Page 107 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Mediterranean or Polarized Pluralist Model

In 1974 and 1975 Greece, Portugal, and Spain threw off the last three au-
thoritarian regimes in Western Europe and began successful transitions
to liberal democracy. Those transitions motivated an increased interest
onthepartofhistoriansandsocialscientistsin“SouthernEurope”asare-
gion with a distinct historical experience (e.g., Gunther, Diamandouros,
and Phule 1995). Southern Europe is usually understood to include the
three countries that moved to democracy in the mid-1970s, plus Italy,
which made that transition earlier but shares many historical and struc-
tural characteristics with the other three countries. France is often men-
tioned in discussions of Southern Europe, though almost always treated
as a marginal case. What distinguishes Southern Europe – and to a lesser
degreeFrance–fromtherestof WesternEuropeandfromNorthAmerica
is most basically the fact that liberal institutions, including both capital-
ist industrialism and political democracy, developed later. The forces of
the ancien r´egime – the landholding aristocracy, the absolutist state, and
the Catholic or Orthodox Church – were stronger there, and liberalism
triumphed only after a protracted political conflict that continued in
many cases well into the twentieth century. One important legacy of this
history is the fact that the political spectrum remained wider and po-
litical differences sharper in Southern Europe than in Northern Europe
or North America. As we have seen in Chapter 3, this is what political
scientists refer to as polarized pluralism, and we will return in the last
section of this chapter to explore more systematically how this political
context has shaped the media systems of Southern Europe.
We argue that the late and contested transition to democracy in the
Mediterranean region of Western Europe has produced distinct patterns
of relationship between the media and the political world. The mass
media in the Mediterranean countries were intimately involved in the

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