The field of political communication has always drawn upon and incorporated elements from different intellectual currents. In recent decades the concept of the public sphere has emerged as a focal point of theorizing, research, and reflection within a number of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities and in political communication. In fact, it could be argued that for political communication, the relevance of the public sphere as a particular concept and as a general perspective is particularly compelling, even if the notion of the public sphere brings with it a number of contested issues. The discussion here first looks at the basic elements of the concept of the public sphere as derived from the groundbreaking work of Jürgen Habermas. From there it suggests that ...