle Ages, and new ideas also relevant to the historians of other European states in the later Middle Ages.
The struggle in projects, ideas and symbols between the strongest Communist Party in the West and an anti-Communist and pro-Western government coalition was the most peculiar founding element of the Italian democratic political system after the Second World War.
Until now, most historians have focused their attention on political parties as the only players in the competition for the making of political orientations and civic identities in Italian public opinion. Others have considered Italian political struggle in the 1940s and 1950s in terms of the polarisation between Communism and organised Catholicism, due to the undoubted importance of the Church in Italian culture and social relations.
This book enlarges the view, looking at new aspects and players of the anti-Communist ‘front’. It takes into account the role of cultural associations, newspapers and the popular press in the selection and diffusion of critical judgements and images of Communism, highlighting a dimension that explains the force of anti-Communist opinions in Italy after 1989 and the crisis of traditional parties. The author also places the case of Italian Cold War anti-Communism in an international context for the first time.
such an approach, while not necessarily embracing the culture industry thesis in toto. The culture industry writings had certainly been largely silent on one of its core commodities: the journalistic production of news. Noting this absence in 1985, four years before the English translation of Structural Transformation was published, the US critical political communication scholar Daniel Hallin remarked that: ‘[O]ne might think that by now … critical theory might have produced a substantial body of research on the institutions of political