Political leadership and public engagement in a changing media environment: A collection of explorative studies

Abstract

The purpose of the research is to contribute to a better understanding of how political leaders operate in the current changing media environment and how this affects and, in turn, is affected by public engagement in society. This thesis has a multidisciplinary approach, drawing on insights from communication studies, political marketing and political sciences. This thesis brings together the results of four studies reported in articles. Various methods are used to investigate cases of political leadership in the context of Estonia, a young democracy, and the older European democracies of Italy and Finland. In this way, it investigates the use of new communication means by political leaders, institutions, non-governmental organisations, pressure groups, movements and other political actors when communicating their messages to the public. Academic research in this field is still relatively limited. Multidisciplinary analyses show that charismatic leaders with mainly monodirectional message-framing fit the new media environment even better than they did the mass media context in which professional journalists and the public service system could filter political messages and take part in the process of discourse creation in society. The results highlight that the deliberative model of democracy does not fit the current media environment where charismatic leaders (or in this thesis rather called magnetic leaders) focusing on emotions tend to dominate the debate. At the same time, public engagement initiatives show weak results or involve only a limited part of the population. In conclusion, a citizen satisfaction model is created to propose how the role of communication in post-web politics can be understood, either in enhancing citizen participation or, conversely, excluding some groups of society, and how communication and information freedom may contribute to deliberative discussion and boost trust and engagement in society.