Comparative Political Communication Research Articles

Transitions to nowhere: Western teleology and regime-type classification

Comparative Political Communication studies often take the same basic regime-type Stage of Democracy Development (SDD) classification as a basis for analysis. In this model, societies can fall into three basic categories: (1) established democracies; (2) transitional democracies; or (3) authoritarian regimes. This article presents a critique of the SDD model. First, it enshrines ethnocentric prejudices as a basis of global comparison in political communication research. It also lacks analytical consistency and scholars using these categories do not feel compelled to justify their choices. Not rarely, they outsource the task of classifying societies to non-scholarly institutions. This makes the model vulnerable to institutional political bias. Finally, the SDD model—which originated in the time of the US global hegemony—is becoming growingly obsolete, in a time when the global order evolves toward a more multipolar structure, and western democracies (the US, in particular) experience a major crisis.

Media-Politics Parallelism and Populism/Anti-populism Divides in Latin America: Evidence from Argentina

ABSTRACT Comparative political communication scholars repeatedly debated political parallelism as a tool to conceptualize the relation of media systems to political cleavages. Despite the fact that populism/anti-populism divides (re-)emerged as central political fault-lines, scholarship has paid little attention to the concept’s potential to look at how populist polarization restructures media-politics connections in Latin America and elsewhere. Through a combination of content analysis, in-depth interviews and other sources, this article traces shifts in news media alignments and journalistic practices during and following the recent experience of leftist-populist rule in Argentina. It argues that news media shifted to a distinct form of political parallelism organized around the populism/anti-populism divide in which most private mainstream news media assumed an active political role in the mobilization of anti-populism. The article provides a broader understanding of political parallelism that applies to settings of competitive-electoral populist politics and sheds light on not only news media alignments, but also media involvement in the political task of cleavage construction. Scholarly research on Latin America, given its focus on instrumental media-politics connections or its concerns over populist threats to media freedom, generally misses both the politicizing role of anti-populist media and the ways in which they mirror populist style.

Theory, Methodology, and Background Information to the Four-Case Studies

This article presents a common introduction to the four case studies published in this volume. It explains some broader aspects of the methodology used in the four-country case studies and the underlying theory. It is based on the belief that research should be contextualised and founded on in-depth theoretical and empirical knowledge. This contribution explains the methodology used, the sample selection criteria, and the conceptualisation of the alternative media and justifies the focus of research and its importance, especially from a long-term perspective. Furthermore, the study puts the country case studies within a broader comparative international and political communication context, particularly social media. Moreover, there is an explanation of the importance and use of the “like” button on Facebook.

The Contexts of Political Participation: the Communication Mediation Model Under Varying Structural Conditions of the Public Sphere

The communication mediation model asserts that the effects of news use on political participation are mostly indirect, mediated through discussion. Recent research has shown that this mediation process is stronger in countries where freedom of the press and expression are also greater. Relying on data collected during election cycles in seventeen countries between 2013 and 2018, we examine how additional country-level factors, including political freedom and digital infrastructure, moderate the indirect relationship between news use and political participation via political talk. Results provide evidence that these factors condition both outcomes, but in different ways. For protest, two of three country-level indices moderate individual-level variation in the pathway between political talk and protest. For voting, two of three country-level indices moderate aggregate-level variation in the pathway between news use and political talk. Results are discussed in light of their implications for the communication mediation model and comparative political communication research.

The Mediatization of Human Rights Memory in Chile

Abstract The current pandemic-imposed reliance on media-centered forms of civic engagement underscores the need for empirical mediatization research on the relationship between media, partisan conflict, and political culture. Drawing from critical Latin American media scholarship, mediatization theory, and Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), this article proposes a framework for comparative political communication research that centers on media practices and sociocultural change. By analyzing how a 1988 political advertising campaign in dictatorial Chile instantiated a peculiar vision of democratic transition, this article provides an examination of the disjuncture between televised representations of cheerful political reconciliation and abominable human rights abuses as the initial stage in the mediatization of Chilean human rights memory (HRM).

