Introduction

The growing interest in investigating the links between the media and politics in the first half of the last century led to the gradual formation of a specific academic discipline generally referred to as political communication and defined as: ‘the role of communication in the political process’ (Chaffee, 1975, p 15). Its origins are linked to the development of communication studies and mass communication theory in the United States in the first half of the last century (Blumler and Gurevitch, 2001). The research into political communication originally focused on analysing the influence that the media have on voters’ behaviour (Lippmann, 1922) and on propaganda (Lasswell, 1971). The historic milestones include the establishment of the Princeton Center for Radio Research in 1937, where P.F. Lazarsfeld conducted his influential research focusing on the news media's influence on voters’ decision making, mainly in The People's Choice (Lazarsfeld et al, [1944] 1968) and later Personal Influence (Katz and Lazarsfeld, 1955).

The history and the present state of political communication research is characterised by a broad range of interests, diversity of approaches and interdisciplinary nature drawing on the theories and analytical procedures of several disciplines from the field of social sciences. Currently, one can identify three main areas of political communication research: studying the media's effects on the public and politics; political marketing and content analyses of the media's coverage of politics; analyses of media systems and the role of the news media in the processes of political decision making. The rather heterogeneous approaches as well as the broad scope in the fields of research are linked in agenda-setting theory as the prevailing interpretation framework for the theoretical, conceptual and methodological bases of research in political communication (Dearing and Rogers, 1996; Kaid, 2004; McCombs, 2004). The theoretical bases and methodological tools of the ‘Western’ research on political communication were largely drawn upon in the investigations into the media and politics in the new democratic environment of Czechoslovakia and later in the Czech Republic, where researchers sought inspiration mainly in the English-speaking world and, to a lesser extent, in German-speaking countries. In this way, the continuous links to the limited research before the revolution were interrupted and a new tradition largely inspired by the situation on the Western side of the Iron Curtain began to unwind.