Local communication: between public service and political strategy

Communication by local authorities, and more specifically by local councils, serves two distinct purposes. On the one hand, it fulfils a public service mission and upholds citizens' right to information. On the other hand, such communication is an essential tool for any political team seeking to promote its work or to create or rebuild social cohesion within a given area. This tension between the neutrality expected of the administration and political promotion has led the legislator to reflect (with difficulty) on the distinction between institutional communication and political communication. This dissertation attempts to analyse the legislator's attempts to regulate local authority communication and make this distinction. But above all, it examines why this distinction is not necessarily relevant, given that local authority communication is intrinsically composed of both an administrative and a political dimension. Ultimately, the aim here is to briefly trace the history of municipal communication departments, which underwent a turning point in the 1970s, and to examine the challenges they face.

Pages: 56, Paperback, Our Knowledge Publishing