Resilience to Online Disinformation: A Framework for Cross-National Comparative Research

Online disinformation is considered a major challenge for modern democracies. It is widely understood as misleading content produced to generate profits, pursue political goals, or maliciously deceive. Our starting point is the assumption that some countries are more resilient to online disinformation than others. To understand what conditions influence this resilience, we choose a comparative cross-national approach. In the first step, we develop a theoretical framework that presents these country conditions as theoretical dimensions. In the second step, we translate the dimensions into quantifiable indicators that allow us to measure their significance on a comparative cross-country basis. In the third part of the study, we empirically examine eighteen Western democracies. A cluster analysis yields three country groups: one group with high resilience to online disinformation (including the Northern European systems, for instance) and two country groups with low resilience (including the polarized Southern European countries and the United States). In the final part, we discuss the heuristic value of the framework for comparative political communication research in the age of information pollution.

Comparative political communication research in the digital epoch: A typology of national communication spaces

This study makes a systematic effort to connect digital communication research with comparative political analysis. It explores the concurrence of global influence and national resilience in digital spheres, integrating the homogenizing tendencies of networked connectedness and globalization with heterogeneous configurations of national political communication spaces, which are strongly influenced by enduring social contexts. Drawing on the process-oriented actor-connector-interlocutor model, this study uses three sets of indicators to classify national political communication spaces. It conceptualizes three distinctive types of political communication spaces – “symmetrical and fully-fledged,” “vigorous but censored,” and “infertile and unresponsive” – and identifies their characteristics, internal logics, and their linkages to other communication spaces. It offers a systematic and applicable framework that may be used in future studies on cross-national comparisons of political communication processes in digital spheres.

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

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.

The Practicalities of a Contextual Approach in Comparative Political Communication Research

As a scholar who conducts most of my political communication and public opinion research in a small city state of over seven million people, I have had more than my fair share of encounters with Ro...

Special Issue Editors’ Introduction: The New World of Comparative Political Communication*

Special Issue Editors’ Introduction: The New World of Comparative Political Communication*

Does the effectiveness of campaigns depend on voters’ predispositions? A comparative study of British and Taiwanese election campaigns

ABSTRACTUsing data from the 2010 British Election Study and the 2012 Taiwan Election and Democratization Study, this paper investigates the impact of political predispositions on the association between election campaigns and voting choice in Britain and Taiwan. Findings show that the political predispositions of partisanship (strength), political sophistication and election interest do play moderating roles in the association between campaigns and voting choice in Britain and Taiwan. Of these predispositions, the study finds no differences in the moderating roles of partisanship and political sophistication in Britain and Taiwan. However, election interest plays a moderating role differently in Britain and Taiwan. This paper argues that this finding may be attributed to differences in the political contexts of the two democracies. The findings of this study offer new insights into comparative political communication, indicating that the impact of election campaigns depends on individuals’ political predispositions.

Building Empirical Typologies with QCA

Typologies are omnipresent both in everyday life as well as in the sciences. Epistemologically, there are several systematic ways to build typologies, such as qualitative, theory-based descriptions on one end and quantitative, exploratory statistical means on the other end of the spectrum. Both have their specific advantages and disadvantages, which can be bridged by applying set-theoretic methods, such as Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). The contribution of this paper is substantial and methodological: First, we show how QCA can enhance our understanding of media systems by building a typology that draws on Hallin and Mancini’s framework. The main improvement of QCA is the ability to identify ideal types as well as border cases. In our analysis, we move beyond the widely discussed case of Great Britain and take a closer look at further border cases such as Austria, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and Portugal. Second, QCA has been scarcely applied to build typologies and if so, only in neighboring disciplines. Thus, we aim at familiarizing comparative political communication scholars with this method.

