Page 22 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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Comparing Media Systems

basis for systematic critique of work that falls into these patterns of
overgeneralization and conceptual narrowness.
The second reason comparison is important in social investigation
is that it allows us in many cases to test hypotheses about the inter-
relationships among social phenomena. “We have only one means of
demonstrating that one phenomenon is the cause of another: it is to
compare the cases where they are simultaneously present or absent,”
´
wrote Emile Durkheim (1965) in The Rules of Sociological Method. This
has become the standard methodology in much of the social sciences,
particularly among those interested in analyzing social phenomena at
the system level, where variation will often not exist in a single-country
study. There are, of course, many epistemological debates surrounding
the effort to find “sociological rules” in Durkheim’s sense. Some be-
lieve social theory should follow the natural sciences in the search for
laws that are “always and everywhere the case”; others believe that the
generalizations of social theory will necessarily be relative to particu-
lar systems and historical contexts. Some believe explanation requires a
clear identification of cause and effect, “dependent” and “independent”
variable; others think in terms of identifying patterns of coevolution of
social phenomena that might not always be separated into cause and ef-
fect.Inthe field of communication, those who do analysis at the system
level often tend to be skeptical of “positivism”; the “positivists” in the
field tend to be concentrated among people working at the individual
level. For many years empirical research in communication was almost
synonymous with the media effects paradigm, which was concerned not
with larger media structures but with the effects of particular messages
on individual attitudes and beliefs. This may be one reason systematic
use of comparative analysis has developed slowly. We believe, however,
that it is not necessary to adopt strong claims of the identity between
natural and social science to find comparative analysis useful in sorting
out relationships between media systems and their social and political
settings.
Let us take one example here. Jeffrey Alexander, in an unusual and
very interesting attempt to offer a comparative framework for the anal-
ysis of the news media, poses the question of how to explain the partic-
ular strength of autonomous journalistic professionalism in the United
States. One hypothesis he offers is that “it is extremely significant that
no labor papers tied to working class parties emerged on a mass scale
in the United States” (1981: 31). He goes on to contrast U.S. press his-
tory with that of France and Britain, and advances the claim that the

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