Reputation in Politics

Reputation designates the respect enjoyed by a person, organization, institution, or, more generally, an individual or collective subject among relevant reference groups in the mid or long term. An agent's reputation gains in social importance to the degree that prestigious information diffuses beyond the sphere of his or her immediate group of acquaintances. This diffusion process takes place either via oral propaganda or—and much more effectively—via the medium of public communications. Because this implies that reputation is strongly linked to public celebrity, it is simultaneously evident [Page 713]that the mass media play a central role in the process of creating reputation. Indeed, in the political sphere, the importance of the mass media as creators of reputation has increased massively in recent decades. Thus stakeholders perceive ...