An Introduction to political communication

In his seminal study of Public Opinion Walter Lippmann observed that the
practice of democracy had ‘turned a corner’ (1954, p. 248). The democratic
process, it seemed to him four years after the end of the First World War had,
to an extent unprecedented in human history, come to incorporate selfconscious strategies of persuasion by political actors. The gradual extension
since the early nineteenth century of voting rights to wider and wider sections
of the population, combined with the emergence of media of mass
communication, had fundamentally transformed the nature of the political
process, for better or worse. No longer could it be assumed that political
action derived from the collectively arrived at will of rational, enlightened
men (for men they exclusively were, of course) of property and education.
Henceforth, the masses would decide, through their exercise of the vote and
the influence of public opinion on the political process.