Mapping Power and Meaning
An Analytical Review of Building Theory in Political Communication Reza Shirmarz The landscape of political communication is increasingly fragmented, dynamic, and multi-directional. Amid this complexity, Gadi Wolfsfeld, Tamir Sheafer, and Scott Althaus’s Building Theory in Political Communication (2022) emerges as a crucial intervention, and aims to unify disparate strands of research and theorizing through their Politics-Media-Politics (PMP) approach. Far from proposing a predictive model, the authors offer a flexible, comparative, and cumulative framework that maps how political contexts shape media, how media selectively transform content, and how this reshaped output loops back to influence politics. This analytical article critically engages with the book’s central propositions. It explores its conceptual foundations, applicability across regimes, and implications for future research. It argues that while the PMP model offers a highly useful heuristic, its strength lies in ...
