Page 64 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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THREE

The Political Context of Media Systems

In Chapter 1 we argued that media systems are shaped by the wider
context of political history, structure, and culture. In this section we will
discuss some of the principal characteristics of political systems that can
influence the structure of media institutions. We have taken from the
literatures on comparative politics and political sociology a number of
concepts that we believe are useful for understanding the evolution of
media systems. We summarize these concepts relatively briefly here –
and apologize to specialists in these fields for what may seem like an
overly elementary discussion, and at the same time to media scholars
unfamiliar with them for what may seem like an overly quick one. We
hope that for both groups, the discussion will deepen and the meaning of
the concepts will become clearer as we go on to apply them to the analysis
of concrete cases. We also outline in this chapter a set of hypotheses that
emerge from our research about how these political system variables are
connected with the media system variables introduced in the preceding
chapter. In the final section of this chapter we introduce an argument
that common historical roots shape the development of both media and
political systems, and are crucial to understanding the relation between
the two. All the arguments introduced here are developed at greater
length as we analyze the evolution of particular systems.
The concepts we have taken from political sociology and comparative
politics were in most cases developed without any thought about their
application to the study of the media, and we may select from them or
adapt them in ways that will seem slightly odd to people in those fields,
though we hope we can show that our adaptations make sense in the
subsequent analysis. One of the challenges for the comparative study of
media systems – which we can only begin to take up in this book – is to
sort out which elements of the frameworks used in comparative politics

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