Introduction Mapping political communication

What is political communication? How can we map the boundaries of a field so vast that includes research on topics as different as artificial intelligence, incivility, cartoons, local news, and semiotics? This short introduction tries to provide a first quick and dirty answer to these overarching questions. Instead of deducing the borders and contents of the field from existing classifications, we thought it useful to begin our mapping from the bottom-up. In this introduction, we first look at how political communication has crossed borders into other adjacent disciplines, thereby diffusing its concepts and theories, but also taking on board insights from “abroad”. Second, we survey the changing landscape of the field internally. What is it that scholars actually study under the rubric “political communication”? And how do they study it? Third, we lay out the Encyclopedia's road map and explain how we tried to do justice to the trends we detect.