Defying expectations: what leader insurgencies reveal about media and party incapacity in the time of ‘audience democracy’

Introduction: media, politics and democratic beliefs

Liberal democratic societies are characterized by a communication ecology intended to unify their members in support of deliberative processes for resolving collective action issues. Success depends on generating, more-or-less, shared belief systems in dispersed populations, the members of which will never meet more than a fraction of their fellows (Anderson, 2006). Success is achieved through the interaction of political practices and common means of information dissemination.

Political parties are integral to this system as the organizational means of articulating world-views, aggregating opinion and negotiating solutions to common problems within representative legislatures. Their communication of party intentions to mobilize support within target communities depends upon widely accessible media (see Young, 2004). Initially, this materialized in the convergence of capitalism and print technology, embodied in the publication of books and daily newspapers (Anderson, 2006: 37–46). The emergence of new media in the 20th century – radio and television broadcasting and the Internet – added to the means of dissemination. But the foundational principle remains: political parties and the media are interdependent. Together, they provide the conditions of production for ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 2006): a workable consensus about the framing values and ideas that determine how we live together.

In theory, parties speak for certain interests and their representatives compete with opponents in legislative debates. The media not only offer channels for dissemination of arguments but also serve as ‘watchdogs’, providing scrutiny, investigation of claims, attention to the broader public interest, and ‘speaking truth to power’. There is also, in theory, a common commitment to civic responsibility; for parties, to represent their supporters but also to attend to the public good, and for the media to chart processes of political and policy deliberation in a manner that enables citizens to make their own decisions about the efficacy of (and their support for) a regime.

It has long been recognized that these processes can produce elite hegemony (Gramsci, 1971; Michels, 1915) by containing and channeling public sentiment while political insiders pursue their ends (Lippmann, [1922] 1946). The problem of how to achieve balance between allowing for individual opinion and a functioning public sphere (Habermas, 1989), which enables communicative connections encouraging collective will, has challenged political scientists and media researchers (see Dahlgren, 2005). However, most concede that the discursive terrain with which we are now familiar has been sustained by mass parties and media conglomerates (see Panebianco, 1988; Schultz, 1998). Arguably, this was constitutive of a binding culture within communities (Walter, 1990). Yet with contemporary challenges to party and media institutions – the hollowing out of parties and the collapse of what is now termed ‘legacy media’ – the organizational capacity to sustain past practices is dissipating.

Some have seen these as promising developments, undermining a discredited political class (comprising political and media elites) by foreshadowing more differentiated and responsive forms of negotiated political organization (e.g. Marsh and Miller, 2012: 30–38) and a more diverse media landscape allowing many more voices to engage in democratic deliberation (e.g. Dahlgren, 2005: 150; Klotz, 2004; Mancini, 2013: 49–50, 53). Others are more pessimistic, seeing the fragmentation that bedevils parties and media as signifying a segmentation of populations that destroys focus, weakens the watchdog function, and cripples political will (Loader and Mercea, 2011: 761–762; Sunstein, 2007).

Our purpose in this article is to treat these suppositions about the positive and negative potentials of party and media transitions as research questions. We review past practices and current events, with a focus on contemporary leadership insurgencies and the media conditions that facilitated these, as indicators of the direction of change.

Centralized institutions and political communication

For much of the 20th-century analysts of the media and politics understandably focused on the agency of mass media and mass parties (see Van Onselen and Errington, 2007). During the 20th century, competitive pressures to extend audience reach, and advances in printing and later broadcast technologies fostered the emergence of media conglomerates intent on capturing the mass market (see Street, 2011). In conjunction, an earlier factionalized and personalized politics was supplanted by centralized, parliamentarist parties claiming to speak for ‘national’ interests, but basing their appeal on relating policy proposals to class interests, rousing class loyalties (Panebianco, 1988).

