Page 89 - Comparing Media Systems THREE MODELS OF MEDIA AND POLITICS

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Media and Political Systems and Differentiation

defined by that triangle. The placements of the individual countries rep-
resent our tentative judgments about their similarity or difference from
the ideal types represented by the three models. Germany, for example,
shares many characteristics with the other countries we have classified
as Democratic Corporatist – high newspaper circulation and strong in-
volvement of organized social groups in policy, including media policy.
But we have placed it toward the middle of the triangle, closer to both the
Polarized Pluralist and Democratic Corporatist Models for a number of
reasons. It shares with the Polarized Pluralist countries a history of sharp
ideological conflict, has a more confrontational political style than the
smaller Democratic Corporatist states, and, as in the Polarized Pluralist
countries, political parties play a particularly strong role in social life, as
they do also in the media. Similar to the Liberal systems, it lacks press
subsidies and tends to give strong emphasis to the privileges of private
ownership in much media policy. Spain and Portugal are shown as fur-
ther from the Democratic Corporatist and closer to the Liberal Model
than Italy because they have weaker welfare states, manifested in less state
support for both the press and public broadcasting. In principle, it would
be possible to place countries in such a space on the basis of some set of
quantitative indices, but the limitations of data noted in Chapter 1 and,
more importantly, conceptual problems about how to weight various
criteria that might be used to construct such indices make that approach
seem more misleading than enlightening. Of course, these conceptual
problems mean that the placement of particular countries is very much
subject to debate. The representation of these media systems in a two-
dimensional space obviously abstracts from a tremendous amount of
complexity and is not meant to substitute for the more complex discus-
sion that appears in Part II.
It is also important to keep in mind that the media systems of in-
dividual countries are not homogeneous. Actually countries themselves
are not homogenous. Many, for example, are characterized by regional
variations in both media and political systems: the media in Quebec
and Catalonia are distinct in a number of ways from the media in the
rest of Canada or Spain, and the history, current economy and political
culture, and media markets of Northern and Southern Italy are very dif-
ferent. We take the nation-state as our primary unit of analysis here –
and media systems have to a large extent been organized at this level
over the past couple of centuries – but it is important to keep in mind
that this is in some ways misleading. It is also important to remem-
ber that not every element of a given media system operates according

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