Sunshine Hillygus —  Political Communication is transmission of information (broadly defined to include verbal, nonverbal, behaviors, etc.) in pursuit of power.


Erika Falk —  Political communication research includes any study that has as its topic communication in a political context or to put it another way any study that has as its topic the intersection of information exchange and power.

Bruce Hardy — The transfer of any information pertaining to the contest over resources.

Ken Goldstein —  On definition, I think that Krosnick's definition was reasonable— exchange of information about exercise of power.

David Birdsell — The study of messages about politics, policy and policy actors; the media that convey and multiply such messages; and the individual, cultural, technological and behavioral factors that influence reception, learning and action. 

Talia Stroud — The interactions between elites, media, and citizens on topics relating to politics. The component that seems particularly difficult to define is what is meant by politics.  Definitions proposed by others at the conference, such as topics related to governance and power relationships, seem useful.  I wonder if this incorporates interactions between citizens about an episode of a partisan program or how entertainment programming can influence one’s attitudes about crime.

Lynn Sanders —  Revising definition of political communication: Direct or mediated exchange of ideas and messages, verbal or visual, in an identifiably public space, whose intention or consequence is to alter the structure or products of government or to prevent that alteration.

Diana Owen —  Communication related to the authoritative allocation of values for a society. 

Bob Lichter — The production, transmission, and effects of information about politics, political opinion and public policy.

Miriam Metzger — Personally, I would define it in terms of "producing, processing, and
disseminating information about public affairs" but I am not sure many would agree with this definition.

John Gastil — The exchange of information, messages, and signals concerning public issues and/or the exercise of collective power.

Kim Fridkin —  Political Communication is the study of the determinants and consequences of political messages on both citizens and political institutions.

Oscar Gandy —  Political communication is the term applied to the identification or characterization of messages, statements or information thought to be relevant to the formation of responses to social problems, including the election of candidates to public office.

Kevin Coe —  The production, content, diffusion, and impact of political messages, where political messages are those that pertain to the exercise and control of power in society.

Brian Southwell —  Regarding a definition of political communication: the presentation and interpretation of information, messages, or signals with consequence for the organization of society and for the exercise of shared power.

Pamela Shoemaker —  1. Communication about politics. 2. Politics is about power relationships, which exist anytime two or more people are in the same space, be it virtual or geographic. 3. But the book cannot encompass every relationship between two or more people...too broad. 4. Therefore we can limit "politics" to the more formal relations among people in a social system, whether defined as a neighborhood, a congressional district, a state, region, nation state, or groups of nation states. 5. By formal, we can include relations between individuals and many layers of groups that represent or hold power, relations between groups and these layers, relations between groups, and relations between the layers of power. 6  By formal, we include the ways in which power moves from one entity to another and the structures established that either facilitate or constrain power.  7. By communication we mean transmission of information that relates in any way to any part of  these formal political relationships. 8. As a group, we are old.  We need some 15 year old kids to describe how and why they communicate.  Do they ever think about politics?  When and why? 9. When old people talk about the changing communication environment we talk about the fragmentation of the media, anxiety, challenges.  Our normative beliefs about 21st century communication are based in old assumptions. 10. Teens don't care about these things because their world is the world that has always been. 11. An important question is whether a book about political communication can address anything other than the anxious world of old people.  Since we'll die off in 10 to 20 years -- by which time today's 15 year old will be old enough to run for national office--the book could be quaint and irrelevant to young adults, whether as voters or scholars, by the time it is published. 12. Is there any way that our book can shed light on the present and future without looking at it only through weak-eyed lenses?  Can we dredge up our assumptions and set them aside long enough to see today's world as if it has always been this way?   Going on and about how the world is so different (to us old people) carries the implicit assumption that it used to be better.  Weak-eyed rose-tinted glasses. 13. The world is the world that is.  Change can be thought of as an opportunity or a problem.