Soon, both the liberal pioneer of public opinion research, Walter Lippmann ([1922] 1946), and the Marxist theorist, Antonio Gramsci (early 1930s, published Gramsci, 1971), concluded that political insiders (in Gramsci’s terms, ‘organic intellectuals’) deployed the media to keep ‘the pictures in people’s heads’ in line with realities that only elites could understand (Walter, 2010: 26–28). By mid-century, sociologists proposed a more nuanced argument, accepting the power of mass communication but allowing that people were not merely passive recipients and that media effects could be mediated by friends, neighbors, family, and trusted local leaders (Lazarsfeld et al., 1944). Those same sociologists, however, famously argued that mass communication, integrated into the business establishment, is most effective in circumstances of monopoly control, when it can ‘canalize’ behavior, and its ‘narcotizing dysfunction’ occlude critical engagement and dissenting voices, reinforcing the status quo (Lazarsfeld and Merton, 1948).

In the mid-20th century, Australia was well on the way to becoming one of the most consolidated media markets in the world (see Schultz, 1998). The potential channels for opinion aggregation were limited. Parties and their leaders recognized both the necessity and the opportunity this presented: favorable relationships with a relatively limited number of people – media proprietors, producers and leading journalists – must be maintained, but channels for broadcasting messages widely to constituents were few and accessible (see Barns, 2005). The capacity to present on radio and television became increasingly important. Marketing based on new modes of opinion research gained ground (Goot, 2007; Mills, 2014). But, until late in the century, the influence of the parliamentary press gallery and its senior figures remained significant (Simons, 1999; Young, 2004: 28–39).

Mass parties were crucial in shaping the public agenda and providing the channels for opinion aggregation throughout the 20th century (Dalton et al., 2011: 13). They operated on the assumption that societies consisted of clearly defined groups united by distinctive features related to social and economic status. They relied on mass membership and party activists to advance their cause and advanced the interests of their constituencies by promoting a holistic set of policy demands (Katz and Mair, 1995: 6). Party members provided the human and financial resources necessary to mount effective election campaigns and could, through branch meetings, policy committees and state and national conferences, participate in determining policies.

After the mid-1960s, this changed (Panebianco, 1988). In response to the decline of identifiable social boundaries in that era (Katz and Mair, 1995: 7), the ‘catch-all party’ emerged (Kirchheimer, 1966). Rather than advancing policy attuned to specific sections of the community, ‘catch-all’ parties appealed to a broad constituency by matching policy to public mood and converging on policy to attract undecided and uncommitted voters from the middle of the political spectrum. This made parties more responsive to public opinion, but weakened their capacity and willingness to represent their traditional constituencies. Public campaigning became less important than ‘broadcasting’ in every medium that might reach a wide constituency (Strömbäck and Van Aelst, 2013). Sectoral appeals were overlaid with assertions that the party was (as, for instance, successive Liberal Party leaders chose to put it) a ‘broad church’ (Kelly and Baxendale, 2017). It coincided with the introduction of television in Australia, which soon became the major source of news and the pre-eminent ‘stage’ for political performance (Chen, 2013).

In the 1970s and 1980s, parties increasingly operated like commercial entities (Katz and Mair, 1995). Party membership declined sharply, but parties now relied on communications professionals and expert advisers rather than party members to sustain their activities. As class loyalties diminished, the party leader and slogans became more prominent in campaigning material. Elections were

… now seen to revolve around the choice of leaders rather than the choices of policies or programmes, while the formation of those policies or programmes became the prerogative of the party leadership rather than of the party membership. (Katz and Mair, 1995: 7)

So was born the electoral-professional party: more attentive to communication professionals and expert advisers than to members and, increasingly reliant on the material resources of the state – justified as assisting parliamentarians in their representational roles and distributed in proportion to electoral outcomes – to maintain their survival (Ghazarian, 2006; Katz and Mair, 1995). As parties evolved, so too did the relationships between party leaders, party organizations and the media. Patterns can be exemplified in the way political leaders interacted with the media, particularly in the way they used press, radio, and television to advance their agendas in lieu of direct interaction with voters.

John Curtin (Labor Prime Minister, 1941–1945) was an exemplary mass-party leader: he recognized the necessity of carrying the party with him and elevated the party cause above his personal interests. A former journalist, aided by a legendary press secretary, Don Rodgers, he drew key print correspondents into his confidence. He spoke their language. He met with them daily, conveyed his trust in them, won their regard, and so encouraged a sympathetic reception. Thus, Curtin and Rodgers managed ‘the story’ and mobilized community commitment to the war effort (Coatney, 2016). For their part, access to the prime minister was the reputational foundation for some prominent post-war journalists, such as Ian Fitchett, Alan Reid, and Don Whitington.

