Here we would like point to one broad distinction between those countries where liberal, bourgeois institutions triumphed relatively early over the feudalism and patrimonialism, and those where the conflict between the forces of liberalism and traditional conservatism remained unresolved until well into the twentieth century.

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Type concepts and typologies in social theory identify patterns in social interaction and facilitate theorizing about why particular patterns occur and what their consequences are. They are ideal types, and the media systems of individual countries fit them only roughly. To give that collective judgment coherence and to protect it from influences that would divert it in their favour, there is the editor and his authority. Political parallelism is also often manifested in the partisanship of media audiences, with supporters of different parties or tendencies buying different newspapers or watching different TV channels. Hallin, D.

This paper comments on the critical reception of Hallin and Mancini's Comparing Media Systems. It focuses on three issues: (1) Classification of media systems, including both the way specific systems are classified in Hallin and Mancini's analysis, and the broader issue of the use of media system .

• Any significant multiplication of cases would probably have made such a two-dimensional representation impossible!
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Summary Essay of “Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of ...

05/10/2017 · Summary Essay of “Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics” Part I by Daniel C. Hallin & Paolo Mancini Sandy Rouhui Sun Oct 5, 2017 · 5 min readEstimated Reading Time: 9 mins

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Hallin Mancini Comparing Media Systems (1) Pradeep Tarafdar. Download PDF. Download Full PDF Package. This paper. A short summary of this paper. 37 Full PDFs related to this paper. Read Paper. Hallin Mancini Comparing Media Systems (1)

Hallin Mancini Comparing Media Systems (1) Pradeep Tarafdar. Download PDF. Download Full PDF This paper. A short summary of this paper. 37 Full PDFs to this paper. Read Paper. Hallin Mancini Comparing Media Systems (1).

The professionalization refers to the continuum of independent to instrumentalized journalism:. This dimension stresses the power the political system has in shaping the structure and functioning of a media system.

Ultimately, the interrelations of these four dimensions are complex. They have to be assessed empirically for every new case under study. In a next step, Hallin and Mancini identified five core dimensions to assess the political contexts of media systems. They took relevant concepts from the literatures on comparative politics and political sociology to gain a better understanding of the political influences on the development of media systems. The resulting dimensions are presented as dichotomies , but they are just poles on a continuum.

The first dimension is the role of the state. The main difference between these two categories is the interventional activity of the state e. This difference takes shape in the relative importance of private business or social institutions within the political system in question. A further important dichotomic dimension is labeled consensus vs.

By contrast, the consensus politics model encompasses a multi-party system which is based on the power sharing principle according to the proportional representation so that compromise and cooperation between the opposing forces are central. Additionally, there is a separation of power between legislative and executive.

The third dimension is the distinction between individual and organized pluralism [27] resp. Hallin and Mancini identify the distinction between rational-legal authority and clientelism [30] as another crucial dimension.

Following Max Weber , Hallin and Mancini use the term rational-legal authority in its meaning as a form of governance whose main influence is maintained through formal and universalistic rules of procedure, i. This apparatus is the main institution of an efficient rational-legal system. In contrast, the orientation on common interests is much weaker within clientelism systems because individual interests and private relationships are the main forces maintaining the social organization.

The final dimension is conceptualized by the distinction between moderate and polarized pluralism. An important indicator is the existence of anti-system parties and factions. Compared to this, moderate pluralism is mainly characterized by stronger tendencies toward the center, lower ideological differences between the political parties , greater acceptance of the political system , and better chances to gain consensus during political controversies.

Hallin and Mancini could identify specific patterns by geographical regions which were crucial for labeling the individual models:. Hallin and Mancini point to restrictions [42] of their three models which have to be considered in order not to overvalue the validity and significance of them. First of all, they focus on nation states and this level of analysis allows a specific perspective on media-politics relations but misses other phenomena of importance e.

Another concern is that the cases summarized within the single models vary enormously especially within the Liberal model. Consequently, the models show a wide range of cases which might blur their distinction. Because of the differences within the countries and the interferences between them, it is difficult to treat the 18 countries analyzed, as single cases because they depend on each other and influence each other.

