The Internet And Political Communication

Political communication is a topic which is often mentioned in western political study. Nowadays people pay more attention to political communication, because it became more important for both the government and the citizen to get information of social and political reality in this information era than in the past.The Internet brings change to traditional method of political communication. It challenges dominant views of media effects and its ability to set the agenda and frame the debate in tandem with political elites. It also challenges, to some extent, the ability of political parties to control information dissemination, and becomes a channel through which opinion may be formed, debated and expressed without elite control. With the development of the Internet, the amount of Netizen keeps increasing and the Internet becomes an important part of their life.This paper brings forward a brief summary of the studies of western political communication scholars. On the base of Easton's theory of political system, this paper tried to form a mode of political communication. When doing this work, the author paid much attention to the role mass media play in the process of political communication. And then the author tried to analyze the influence of the internet on political communication.