Page 283 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Forces and Limits of Homogenization

an earlier period (Panebianco 1988; Mair 1990; Katz and Mair 1994).
Mass parties served as central instruments for the representation and
defense of social and economic interests, for “aggregating interests” and
forming consensus, and served as important structures of communica-
tion through the interpersonal networks on which their organizations
were built. Mass parties, among their other functions, were responsible
for the production of social representations and imagery. In the service
of this function they owned and controlled newspapers, and journal-
ists working within these newspapers had the duty of spreading and
defending the ideas of the party. Journalists’ practices of information
gathering, writing, and interacting with readers were rooted to a sig-
nificant degree in the ideological framework and party-centered social
network to which they belonged. Being at the same time both jour-
nalists and political figures, they acted according to models of practice
shapedbyspecificpoliticalculturesthatvariedfromcountrytocountry–
hence the substantial differences we have found among national media
systems.
The decline of the mass party, ideologically identified and rooted in
distinct social groups, and its replacement by the “catchall” or “electoral-
professional party” oriented not primarily toward the representation
of groups or ideologies but toward the conquest of electoral market
share, has been widely documented in political science (Kirchheimer
1966;Panebianco1988).Thestablepsychologicalandsociologicalbonds
that once existed between parties and citizens have been weakened in
this transformation. Party membership has declined (as have church
and trade union membership). So has party loyalty, measured either by
identification with political parties or by partisan consistency in electoral
behavior, at least in many cases. Voting turnout has declined in many
countries. “When partisanship was closely tied to class and religion, the
conjoint of social and political identifications provided a very strong
incentive for party identifiers to turn out. These linkages, however, have
withered in recent years . . .” (Dalton and Wattenberg 2000: 66). The
“grassroots” political organizations that once tied parties to citizens have
atrophied,whileprofessionalstaffsconcernedwithmediaandmarketing
have grown. Individual leaders have become increasingly important to
the appeal of parties, while ideology and group loyalties have become
less so.
The weakening of mass political parties is in turn connected with a
wider process of social change, which involves the weakening or frag-
mentation of the social and economic cleavages on which mass parties

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