Adoption of Media Logic? An Investigation of Political Communication Strategies of Actors in Germany and Austria

Although it is theoretically claimed that political elites get increasingly dependent on public communication and stronger orientated towards media logic formats, empirical knowledge to underpin this claim is scarce. Therefore, this paper asks how far perceptions of the effectiveness of different political communication strategies reflecting fundamentals of media logic differ between German and Austrian politicians and spokespersons. The study is based on 259 answers to open questions by 318 respondents surveyed in an international study about political communication cultures (2008/2009). The answers were dissected into 592 single communicative strategies, which were then inductively condensed and counted. A bivariate quantitative analysis indicates a relative homogeneity between countries and actors belonging to either governing or opposition parties. Only a slightly stronger tendency towards dramatizing a story was found in Austria. Nonetheless, a multiple logistic regression analysis shows that the specific party a respondent belongs to and his/her low trust in the effectiveness of parliamentary speeches increase the probability to value strategies geared toward media logic.