Platforms, Power, and Politics

Political Communication has gone through tremendous transformations over the past decades as media and technologies have dramatically changed across the globe. Technology platforms have become powerful political instruments for world leaders, campaigns, social movements, journalists, and non-governmental organizations - central to their attempts to create, persuade, engage, and mobilize publics in pursuit of political power. Platforms are essential to the ways that people communicate about politics, encounter and share political information, and take action to pursue their political goals.

This is the first textbook to center digital platforms in understandings of political communication. It reveals how social media, search engines, messaging services and news portals are increasingly shaping strategic communication, journalism, policymaking, and governing in countries around the world. This book takes a global approach beyond the context of Western democracies to identify diverse yet intersecting examples of media and political developments. It deepens readers' understandings of how the power of platforms in political communication depends on country-specific contexts that shape everything from how elections are contested to how issues make it onto policymaking agendas. Topics covered include public opinion, journalism, strategic communication, political parties and social movements, governance, disinformation and propaganda, populism, race and ethnicity, and democratic backsliding.

Platforms, Power and Politics offers an exciting and innovative new approach to political communication. It will be essential reading for students of political communication as well as being an important resource for scholars, journalists and policymakers.