A final point is the dynamic of media systems because they cannot be assumed as static entities. Hence, media systems will always progress and there will always be changes resulting from those developing processes, so that reconsidering the characteristics of the mentioned models becomes necessary over time. Consequently, Hallin and Mancini point out in subsequent discussions that their models are not intended to be universal typologies which can be applied to other cases mechanically.

At the end of their book, [46] Hallin and Mancini discuss the convergence- or homogenization-thesis. The basis for their argument is their observation of several transformation processes that take place especially in Europe. European media laws , the decline of traditional political mass parties , the American influence on the professionalization of journalism , and finally the commercialization of the media markets in Europe.

These are the main reasons why Hallin and Mancini conclude, that the European countries might be pushed toward the Liberal model. They even go one step further and hypothesize that the core forces of that homogenization- or convergence-process might be valid for other parts of the world. However, they point out that there might be limitations to this process as well because the elements of the process are anchored in the structural differences between the political systems around the world.

For example, Dobek-Ostrowska and colleagues published the edited volume Comparative Media Systems. As Hallin and Mancini did, Hardy focuses on media systems within Western democracies actually 18 countries and he adjoins their convergence thesis while he concentrates on print and broadcasting especially TV.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics Author Daniel C. Hallin, Paolo Mancini Country United States Language English Subject politics , comparative analysis, media systems Publisher Cambridge University Press Publication date. Dewey Decimal. Hardy , p. Hardy, , p.

Patterson , p. Jackubowicz , p. Picard and alternative schemas as well, which moved further away from the original typologies e. Herbert Altschull Jakubowicz , p. Sparks , p. They trace to then existing concepts e. Table 4. This is also much less common today. Political parallelism is also often manifested in the partisanship of media audiences, with supporters of different parties or tendencies buying different newspapers or watching different TV channels.

Finally, it is manifested in journalistic role orientations and practices. These differences are connected with differences in emphasis on commentary or analysis versus news gathering.

These differences are also manifested in the organization of journalistic labor, with journalists in some systems moving fairly freely between the roles of reporter and commentator — if indeed the distinction has meaning to them at all — while in others those roles tend to be segregated. We will argue that the strength of advocacy traditions in journalism is connected with the history of institutional ties between the media and the system of parties and organized social groups, and we will treat these characteristics of journalistic culture also as indicators of political parallelism.

In systems where political parallelism is strong, the culture and discursive style of journalism is closely related to that of politics.

Closely related to the concept of political parallelism is the distinction between two manners in which media systems handle diversity of political loyalties and orientations, which are referred to in the literature as internal and external pluralism. External pluralism can be defined as pluralism achieved at the level of the media system as a whole, through the existence of a range of media outlets or organizations reflecting the points of view of different groups or tendencies in society.

Systems characterized by external pluralism will obviously be considered to have a high level of political parallelism. The contrary term, internal pluralism, is defined as pluralism achieved within each individual media outlet or organization. The term is actually used in two different ways in the media studies literature. Internal pluralism is also sometimes used to refer to media organizations — usually broadcasting organizations — that formally represent a variety of political forces within the structure and content of a single organization Hoffmann-Riem These relationships vary significantly in form, however, and could also be said to reflect different degrees and forms of political parallelism.

Four basic models can be distinguished for the governance of public broadcasting c. In the latter case, directors of public broadcasting are appointed by Parliament, not directly by the government, but this in the end gives the majority party effective control. As we shall see, this model is also characteristic of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation CBC , Irish public broadcasting, some Scandinavian countries, and public broadcasting in the United States.

Lower-level appointments within RAI also largely followed the principle of proportional representation. The parliamentary model is only really distinct from the government model in systems where coalition government and power sharing are typical — a distinction that will be explained further in the following text. This model can also be seen 2 In fact, as we shall see, the government parties in Italy had the predominant position; in this sense Italy, like other Southern European countries, shaded toward the government model.

Kelly proposes a three-way distinction, to which we will also refer. Kelly distinguishes among what she calls politics-over-broadcasting systems, formally autonomous systems, and politics-in-broadcasting systems.

What we have called the professional model is obviously a formally autonomous system; the government model is a politicsover-broadcasting system; and the parliamentary and civic models are typically politics-in-broadcasting systems, though some powersharing systems are further along the spectrum toward politics-overbroadcasting systems, where the parties are particularly insistent on maintaining control.

