Page 224 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Hanspeter Kriesi

visibility, resonance, and legitimacy in the public sphere. Challengers,
put differently, are more likely to choose public strategies if the insti-
tutional accessibility of state actors is high, rather than low. In poorly
accessible settings, however, the bottom-up public strategies tend to be
more radical.
Note that this typology of the national political context is entirely
based on the characteristics of the political system and does not refer at
all to the party systems or the media systems in the various countries.
As it turns out, the structure of these two systems heavily correlates
with the type of democracy: consensus democracies (including Germany
and Austria) generally tend to have a strong, independent press and a
comparatively strong party system, while majoritarian democracies tend
9
to have a weak press that is less autonomous from the state and weaker
10
party systems, too.
It is likely that in countries in which the parties are no longer able to
control their base, public strategies will become increasingly important.
Italy presents the paradigmatic case of a collapse of the old party sys-
tem and the development of new parties from scratch – above all Silvio
Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, which lacks any established social-structural
base. In fact, the strategy of Berlusconi’s “media-centered personality
party” corresponds rather closely to the proactive version of the strategy
of “going public” (Seisselberg 1996). Italy is also the extreme case of a
weak press. As is pointed out by Seisselberg (1996, 725), in the 1990s Italy
became the television-society par excellence. In Italy, television plays a
larger role as a source of information than in other countries and it is
also generally accepted as a means of forming political opinion (Gabriel
and Brettschneider 1994, 541–3). Ricolfi (1997) adds that more than any
other Western nation, Italy has only been linguistically united by televi-
sion. Finally, television is the only means of communication for a major-
ity of Italians. Italy also illustrates the consequences of a weak press and
the concentration of political communication in television. According to

9 Indicators for the strength of the press are the circulation per capita (Lane et al. 1997,
175; Table 8.9) and the share of national publicity expenditures obtained by the press
(De Bens and Ostby 1997, 19; Table 2.3). An indicator for the independence of the
press can be obtained by the share of the ten largest national newspapers that are rated
as “neutral” or “independent” by Banks’ Political Handbook of the World (Voltmer
2000, 21).
10 For measuring the strength of party systems we use the share of citizens who still are
party members. The newest available data are those presented by Mair and van Biezen
(2001, 9). Greece is a partial exception, because it has a strong party system (but no
strong media), although it is a majoritarian democracy.

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