Page 80 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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Concepts and Models

HISTORICAL ROOTS
European political institutions developed out of a series of conflicts
rooted in major social transformations: the Protestant Reformation, the
industrial revolution, the democratic revolution, and the formation of
the nation-state. Media systems also developed out of these transfor-
mations and the conflicts and cleavages that resulted from them. Early
mass media – newspapers, books, pamphlets, handbills – were deeply
implicated in these conflicts, and the modern mass media are to a sig-
nificant extent associated with certain poles in them. The modern news-
paper, especially, is most characteristically an institution of a secular,
urban, national, democratic, capitalist social order. The particular pat-
terns through which these transformations and the associated conflicts
were played out are thus crucial to understanding the relationships be-
tween media and political systems.
In the chapters that follow, we will deal in much greater detail with the
historical co-development of particular media and political systems in
their social contexts. Here we would like point to one broad distinction
between those countries where liberal, bourgeois institutions triumphed
relatively early over the feudalism and patrimonialism, and those where
the conflict between the forces of liberalism and traditional conservatism
remained unresolved until well into the twentieth century. This histor-
ical difference accounts to a large extent for the quite distinct patterns
of media system development that prevail in Northern and Southern
Europe. In much of Northern Europe, the landed interests that were the
social basis of the old order in Europe were relatively weak, and liberal
forces consolidated their hegemony relatively early. Where this pattern
prevailed, one usually finds moderate pluralism and a strong develop-
ment of rational-legal authority in the political sphere, combined with
a strong development of mass circulation media and of journalistic pro-
fessionalism. The United States, as Tocqueville pointed out, was a liberal
society from the beginning, and subsequent political conflicts – between
labor and capital and over slavery and race – were carried out on the
ground of liberal hegemony; in this sense the United States also fits this
pattern.
In Southern Europe the landed interests and the Catholic Church
were much stronger; industrialism and the market developed later, and
sharp political conflict over the basic shape of the political system con-
tinued much longer. Polarized pluralism, clientelism, and statism re-
sulted in the political field. In the media system, discouraged by the

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