William Benoit — “Political Communication” is the intersection of politics and communication. Politics informs the purpose of this discourse: to accumulate and apply power to allocate resources (election campaigns are one way to accumulate power). Messages connect political actors (candidates, elected officials, interest groups, news media, and others) to audiences. Political communication should always focus on messages: The focus can be on message productions (e.g., are messages from incumbents different from messages from challengers; do differences in here in messages from, say, presidents, governors, mayors and members of deliberative bodies) and/or on message reception (what affects do messages have on variables such as knowledge, interest, attitudes, and behavior)? This book has a limited scope, including a focus on governments and governance (some of the principles of political communication.

Dietram Schuefele — All communication is inherently political.  The conversations we have with family and neighbors about local school board elections are a form of political communication.  So is a NYT Op-Ed about health care, and the act of forwarding it to our best friend from college halfway across the country. And the thoughts that go through our mind when we cast our ballot for various candidates on November 2 are also a form of political communication.  In short, the academic field of political communication is really a very broadly defined set of interdisciplinary efforts at the intersection of communication research, political science, psychology, sociology, neuroscience and a host of other disciplines. And in recent years, this list of disciplines has gotten longer and longer.  Ultimately, political communication is very similar to a field like nanotechnology, i.e., a research area that is (a) an outcome of increasing specialization in disciplines, such as political science and communication, and (b) the area where those disciplines overlap and share research questions. Most recent trends in political communication research have been dictated by the tectonic shifts in how politics is communicated and the issues that we as a society are facing. What used to be the “mass” in mass communication, for instance, has morphed into different publics that generate, exchange, and use content in ways that were unimaginable just a decade ago. And with global warming, synthetic biology or stem cell research, we have seen issues move to the forefront of political discourse that have the potential to bring long-term and far-reaching changes for almost all aspects of people’s daily lives. Many of big questions that we face as a society – energy independence, global warming, or an increasingly polarized electorate – require answers that transcend the boundaries of a single field or discipline. This is particularly challenging for a young field, such as political communication, that continues to struggle with its identity and its desire to compete on an even playing field with much larger disciplines, such as psychology and political science. And if we are not careful, we may follow these disciplines down some dead ends. A good example is the debate surrounding Republican Senator Tom Coburn’s proposal in October 2009 to prohibit the National Science Foundation from “wasting any federal research funding on political science projects.” Coburn, of course, used the label “political science” but targeted social science much more broadly. And his comments rekindled an old debate among political scientists about incremental disciplinary research versus big questions. Cornell’s Peter Katzenstein summarized this intra-disciplinary dilemma best: “Graduate students discussing their field ... often speak in terms of ‘an interesting puzzle,’ a small intellectual conundrum... that tests the ingenuity of the solver, rather than the large, sloppy and unmanageable problems that occur in real life.” Interestingly, President Obama has prioritized the search for answers to many of these supposedly sloppy, unmanageable problems, ranging from mandates for a green economy, to climate change, stem cell research and global warming.  All of these issues relate to the increasingly blurring lines between science, politics, and society – and of course, political communication. These are the same areas where most societal debates of the next 50 years will take place. And unless we as political communication researchers and educators find a way to make both scholarly and public contributions to these conversations, we will increasingly be marginalized as a discipline.

Fay Lomax Cook — Political communication consists of the multiple ways in which information -- both correct and incorrect, both attitudinal and empirical -- is conveyed in societies about what local, state, or national government does or should do.  The multiple ways in which it is conveyed range from one on one conversations to small groups to formal forums to the statements of political elites to the mass media.

John Gastil — Are we trying to define the boundaries of pol comm, or really some kind of core emphasis within those boundaries? If the former, then the field is simply all comm that relates to topics related to politics, public affairs, and/or the polis? That can *not* include the notion that “all things are political,” or the field has no boundary whatsoever. (We might also stipulate that the field exclude private thought or expression that has no social connection whatsoever, i.e., isolated thinking/muttering.) If we instead seek to define a core within the wider boundary, then the core relates to political influence, persuasion, expression, and decision making of political beliefs/attitudes/behaviors--an emphasis on core dependent variables. Another narrowing move might be the requirement that theory ultimately connect back up to a collective of some kind or another, the body/public that must make decisions together—be they governmental or cultural choices about political matters.

Lynn Vavreck — Any signal or signifier the purpose of which is to comment on politics.