Page 84 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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FOUR

Media and Political Systems, and the Question

of Differentiation

In Chapters 2 and 3 we introduced a framework for comparing media
systems and a set of concepts adapted from comparative politics and po-
litical sociology that, we argued, have important relationships with the
media system. In Chapter 3 we also introduced a number of hypotheses
about how particular political system variables were related with par-
ticular media system variables. In the remainder of this book, we will
try to analyze these relationships in a more synthetic and historical way,
exploring the broader patterns of relationship that have developed in
North America and Western Europe; the reasons why particular sets of
characteristics have tended to co-occur; and why these patterns occur
when and where they do. This chapter will begin this process of anal-
ysis, first, by introducing three models of the relation between media
and political systems that will organize our empirical discussion of the
media systems of particular countries, and second, by posing the ques-
tion whether the patterns observed here can be understood in terms of
differentiation theory. The discussion of differentiation theory will lead
us into a deeper look at an issue posed in the introduction to this vol-
ume, the use of the Liberal Model as a standard for measuring media
systems; it will also carry us forward to a discussion, in Chapter 8, of
convergence or homogenization of media systems, and whether this can
be understood as a process of “modernization.”

THE THREE MODELS INTRODUCED
Our discussion of the patterns of interrelationship among the political
and media system characteristics discussed in this chapter will be orga-
nized around three models, which are summarized in Tables 4.1 and 4.2.
The basic characteristics of these models are described here. In Part II

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