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Political Communication in Croatia: Critical Assessment of the Field

Political communication research in Croatia began with the country’s declaration of independence in 1991. Although there is convincing evidence that certain concepts, such as political public relations, existed well before democratic changes but “were erased” in the process of purging from a socialist heritage and had to be “reinvented” as Western concepts (Grbeša & Rašeta, 2015), political market, strictly speaking, did not exist in socialist Yugoslavia. Therefore, the goal of this chapter is to analyze the development of the political communication field since the breakup with Yugoslavia and the first democratic elections in 1990. The chapter first introduces the political context necessary to understand research trends in the field. It then provides an overview of the scholarly research in political communication. It differentiates between campaign studies and political communication research that is not directly related to elections. The section on elections looks at the scope of researched topics and theoretical concepts used in the texts. It especially focuses on the concept of Americanization and one of its most pervasive indicators, personalization. It examines how these concepts have been used across different studies to explain events and processes in Croatian political communication. It then outlines research dealing with the media coverage of elections which again heavily leans on an Americanization framework. The next section looks at the research topics that are not exclusive to elections, such as government communication, politicians’ rhetoric, populism, technology- related topics such as “LOLitics” (the art and power of Internet humor), fake news, and connective action. The central section of the chapter is the discussion that summarizes the main findings and critically analyzes the main approaches, research patterns, and methods used across the field. Finally, the chapter evaluates strengths and weaknesses of political communication research in Croatia and assesses the country’s comparative contribution to the field. The ambition of this chapter is not to present all the scholarly work in Croatian political communication which has proliferated in recent years. The goal is instead to present main lines of research, methods, and approaches that indicate prevailing trends but also point to some obvious deficiencies in political communication research in Croatia.

Political communication, Croatia, Americanization. methods, critical assesment

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