Communicating Politics : political Communication in the Nordic Countries

In the first part of the book – Political Communication Systems in the Nordic Countries – these aspects will be described, discussed and analyzed in one chapter for each Nordic country. These country chapters will be presented in alphabetical order, thus starting with Denmark and finishing with Sweden. The second part of the book will focus on Cases in Nordic Political Communication. The first chapter of this part is written by Tom Andersson, and it is titled Conflicting Representations in the European Parliamentary Elections. In this chapter and with a focus on Sweden, the author argues that elections to the European Parliament lack rationality, mainly due to the conflicting representations of the EU, and of its institutional, democratic and economic performance. As long as there is public and political disagreement on the raison d’être of the EU, there will be a tendency for elections to the European Parliament to treated as second-order elections with nationalistic rather than European representations and policy appeals being dominant. Chapter eight is titled Visualizing Egalitarianism: Political Print Ads in Denmark, and it is written by Jens E. Kjeldsen. In this chapter and from the perspective of visual rhetoric, the author investigates the aesthetics of power as represented in political print ads from the 1998 and 2001 Danish elections. This is followed by a chapter on political campaigning on the Internet in Finland, entitled Plus ça change, plus ça reste le même? The Evolution of Finnish Web Campaigning 1996-2004 and written by Tom Carlson and Kim Strandberg. The focus of this chapter is on the web presence amongst candidates, the adoption patterns regarding candidate web campaigning, and changes in the features of the candidates’ web sites. Longitudinal comparisons are evident also in chapter ten, written by Bengt Johansson: Popularized Election Coverage? News Coverage of Swedish Parliamentary Election Campaigns 1979-2006. The author investigates a number of hypothesis with respect to changes in how the media cover election campaigns, and find that the Swedish election news coverage indeed has become more popularized during the last decades. The Swedish media and comparisons across time are the focus of chapter eleven as well, in which Monika Djerf-Pierre and Lennart Weibull analyze regimes of political journalism in Swedish public service broadcasting between 1925 and 2005. The main title is indicative of their results: From Public Educator to Interpreting Ombudsman. In chapter twelve, Anne Marit Waade and Iben Have investigate one kind of media genre that usually do not receive much attention from political communication scholars, namely television documentaries. In their chapter Aesthetification Politics, the authors focus the empirical analysis on non-verbal communication in two Danish documentaries on politics. Among other things, their findings explain and nuance the growing of political backstage communication as well as emotional and social intentions in political communication. Chapter thirteen make use of one of the most political communication theories during the last decade or so, namely framing theory. In This is the Issue: Framing Contests and Media Coverage, Øyvind Ihlen and Sigurd Allern focus on the dynamic contests between different frames and their reception in the Norwegian media. The question guiding their analysis I what kinds of frames typically prevail in mediated conflicts where various actors present competing frames. This is followed by a chapter by Kersti Torbjørnsrud, entitled Organizing Audiovisual Campaign Coverage and Its Influence on Power Relation Between Media and Politics in Norway. In her chapter, the author discusses how audiovisual campaign coverage is organized in Norway, and then, based on a production study and interviews with editors and political actors, proceeds to analyze how the organization of this news coverage influences power relations between media and politics in Norway. In the final chapter, we summarize and analyze the findings from both the country chapters and the case studies, and make an assessment of the classification of the Nordic countries as forming part of the Democratic Corporatist Model of media and politics. As editors, we hope this will give the reader not only a number of chapters that are interesting in themselves, but also a better understanding of differences and similarities between the Nordic countries.