Robert Menzies (Liberal Prime Minister, 1949–1966) established the post-war Liberal Party after the collapse of the former United Australia Party and fashioned its constituency: ‘the moral middle class’ (Brett, 1992). He was a formidable parliamentary performer and campaigner, but broadcasting was integral to his success. He flourished on radio, which he used in the 1940s to engineer support for the new Liberal Party. Success in this medium forged the sustaining link between his party and ‘the moral middle class’. Radio remained his preferred medium. He was less comfortable with television when it arrived but soon found the formula he wanted, which was ‘to appear that he was in your living room, reasoning with you’ (quoted in Strangio et al., 2017: 46). But he was ambivalent about the press, convinced of the hostility of some elements, and that the selectivity and editorial intrusions of print journalists distorted and trivialized his message.

Menzies made little effort to charm journalists. Few of them were willing to confront him: most were afraid to provoke a man famously given to acerbic responses (Lloyd, 1988: 175). Incrementally, through patronage, on one hand, and a war of attrition, on the other, Clem Lloyd (1988) concluded,

Menzies established an ascendancy over the Gallery as absolute and assured as his dominance of parliament, ministry, party and electorate … It was a gradual process, but the overwhelming effect of the long Menzies hegemony on political journalism was one of pervasive enervation. (p. 174)

In short, Menzies used electronic media to speak directly to followers and manipulated the print media to what Lazarsfeld and Merton (1948) would have recognized as a ‘narcotizing effect’, reinforcing the status quo.

Gough Whitlam (Labor Prime Minister, 1972–1975) used both television and the press to outline his program confidently. He fascinated the press gallery and performed strongly in the media as opposition leader, then prime minister. Old journalistic hands – Alan Reid especially – were intensely skeptical, but Whitlam’s advent coincided with the emergence of a new generation – Michelle Grattan, Paul Kelly, and Laurie Oakes, for example – who dominated public commentary for the next 40 years. The public did not wholly share the gallery’s fascination, and the campaign leading to Labor’s victory in 1972 saw another innovation: It’s Time!, ‘Australia’s first recognizably modern, marketing driven campaign’ (Mills, 2014: 72). Designed to address factors that party commissioned focus group research had indicated as negatives in public attitudes to Whitlam, it marked a decisive transition from party-oriented to leader-oriented marketing as a campaign tactic. It was indicative of the emergence of the electoral-professional party in Australia.

Bob Hawke (Labor Prime Minister 1983–1991), a public figure well before entering parliament, gained the leadership based on his capacity to command a public response. The campaign pitch in 1983 was, again, about the leader rather than the party. Hawke relied on television, and broad coverage of engineered events – policy summits – to command public attention. His successor, Paul Keating (Labor Prime minister 1991–1996), in contrast, dazzled the Press Gallery and ensured its ‘God journalists’ (see Simons, 1999) carried his message to the public. Disdaining shallow showmanship (he lambasted Hawke ‘stumbling over television cables in shopping centres’ (Wright, 2010)), Keating was more akin to Curtin than any other leader in his relations with journalists – though he mixed charm with fire and brimstone in communicating with them. They were captivated by his bravado, but above all by arguments of such vigor and detail that they became the received wisdom. Keating joked about leaving critics with no foothold: ‘What I love about the Road Runner’, he said, ‘is he runs so fast that he burns up the road behind him; there’s no road left for the others’ (quoted in Gittins, 2013: 30). It was an approach that relied on persuading to his view a cohort of journalists of such influence that their commentary had a trickledown effect on tabloid, radio, and television news.

John Howard (Liberal Prime Minister 1996–2007), no orator, was nonetheless a master of controlled communication. He knew that campaigning had become ‘presidential’, and that the party message depended above all on himself. Howard instituted ‘the permanent campaign’, in which he prefaced every policy announcement with a statement of the values it served and its part in his broader mission (see Van Onselen and Errington, 2007). He consolidated the ‘government’ media units, which had emerged from Whitlam onwards, to ensure his oversight of all aspects of publicity. Howard consulted polling analysts for insights into mobilizing underlying attitudes or shifting opinions. And, like Menzies in distrusting print journalists, he focused on radio as a primary medium of dissemination (Strangio et al., 2017: 209–213).

