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1. Introduction
The general area of political communication cuts across almost all of communication study. The very name of the subject area gives a sense of what it encompasses, but with something so broad, definition poses a challenge. In her introduction to an important handbook on the subject Kaid (2004a) acknowledges many definitions but concludes "Perhaps the best is the simplest: Chaffee's (1975) suggestion that political communication is the 'role of communication in the political process' (p. 15)" (Kaid, 2004b, p. xiii). Gräber and Smith (2005) offer an expanded sense of the area:
The field of political communication... encompasses the construction, sending, receiving, and processing of messages that potentially have a significant direct or indirect impact on politics. The message senders or message receivers may be politicians, journalists, members of interest groups, or private, unorganized citizens. "The key element is that the message has a significant political effect on the thinking, beliefs, and behaviors of individuals, groups, institutions, and whole societies and the environments in which they exist" (Gräber, 1993, p. 305). There are many other definitions, of course, but all encompass the same essential elements, (p. 479).
These definitions come from two examinations of political communication. The contributors to the handbook edited by Kaid (2004a) look back, reporting on the state of political communication in the early 21st century while Gräber and Smith (2005) look forward, to where political communication study might go.
Both views acknowledge history. Gräber and Smith call attention to Aristotle's Rhetoric and Politics, dating from the fourth century BCE as a starting point (2005, p. 479); for Aristotle, the purposes of the art of rhetoric included deliberative and persuasive discourse to guide decision making in the body politic. According to Rogers (2004), in his essay in Kaid (2004a), the history of political communication study begins more recently, after World War I with Lippmann's Public Opinion (1922) and Lasswell's propaganda studies (1927). Also writing in Kaid's handbook, Sanders (2004) looks at academic starting points: "the creation in 1973 of the Political Communication Division within the International Communication Association"; "the teaching of courses, beginning in about 1968, and the development of graduate programs"; and "the publication of the first Handbook of Political Communication (Nimmo & Sanders, 1981), one of the earliest...