Page 205 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

184 Critical investigations in political economy

to supranational governance. Nation-states remain lead players in the design and
implementation of media policy and in the application of structural, behavioural
and content rules, technical standards and interoperability, production incentives
and subsidies, tax and financial rules (Straubhaar 2002: 187; Goldsmith and Wu
2006). Yet supranational governance increasingly shapes all these policy areas.
EU states are subject to European Union Directives across television, telecoms
and computing, rules on competition and restrictions on ‘state aid’ and subsidies
for enterprises including public service media. States are differentially involved
in and affected by supranational bodies from issue to issue, but they are
increasingly constrained by supranational agreements on market openness,
competition and trade. Yet states can be key agents here, depending on the flows
of influence, not merely acted upon ‘from above’. Individual states may succeed
in influencing ‘supranational’ regulation. States may also manage domestic
opposition by presenting supranational decisions that they have actively pursued
as being imposed upon them, as Thatcher (2000) examines in the case of European
telecommunications regulation.
Policy convergence is a predicted consequence of convergence in media systems
as the forces of the global market ‘tend to displace the national political forces that
once shaped the media’ (Hallin and Mancini 2004: 276). Shared processes of
internationalisation, digitalisation, convergence and market expansion influence
the adoption of similar policy solutions. Supranational governance also imposes
greater uniformity. Powerful lobbying by transnational corporations and industry
bodies shapes policy convergence. Civil society coalitions and networks have
some influence too, for instance at the World Summit on the Information
Society (Chakravartty and Sarikakis 2006), but represent a considerably weaker
force and one that has very often been eclipsed as policy-making shifted from
societal to pro-market values. Societal regulation at international level has been
limited (Ó Siochrú et al. 2002).

Analysing policy
Amongst the many approaches to explaining policy and regulation are those that
can be identified as institutional, socio-economic, ideational and public choice (also
referred to as rational choice) (John 2003; Baldwin and Cave 1999). CPE analysis
has had an affinity with Marxist socio-economic accounts, yet, as in other areas, is
characterised by a more complex interaction with other theories. This involves a shift
from determinism and functionalism to radical pluralist analysis. It acknowledges
that neither the state nor policy process is monolithic but involves a diverse range of
policy agents and interests. It is radical in its focus on power relations and asym-
metries within the policy process and their connection to societal orderings of political
and economic power. However, in doing so it draws upon mainstream policy analysis
and other approaches such as new institutionalism, pursuing various efforts at
synthesis. There is no space to do justice to all these alternative perspectives but the
following summary seeks to trace their influence on CPE approaches.