Page 68 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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Concepts and Models

some limit the length of campaign periods; some regulate the time given
to politicians on public service and/or commercial television. In the
United States such regulations are held by the courts to violate the First
Amendment.
The European tradition of an active state has complex historical roots.
It arises both out of a preliberal tradition of aristocratic rule and out of
the more modern tradition of social democracy. In the media sphere
as in other spheres, it involves a combination of more authoritarian or
paternalistic and more participatory and pluralist elements. The British
Official Secrets Act and interventions by various Spanish governments
to influence media ownership might be taken as examples of the for-
mer, and the Swedish press ombudsman or German rules on representa-
tion of social groups on broadcasting councils as examples of the latter.
Though many institutional structures and practices – French laws reg-
ulating foreign-language content might be an example – combine both
elements.
Beyond the distinction between welfare state and liberal democracy,
many other distinctions can be made in the role of the state in society.
Katzenstein (1985) for example, makes a three-way distinction among
liberalism in the United States and Britain, statism in Japan and France,
and corporatism in the small European states and to a lesser extent in
Germany. We will come back to this distinction in discussing the Demo-
cratic Corporatist Model. It should also be noted that three of the coun-
tries in our study, Greece, Spain and Portugal, shifted from authoritarian
to democratic systems relatively recently. They have been characterized
for most of their history by statism without social democracy – astrong
stateroleintheeconomyandinsocietygenerally,butnotastrongwelfare
state. This history, combined with the tradition of clientelism discussed
in the following text, makes these Southern European countries histori-
cally distinctive in important ways.

CONSENSUS VS. MAJORITARIAN DEMOCRACY
Lijphart’s (1984, 1999) distinction between consensus and majoritar-
ian democracy is widely used in comparative politics and is probably of
considerable use in understanding relations between the political and
media systems, particularly along what Lijphart calls in his later formu-
lations the executive-parties dimension. Lijphart’s contrasting models
are summarized in Table 3.1.

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