The distinctions introduced by Kelly underline an important difference of philosophy. The professional model solves the problem by attempting to insulate broadcasting from political interests in order to keep the parties and other organized interests out of the process of producing television and radio. In terms of political parallelism, the professional model is obviously toward the low end of the spectrum, the government model toward the high end, and the other two models — the politics-inbroadcasting systems — are in between.

Many systems, for example, combine proportional representation in appointments to the board of directors of public broadcasting with a culture and often legal norms that grant substantial autonomy to broadcasting professionals. All modern broadcasting systems require professionals to run them and no system can work adequately if these professionals do not enjoy some degree of independence.

The particular ways in which these models are combined, however, do differ significantly between systems. It should also be noted that distinguishing among these models requires looking beyond formal structures to the norms and practices that govern their actual operation as institutions. The BBC is a good example of this. The director general of the BBC is appointed by the prime minister. In its formal structure the BBC is not distinguishable from state-controlled broadcasting.

Its distinctiveness, as we shall see, is rooted in the informal norms expectations that govern the selection of the director general, his or her relation to the government and opposition, and the role of journalists and other broadcasting professionals within the organization. As noted, similar differences can be found in the governance of the regulatory authorities that oversee privately owned broadcasting. Their boundaries are ambiguous and their core definitions have been subject to repeated reinterpretation.

Journalism departs substantially from that ideal type. Journalism has no such systematic body of knowledge or doctrine. But it is clearly not essential to the practice of journalism, and there is not a strong correlation between professionalism as we define it here and formal training. By other criteria, however — as we shall see subsequently — Italian journalism has a particularly low level of professionalization. The focus of this section is specifically on journalistic professionalism.

However, it should be noted that similar questions can be raised about other kinds of media professionals. In public broadcasting systems, particularly, where all broadcast programming has been seen in some sense as a public service, it is quite relevant to raise similar issues about the degree of professional autonomy of television producers.

As much as it departs from the ideal type of the liberal professions, journalism has come to share important characteristics with them, and it can be very useful to compare media systems in terms of the degree and form of professionalization of journalism. We will focus primarily on three fairly closely related dimensions of professionalization. Autonomy has always been a central part of the definition of professionalism.

The classic case is medicine: even if bureaucratization has limited the autonomy doctors enjoyed in the era when virtually all at least in the classic U. Journalism has never achieved a comparable degree of autonomy. Journalists lack esoteric knowledge, though their strategic position in the flow of information sometimes provides a partial substitute. Nevertheless, they have often been successful in achieving significant relative autonomy within those organizations.

Or to put it in another way, control of the work process in journalism is to a significant extent collegial, in the sense that authority over journalists is exercised primarily by fellow journalists.

It should be noted that the autonomy we are talking about here is not necessarily the autonomy of individual journalists, but of the corps of journalists taken as a whole. The degree of journalistic autonomy varies considerably over time, across media systems, and often within media systems, from one type of news organization to another e.

Obviously the existence of distinct professional norms is related to autonomy, in the sense that such norms could not govern the practice of journalism if that practice were controlled by outside actors. We shall see that there are important variations in the degree to which distinctively journalistic norms have evolved, the degree of consensus they enjoy among those who practice journalism, and their relative influence on news-making practices. This has been a particularly controversial point in the sociology of the professions.

We will often draw a contrast in the pages that follow between professionalization and instrumentalization of the media. What we mean by instrumentalization is control of the media by outside actors — parties, politicians, social groups or movements, or economic actors seeking political influence — who use them to intervene in the world of politics.

We shall also see that privately owned papers have been established primarily or partly to serve as vehicles for political intervention. As we shall see there is considerable debate about the relation between commercialization of the media and professionalization. Some see them as essentially in harmony, arguing that commercialization undercuts political instrumentalization.

We will generally take the view that professionalization can be threatened either by political instrumentalization or by commercialization, and indeed in many cases by both at once. One question that might be raised here is why we have treated the degree of professionalization and political parallelism as separate dimensions. In this view, a system in which media have ties to organized social and political groups, and in which journalists retain elements of a publicist conception of their role, is by definition a system in which professionalization is weakly developed.

If journalists are to serve the public rather than particular interests, if they are to act according to specifically journalistic standards of practice rather than following agendas imposed from outside, they must act as neutral information providers and avoid identification with particular points of view, according to this interpretation.

