Democratic Heuristics – The Role of Communication Agencies in The Development of Resilient Democratic Discourses

Recent scholarship in political communication has described fundamental transformations of contemporary information environments that create serious challenges for democratic discourses. According to this scholarship, digitalization is leading to a “further structural transformation” (Habermas 2022) of the increasingly “disrupted” (Bennett & Pfetsch 2018) public sphere characterized by a pluralization of channels for political communication, a fragmentation of audiences and a “high choice media environment” (van Aelst et al. 2017) that facilitates the spread of (dis-)information. Political actors need to develop new strategic heuristics to navigate increasingly complex and volatile communication environments (Schäfer 2023). Populist political communication proves to be rather successful in doing so by producing simplifying messages – strategies that potentially drive social polarization and jeopardize political integration. This paper focuses on an important but rather underexplored group of actors in this context. It asks how professional communication agencies respond to these challenges for designing political communication? What kind of strategies do they develop and why? How can those strategies be assessed in light of their potential for stabilizing democratic discourses? Giving that communication advisors serve a multiplier function through their consulting services to political and civil society actors, they take a potentially pivotal role in the stabilization of effective and productive democratic discourses. This paper presents results of a study that uses participant observation, interviews and expert processes in order to examine and reconstruct communication strategies developed and employed by two Berlin-based consulting agencies to navigate increasingly complex and volatile communication environments. It reconstructs those strategies empirically in light of heuristic-decision-making theory. Based on this, the paper discusses those heuristics against the background of democratic theory. In this way, the paper strives for contributing to a debate that links the expertise of scholars and practitioners in order to identify effective solutions to the problems democratic political communication faces today.