Page 211 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The North/Central European Model

of the key elements of a system of rational-legal authority is the develop-
ment of an administrative corps selected by qualifications rather than by
patronage, governed by established rules, relatively autonomous from
outside control, and in theory serving the nation as a whole. Such a sys-
tem was established by the Hohenzollerns in Brandenburg-Prussia in the
eighteenth century, in an effort to balance the power of the landed aris-
tocracy, and strengthened after the Napoleonic invasion (Shefter 1977:
423ff). In Scandinavia, “centralized, powerful, relatively independent
bureaucracy came to play a central role” (Esping-Anderson 1985: 48)
beginning as early as the seventeenth century, and was generally well
consolidated by the early nineteenth century. In Denmark, for instance,
“The Danish Law of 1685 standardized the payment of service dues, re-
placing a decentralized and personalistic system organized around the
landed aristocracy with a centralized and bureaucratic one run by the
state” (Katzenstein 1985: 159). Lægried and Olsen (1984: 210) write of
Norwegian civil servants, who dominated the state from the early nine-
teenth century:

Their ideology came close to what Weber later labeled an ideal bu-
reaucracy based on rational-legal authority. The main task of civil
servants was seen as the implementation of enacted rules – to find
the proper solution and guard the public interest, unhampered by
arbitrary outside pressure. The role model was the objective and
impartial judge, and their primary loyalty was toward an imper-
sonal system of laws.

Clientelism, meanwhile, never took strong root in most of the Demo-
cratic Corporatist countries (with Austria and Belgium often considered
as partial exceptions). 25
A strong tradition of rational-legal authority affects the media sys-
tems of Democratic Corporatist countries in several ways. First, as we
note in Chapter 3, the expansion of the newspaper is connected with the
development of rational-legal authority, as it is with the expansion of the
market and parliamentary democracy. Second, the relative autonomy of
public service broadcasting systems in Democratic Corporatist coun-
tries is consistent with the independent character of public institutions

25
On the absence of clientelism in Northern Europe see Papakostas (2002) and
Randeraad and Wolffram (2002).

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