Page 81 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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The Political Context of Media Systems

counterreformation cultural tradition, by political authoritarianism,
and by weaker development of the market and the nation-state, mass-
circulationnewspapersneverdevelopedandjournalisticprofessionalism
was limited by clientelism. What did emerge, once democracy took root,
was a wide spectrum of media closely tied to the diverse political factions
that contended for power – a system marked by a high degree of political
parallelism.
One good illustration of the importance of history for understanding
contemporary media systems is the fact that rates of newspaper circula-
tion still reflect patterns established at the end of the nineteenth century,
when the mass-circulation newspaper first developed. Figure 3.1 shows
the correlation between literacy rates in 1890 and newspaper circula-
tion rates in 2000, for thirteen countries on which we have data. The
correlation between the two (using a log transformation of circulation
rates) is about .8. The split between Northern and Southern Europe is
clear in these figures, with low circulation rates across Southern Europe
reflecting their literacy rates in 1890. The point here is not that literacy
rates cause the development of mass-circulation newspapers (to some
extent the causality may even run the other way). As Cipolla (1969: 18)
puts it, “literacy is in fact only one aspect of a complex socio-cultural
reality”; the development of a mass-circulation press is another aspect
of that same reality.
Of course, there are many variations among individual countries, as
weshallseeinsubsequentchapters,whichcomplicatethesimpledivision
wehaveusedherebetweenthosecountrieswhereliberalinstitutionswere
consolidated early and those where the transition was more protracted.
Germany and France, in particular, are very much mixed cases in terms
of this historical distinction. And though the liberal countries of the
north Atlantic – Britain, Ireland, the United States, and Canada – share
many characteristics with Northern European countries where liberal
institutions also developed relatively early, they also diverge from them
in important aspects of their subsequent political and media history. In
Part II we will try to give a more nuanced view of the historical context
of media systems.

CONCLUSION
In this chapter we have identified a number of political system variables
that we believe are relevant to the comparative analysis of media systems.
These variables, derived and in some cases adapted from the literatures

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