Page 34 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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Comparing Media Systems

draw any firm conclusions about the relations between media and social
systems.
In some ways, comparative research in communication may be inher-
ently harder than in some fields. Those who study comparative politics,
for example, can take advantage of the structured choices that character-
ize electoral politics to generate quantitative data that are relatively easy
to compare across systems. It is easy enough to come up with comparable
quantitative data on things such as newspaper circulation, state subsi-
dies to the press, or (slightly more difficult) ownership concentration.
Although even when dealing with very concrete kinds of information –
whether particular countries had right-of-reply laws, for example, or
whether they allowed paid political advertising – we were surprised at
how difficult it could be to find information on all the countries in our
study, and often found contradictions in the published literature or be-
tween that literature and scholars we consulted in each country. The
situation is far more difficult with something such as the day-to-day
flow of political discourse in the media, the significance of which is often
dependent on subtle cultural cues that may be inherently harder to study
comparatively than much of the subject matter of comparative politics
and certainly harder to quantify. We would stress here that comparative
research by no means requires quantitative data, though such data can
often be extremely useful. To a large extent what we need in communi-
cation is more qualitative case studies based, for example, in discourse
analysis or field observation – case studies carried out with a theoretical
focus that gives them broader significance for the comparative under-
7
standing of media systems. This brings us back to the fundamental
problem identified by Blumler and Gurevitch in 1975: the fact that we
are still so unclear on what to look for when we do comparative research
on media systems. It is toward this conceptual problem that our book is
directed. Given the limitations of the existing research, we cannot claim
to test most of the hypotheses we raise here. Neither will we attempt to
fill the gap of comparative research. Our analysis is based primarily on
existing published sources and we make only very limited attempts at
new empirical research. It is our intent instead to propose a theoretical
synthesis and a framework for comparative research on the media and
political systems.

7
On the role of case studies in comparative analysis see Lijphart (1971), George (1979),
George and McKeowan (1985).

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