Clearly the two dimensions of political parallelism and professionalization are in fact related. Where political parallelism is very high, with media organizations strongly tied to political organizations, and journalists deeply involved in party politics, professionalization is indeed likely to be low: journalists are likely to lack autonomy, except to the extent that they enjoy it due to high political positions, and journalism is likely to lack a distinct common culture and distinct sense of social purpose, apart from the purposes of the political actors with which media are affiliated.

Or to put it the other way around, it is clear that historically the development of journalistic professionalization eroded political parallelism in important ways, diminishing the control of parties and other political organizations over the media, and creating common practices that blurred the political distinctions among media organizations. Nevertheless, we believe that the empirical relationship between these two dimensions is only rough, and that there is no convincing justification for treating them as conceptually synonymous.

We will consider two examples drawn from outside the region that is the primary focus of this book. Curry argues that despite an official ideology that conceived the media as instruments of the party, Polish journalists developed a strong professional culture.

This was in some sense, of course, a failed professionalism: external conditions — the prevalence of censorship, state ownership of the media and political repression — meant that journalists were routinely thwarted in attempting to act according to a professional conception of their role. They placed a high value on autonomy, had a strong sense of professional solidarity that persisted even in periods of sharp political conflict, and a hierarchy of prestige based on peer judgments that cut across political differences.

They conceived it as part of their role to shape policy and solve social problems. They considered the mere reporting of facts not to be real professional work, and practiced a style of writing that placed heavy emphasis on commentary. This conception of journalism seems to have carried over to the independent media of the post-Communist period. In , the Canadian publisher Hollinger, Inc.

The Jerusalem Post had for many years been owned by economic institutions connected with the Labor party — a common pattern in Europe as well; Conrad Black, then the owner of Hollinger, is politically conservative. The object of that judgment is the historical present, the fast flood of daily events. Journalism plucks from this infinite flow those events deemed worthy of public regard, reporting them as honest witness. That it calls news.

It assigns such news events weights of importance and interest. In that sense, journalism is guardian of a public trust. In a newspaper this process of judgment is a collective effort. It has checks and balances. But judgment it remains. For that reason all newspapers have a character of their own, telling the story of the present as they perceive it. To give that collective judgment coherence and to protect it from influences that would divert it in their favour, there is the editor and his authority.

In the end, it is his voice, his judgment over what is fit to print, that would save this collective process from chaos or corruption. So long as his judgment of what is fit to print is not subject to fear or favour. The judge expressed the view — common as we will see in many countries in Northern and Central Europe where it is sometimes referred to as internal press freedom — that press freedom requires that editors and reporters have freedom of expression and limits the right of media owners to interfere with their work.

But it does describe a commitment. A commitment to its own integrity. THE ROLE OF THE STATE The state plays a significant role in shaping the media system in any society. But there are considerable differences in the extent of state intervention as well as in the forms it takes. Funding levels are also much higher in Europe than in the United States.

The purity of public broadcasting systems, in the sense of their dependence on commercial revenue, on the other hand, varies considerably within Europe. However, in many countries the state has also owned news agencies, newspapers, or other media-related enterprises, either directly or through state-owned enterprises.

These can be direct or indirect e. Subsidies for the film industry are also very common. He also attempts a ranking of countries in terms of such intervention, but not very successfully, as his ranking only takes into account the presence or absence of a particular kind of state support, not its magnitude or the policy governing its allocation which may or may not, for instance, allow authorities discretion to reward or punish particular papers for their political support or opposition.

In the broadest terms, a distinction can be made between relatively liberal media systems, in which state intervention is limited and the media are left primarily to market forces, and systems in which social democratic or dirigiste traditions are manifested in a larger state role in the ownership, funding, and regulation of media. There are also subtler variations in the particular mixes of media policy that have evolved in different systems, usually closely connected with broader patterns in the relation of state and society that we will introduce in the following chapter.

Systems also vary in the effectiveness of media regulation: a weaker state role can result either from a deliberate policy favoring market forces or from failure of the political system to establish and enforce media policy.

Each of these dimensions probably also has other correlates e. We also conceive of the four dimensions as ultimately irreducible to one another. We have argued this explicitly in the case of journalistic professionalism and political paralellism — that the two influence one another in important ways, but also vary independently.