By speaking with just two friendly talk-back hosts, Alan Jones (2UE) and Neil Mitchell (3AW), on two dominant networks (Southern Cross and Macquarie), Howard gained outreach to major population centers. Significantly, his comments were transcribed and distributed to the Press Gallery, and journalists raising questions were referred to those transcripts. This was designed to ensure blanket coverage without the niggling cross-examination of interviews and press conferences, which were indulged increasingly sparingly (Ester, 2007: 118–122).

In all these instances, political leaders clearly recognized their role as communicator-in-chief for a cause and their dependence on mass media and the need to identify the channels that best suited their purposes. It was a broadcasting approach, tailored to dependable news cycles, and conscious of cumulative dispersion through the interaction of distinct media. It was a process of leveraging particular skills to reach a mass audience. That relied on understanding the business models determining how media organizations functioned, and increasingly on insights from mass marketing.

The transitional phase: leader-centrism and ‘mediatization’

The negotiated settlements between Australian prime ministers and journalists described above were accompanied by a transition in power relations that led toward a new communication ecology during the late 20th century. Leader-centric trends have been more or less universal in the Western polities since the 1980s as a consequence of party change (Pakulski and Körösényi, 2012). The transition from mass to electoral-professional parties encouraged not only policy centralization but also an increasing ‘personalization of politics’ (McAllister, 2007). Traditional party attachments diminished as electoral-professional parties developed and citizens became more issue-oriented and more selective in picking and choosing the issues with which they were concerned (Blondel and Thiebault, 2010: 59–64). Party professionals recognized that voters now relied on the cues provided by the leader in deciding their support, that is, ‘political leaders have become electorally important in their own right, by personifying the policy platforms of their respective Parties’ (McAllister, 2007: 574).

Voters have come to understand what a party represents through the voice (and in some respects, the personality) of its leader. The leader’s articulation of policy preferences and values is what citizens relate to. This articulation governs perceptions of what a party stands for. With so much depending on the leader, leaders have been given additional authority over the platform, executive appointments and decision making, with reduced accountability to the party membership. It has been, however, a devilish compact: the leader’s position is at once more powerful and more precarious. Colleagues no longer judge their leader by assessing fidelity to a cause but on whether or not popular support is delivered. And support depends on the leader’s capacity for ‘personifying’ the party, making political communication, now dependent upon media skills and media management, more important than ever. The system is open to the ‘mediatization’ agenda (Boumans et al., 2013; Brants and Voltmer, 2011; Hjarvard, 2008; Strömbäck and Van Aelst, 2013), an agenda in which parties and leaders themselves are complicit.

In Australia, the trend has been evident in the changing relations between politicians and the mass media, especially television (Blondel and Thiebault, 2010: 40–41; McAllister, 2011: 240–265; Pakulski and Körösényi, 2012: 54). Since the 1980s, citizens have taken most of their information from television and typically rely on a small number of issues, which are systematically linked to the leader (McAllister, 2011: 244). Whitlam’s It’s time! campaign in 1972 was the progenitor here in pioneering the mass marketing electoral campaign, but also in solidifying the tendency to name a government for its leader. Increasing reliance on electronic media favored short-form grabs rather than long-form journalism, and generated a 24-hour news cycle rather than one reliant on the routine cycles of print media production.

Forty years later, the effect has been so profound that it is now said to amount to the ‘mediatization’ of politics (Boumans et al., 2013; Campus, 2010; Hjarvard, 2008; Splendore and Rega, 2017). This is a subset of the transition from investigative journalism to ‘infotainment’ (Turner, 2005). Instead of interrogation and scrutiny of policy and performance, promoting debate about and informed opinion on challenges and issues, the contemporary focus is on the production and reception of leader messages – on image over substance and personality over ideology and on 24-hour tailoring of ‘the story’ (Campus, 2010). An audience-oriented media logic overtakes the political logic of policy (Esser, 2013). Party democracy is supplanted by audience democracy (Manin, 1997: 218–235). Politics is no longer a sphere for engagement (e.g. as a party member) but rather ‘part of an external world which people watch from outside: a world of political leaders, separate from that of the citizenry’ (Mair, 2006: 44).

