Page 87 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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Media and Political Systems and Differentiation

of this book we will explore each in detail, showing its inner logic and
historical evolution. We have identified the three models both by the ge-
ographical region in which they predominate and by a key element of the
political system that we consider crucial to understanding the distinctive
characteristics that mark the media-politics relationship in each model:
the Mediterranean or Polarized Pluralist Model, the North/Central
European or Democratic Corporatist Model, and the North Atlantic
or Liberal Model. Table 4.1 focuses on the media system and Table 4.2
summarizes relevant characteristics of the political system and political
history.
We will argue that these models identify patterns of development that
are both coherent and distinct, and that the sets of countries we have
grouped together under these headings share many important charac-
teristics. Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind that these are
“ideal types.” We hope they will prove useful as conceptual devices for
organizing a discussion of media and political systems in comparative
perspective, but they are far from capturing the full complexity either of
the media systems of particular countries, or of the patterns of relation-
ships among the major variables we have identified.
The tables, in particular, are extreme simplifications, affected in part
by the simple need to fit the information on single pages. We hope they
will be useful to the reader in getting an overview of the framework we
are proposing. At the same time we hope they will be interpreted in light
of the more nuanced discussion of the three models and of particular
countries presented in the chapters that follow. We would reiterate here
a number of qualifications introduced in Chapter 1. First, the groups
of countries we discuss under each of the models are heterogeneous in
many ways, and it is not our intent to minimize the differences among
them. In certain cases, indeed, those differences will be central to our
argument. Although the United States and Britain, for example, are often
lumped together – with good justification up to a point – as Liberal sys-
tems we will try to show that they are very different in important ways,
and that the common idea of an “Anglo-American” model of journalism
is in part a myth. Britain could actually be conceived as lying somewhere
between the ideal type of the Liberal Model and the Democratic Corpo-
ratistModelthatprevailsinnortherncontinentalEurope.Franceisalsoa
mixed case, and can be conceived as lying between the Polarized Pluralist
and Democratic Corporatist models. In terms of newspaper circulation,
to take just one example, it is higher than all the other “Mediterranean”
countries, but lower than the rest of Europe – a difference that reflects

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