№ 3 - 2002
Solovyov A.I.
Political Communication: To the Problem of Theoretical Identification.

On stating that the concept of communication, which has been in active use in social studies for more than half a century, allows for the unravelling of a good many mysteries of political life, the author points out that quite a few aspects and parameters of communication still remain insufficiently explored. At present, applying the laws of the circulation of information for explaining social communication is, as a matter of fact, equivalent to interpreting the latter as an integral whole. Meanwhile, according to the author’s finding, the role and character of the information-communicative process are not at all the same in different spheres of social life. As for, in particular, the concept of political communication, it describes not a universal-type communicative process, but one of a unique type, with such properties inherent in it, as: its own sources of information contacts; especial type of the organization of social interrelations; specific functional loads within society; its own morphology; multiply mediated style of macro-social groups’ intercourse; and a number of other characteristics. Through the analysis of these characteristics, the author comes to the conclusion that although the content of political communications is extremely varied, and heterogeneous, they have, nevertheless, a number of parameters that enable their being regarded as a quite definite combination of phenomena. It is therefore necessary that approaches applied in science were fit to represent not some incidental nuances, aspects and fragments of this complex of social contacts, but, first of all, its nature and essence.