However, in parallel with leader-centrism, party organization and discipline became increasingly difficult. In major parties, policy convergence to capture the middle ground (Iversen and Soskice, 2006) accelerated the departure of ‘true believers’ and encouraged their perception that difference was largely a matter of managerial style rather than policy substance (Koole, 1996), though the public at large held to the idea that who governed mattered (Goot, 2004). That the parties were dominated by professionals – organizers and politicians whose backgrounds and life experiences did not reflect those of the community in which they worked (see Borchert, 2003; Young, 2004) – encouraged the perception of control by a ‘political class’ and a growing disconnection between parties and broader society emerged.

This provoked a backlash, with some battling within the parties to recover what they believed to be ‘core values’ and others attracted to new ‘issue competitive’ parties seeking to force the political class ‘to pay attention to issues they would rather see disappear’ and ‘to issues that are not necessarily attractive in electoral terms’ (Green-Pedersen, 2007: 609). While the political class squabbled about minor differences in a broad policy orthodoxy during the neo-liberal reform period (Walter, 2010: 289–331), the idea of parties as broad churches dissolved: internal factions competing over ‘core values’ in major parties became more powerful, and a plethora of new minor party challengers, qualitatively different from the established parties, emerged (Ghazarian, 2015).

This domain was well suited to media logic, given the ‘news story’ potential of inter- and intra-party polarization, and its disposition toward leadership battles. The climate was conducive to populist insurgency against the political class and to extremes of internal leadership volatility in major parties unprecedented in a majoritarian electoral system (cf. Helms, 2012; Landerer, 2013). It reinforced the mediatization of recent decades and signified a more atomized politics in which the comfortable partnerships between major party leaders and mainstream media, such those that prevailed from Menzies through to Howard, were undermined.

The cause was not only that there were many more voices in play, but also that media conglomerates themselves were under challenge by new entrants. As online competitors captured their traditional revenue streams, the ‘legacy media’ cut the staff and resources necessary to sustaining considered analysis and investigative journalism (Jericho, 2012: 6). Still, some observers were optimistic that the challenge to the partnership of political and media elites would open up the terrain, allowing for a revitalisation of democracy (e.g. Klotz, 2004). On the other hand, finding common ground on which to negotiate the solutions to collective problems came to seem near impossible (see Sunstein, 2007).

The contemporary communication ecology

Some read the hollowing out of mass parties and the collapse of ‘legacy media’ in the face of a plethora of new platforms and Internet start-ups as facilitating a successful challenge to the elite dominance of political communication (Brants and Voltmer, 2011). The hollowing out was expedited by technological change from print capitalism to screen capitalism, with web access afforded by smart phones, tablets, and personal computers. With the development of the Internet, access to information is less easily dominated by media conglomerates. There is no sign that leader centralism, or the significance of leader communication in mobilizing support, is diminishing, but conventional means of mass communication by political leaders is eroded.

Citizen capacity to express difference, to enact identity (rather than party) politics, and to pick and choose issues selectively rather than follow a party program has been enhanced. Networks and interest coalitions come into their own. Issue competitive parties are born. Screen in hand, the ‘netizen’ can exercise control over the information flow and even find a voice (see Kunelius and Reunanen, 2016). Centralizing institutions, the traditional parties and legacy media, are now said to have negligible influence (Juma, 2016: 312). Given new possibilities for citizen engagement, politicians must create an audience via new platforms; people can be more influential by direct communication or through bypassing traditional parties in favor of web-based activist groups speaking directly to those in power (Parmelee and Bichard, 2013: 35–39). And the opportunities for innovative journalism, with new channels of dissemination, are said to be there for those who can adapt (Andreessen, 2014).

