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The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Sjifra de Leeuw, whose interest is in the recent rise of populist parties that also take an explicit stance against the role of mainstream media as supposedly elitist gatekeepers.

When news media frame such parties as anti-democratic, this has a distinct effect on their positioning, but not all extremist parties are marked in this way – and which are marked this way by the media may depend on the political history of the nation: nations with a leftist autocratic history may be more likely to brand leftist parties as anti-democratic, while …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Alexandre Borrell, whose focus is on references to ‘the people’ in political rhetoric in the past two French presidential elections. Are such references used similarly by candidates from different political camps, or do left- and right-wing candidates use them differently? The study used official posters, statements, and TV ads from the campaigns to analyse this.

Reference to the people is common for the campaigns of the far-right Front National under both Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen, as well as for the populist candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon of Front de Gauche. Not a …

The next ECREA 2018 session starts with Christina Peter, who begins by noting the reference to (supposed) popular opinion as a common rhetorical strategy of populist politicians as well as of journalists; this is classified as an explicit public opinion cue. By contrast, implicit public opinion cues simply represent public opinion for instance in the form of vox-pops.

Such explicit cues are very prominent in the media, while implicit cues are somewhat less prominent; what effects do they have on the formation of popular opinion, however? Does this convince actual citizens that the general public truly hold these views? Christina’s …

Finally for this ECREA 2018 session, Natalie Fenton asks how we as academics might therefore need to reconsider our own work in political communication. If we are considering different ways of doing democracy, this is inevitably also a question of power, of course, and it has immediate and critical implications for societies in which the gaps between the powerful and the powerless are rapidly widening.

As the institutions – especially at local levels – in which publics have traditionally sought to engage are being hollowed out and shut down (for instance as a result of austerity policies such as those …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Aeron Davis, whose focus is on the role of political parties in political communication. Might we head towards a (non-)democratic future in which parties no longer exist in their present state – or is it just the dominant party model that is failing now?

On a variety of measures, including membership and participation, party structures have been declining for several decades; in many national systems, this has also contributed to an increased volatility in vote shares from election to election, independent of the voting systems (first-past-the-post or proportional representation) used in …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Gholam Khiabany, who points especially at the absence of significant debates about war and military intervention in political communication. War is not absent from media research, of course, but perhaps war should be considered as central in our reassessment of democracy itself.

Militarism and war is now a motor of historical development, and not just a consequence; revisiting political communication must include a reassessment of its role in democracy, and as a subject of political communication. If war is the continuation of politics by other means, should it not be central …

The post-lunch session at ECREA 2018 is on media, democracy, and social change, and starts with Des Freedman. He begins by noting the role of the state as a particular, and particularly important, institutional power in political communication, whose role tends to be underresearched compared to that of various non-state actors from politicians to activists – perhaps because the idea of the state is seen as somewhat dated, following the decline in authority of territorial nation states.

States have outsourced many of their functions to the private sector, and have been overtaken by globalised commercial players, to such an extent …

The final speaker in this ECREA 2018 panel is Oscar Westlund, who highlights the dislocation of news journalism in our contemporary multi-platform media environment. Journalists and news organisations have at times been eager to jump on new bandwagons and explore news delivery through new platforms – most recently, for instance, through voice-controlled information systems such as Alexa or Google Home.

This may mean changing the shape of the news itself, adjusting it to such new platforms – and it is often done in pursuit of greater reach for news content, but this reach is not usually rewarded by greater advertising …

The fourth speaker in our ECREA 2018 panel is Agnes Gulyas, whose focus is on how news is defined by audiences. The meaning of news is often taken for granted, and this is problematic – not least in the context of present ‘fake news’ debates. What makes a piece of information ‘news’, and is that understanding shared between participants? What expectations do audiences have of news?

This debate about what news is is not new: historically there are four key approaches to this question. The first is journalism-centric, and defines news as the professional output of journalistic practice; it builds …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Steve Paulussen, whose fundamental question is who now makes the news in a hybrid cross-media news system. His project examined this especially in the context of the 2014 Belgian parliamentary election, and it recognises the crossmediality of news and news flows, the collective produsage of news, and the real-time meaning-making of news in the contemporary moment. To understand this, it is crucial to look beyond merely binary conceptions of news and media, and see the current environment as considerably more complex and hybrid.

We should therefore look at the interactions between …