Page 147 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Mediterranean or Polarized Pluralist Model

commercial media more risky. And limited development of political
democracy meant a limited constituency for political news. Spain, for
example, had an electoral system in the late nineteenth century, the turno
system, in which parties made up of small cliques of notables agreed to
alternate in office and political bosses controlled the votes of a dependent
rural population. Collusion among political elites was characteristic of
the early periods of liberal rule in Southern Europe.
This history is not, of course, uniform within each country: there
were important regional variations, and the legacy of these variations
can be seen in the contemporary media systems. As Putnam (1993)
stresses in his well-known study of regional government in Italy, parts of
northern and central Italy had very different social systems in medieval
and early modern Europe from the typical pattern of Southern Europe.
These were the regions where the communal republics developed self-
governing urbanized communities with significant market economies in
which, as Putnam shows, a dense network of civic associations as well
as relatively professionalized administrative structures developed. Self-
government was lost in these regions by the seventeenth century, but
Putnam argues that the habits of civic life remained part of the culture
and are an important part of the explanation for the success of regional
government in these areas. It is in these same regions that newspaper
circulation is most extensive. Putnam includes newspaper readership in
theindexofCivicCommunitythatishisprimaryexplanatoryvariable.In
Spain, liberal institutions were stronger in the Basque country, Madrid,
and Catalonia than in most of the rest of the country – many historians
refertothe“twoSpains”–andagainthiscanbeseeninthecontemporary
media system, both in newspaper readership and in such phenomena
as the development of the only press council in Southern Europe in
Catalonia. In France, too, there were important sociological and cultural
differences between north and south, but the centralized French state
diminished the significance of these differences.

Polarized Pluralism
The strength of conservative forces in Southern Europe ensured that pol-
itics in the region would be sharply polarized and conflictual. Supporters
of the old order continued to resist liberal modernization from the right.
As the socialist and sometimes anarchist working-class movement de-
veloped, the strength of the right prevented its incorporation into a con-
solidated liberal order and a radicalized opposition became entrenched
on the left as well. The stakes of political conflict were high, as there was

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