Relating Face to Face. Communicative Practices and Political Decision-Making in a Changing Media Environment

Abstract

Why do decision interactions within the field of politics still rely on face-to-face communication? While vast areas of day-to-day political practices and routines are backed up or substituted by electronically mediated forms of communication, face-to-face communication manifests itself as the core medium of political decision-making. In a time of ‘deep mediatization’, figurations of political decision-making seem to resist transformation, although they are surrounded by a changing media environment. Moreover, within the field of politics, face-to-face interactions even seem to gain importance as core elements of decision processes. Following the concept of communicative figurations, this chapter takes a closer look at the construction of relations within actor constellations involved in decision-making processes. Based on a micro-analysis of face-to-face group experiments and a series of computer-mediated chat experiments, typical sequences of face-to-face interaction are identified as significant elements of successful decision-making processes. The aim of this chapter is to show that these sequences or patterns of interaction produce and reproduce forms of relatedness within figurations of political decision-making.