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Three Ages in One: Content Analysis of Pre-Electoral Campaigns in Transitional Croatia (1999-2011)

The empirical research this presentation is based on departs from Blumler and Kavanaugh’s conception of “three ages of political communication” and Pippa Norris’s distinction between pre-modern, modern and post-modern traits of pre-electoral campaigns. The conceptualizations and distinctions these authors make are seen not only as cornerstones of the historical evolution of political campaigns, but also as indicators of social change connected with a general level of modernization of a given social context. In order to track the evolvement of pre-electoral campaigns in transitional Croatia, a content analysis of campaign coverage in the years 1999, 2003, 2007 and 2011 was performed on a sample of national and regional daily newspapers. The code book was operationalized on the basis of Vaccari’s (2007) classification of the characteristics of pre-modern, modern and post-modern campaigns derived from the analyses of Farrel (1996), Blumler and Kavanaugh(1999), Norris (2000), Farell and Webb (2000), and Plasser (2002). The research results indicate that pre-electoral campaigning in transitional Croatian society has been marked by a simultaneous existence of the elements of all “three ages of political communication”, but with a gradual move towards postmodern campaigning. More precisely speaking, in 1999 the elements of pre-modern and modern campaigning prevailed, while in the years 2003 and 2005 there was a prevalence of modern campaigning with some post-modern elements, and in 2011 there was a clear-cut domination of post-modern campaigning, with some modern elements.These findings are consistent with Tomić-Koludrović’s theory of the simultaneous evolvement of two modernizations (“simple” and “reflexive”) in transitional Croatian society (Tomić-Koludrović, 2000 ; 2007), with a gradual “move towards modernity” (Tomić-Koludrović, Zdravković, 2013).

Croatia; transition; political communication; campaigns; modernity

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