Such optimistic views, however, are now more difficult to sustain. Instances such as the Occupy Movement and the ‘Arab Spring’, seen initially as manifesting the possibilities of web-enabled popular activism, have proved incapable of translating emotional engagement (frustration, anger, hope) into informed debate that regenerates an effective public sphere. The majoritarian democracies are plagued by post-truth politics and populist insurgencies (see below). Those who championed the challenge to the cozy partnerships between media conglomerates and party establishments, and argued that access to information and journalism itself had recently become better than ever, have been compelled to wonder where they went wrong (Glasser, 2016). The answer, we argue, is threefold. First, the reality that social psychological dynamics of identity and affiliation – rather than rational deliberation – determine political engagement has been overlooked in optimistic views of web-enabled citizenship (see Achen and Bartels, 2016). Second, new business models accompanying new media technology have had a decisive impact in exacerbating identity dynamics, rather than informed deliberation. Third, party decline has removed an important barrier to capricious leadership. All of these points are illuminated by considering contemporary leadership volatility and party insurgencies.

Party volatility and instability in Australia and abroad

There have been striking manifestations of leader volatility and party insurgency in the past decade. Australia has become renowned for leadership coups, with successive prime ministers toppled by internal party insurgencies rather than electoral defeat (Tiffen, 2017). This volatility is associated with the inter-related problems of the precariousness of leader-centric governance; the decreasing utility of parties in opinion aggregation, impelling the leader to ‘stand in’ for the party; the fragmentation of political audiences and the consequent difficulty of negotiating solutions to collective action problems, let alone generating a unifying narrative (Strangio et al., 2017: 235–306). And in each case, as Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd (2007–2010) was toppled by Julia Gillard, as her reign (2010–2013) was terminated in turn by a resurgent Rudd (2013), and as the winner of the 2013 election, Tony Abbott (2013–2015), was unseated by Malcolm Turnbull, media commentators were not only analysts but players fueling the combat (Tiffen, 2017: 18–69).

Consider, briefly, the media performance of each of these figures. Rudd built popularity through sustained television performance – always in public view, appearing affable and knowledgeable – and won office largely on the grounds of his popularity. But he proved autocratic, alienating his colleagues, mistaking the symbolic power attached to the leader for real authority and was unable to deliver on policy. His popularity dissipated, allowing Gillard to challenge on the ground that the government had ‘lost its way’. Yet Gillard, a capable administrator able to deliver on policy, lacked the performative skills for leadership in a mediatized environment: she seemed unable to sustain a governmental narrative. Rudd and his supporters destabilized from within, but media players were complicit in the ‘stalking’ of Gillard (Walsh, 2013) and the demolition of her narrative. (On returning to the prime ministership in 2013, Rudd moved to change Labor Party rules to enable ordinary party members to vote alongside parliamentarians to elect a new leader. Yet the adoption of such a process did not stem, but rather exacerbated, the leadership insurgency of Jeremy Corbyn in Britain as will be discussed below.) Although Rudd was disruptive, Gillard’s chief antagonist was opposition leader, Tony Abbott, so proficient in simplistic slogans and the politics of negation that he was dubbed ‘Dr No’.

Turnbull’s predicament illustrates neatly the contemporary leadership dilemma. Abbott, whose ruthless attacking campaign against Gillard concealed the paucity of his own ideas, was elected in 2013 largely because of disquiet about Labor’s persistent leadership divisions. Abbott had no coherent program for government, did not consult sufficiently, made ill-judged ‘captain’s picks’ on policy and appointments, and was prone to follow the preferences of the much-diminished party base, which were substantially at odds with majority public opinion. He was never in front in the polls, and eventually Turnbull challenged, persuading his colleagues that the losing streak was so dire that fresh leadership was imperative.

A more progressive figure than Abbott, Turnbull immediately secured gains in the party’s polling, but internal party divisions ensured that he could not deliver on his promises. An election in 2016, intended to secure his authority, saw him returned with a one seat majority and forced to negotiate with an augmented cross-bench of independents and splinter party representatives in the Senate. Faced with negotiating a coalition of interests with this diverse band of critics, and attempting to straddle the gap between the electorate’s preferences (catering to which had generated his initial popularity) and a party base in which opinion diverged from that of the public, Turnbull faltered. His popularity collapsed.

As these events played out, even more striking manifestations of like problems were presented by the insurgent party campaigns of Jeremy Corbyn in Britain and Donald Trump in America, indicating a degree of universality in this dynamic. While Australian leaders have persisted with conventional broadcast media performance, even though that is losing traction, the Trump/Corbyn effect alerts us to the real potential of competing media platforms and social media in audience democracy. Hence, it is to these cases that we turn, but with one proviso: Corbyn and Trump were consistently represented as outsiders, battling political professionals and media opinion. The Australian instances attest that the complex relations between party organizations, leaders, the electorate, legacy media, and new media can also hobble mainstream leaders in government.