We suspect that the same is probably true of any pair of dimensions. The following chapter identifies the principal dimension of the political system that we consider essential for comparative analysis of media and politics, and outlines a number of hypotheses about the relations between these variables and the media-system dimensions introduced here.

In this section we will discuss some of the principal characteristics of political systems that can influence the structure of media institutions. We have taken from the literatures on comparative politics and political sociology a number of concepts that we believe are useful for understanding the evolution of media systems. We summarize these concepts relatively briefly here — and apologize to specialists in these fields for what may seem like an overly elementary discussion, and at the same time to media scholars unfamiliar with them for what may seem like an overly quick one.

We hope that for both groups, the discussion will deepen and the meaning of the concepts will become clearer as we go on to apply them to the analysis of concrete cases.

In the final section of this chapter we introduce an argument that common historical roots shape the development of both media and political systems, and are crucial to understanding the relation between the two. All the arguments introduced here are developed at greater length as we analyze the evolution of particular systems. This issue we will take up in detail in Chapter 8. It is important to keep in mind, however, that the relationships are only rough, and we are not proposing any kind of one-to-one correspondence between political and media-system characteristics.

This is true both because of the complexity of real political systems and because political variables interact with a number of other influences on media systems. The media are in a very important sense a political institution, but they are also increasingly often businesses and are shaped by many economic factors.

Relatively little work has been done to develop conceptual frameworks for understanding these factors in comparative perspective, 1 Media are also cultural institutions. Because our focus in this book is primarily on the news media and the relation of media to the political system, it is political culture, specifically, something that is intimately connected with the kinds of structural factors considered in this chapter, that is relevant to our analysis. But it is worth giving just a couple of examples of the kinds of factors that may be relevant.

One extremely important factor is clearly the development of the advertising industry, which in turn is linked to historical patterns in the sociology of consumption and of business. Pilati 47 , for example, makes these observations about the differences between the United States, where the use of media for marketing developed early and strongly, and Europe: In Europe markets have national [as opposed to continental] dimensions which are therefore much smaller than those in America: this means a greater cultural homogeneity and therefore weaker motivations to standardize collective customs through communication; at the same time, in many cases, it confines firms to modest dimensions which result in much lower advertising revenues than those associated with larger-scale business organization.

Also local producers, who exploit commercial factors capillary networks of distribution, price and are favored by the lesser coverage of large-scale distribution networks, maintain consistent operating potential. Even the prevalence of public broadcasting in Western Europe may in part be attributed to this fact. Another factor that we suspect is relevant is the degree of concentration of capital, both in the media industry specifically and in the economy generally.

It seems likely that where capital is highly concentrated there will be a relatively high degree of interrelationship between the state and media owners, either through subsidy and regulation or in the form of clientelist ties and partisan alliances, and also — other factors being equal — a tendency for media to be influenced by outside business interests.

In the balance of the chapter we will focus specifically on the political context of media systems. The difference is obviously not absolute, as the state plays a significant but also limited role in all capitalist democracies. Nor is it a dichotomy: there are many shades of difference within Europe, with Switzerland, for example, considerably in the direction of the liberal pattern, compared with Sweden, Norway, or neighboring Austria.

But there is clearly an important distinction between the relatively restricted role of the state in the U. Just as the state in Europe takes responsibility for funding health care; higher education; cultural institutions such as symphony orchestras and operas; and often political parties and churches, so it takes responsibility for funding television and to a significant degree the press.

Just as the state in Europe is expected to play an active role in mediating disputes between capital and labor or in maintaining the health of national industries, it is expected to intervene in media markets to accomplish a variety of collective goals from political pluralism and improving the quality of democratic life Dahl and Lindblom ; Gustafsson to racial harmony and the maintenance of national language and culture.

The difference between the United States and Europe in the degree of state intervention may in fact be sharper in the case of the media than in other areas of social life, as the American legal tradition gives press freedom — understood in terms of the freedom of private actors from state intervention — unusual primacy over other social values. In the United States such regulations are held by the courts to violate the First Amendment.

The European tradition of an active state has complex historical roots. The British Official Secrets Act and interventions by various Spanish governments to influence media ownership might be taken as examples of the former, and the Swedish press ombudsman or German rules on representation of social groups on broadcasting councils as examples of the latter. Though many institutional structures and practices — French laws regulating foreign-language content might be an example — combine both elements.