“They Say One Thing and Mean Another” How Differences in In-Group Understandings of Key Goals Shape Political Knowledge

Abstract Journalists and politicians play different roles in the functional structure of the Habermasian public sphere; as such, they might be expected to have different understandings of what knowledge production and transmission might mean. This difference of understanding is more than a conflict over definitions; it is an epistemic divergence à la Fuller (2002:220), where already defined groups hold divergent understandings of what constitutes understanding. While a substantial body of work has been based on the idea of epistemic communities in the context of science and expert organizations in general, little empirical research exists to demonstrate the validity and adaptability of the concept of epistemic communities in comparative political communication research. Here, we show the cross-national validity of the concept of epistemic communities in the context of professional groups of politicians and political journalists in Austria, Finland, France, Denmark, Germany, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.

Who Receives Media Attention in South Korea: Analysing Internal and External Pluralism in the News Coverage of Policy Debates

The mass media in democracies plays an important role in portraying key policy debates and viewpoints, ultimately shaping how citizens and political actors understand policy problems. How diverse are the policy perspectives represented in the news? Research in comparative political communication typically points to two ways through which pluralism is maintained in the news coverage of policy debates—internally and externally. Using 1,341 Dong-A and 1,205 Hankyoreh Daily front-page newspaper stories published in Korea in the year 2008, this article examines the circumstances under which internal and external pluralism in the news is limited in a democratic media system. Specifically, the article argues that a unique newsgathering process relying heavily on government sources for policy-relevant information, as well as relatively weak and unstable ties between news outlets and political/social organizations significantly restrict the diversity of voices appearing in the news in Korea. Such attention patterns offer a partial explanation for rapidly declining trust in print newspapers among the Korean public, and raise concerns about whose views are actually reflected in public policy debates in the news.

Is Albania Ready for a New Media Model?

Albania inherited a media system with only a handful of state-owned media outlets controlled austerely by the communist party-state. Actually the political system and the society as a whole, and particularly, the media landscape have changed dramatically. Despite the variety of choices the numerous media outlets might seem to offer to a wider public audience, a series of factors, - including the lack of proper journalistic education, political polarization, and still a weak economy and relatively small media market - have hampered the development of a professional media system in Albania, which fails to measure up to any of the key dimensions of well-established western media models. Our analysis is largely based on the most important dimensions that might characterize (and influence) Albanian media systems, more specifically, the Albanian media system, in light of Hallin and Mancini’s (2004) work on comparative political communication. In view of their four key dimensions on media models analysis, Albanian press system clearly lags behind the indicators of most of the countries reviewed, especially in terms of its very low press circulation and readership figures, the severe financial burdens it is faced with; Albania press system clearly lags behind the indicators of most of the countries reviewed, especially in terms of its very low press circulation and readership figures, as well as the severe financial burdens it is faced with; Albanian news media fail in meeting adequate journalistic education and proper training standards; Albania is apparently needing to adopt a new model that could curb the Government’s and state’s potential intervention and attempts to control information. We would argue that Albania is closer to the model named ‘the Mediterranean,’ or ‘the Polarized Pluralistic Model,’ which relates to media systems in Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal and France and we believe that it would be very interesting to explore whether adopting such a model would be a better solution for Albania’s media system. DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2013.v2n2p485

Dimensions of Political News Cultures: Sound Bite and Image Bite News in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States

This study offers the first systematic analysis of sound bites and image bites across countries and across time. It goes beyond traditional sound bite research by extending the scope of analysis also to visuals and by analyzing both sound and image bites not only with regard to their length but also with regard to their content and editorial packaging. Based on these findings, contours of three different political news cultures emerge: a strongly interventionist U.S. American approach, a moderately interventionist Anglo-German approach, and a noninterventionist French approach. Adopting an explicitly cross-national comparative perspective, the study introduces a theoretical model that explains sound bite news in divergent media systems and links it to the concept of media culture. It derives seven hypotheses from the model and tests them on three levels of analysis—organizational, national, and transnational. Despite a growing transnational convergence, multivariate data analysis shows evidence of the enduring importance that national parameters continue to exert. Conclusions for comparative political communication research are drawn.