What’s Good and Bad in Political Communication Research: Normative Standards for Evaluating Media and Citizen Performance

Political communication research often claims that empirical findings are important or relevant for democratic politics without identifying the value judgments that support these assertions. Because these value judgments often lurk in the background as unstated premises, empirical scholars frequently advance normative claims about the importance or relevance of their findings without being aware that they are doing so. This chapter introduces normative assessment as a way to advance the horizons of political communication research by bringing these usually hidden claims to light. Doing so clarifies the normative standards that empirical scholarship implicitly uses to evaluate media and citizen performance. Drawing attention to these normative standards makes it possible to spot theoretical inconsistencies in empirical research while simultaneously broadening the theoretical foundation of this research to better appreciate varied ways that democratic communication can occur within complex information systems. The purpose of normative assessment is not to contend that one state of the world is somehow ‘better’ than another in an absolute sense, but rather to evaluate when and why a pattern of findings might be more important for some social problems than others, or might align more readily with some theoretical concerns than others. This chapter details how normative assessments relevant for political communication research can be made and defended.