Page 142 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Pippa Norris

the predominance of the commercial broadcasting channels mean that
tendencies in American network news may well prove different to me-
dia systems where public service broadcasting has a long tradition. The
United States is also distinctive from equivalent established democra-
cies in Europe for many other reasons, such as the marathon length
and sheer frequency of American elections, the role of private funding
in campaigns, the importance of entrepreneurial candidates over par-
ties, the lack of a significant national newspaper sector, the complexity
and fragmentation of the policy-making process, and the culture and
traditions of journalism.
Another body of research, exemplified by the Euromedia group, has
compared political communications within established West European
democracies, while others have compared media systems in affluent
postindustrial states (e.g., Østergaard 1992; Norris 2000). Yet it is not
clear how far we can generalize more widely from these particular con-
texts to middle- and low-income countries around the globe. West
European media systems that gradually evolved in the mid-nineteenth
and early twentieth century, following the long-term process of indus-
trialization, are unlikely to be similar to those found in Latin American,
African, Middle Eastern, or Central European states. Where distinctive
historical experiences stamp their cultural mark on different global re-
gions,theymaycontinuetoinfluencepatternsofpoliticalcoveragetoday,
in a path-dependent pattern. Another common approach is that many
edited collections consist primarily of country-by-country case studies,
from established and consolidating democracies, within a loose theoret-
ical framework. This is a step in the right direction, for example when
comparing changes in campaign communications, but nevertheless it
still remains difficult to develop and test more systematic comparisons
from separate studies of particular nations (e.g., Swanson and Mancini
1996; Gunter and Mughan 2000). Unlike some other fields of compar-
ative politics, such as the study of parties, electoral systems, and voting
behavior, or constitutions, political communications lacks strong and
well-established conceptual typologies. The best known classification of
media systems, Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm’s Four Theories of the
Press,developed at the height of the Cold War era, is now so dated as to
provide little contemporary value (Siebert 1984). As a result of all these
problems, older comparative politics textbooks commonly relegated the
mass media to a minor player as an agent of political socialization, or a
channel of interest group demands, at most, rather than as an institution
and political actor in its own right (e.g., Almond and Powell 1992).

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