Just a reminder as the deadline – set to January 15 – is approaching:

Now the Nordic Political Communication Association has issued the Call for Papers for their next conference, to be held in Vasa, Finland, between August 9-12, 2011. Together with Claes de Vreese and Rune Slothuus I will be leading the working group ”Political Communication: antecedents, contents and effects of political information”. More information about the conference can be found at the conference’s website. The full call for papers is featured below:

Today’s societies have been labeled mediatized and the relationship between journalism, politics and citizens is allegedly driven by media-logic. It is evident that many citizens do not have extensive first-hand experiences or engagement with the political arena. For them, and also for those that are engaged in political discussions, the media play a crucial role as channel of communication, source of information, and in crystallizing opinions and changing attitudes and behavior.

In very general terms, political science has tended to downplay the role of the media and information for the development of attitudes and behavior, despite evidence showing that the media can have significant effects. Communication science and media studies have tended to focus in particular on the media themselves and less on the political context and implications of the media. In the recent years there is a renewed interest in issues of political communication, triggered by developments in political campaigning, with an increasing level of professionalization and importance of news management, by developments in the media, with increasing market competition and new technologies, and by developments in the electorate showing signs of increasing political dissatisfaction and electoral volatility.

In the Nordic countries research agendas have emerged in both communication science and political science departments. It is the explicit goal of this workshop to bring together social
scientists working on issues of political communication. We will welcome paper proposals that deal with the antecedents and conditions of political news and actor-controlled political information, papers dealing with contents and systematic features of news and political information, and papers dealing with the effects of the media and mediated political information on attitudes, opinions and behavior.

The workshop takes a starting point in the Nordic countries – focusing on new research agendas and changes in political communication – but is explicitly open for international scholars, and English will be the language used in all workshop sessions.

The deadline for paper abstracts is January 15. Abstracts should be no more than one page and be sent to the three workshop leaders:

Claes de Vreese (c.h.devreese@uva.nl)

Jesper Stromback (jesper.stromback@miun.se)

Rune Slothuus (slothuus@ps.au.dk)