Page 69 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Political Context of Media Systems

Table 3.1 Consensus vs. Majoritarian Politics

Majoritarian Politics Consensus Politics
1. Winning party concentrates Power sharing
power
2. Cabinet dominance Separation of power between
legislative and executive
3. Two-party system Multiparty system
4. Plurality voting system Proportional representation
5. Clear distinction between Compromise and cooperation
government and opposition between opposing forces

Majoritarianism, as we will try to show in Chapter 7 when we discuss
the Liberal systems where this pattern prevails, tends to be associated
with the notion of the journalist as a neutral servant of the public as a
whole, rather than as a spokesperson of a particular political tendency
or social group, and with internal rather than external pluralism, though
as we shall see the British press deviates significantly from this pattern.
It is part of the political culture of a majoritarian system – at least of a
long-standing majoritarian democracy – that the parties compete not
to gain a greater share of power for their particular segment of society,
but for the right to represent the nation as a whole, and it may be that
in this sense the notion of neutral professionalism is more natural in
a majoritarian system. Majoritarianism probably also tends to be as-
sociated with the development of catch-all political parties with vague
ideological identities, appealing to a wide public across social divisions,
though this is much more true of the American presidential system than
of the British Westminster system. Where catch-all parties predominate,
it makes sense that catch-all media should also develop. Consensus sys-
tems, on the other hand, are typically multiparty systems, and external
pluralism (as defined in the previous chapter) is more likely in the media
system of multiparty polities, along with other characteristics of political
parallelism.
There is a particularly clear and direct connection between patterns
of consensus or majoritarian rule and systems of broadcast governance
and regulation that tend to follow patterns similar to those that pre-
vail in other spheres of public policy. The most basic feature of politics
in consensus systems is power sharing, and the strongest examples of

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