Page 79 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Political Context of Media Systems

countries in terms of ideological polarization (reported by Lane and
Ersson 1991 and measured through analyses of party manifestos) and
the number of political parties. The degree of ideological polarization is
related to historical differences, summarized in part in the final section
of this chapter – polarized pluralism developed where conservative op-
position to liberalism was strong, and the transition to liberalism long
and conflictual. Later in our analysis, we will extend the term polarized
pluralism to refer to this broader pattern of political development – and
thus apply it to countries such as Spain and Portugal, which had a form of
polarized pluralism only during brief periods of democracy early in the
twentieth century (after which pluralism was suppressed for half of the
twentieth century by dictatorship), but that share much of the pattern
of historical development of Sartori’s Italy.
Polarized pluralism tends to be associated with a high degree of po-
litical parallelism: newspapers are typically identified with ideological
tendencies, and traditions of advocacy and commentary-oriented jour-
nalism are often strong. The notion of politically neutral journalism is
less plausible where a wide range of competing world views contend.
Similar to clientelism, with which it has common historical roots, polar-
ized pluralism tends to undermine a conception of the “common good”
transcending particular ideological commitments. Sartori argues that
Polarized Pluralist systems tend to have political cultures that empha-
size “ideology understood as a way of perceiving and conceiving politics,
and defined, therefore, as a distinctly doctrinaire, principled and high-
3
flown way of focusing on political issues (137).” In such a culture it
is not surprising that a tradition of advocacy or commentary-oriented
journalism would be strong. Polarized pluralist societies are also charac-
terized historically by sharp political conflicts often involving changes of
regime. The media typically have been used as instruments of struggle in
theseconflicts,sometimesbydictatorshipsandbymovementsstruggling
against them, but also by contending parties in periods of democratic
politics. This history similarly pushes toward the politicization of the
media. Moderate pluralism, on the other hand, is more conducive to the
development of commercialized and/or professionalized media with less
political parallelism and instrumentalization.

3 Sartori connects this ideological style to a “mentality of rationalism as opposed to the
empirical and pragmatic mentality (137),” though he does not explore the historical
roots of this cultural difference. As we shall see in Chapter 5, Putnam (1973) attributes
it more to the simple fact of polarization – to the fact that political life is highly
conflictual.

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