Page 72 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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Concepts and Models

and Switzerland, developed a characteristic form of politics early in the
twentieth century that was “distinguished by three traits: an ideology of
social partnership expressed at the national level; a relatively centralized
and concentrated system of interest groups; and voluntary and infor-
mal coordination of conflicting objectives through continuous political
bargainingbetweeninterestgroups,statebureaucraciesandpoliticalpar-
ties.” Katzenstein contrasts this form of democratic corporatism, which
was also adopted in significant part by Germany and Austria after World
War II, with liberalism. We will argue in Chapter 6 that the concept of
democratic corporatism is extremely useful for understanding the me-
dia systems of Northern and West-Central Europe. The kinds of group
structures associated with segmented pluralism and corporatism have
broken down to a very significant extent in Western Europe, giving way
to a more individualized pattern of social belonging. But they played a
central role in the development of both political and media systems in
much of Europe, and significant differences do persist in the extent to
which they continue to affect political life.
It is worth adding here that systems also differ in the extent to which
political parties play a dominant role relative to other kinds of organized
social groups. A strong role of political parties tends to be characteristic
of systems that tend to polarized pluralism – a concept that will be
explained in the following text. These systems usually have a history of
weaker development of civil society and parties have tended to fill the
organizational void.
Where organized pluralism was strongly developed, the media were
always integrated to a significant extent into the institutions of group
representation. The Dutch pillars, for example, had their own newspa-
pers, and Dutch broadcasting was similarly organized into a pillarized
system of broadcasting organizations representing the different subcul-
tures. Organized pluralism is thus clearly associated with external plural-
ismandpoliticalparallelism:mediatiedtopoliticalparties,tradeunions,
and churches, and the notion of journalism as a vehicle for the repre-
sentation of groups and ideologies develops most strongly in societies
characterized by organized pluralism. These societies also tend to have
someversionofapolitics-in-broadcastingsystem–eithertheparliamen-
tary or the civic/corporatist model – because democracy is conceived as
requiring direct representation of social interests. One interesting mani-
festationofthewaythisdifferenceinpoliticalcultureaffectsbroadcasting
policy can be found in the different rules introduced by Britain and by
Scandinavian countries for the granting of licenses for community radio:

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