Political communication, government, media and citizenship

Case study of the National Council of Rural Parochial Governments of Ecuador (2010-2015)

Abstract

This article summarizes an investigation that aimed to establish a relationship between political communication and representation, through the analysis of thematic agendas of the actors that participate in the political communication process of the National Council of Rural Parochial Governments of Ecuador, CONAGOPARE, among 2010 and 2015. To develop the project, we hypothesize that a change in the interaction of any of the interlocutors in the communication process, whether they are: the government system, the media system or the citizen system, directly influences the entire process. process. For its analysis we focus on CONAGOPARE and on the agendas of the rural parochial governments of Pichincha. For this purpose, we define four transcendental moments reached by CONAGOPARE in favor of the country's parochial governments, which are: increase in the budget of parochial governments at the national level (2010); provision of Internet for rural parishes nationwide (2012); agreement for parish governments to access direct loans from the State Bank (2013); and the National Forest Restoration Plan (2015). After the field findings, through a mixed research methodology, in which the analysis of quantitative and qualitative data was combined, we determined that CONAGOPARE represented the agendas of the parish governments, and from this, it became the the only interlocutor of the so-called "rural sector" with the capacity to be recognized by the actors in the political field. However, we appreciate a series of environmental factors that have had a direct impact on each of the actors in political communication.