Page 25 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Comparing Political Communication

democracies are being considered. While there is evidence that the me-
dia in transition countries support the adoption of democratic norms
and play a marked constructive role in political consolidation (Schmitt-
Beck and Voltmer 2001), their contribution to the democratic process
in contemporary Western systems is no more than ambivalent. Thus,
the interrelations and consequences of political communication clearly
vary according to the duration and the traditions of the development
of democracy, whereby the problems and deficits of modernized po-
litical communication mainly occur in the Western mass democracies.
Asaconsequence, the contributions to this volume – with the excep-
tion of the study by Norris (Chapter 6, this volume), which takes a
global perspective – concentrate on the “old,” established democracies
in Western Europe and the United States.
In view of the significance of communication processes for the de-
velopment of democracy many mainstream researchers dwelled on the
United States as the country in which the modernization of politi-
cal communication seemed furthest advanced and most apparent. The
American “media democracy” appeared for a long time to be the role
model for the development of political communication in all Western
democracies (Blumler and Gurevitch 1995, 77). With the creation of
the term Americanization the essential paradigm had been set that gen-
erated a great deal of dynamics in international research. A boom in
comparative political communication studies was the outcome follow-
ing the criticism of the parochial perspective of many U.S.-centered
projects, which tended to neglect institutional arrangements as well as
cultural and structural contexts of political communication. Since the
1990s, European and American scholars have been asking themselves
whether the American model of media democracy is indeed appropriate
for describing generalizable patterns of developments of modern po-
litical communication in today’s Western democracies (Gurevitch and
Blumler 1990; Swanson 1992; Negrine and Papathanassopoulos 1996;
Swanson and Mancini 1996). The fundamental transformation of the
media systems of the Western world, which was caused by the changes
in information technology and communication infrastructure and by
the global media economy and diffusion of news, also belongs to the
driving forces behind comparative research. A clear sign of the global-
izationofmediaisthegrowthandconcentrationofinternationallyactive
media conglomerates. This development has had significant repercus-
sions for national media systems. In almost all European countries there
has been a reorientation of media policy with respect to deregulation

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