Page 318 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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TheFutureofthe ThreeModels

Pluralist and Democratic Corporatist models, for example, but it does so
in very different ways. The table also dichotomizes the four dimensions,
and it abstracts from single-country variations, as well as change over
time (it is meant to represent the three models in a period when they
were maximally distinct, say the 1950s to 1970s).
With all those qualifications, this schematic representation may nev-
ertheless be worth considering for a moment. One thing it shows is that
two pair of media system variables show the same pattern of differences
across models: the development of the mass press and professionaliza-
tion, and political parallelism and the role of the state. It does seem plau-
sible that there are connections between these dimensions. Profession-
alization may tend to develop where the mass circulation press is strong,
in part because both result from strong development of capitalism, mass
democracy, and the middle class, and in part because professionalization
tendstodevelopinlarge-scale,economicallyself-supportingmediaorga-
nizations, where the relation of journalists to their readerships is crucial
to the success of the enterprise. And it seems plausible as well that there
may be a connection between political parallelism and state interven-
tion. Where the state plays a large role in society, parties are likely to have
deep social roots and strong influence, and to some extent it may work
the other way around as well: where parties are strong, collective action
through the state may be a favored means of solving social problems. It
makes sense that where politics is central to social life, and parties play
a central role in the community decision-making process, the influence
of the political field, in Bourdieu’s terms, on the media should be strong
and political parallelism high. We would not propose collapsing our four
dimensions into two, but we would suggest the hypothesis that the two
pair of variables identified here may be interrelated in important ways.
We also have placed considerable emphasis in this book on history:
we believe that it is essential to go back both to the origins of the press
and to those of the political system, and to trace the development of
both historically to understand how media systems function today. In
one of the classic works of comparative politics of the 1960s, Lipset and
Rokkan (1967: 2) wrote, “As soon we move into comparative analysis we
have to add an historical dimension. We simply cannot make sense of
variations in current alignments without detailed data on differences in
the sequencesofparty formation...beforeand after the extension of
suffrage.” They go on to trace the origins of party systems to transition
from feudal or patrimonial to liberal institutions, and explain varia-
tions in party systems in terms of the particular patterns of conflict that

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