Esteves, João Pissarra (2019). Comunicação política e democracia. Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra. 387 pp. ISBN: 978-989-26-1735-0

Abstract

Several years before Gustave Le Bon published Psychologie des Foules (1895) and Gabriel Tarde (1901) distinguished between crowd and public in his studies, the Portuguese politician and historian Joaquim de Oliveira Martins had already published a curious article in which he defined the public as “powerful, invincible as fate; hysterical as a nervous woman; naive as a child” (Oliveira Martins, 1924 [1886], p. 88) and raised concerns about the relationship between citizens and the media: “How many times have we annoyed and bored you by trying to make you think, placing before your eyes the crucial problems of the nation’s economic life, the problems of your life? You want excited nerves: sensational news and scandals” (Ibid., p. 90). He also describes citizens’ cynicism toward politics and their consequent disengagement: “You always grumble about politicians, and you make them in your own image and likeness. If they do not deceive you, if they do not flatter your depravity or your whims, you stone them. [...] You dislike the work of thinking and reflecting; you entrust this task to your representatives, whom you choose at random, with closed eyes” (Ibid., p. 91). Although the “great anonymous” (Ibid., p. 89) is described more in the irritable style of Wilhelm Reich’s “Nobody” (1972) than in Walter Lippmann’s notion of “public opinion” (1922), this brief text by Oliveira Martins managed to raise the longstanding problem that has always concerned publicists, scholars, historians, philosophers, sociologists, and current social science researchers: understanding the extensive triad of power–media–public, which so clearly represents the pillars of political communication.