Jeremy Corbyn differs significantly from Donald Trump. Trump is a practitioner (and a product) of celebrity culture: Corbyn was a virtual unknown until his unexpected translation into party leader. Trump appears to be driven by narcissism (Ashcroft, 2016); Corbyn by the cause he serves (Stafford, 2016). They are ideological opposites. In two respects, however, Corbyn parallels Trump. First, each of them took on established elites of both parties and mainstream media and used social media to build an insurgent support base. Second, each appealed to supporters whose anger over contemporary politics has generated disaffection and opposition to the party orthodoxy and prevailed over party professionals inclined to describe such supporters as ‘morons’ (John McTernan, quoted in Harries, 2015: 249) and who were convinced that their elevation spelled ruin. Yet Corbyn’s Labor Party did better than anyone expected when Conservative prime minister Theresa May called an unexpected election in 2017, while Trump, famously, won the US presidency.

Each of them capitalized upon party decline. Parties once had the capacity to check leadership caprice, but in these cases proved unable to contain their candidates. They could ignore the conventional leadership repertoire, shaped as it was by old mass media expectations and the belief that a leader should ‘present policy and … focus an election campaign on the party’ (McAllister, 2011: 251). Given the license of personalization, and the performative opportunities offered by mediatization, a leader could shift the focus to himself (Trump) or to a program at odds with that determined by party professionals (Corbyn) rather than concentrating on shepherding the party over the line. What, then, could parties do? An American commentator remarked,

there is no Republican Party organization, per se …. [It] exists as an array of allied groups, incumbent office holders, media organizations, and funding vehicles … When people ask why … ‘the party’ has not done anything to stop Trump, it is not exactly clear who they mean. (Nathan Persily, quoted in Edsall, 2016)

And Corbyn’s detractors lamented that ‘The party has slipped its moorings … launching on the choppy waters of an atomized, affective politics, mediated by social networks’ (Stafford, 2016).

In fact, Corbyn and Trump developed means of communication that exploited this ‘atomized, affective politics, mediated by social networks’ to generate their audiences and thereby to create their own ‘publics’ – activists who identify with their messages and can be mobilized against ‘established’ views of ‘the public’, the suspect media and the hegemonic orthodoxies of their time. It is an exemplification of the fact that publics are emergent rather than stable entities (Emirbayer and Shelley, 1999); produced ‘and then revised, erased and revised again by countless acts of creative representation’ (Coleman, 2011: 40); that organic intellectuals (Gramsci, 1971) and political insiders (Lippmann, (1922) 1946) cannot indefinitely maintain ‘the phantom public’ (Lippmann, 1925); and that those disillusioned when homogeneity breaks down are capable of generating subaltern publics now reliant on the segmentation of communication afforded by new media.

These subaltern publics satisfy two purposes for their members: the provision of sources of identity and affiliation, and the articulation of views that accord with those identity preferences and predilections. This last is reinforced by both the technology and the business models of new media. Old style media conglomerates may be waning, but far from that allowing a hundred flowers to bloom, as optimists about web-enabled citizenship assumed, web-based news aggregation is dominated by two giants, Facebook and Google/Alphabet, exemplars of the new screen capitalism. While the viability of mass market newspapers, radio, and television always depended on advertising revenue, the very fact of contemporary lamentation about the potential demise of ‘legacy media’ is testament to their capacity for crusading investigative journalism. The new giants make no such pretense: they are in the business of on-selling their capacity to capture audience attention (Wu, 2017). At the heart of this capacity – and integral to their business model – are newsfeed algorithms. Far from encouraging critical analysis,

The Newsfeed algorithm is a superoptimized gratification machine, observing what types of content you enjoy, and then curating that content for maximum user engagement, regardless of whether that content is true or false. This algorithm distorts the conversation in an invisible, insidious way. News stories are shown to those who are likely to like or reshare them. Users are shielded from stories the algorithm determines they won’t enjoy. (Campbell- Dollaghan, 2016)

