Page 50 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini

of the social cleavages and their institutional expressions. This was one
reason political and media systems differed across the continent. At the
same time, most were characterized in one way or another by a rooting
of the party and media systems in organized social groups, and this set
them apart from the more individualistic, market-oriented American
political and media system.
The “secularization” of European society has been accompanied by a
transformation of political life, which has been extensively documented
by political scientists. This transformation involves the decline of the
mass party, ideologically identified and rooted in distinct social groups,
and its replacement by the “catch-all” or “electoral-professional party,”
oriented not primarily toward the representation of a group or ideol-
ogy but toward the conquest of electoral market share. This is some-
times interpreted as a “decline of party,” though some analysts dispute
this interpretation, arguing that professional electoral parties are actu-
ally more effective than earlier mass parties at conquering and wield-
ing political power. It does seem to be correct, however, that the stable
psychological and sociological bonds that once existed between parties
and citizens have been weakened in this transformation. Party mem-
bership has declined (as have church and trade union membership). So
has party loyalty, measured either by identification with political par-
ties or by partisan consistency in electoral behavior, at least in many
cases (in the U.S. case, actually, partisan consistency in voting and polit-
ical attitudes declined from the 1950s to 1970s, and then subsequently
strengthened [Jacobson 2001]). Voting turnout has declined in many
countries. “When partisanship was closely tied to class and religion, the
conjoint of social and political identifications provided a very strong
incentive for party identifiers to turn out. These linkages, however, have
withered in recent years ...” (Dalton and Wattenberg 2000, 66). The
grassroots political organizations that once tied parties to citizens have
atrophied, while professional staffs concerned with media and market-
ing have grown. Individual leaders have become increasingly important
to the appeal of parties, while ideology and group loyalties have be-
come less so. The shift in Italy from the mass politics of the Commu-
nist and Christian Democratic parties to Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia,
a party created essentially as a vehicle for marketing a single political
leader, is a particularly striking symbol of this change, but a similar
trend toward “presidentialization” can be seen, in differing degrees, in
other cases as well – with Blair in Britain, for example, or Schr¨ oder in
Germany.

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