Chapter 16. Public bureaucracies

Abstract

Public bureaucracies have mostly been invisible in research on political communication, but more recently, there has been an increasing interest in their communicative efforts. In this chapter, we review the literature and synthesise the scholarship on Nordic public bureaucracies in relation to political communication. Three research areas are put to the fore: 1) Mediatisation: how and to what extent bureaucracies prioritise the media and what consequences it has for activities, routines, and resource allocations across organisational contexts; 2) Reputation management: why and how bureaucracies make use of communication to build, maintain, and protect their reputation; and 3) Crisis communication: public actors' abilities to provide information and support to citizens and communities before, during, and after crises. Although highly interconnected in practice, these strands of literature have largely been three separate academic discussions. We therefore suggest that a first step to consolidate research on communication and public bureaucracies would be to combine the knowledge research has gained in terms of media management, reputation management, and crisis communication. Such an effort would provide a much broader, but also detailed, knowledge on the motives, organising, content, and consequences of public bureaucracies and their communicative efforts.