Page 260 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Three Models

conservative. ... [T]he list of pre-war broadcasters included many
of the most fertile and imaginative speakers of the day. ... Party
or organization politics, on the other hand, were another mat-
ter. The BBC would only countenance reform in terms of which
it approved: “non-partisan,” advocated by speakers talking in an
individual capacity ... (Seaton and Pimlott 1987: 137).
In Chapter 4 we noted an interesting illustration of this difference be-
tween the Liberal and Democratic Corporatist countries: The fact that
when local radio was introduced in the 1980s, Britain banned political
partiesandchurchesfromholdinglicenses,whileScandinaviancountries
specifically encouraged such ownership (De Bens and Petersen 1992).

Majoritarianism
All four Liberal systems tend toward majoritarian politics. The British
Westminster system, which Ireland and Canada essentially share, is of
course the classic case of a majoritarian system. All except Ireland have
single-memberdistrictsand“first-pastthepost”electoralsystems,rather
than proportional representation, all have relatively small numbers of
political parties, and each system is dominated by two broad, catchall
parties. In the United States, majoritarianism is modified by federal-
ism (as it is in Canada as well) and by separation of powers, but these
countries can still be described as predominantly majoritarian, at least
on Lijphart’s Executives/Parties Dimension. As with other aspects of the
Liberal systems, majoritarianism implies the existence of a unitary pub-
lic interest that in some sense stands above particular interests: parties
compete not for a larger or smaller share of power, but to represent the
nation as a whole.
In the specific case of broadcast regulation and governance, we argued
in Chapter 4 that majoritarianism tends to result in movement toward
the professional model, which is indeed the pattern we find in the Liberal
countries. In a majoritarian system, power sharing is not an option: Pub-
lic broadcasting must either be controlled outright by the majority or
separated from political control. As we have seen in the case of Mediter-
ranean countries that have essentially government-controlled systems,
these lead to diminished credibility with audiences and sharp conflict
between government and opposition, and such systems seem unlikely
to survive the alternation of government and opposition beyond a short
period of time. The alternative in a majoritarian system is professional-
ization, and this is the pattern that has developed in the long-standing

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