Political Communication: An Epistemological Base of Political Campaigns

Abstract

The advent of market-industrial society has brought about fundamental changes in social cultural and economic context of pre-industrial societies. Modern man is no longer characterized by personal impotency emanating from fatalism but by a psycho-social complex of norms based on democratic orientation that imply implicit faith on egalitarianism and meritocracy as value concepts. The rise of political communication as the privileged forum for the transmission of political cues is the response to the needs of time as mass media act as mobility multipliers; infusing people with diffused rationality; thus ways of thinking and acting ceased to be articles of faith and became instrument of intention. The present article is not an attempt to examine the reasons for shift from rural to urban; but to examine the changes resultant of that shift which made communication an essential tool of election campaign as all parties need political campaign not because they know it will deliver but because they do not know for sure it will not.