Political communication and democracy

By Ignas Kleden

This is the second of two articles on the relationship between political communication and democratization. Sociologist Ignas Kleden addresses the question in this article.

JAKARTA (JP): So far we have discussed technical as well social and personal know-how as preconditions for political communication.

However, it is equally important to look at the political conditions required by effective political communication. This implies the existence of a reciprocal and even dialectical relationship between political life and political communication.

Indonesian Minister of Environment Sarwono Kusumaatmadja made a good point at a seminar at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences on Sept. 3. He said political communication in Indonesia should be improved. At present, he said, political communication is so poor that it makes but little sense to talk about democracy and the enhancement of democratic life, unless there are real efforts to improve political communication.

According to the minister, the poor political communication is due to factors which may be summarized as follows.

First, political accountability has not worked as well as it is expected to. The recent banning of a television talk show, for example, was carried out without much attention being given to the reasons for the banning or any consideration of whether the reasons are valid.

Second, there could be better communication between the government and the people if there were better communication between the people in political decision-making positions. This is important in order that the policies of one official do not contradict those of another.

Third, it would be better to establish a comprehensible political vocabulary which rests on common sense and is clear, rather than persisting with the use of expressions and formulations which mask political messages which are frequently not received by those to whom they are addressed.

This means we have to learn to say what we mean and to start to do away with the habit of saying what we do not mean, while meaning what we do not say. In other words, even in politics it would be better to have low-cost rather than high-cost communication.

The assumption which underlies such an analysis is that political communication is a precondition and democratic political life is a result. However, in order to be able to improve political communication it is first necessary to understand why political communication in Indonesia is the way it is.

To assume that political communication is precondition for democracy is evidently true, but to contend that a more democratic life is a precondition for the improvement of political communication is no less plausible.

The reason is that communication always involves two or more parties. In order for communication to be effective, those involved in it have to have an equal position; each with a right to expression and each with an obligation to receive. The verb "receive" is used here in the sense of a willingness to understand what the other party is saying and why he is saying it, without necessarily being bound to a practical acceptance of it.

Equality is necessary because, although communication aims at understanding, it is nevertheless often laden with misunderstanding, either because one party is deficient in expression and the other party is deficient in reception or because the parties proceed from totally different basic assumptions.

The statement, for example, that Indonesia receives a lot of attention from foreign experts as an object of social science research can be understood in totally differently ways. One person might be very proud that Indonesia seems to be so interesting to foreign scholars, while another person might resent the fact that the country is so dependent on foreign resources when it comes to social scientific knowledge.

One of the main sources of misunderstandings in political communication is the existence of unequal power positions.

Those who are in more powerful position (politically, economically, intellectually or spiritually) tend to have a greater right to expression and a lesser obligation for reception (though they might not claim it), whereas those who are in less powerful position usually have less right to expression and a greater obligation for reception.

In such unequal communication, the exchange of opinion and argument becomes limited, with the level of misunderstanding being proportional to the level of inequality.

If the resultant misunderstanding plays a decisive role in further communication, we are faced with distorted communication. If the distortion persists to the point at which it becomes regular we end up with systematically-distorted communication, in which distortion is no longer treated as something to be corrected or straightened out but, rather, as something normal and natural which is taken for granted.

Thus, the more democratic the conditions of communication, the greater the likelihood of effective communication and the less likely that communication will be distorted and, eventually, paralyzed.

One way to improve communication and to safeguard equality is to suspend power considerations in communication (seeing it is impossible to get rid of power imbalances) and to rely on sound common sense and human reason in order to enable the exchange to be based on relative equality.

In that sense, the less communication is the communication of power, the greater will be the power of communication, such that both a threatening shout and a plaintive whimpering are transformed into a normal voice.

The writer is a sociologist with the SPES Foundation Research Centre in Jakarta.

Window: The less communication is the communication of power, the greater will be the power of communication, such that both a threatening shout and a plaintive whimpering are transformed into a normal voice.