The Evolution of Political Communication as an Academic Discipline: Media Infrastructures, War, and the Making of an Interdisciplinary Field

Political communication is becoming an interdisciplinary research field but somehow histories either diminish its evolution to a media-effects line or provide a disjointed catalogue of theories. The paper provides an evolutionary genealogy which reinvents political communication as a hybrid field of studies due to the transformation of media infrastructures, war, ideological conflict and the transformation of models of the citizen and of the public opinion. The discussion starts with Greek and Roman rhetoric as the initial theories of civic persuasion and then the non-Western traditions of symbolic governance to prevent being confined to a highly Eurocentric origin story. It is followed decade after decade, tracing the development of interwar propaganda research and the theory of the public opinion, wartime persuasion studies, Cold war press-system thinking and comparative agendas, the effects researches of the television, the sociology of news rooms, the agenda setting, framing and priming, and the subsequent mediatisation and the digital transformation as cumulative developments in the development of the field. The article posits that political communication has developed by the process of accretion as opposed to paradigm shift. Its long-standing definitional dispute is a product of structural interdisciplinarity, which is formed through the intersection of journalism studies, mass communication research, political science, sociology and behavioural and social psychology. Instead of putting forward a single definition of coherence in political communication, it suggests that the major concern of coherence in political communication is a recurrence of problem spaces of communication to legitimacy, power, and judgement of the people in the changing media environments.