Political Communication Roles Inside Out

A well-established sociological insight states that roles constitute a key component of social systems, regardless of their size and type (Linton, 1936; Parsons, 1951; Morris, 1971). The importance of roles lies in their ability to establish the crucial link between the functional orientation of a given system and the social identity of the actors operating within the system. This is not meant to suggest that the social identity offered by roles simply corresponds to the experienced identity and actual behavior of individual actors. However, roles stand out among the various components of systemic culture due to their intrinsic expectations toward individual behavior that provides actors with a social identity or “self-image” within a given system: “A role may be understood as a set of norms and expectations applied to the incumbent of a particular position” (Banton, 1965, p. 29).