Advances in Comparative Political Communication Research through Contextualization and Cumulation of Evidence

Abstract

The recent demand to strongly contextualize findings of political communication research (Rojas & Valenzuela, 2019) should be welcomed. Such a call is pushing at an already open door, particularly with scholars engaged in comparative research. Comparative research is essentially about context; it is context-sensitive in the way that it aims to understand how the contextual environment shapes individual-level political communication phenomena (Blumler, McLeod & Rosengren, 1992). Not only are individual-level processes better understood through the consideration of contextual factors but the significance of macro-level characteristics only becomes visible when different national political communication arrangements are compared with each other.