How do different political institutions shape the communication strategies and opportunities of public relations?
A closer account of the question, evidence, and how to interpret this work.
The chapter coauthored with James McCann appears in the third edition of The Global Public Relations Handbook. Bringing comparative politics to public relations means asking how the institutions surrounding communication affect what organizations can say, who can hear them, and which voices enjoy credibility. Media arrangements, public-sector authority, and political accountability differ across settings.
Public relations can look like a technical skill when examined only as messaging. A political perspective instead asks how organizations seek access to decision makers and publics, how institutional constraints change their options, and how the same advocacy activity may have different meanings under different governing systems. These are comparative questions about context rather than claims that every communication tactic travels unchanged across countries.
The contribution connects political institutions, public authority, and strategic communication—issues that also appear in the portfolio’s work on climate countermovements and scientific expertise. The current project overview does not claim particular national cases or quantitative findings that cannot be verified without the chapter text.
Source: Young and McCann, The Comparative Politics of Public Relations, in The Global Public Relations Handbook (3rd ed., Routledge, 2019).
This overview is grounded in the bibliographic description; cases, specific hypotheses, and findings require consultation of the original chapter.
Published handbook chapter · 2019 · Laura D. Young and James McCann · The Global Public Relations Handbook, 3rd edition · Routledge.