ABSTRACT
Local political communication research looks like a rather disparate subfield within the context of political communication studies. In many textbooks or major works on political communication it does not even exist. This is even more surprising since the local, as a category of analysis, has in the last decade spurred an impressive body of research in sociology, political science and geography (see Parry et al., 1992; Berry, 1993; Judge et al., 1995; Mayer, 1996; Pratchett & Wilson, 1996). While for some time it seemed that with the rise of globalization the local would turn into a negligible quantity, recent globalization research exposed a renewed interest in the local (see Castells, 1996; Sassen, 1996; Rosenau, 1998). The local, at the turn of the century, seems to have become the marker for reality against virtuality, for presence against abstraction, for citizen participation against the hegemony of global capital interests, and for the space of “real places” against the vague “space of flows” (Castells, 1996, p. 425). Yet this renewed interest in the local not only as a counterforce but also as a site of the global has not as yet taken root in communication research. Those researchers who are concerned with local aspects of political communication are therefore almost unequivocally critical of the lack of sufficient representation of the local within the field (see Cox & Morgan, 1973; Franklin & Murphy, 1991; Kaniss, 1991; Graber, 1997, p. 313). 1