Web-based news aggregators garner rather than create content, use their capacity to track user interests to direct it to different elements in a segmented market, but achieve a new form of massification by ‘connecting’ these discrete audiences in ways that cater to the precise purposes of the advertisers who are their primary customers. They have no financial interest in disseminating ‘truth’, only in monetizing audience attention. This arguably has a severe impact on our increasingly fragmented polity: ‘“fake news” and “post-truth” … were made possible by the retreat from a general agora of public debate into separate ideological bunkers’ (Lanchester, 2017: 5). The filtering of information closes minds – enclosed echo-chambers (see Sunstein, 2007) bounce back what one already ‘knows’ and one can remain unaware of the contradictions and debate that might expose fake news and lies. One is also blinded to the potential of common interests and community.

Commercial consultants, recognizing the potential of the new media business model, have taken it a step further by combining psychographic expertise with big data mining intentionally to mobilize reaction within ideological bunkers. The strategy is to overlay voting patterns with consumer data and psychological profiles that enable political campaign teams very precisely to target specific groups of voters on social media. A representative of one of the most prominent of these firms, Cambridge Analytica, said this is ‘about understanding what message is relevant to that person at that time when they are in that particular mindset’. By understanding ‘attitudes and opinions … we then work out and do [sic] a creative look at what is the best way to engage with these people’ (quoted in Tett, 2017). Cambridge Analytica, notoriously, is credited with helping Trump to win the 2016 US presidential election and is said to have been in discussion with campaign teams in other countries, including Australia.

Conclusion

Politics is about negotiating solutions to common problems – those having effects in an identifiable community. Parties emerged to consolidate specific coalitions of interest to compete with other such coalitions not in warfare but in negotiation of outcomes more or less acceptable to most in the community in which they are situated. Success is realized by winning electoral support and maintaining confidence in legislating institutions. And effective political communication, focussing on the common good, is dependent upon the media (providing scrutiny and transparency). This is at the core of the process.

The mass parties and the mass media established discursive practices in the past century that served opinion aggregation and debate and generated a functioning public sphere. Arguably, they worked together in ways that identified both the character of the ‘imagined community’ and the range of ideological options to address problems specific to their historical moment. The conjunction was far from perfect. It depended upon political insiders and program professionals rather than on community voices and was criticized as hegemonic, privileging the status quo, marginalizing dissenting voices, and ‘narcotizing dysfunction’. We must resist any nostalgic idealization of its communicative capacities. Indeed, because of such shortcomings, some thought that hollowed-out parties presaged resort to poly-vocal, negotiated deliberation, and the collapse of mass media would foster a more differentiated and responsive social media environment in which citizens themselves could command the resources to mobilize and ‘speak truth to power’.

The political and communicative practices that became convention are now dissolving before us. Major parties are wracked by division; splinter parties and issue-specific parties proliferate and demand entry; legislatures become arenas for polarized confrontation; insurgencies generate ‘revolving door’ leadership: the result is policy stasis. Party division has been paralleled by accelerated audience fragmentation in media domains due as much to demography and technology as to any intentional action of parties and old media elites.

Has such dissolution encouraged new forms of web facilitated political negotiation, informed by unparalleled access to information and a media sphere in which many voices can enter debates that were previously dominated by the political class? Has an effectively functioning public sphere been expanded or vitiated?

The cases considered above suggest serious reservations. Rather than a proliferation of entrants in the new media domain that encourage differentiation and an enlarged agora of debate, a handful of global giants dominate. Their objective is to on-sell their capacity to capture audience attention. In seizing on social media for news aggregation, the business models of the new media giants make no pretense of satisfying such old media nostrums as ‘speaking truth to power’, acting as watchdogs against political caprice or encompassing any particular community’s interests. Their reach is global, but their ‘algorithmic democracy’ cocoons individuals in echo chambers of the like-minded that are bounded by affect and predilections rather than truth or evidence, and that satisfy needs for identity and affiliation in ways that pay no regard to the interests or views of others with whom they must live. Commercial data mining takes it further, perverting identity politics in ways that few understand and that are far from transparent but with profoundly debilitating effects on a functioning public sphere. Such factors suggest the need for radical rethinking of the relationship between party organization, media regulation, and political communication if an effective public sphere is to be sustained.