Page 282 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

P1: GCV
0521835356agg.xml Hallin 0 521 83535 6 January 21, 2004 16:18

TheFutureofthe ThreeModels

A similar process has taken place in Italy, where two main political
subcultures, the Catholic and the Communist, based on deeply rooted
religious and political faiths, simultaneously represented the main in-
struments of political power and the most important socialization agen-
cies in the country. The Catholic subculture was essentially, though not
exclusively, linked to the structures of the Catholic Church, its charity
organizations, and interpersonal networks. The Christian Democratic
party was its political arm. The Communist subculture was built out of
the first trade unions and workers’ solidarity organizations. Associated
with the Communist Party were many other organizations active in dif-
ferent fields: social solidarity, sport, culture, leisure, education, media,
and so on. (Galli 1968; Sani 1980; Trigilia 1981; Mannheimer and Sani
1987). In Italy as in the Netherlands – though more recently – these
two subcultures and their organizations have declined in importance.
The birth and the victory of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, relying almost
completely on mass media for its connections with the electorate, is an
excellent illustration of this decline – and of the tendency for media
correspondingly to expand their social role.
In Scandinavia agrarian, conservative, liberal, and socialist parties, to-
gether with trade unions, once pervaded many fields of society, but have
substantially declined. One interesting illustration of the shift “from a
collectivist to an individualist political culture,” and its effect on jour-
nalism, can be found in a content analysis of Swedish news media from
1925 to 1987 (Ekecrantz 1997: 408), which found the use of the term we
was more frequent than the use of the term I in news discourse in earlier
decades, with the relationship reversed by the 1980s. Similar stories can
be told, with many local variations, about most of the countries covered
in this book.
The decline of political parties is closely related to this process of “sec-
ularization,” and is particularly important to understanding change in
media systems. There is a large literature on the “decline of party,” and
some debate about whether, or in what sense, it has actually taken place.
Some argue that parties have not so much declined as “modernized”
and narrowed in their functions, that they are actually more effective in
mobilizing voters at election time now that they have been profession-
alized and separated from their connections with institutions such as
trade unions. Some argue that rather than speaking of “party decline”
in generalweneedtolookspecifically at the decline of the traditional
“mass parties” that were powerful in Europe through much of the twen-
tieth century, as well as in the United States in an earlier form and

264