Government Communication: An Emerging Field in Political Communication Research

In February 2009, the US Congress passed a US$787 billion stimulus package designed to put the country on the road to economic recovery. Thereafter, managing ‘the stimulus story’ became, as Time magazine reported, ‘a full-time White House preoccupation’ (Scherer, 2009: 31). Obama and his team understood that without a concerted effort to communicate the plan, it would almost certainly fail in the court of public opinion. The quality of government matters for human well-being. Governing necessarily involves constant exchanges of information and communication about policies, ideas and decisions between governors and the governed. Despite its key importance for 21st-century politics, the study of government communication is an under-researched area of political communication studies, finding itself in a kind of theoretical no-man’s land between political communication, public relations and organizational communication research. This chapter examines three related issues. First, it examines what we mean by government communication. This task poses a number of challenges not least that of settling what kinds of institutions count as governmental in the diverse settings of democratic politics.1 Second, the article draws together the distinctive contributions to the study of government communication found in the political communication literature. Third, the chapter argues that perspectives developed by public relations and organizational communication studies may have much to offer political communication scholars studying government communication. Finally, we suggest a number of issues that could form part of a research agenda for government communication (see Sanders, 2011). DEFINING GOVERNMENT COMMUNICATION