Page 162 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Three Models

became vehicles for expression of deeply rooted, conflicting political and
religious subcultures.
Germany apart, all the countries discussed in this chapter have rather
small populations: the name we give to this model, Democratic Corpo-
ratist, is strongly influenced by the analysis of Peter Katzenstein’s (1985)
Small States in World Markets. As Katzenstein points out, the small coun-
tries of Northern and West-Central Europe adopted political models in
the early twentieth century that involved compromise and power sharing
among the major organized interests of society and an expansion of the
welfare state, with Germany, as well as Austria, adopting much of this
model after World War II. (When we speak of Central Europe in this
chapter we are thinking of Austria, Switzerland, and Germany; countries
such as Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic share much of the his-
tory with the Democratic Corporatist countries, but the experience of
communism obviously separates their political and media history from
that of the countries discussed here.) Katzenstein traces the historical
origins of this political model, as we shall see in the last section of his
chapter, to a pattern of historical development in which the conservative
forces of the Catholic Church and land-owning aristocracy were much
weaker than in the Southern European countries where the Polarized
Pluralist Model developed. We shall see that this history is associated
with a distinct pattern of evolution of the media system as well.
The common history of the countries of this region and the intensity
of their interaction both in peace and in war, has meant that, despite
many differences among them, their media systems share important
common characteristics. These characteristics can be summarized in
termsofthree “coexistences” that we will identify as distinctive to the
Democratic Corporatist countries – three sets of media system elements
thatinothersystemsdonotappeartogether(oronlyatdifferenthistorical
moments), and that we might assume (particularly if we take the Liberal
Model as “normal”) to be incompatible, but which have been simultane-
ously present in the Democratic Corporatist countries throughout the
twentieth century.
In the first place, a high degree of political parallelism, a strong ten-
dency for media to express partisan and other social divisions, has coex-
isted in the Democratic Corporatist countries with a strongly developed
mass-circulation press. The first of these two elements, political par-
tisanship, has clearly weakened substantially over the last generation.
Nevertheless we believe that the experience of a strong advocacy press
not only characterizes the history of the media in Northern and Central

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