Page 205 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The North/Central European Model

THE CENTRALITY OF ORGANIZED SOCIAL GROUPS. One of the most impor-
tant characteristics of the Democratic Corporatist system is the central
role played by organized social groups, including political parties, trade
unions and employer associations, religious communities, and many
other sorts of “socially relevant groups,” in the German phrase. The
corporatist system is based on the existence of strong, unified “peak
organizations” that can represent the interests of their members in bar-
gaining with other groups. Such groups are formally integrated into the
policy-making process in corporatist systems and in many cases have the
status of public institutions, exercising what in other systems would be
state functions – running welfare systems, for instance, or in the Dutch
case, public broadcasting. The corporatist bargain of the 1930s insti-
tutionalized the place of organized social interests in the Democratic
Corporatist countries, but a history of strong social self-organization
goes back many centuries earlier. The pattern of strong civic life that
Putnam (1993) describes in northern Italy was evident very early as well
in much of Northern Europe, Germany, and Switzerland. Local commu-
nitieswithsignificantrightsofself-governancewereanimportantpartof
the history of these countries, including trading cities of the Netherlands
and Germany, and Swiss cantons. Merchants formed joint-stock compa-
niesandotherformsofassociation;artisansformedguilds;inmanycases
independent agricultural producers formed cooperatives; the Protestant
tradition of self-governing church congregations also played a role in the
development of this organizational culture. The strength of this kind of
civil society no doubt is an important factor in the growth of newspaper
readership in Northern and Central Europe, as civic organization de-
pends on a flow of publicly available information. And as we saw earlier
in this chapter, conflicts among these groups were fought out from early
on through the print press. It is worth underscoring here the fact that
traditions of civic organization were not confined to the cities but existed
inthecountrysideaswell.Thestrongurban-ruralsplitthatcharacterized
the Mediterranean countries – and held back the growth of newspapers
in Southern Europe– did not exist to nearly the same degree in the north.
The strongest urban-rural split in newspaper readership today, among
the Democratic Corporatist countries, is in Austria – which as a part
of the Austro-Hungarian empire has a feudal history more similar to
that of Southern Europe.
In the nineteenth century, strong mass political parties emerged in
the Democratic Corporatist countries, usually first in the form of so-
cial democratic parties, with mass conservative and agrarian parties

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