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Some considerations about governmental information from the viewpoint of sociology of law and communication science - The author distinguishes two forms of governmental information: the information about legal norms and the information given by the government or governmental agencies about political, social, economic and financial problems. The first form mostly is studied by the constitutional law, but also by the sociology of law; indeed, a lot of sociological studies have focused the attention on the degree of knowledge (or the lack of knowledge) of the citizen about legal norms. The second form of governmental information that has taken an enormous extention in the years after World War II is mostly discussed by policy makers and journalists (the problem of the monopolization of the information by the government, the mixture of real information and propaganda, etc.). The author points out that both forms of governmental information have to be studied in the first place as communication processes. The Polish author F. Studnicki was the first who tried to describe the flow of information about legal norms in terms of communication science. Most attention was given to the channels by which the information reaches the citizens. The author of this article thinks that only the use of a “communication model” will enable the gathering of all the findings about the different moments of the communication process: so he proposes the so-called “topological model” developped by K. Lewin. This model can not only be succesfully used for both forms of governmental information, but it also allows the application of a lot of findings about communication processes (the „gate keeper”, the “pseudo communicator”, the “two step flow of communication” a.o.) to the process of governmental information.
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How to Cite: Van Parys, G. (1974) “Rechtssociologische en communicatiewetenschappelijke aspecten van de overheidsvoorlichting”, Tijdschrift voor Sociale Wetenschappen. 19(4). doi: https://doi.org/10.21825/tvsw.95981