Mediating politics in Scotland: information and ideology

Much of the research in the field of political communication rests of foundational assumptions about how attitudes and behaviours relate to one another. Research that examines variation in political attitudes often presumes that they drive key behaviours such as voting patterns. This is often manifested through attempts to explain attitude variation through communication exposure and attention variables, as in research on media framing, or through the overall tone and content of political communication. This chapter seeks to problematize this linkage through an examination of a set of exemplars of political communication in the news media that exploits web-based interfaces. These are primarily drawn from BBC webpages because of the authoritative nature of this broadcaster in the UK and its in-dept coverage of Scottish politics. The aim is to provide a critique of cognitive approaches to political communication by considering the growth of this form of communication as part of a wider ideological association with neo-liberalism in which the individual is thought to access 'information' through various new media as the basis for action.