Government communication is a curiously neglected area of discursive analysis. No considered examination of the subject exists which provides either an account of the contemporary governmental landscape or an explanation of the common and divergent themes on both a domestic and international basis. This volume aims to fill that gap, providing a concise and illuminating case-study based review of government communication. It will be divided into three sections to reflect differences in both geography and political allegiances, scrutinizing continental Europe, Anglo-American traditions and newly emerging democracies. Offering a global and thematic account, it is an indispensable resource for all students of political communication.

This book opens up the black box of government communication during the age of political spin, using archival and official documents, memoirs and biographies, and in-depth interviews with media, political and government witnesses. It argues that substantive and troubling long-term changes in the ways governments manage the media and publicly account for themselves undermine the public consent essential to democracy. Much of the blame for this crisis in public communication has been placed at the feet of politicians and their aides, but they are just part of the picture. A pervasive ‘culture of mediatization’ has developed within governments, leading to intended and unintended consequences that challenge the capacity of central public bureaucracies to implement public values and maintain impartiality. It concludes that public servants, elected officials and citizens have an important role to play in accounting for governments’ custodianship of this most politically-sensitive of public goods – the public communications function.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Government communication is a curiously neglected area of discursive analysis. No considered examination of the subject exists which provides either an account of the contemporary governmental landscape or an explanation of the common and divergent themes on both a domestic and international basis. This volume aims to fill that gap, providing a concise and illuminating case-study based review of government communication. It will be divided into three sections to reflect differences in both geography and political allegiances, scrutinizing continental Europe, Anglo-American traditions and newly emerging democracies. Offering a global and thematic account, it is an indispensable resource for all students of political communication.

This book presents a comparative perspective on different government communication strategies to COVID-19 around the globe. Scholars from twenty parts of the world specialized in political and government communication analyze initiatives and methods of various governments' communicative responses to the pandemic. In their contributions to this volume, they examine a wide range of distinct attitudes and reactions facing the crisis. Today’s omnidirectional contact allowed by social media, with its load of contradictory rumors and fake news, often obliterates the citizens' ability to comprehend reality. The book frames a broad canvas on how government communication may deal with that and manage similar crises — bound to happen as climate changes and war menaces are generating more and more worries about the future of humanity. This makes this volume a must-read for scholars and students of political communication, health policies and communication, crisis marketing and communication. It will also be of utmost interest for practitioners and policy-makers from these fields willing to better understand government communication and its answer to global crises.

This report recognises that, now more than ever, it is essential that central government communicates and engages well with local government. Responsibilities such as public health are moving to local government, local authorities are playing a vital role in the Government's decentralisation agenda, and substantial reductions in staff are causing pressure. It is clear that there is goodwill on both sides, however, the organisational differences between central and local government make communication very challenging. Where departments are designing services for local delivery, the operational experience of local authorities is important to the effective design and implementation of programmes. The NAO's work across government has also demonstrated that not consulting local delivery partners early brings a high risk of waste and 'optimism bias' that can result in the failure of programmes. Some policy consultations are rushed. Departments also issue a disproportionate number of consultations just before parliamentary recess and holiday periods making it difficult to co-ordinate their work on them. Though most individual communications between central and local government are of good quality, there are so many that poor ones can still have a significant impact. Departments' standards for, and oversight of, their communications with local government are not systematic enough to eliminate the risk of some poor communications slipping through. Local authorities are also exasperated by the poor targeting of emails to relevant audiences, wasting the time of the hundreds of people who receive each one. This is of particular concern to local authority managers working with fewer staff following cost reductions.

Timely text authored by leading political communication scholars on the effects of tCovid-19 on political communication. How governments, journalists, and the public communicate is of interest within the disciplines of political science, media studies, communication studies, and journalism.

This Public Communication Scan of the United Kingdom, the first such scan of an OECD Member country, brings new insights to the OECD’s work on understanding how public communication contributes to democratic governance.

Distance, in its traditional sense, connotates "estrangement" and "division". But in the context of modern political studies, it means a controllable resource that can be manipulated to change the relationship between the government and the public. Drawing on this concept from Western political science, the author explores the law and mechanisms of China’s political communication. In this volume, the author introduces a creative theoretical framework of distance, which is a dynamic system comprised of physical and psychological distance, ideal distance and real distance, and natural distance and consequent distance. Psychological distance is the core, because it signifies not only whether there is trust between a government and the public, but also whether the political community can maintain a high degree of harmony, stability, unity, and vitality. Events in the past five years in China are used as cases to illustrate the point. Students and scholars who are interested in political science and political communication, especially Chinese politics, would find this title a useful reference.