Beyond the distinction between welfare state and liberal democracy, many other distinctions can be made in the role of the state in society. Katzenstein for example, makes a three-way distinction among liberalism in the United States and Britain, statism in Japan and France, and corporatism in the small European states and to a lesser extent in Germany. We will come back to this distinction in discussing the Democratic Corporatist Model. It should also be noted that three of the countries in our study, Greece, Spain and Portugal, shifted from authoritarian to democratic systems relatively recently.

This history, combined with the tradition of clientelism discussed in the following text, makes these Southern European countries historically distinctive in important ways. CONSENSUS VS. Majoritarian Politics Majoritarian Politics Consensus Politics 1. Winning party concentrates power 2. Cabinet dominance Power sharing Separation of power between legislative and executive Multiparty system Proportional representation Compromise and cooperation between opposing forces 3.

Two-party system 4. Plurality voting system 5. Clear distinction between government and opposition Majoritarianism, as we will try to show in Chapter 7 when we discuss the Liberal systems where this pattern prevails, tends to be associated with the notion of the journalist as a neutral servant of the public as a whole, rather than as a spokesperson of a particular political tendency or social group, and with internal rather than external pluralism, though as we shall see the British press deviates significantly from this pattern.

Where catch-all parties predominate, it makes sense that catch-all media should also develop. There is a particularly clear and direct connection between patterns of consensus or majoritarian rule and systems of broadcast governance and regulation that tend to follow patterns similar to those that prevail in other spheres of public policy.

As Humphreys also notes, however, the quintessential majoritarian system, the British Westminster system, is characterized not by capture of public broadcasting by the majority but by separation of broadcasting from political control, a deviation from the expected pattern that he attributes to the relatively strong liberal tradition of limited government in Britain. In fact it seems likely that the professional model of broadcast government is quite commonly associated with majoritarianism.

In a pluralist political system direct control of broadcasting by the political majority is difficult to sustain. One alternative is power sharing, but this conflicts with the basic political structure and culture of majoritarian systems; the logical solution in such systems would seem to be the professional model. Canada and Ireland fit this pattern. Sweden might also be cited as an example.

The Catholic and Communist subcultures in Italy similarly developed dense webs of organizational structures, on which individuals depended, to a large extent, for everything from leisure activities and cultural life to jobs and government services. The formal integration of social groups into the political process is what is known as corporatism. We will argue in Chapter 6 that the concept of democratic corporatism is extremely useful for understanding the media systems of Northern and West-Central Europe.

But they played a central role in the development of both political and media systems in much of Europe, and significant differences do persist in the extent to which they continue to affect political life. It is worth adding here that systems also differ in the extent to which political parties play a dominant role relative to other kinds of organized social groups.

A strong role of political parties tends to be characteristic of systems that tend to polarized pluralism — a concept that will be explained in the following text. These systems usually have a history of weaker development of civil society and parties have tended to fill the organizational void. Where organized pluralism was strongly developed, the media were always integrated to a significant extent into the institutions of group representation.

The Dutch pillars, for example, had their own newspapers, and Dutch broadcasting was similarly organized into a pillarized system of broadcasting organizations representing the different subcultures. Scandinavian countries expressly included them De Bens and Petersen It should be noted, finally, that in societies that typically have strong, centralized organizations representing social groups, journalists will also have such organization.

As we shall see, the democratic corporatist societies of Northern Europe are characterized by a particularly strong formal organization of the profession of journalism. The characteristic institution of a rational-legal system, for Weber, was bureaucracy — that is, an administrative apparatus that is autonomous of particular parties, individuals, and social groups, acts according to established procedures and is conceived as serving society as a whole.

Historically, according to Shefter , bureaucratic autonomy originated in the United States and Europe in one of two ways. One important recent statement, on which we have drawn here is Evans In addition to bureaucracy, the other principal institution of a rational-legal order is an autonomous judicial system.

Where rational-legal authority is strongly developed, these institutions, similar to other public agencies, are likely to be relatively autonomous from control by government, parties, and particular politicians, and to be governed by clear rules and procedures. This does not necessarily mean broadcasting governance will follow the formally autonomous, professional model. As we shall see, many of the democratic corporatist countries of Northern and Central Europe have strong rational-legal authority, but follow broadcasting-in-politics models of media regulation.

