Page 154 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Three Models

power gave way to a more competitive structure. But the parties incor-
porated many of the particularistic forms of patronage that had been
part of classic clientelism. Clientelism is generally seen as destructive
of “horizontal” forms of organization such as mass parties and volun-
tory organizations, but it might be argued that forms of “democratic
clientelism” that aided the growth of such organizations did sometimes
emerge in Southern Europe, as they also did when mass parties first
developed in the United States in the nineteenth century.
France is an exception to this pattern of persistence of clientelist re-
lationships and weakness of rational-legal authority. This is one of the
principal reasons we have described France as a marginal case lying at the
boundary between the Polarized Pluralist and Democratic Corporatist
systems. It has a strong cultural tradition of the state as an embodiment
of the “general will,” and a long history of professionalized administra-
´
tion going back even to the ancien r´egime and the Ecole Nationale des
PontsetChause´ es,theNationalSchoolofBridgesandRoads,whichfunc-
´
tionedtotrainandselectcompetentadministrators.TheEcoleNationale
d’Administration now performs that function, producing an adminis-
trative elite selected on meritocratic rather than political criteria, with
astrong ´esprit de corps and substantial autonomy. French civil servants
are less rigidly separated from party politics than those in other coun-
tries. They can and often do run for office without resigning from the
civil service. But the common norms and culture of the administrative
elite remain strong (Suleiman 1984). 18 Thenegativestereotypeofbu-
reaucracy as an administrative apparatus following its own rules and
intractable to control from the outside is actually based on the French
case. French journalists often share with civil servants training at the
Institut des Etudes Politiques in Paris, and in some sense are thus part
of a common elite culture.
In all the countries covered here, clientelism has been undermined in
recent years by many forces, from economic growth to European inte-
gration (which imposes common standards of rational-legal authority)
to the rise of journalism education, which tends to replace particular-
istic ties and subcultures with a common professional culture and re-
cruitment network. Nevertheless the historical strength and continuing
relevance of clientelism has a number of consequences for the media sys-
tems of Southern Europe. In clientelist systems, information is treated

18
Italy,bycontrast,hasaneutralcivilservice,butwithoutthestrongsystemforrecruiting
and forming an elite corps and without the importance in the political process of
French administrators (Cassese 1984).

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