Political Management and Political Communications

Political management has long-standing ties to applied political communications and to political communication as an academic discipline. From both the applied and theoretical perspectives, political communication traces its roots to the classic writing of Aristotle, Plato, Quintillian, and Cicero.1 In more modern contexts, the study of political communication as a theoretical and scholarly discipline is derived from a melding of multidisciplinary work in communication, political sciences, psychology, sociology, and marketing.2 Among the many definitions of political communication, Steve Chaffee’s simple and straightforward one is perhaps the best: the “role of communication in the political process.”3