Bureaucracies of course are not intended to be entirely autonomous, but to be responsive to elected political leadership; the negative connotations of the term bureaucracy have their origins in complaints about administrative apparatuses losing accountability.

All bureaucracies therefore have some degree of political control and penetration, particularly at the top levels Suleiman In countries where rationallegal authority is less strongly developed — principally, as we shall see, in Southern Europe — party control and penetration of public broadcasting and regulatory institutions tends to be stronger and deeper.

Systems of rational-legal authority, for one thing, require formal codification of procedures and information, and their public accessibility, and thus provide relatively fertile ground for the development of journalism. Instrumentalization of the media, as defined in the previous chapter, is less likely in systems with strong rational-legal authority: media owners are less likely to have strong and stable alliances with particular political parties, and less likely to use their media properties as instruments to intervene in political affairs.

The independence of administrative and judicial institutions and the rule-governed character of public policy means that in systems where rational-legal authority is strong businesses do not depend too heavily on arbitrary decisions of particular officials, who may, for example, favor an enterprise with which they are allied politically, nor are their fates affected too dramatically by which party happens to be in power at the moment.

This does not mean that business will lack influence on public policy in a system with strong rational-legal authority, nor that their interests will be disfavored: on the contrary, a system of rational-legal authority will often institutionalize this influence, though depending on the balance of political forces in society it may also provide other interests with access to the policy process.

But it does mean that business owners will have less need for particularistic political alliances, and this implies that media owners will find it easier to keep their distance from party politics. Journalistic professionalism began to develop in Europe and North America in the second half of the nineteenth century, as there was a general shift toward professionalism as a model of social organization in many areas of social life, including public administration.

Journalistic and administrative professionalism involve similar world views, including the notion of an autonomous institution serving the common good, and an emphasis on rational and fact-centered discourses.

The same can clearly be said of the new forms of information-oriented journalism. In many cases journalists, who also tended to come from the progressive middle class, were deeply involved in the reform movements that established modern administrative systems. A contrasting form of organization is political clientelism, which remained strong in Southern Europe through much of the twentieth century, and whose legacy, we will argue, is still important to understanding media systems in that region.

It is a particularistic form of social organization, in which formal rules are less important relative to personal connections or, in later forms of clientelism, connections mediated through political parties, the Church, and other organizations. All societies saw the development of clientelism at some point in their history, and clientelist relationships continue to exist to some degree everywhere Legg These relationships, however, were the target of the reform movements that sought to strengthen rational-legal authority, and where those movements were successful clientelism receded in importance.

Clientelism tends to be associated with instrumentalization of both public and private media. Private business owners also will typically have political connections, which are essential to obtaining government contracts and concessions including broadcast licenses and in many other ways necessary for the successful operation of a business. These owners will often use their media properties as a vehicle for negotiation with other elites and for intervention in the political world; indeed in many cases this will be the primary purpose of media ownership.

For these reasons political parallelism tends to be high where the tradition of clientelism is strong. It also contributes to instrumentalization. The fact that laws are often honored in the breach offers many opportunities and incentives for particularistic pressures. Politicians can pressure media owners by selectively enforcing broadcasting, tax, and other laws.

Media owners, and in some cases perhaps prominent journalists as well, can exert pressures of their own by threatening selectively to expose wrongdoing by public officials. Clientelism is also associated with lower levels of professionalization of journalism.

Journalists tend to be integrated into clientelist networks, and their ties to parties, owners, or other patrons weaken professional solidarity. There is also an important distinction to be made between dependent and powerful media. Media organizations that have few readers and little advertising base, and that survive by selling publicity to politicians or other actors are a common phenomenon in Latin America, as in much of the world, and clearly fit the concept of capture.

Latin American media systems are also characterized, however, by powerful, often transnational media conglomerates, centered around lucrative television markets, which often have the power to intervene in politics, influencing both elections and policy-making. Latin America is extremely diverse, and probably, as with Western Europe, a full analysis of its media systems would require identifying a number of distinct patterns.

Chile and Uruguay, for example, have highly concentrated private media ownership, as in other Latin American countries.

This pattern involves capture or efforts at capture, but also contestation and, often, popular mobilization. In other Latin American countries—Mexico and Honduras, for example—violence against journalists is a central force shaping the media systems. This represents a different mechanism of control from those involved in capture: if the actors involved had captured media, they would not need to exercise violence.

Theorizing about variations among African media systems has been limited, though Nisbet and Moeller 1 proposed a typology distinguishing among open democratic, liberalized democratic, liberalized autocratic, closed autocratic and repressive autocratic systems.

She distinguishes among military dictatorship, communist one-party rule, one-party rule in the context of statism, and personalized one-party rule in the context of weak state institutions, and argues that each tends to be associated with patterns in the role of media that shape subsequent development in a transition to democracy or to some intermediate political form.

Military dictatorships, for example, because ideology and political mobilization are typically not central to their rule, often encourage the development of commercialized, apolitical media; in personalized rule in the context of weak state institutions, media often have limited reach beyond urban areas and elites. Sometimes types are used as an independent variable in a causal analysis; that is, it is hypothesized that some variable of interest will be affected by which type a particular media system fits e.

This makes sense when the classification of a media system by type summarizes a pattern of interactions among a number of different media system variables which is considered essential to explaining the phenomenon in question.

But it is crucial to specify which particular characteristics of media systems fitting a type actually account for effect in question, and not to imagine the types themselves as causal agents. Media system typologies are also used to specify the scope conditions of social theories, that is, to specify the range of systems to which a particular theory might be expected to apply, or within which a particular concept might be considered relevant. One important general function of typologies is that they provide a means of conceptualizing context.

This can be important to the development of quantitative measures or other kinds of operationalization of important variables, as the significance of indicators of some construct may vary across systems. It can be important to the development of hypotheses about relationships. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice.

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Sign in with your library card Please enter your library card number. Show Summary Details Typology of Media Systems. Typology of Media Systems.

Daniel C. Hallin Daniel C. Hallin Department of Communication, University of California, San Diego. Keywords media system typology comparative analysis journalism media policy political communication measurement.

Subjects Political Communication Political Institutions. The Function of Media System Typologies Typologies of media systems have been fundamental to comparative analysis in media studies since the publication of Four Theories of the Press The differentiation of these models was organized around four main dimensions of comparison: 1. References Aalberg, T. Media systems and the political information environment: A cross-national comparison.

Albaeck, E. Political journalism in comparative perspective. Cambridge, U. Albuquerque, A. On models and margins: Comparative media models viewed from a Brazilian perspective. Mancini Eds. New York: Cambridge University Press. Altschull, J. Agents of power: The role of the news media in human affairs. New York: Longman.

Brüggemann, M. Hallin and Mancini revisited: Four empirical types of western media systems. Journal of Communication , 64 6 , — Büchel, F. Castro-Herrero, L. International Journal of Press-Politics , 21 2 , — Chakravartty, P. Curran, J. Institutional logics: Rethinking the media as a public sphere. Sparks Eds. London: Routledge. Curran J.

De-westernizing media studies. Politics and the Life Sciences , 32 2 , — Dobeck-Ostrowska, B. Italianization or Mediterraneanization of the Polish media system: Reality and perspective, In D. Downey, J.

Comparing Media Systems - Cambridge Core

Hallin, Daniel C. and Paolo Mancini (1994). “Summits and the Constitution of an International Public Sphere: The Reagan-Gorbachev Meetings as Televised Media Events.” In D. C. Hallin, ed., We Keep America on Top of the World: Television Journalism and the Public Sphere, pp. 153–69. London: RoutledgeCited by: 5872

Hallin, Daniel C. and Paolo Mancini (). “Summits and the Constitution of an International Public Sphere: The Reagan-Gorbachev Meetings as Televised Media Events.” In D. C. Hallin, ed., We Keep America on Top of the World: Television Journalism and the Public Sphere, pp. – London: RoutledgeCited by: Comparing Media Systems This book proposes a framework for comparative analysis of the relation between the media and the political system. Building on a survey of media institutions in eighteen West European and North American democracies, Hallin and Mancini identify the principal dimensions of variation in media systems and the political. He urges res earchers to push b eyond the frontier of the countries studied in Comparing Media Systems, and consequently further develop comparative media theory. (Hallin & .

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