Comparing Political Communication across Time and Space

New Studies in an Emerging Field

M. Canel, K. Voltmer, M. Canel, K. Voltmer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137366467
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137366474
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

By using a wide diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches and by encompassing both cross-national and longitudinal analyses, this volume sheds new light on comparative political communication research, such as personalization, globalization, democratization, and the changing nature of journalism,

1

Comparing Political Communication across Time and Space: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges in a Globalized World – An Introduction

María José Canel and Katrin Voltmer

As political communication in advanced democracies has reached its ‘third age’ (Blumler and Kavanagh, 1999), or is even about to enter a ‘fourth age’ (Strömbäck, 2008), the relationship between citizens and those who govern is undergoing fundamental changes. Developments such as the commercialization of media systems, the changing norms and practices of journalism, the rise of professional communication advisors and political public relations and – last, but not least – the unpredictable nature of the Internet are fundamentally altering the way in which political matters are communicated in the public sphere. For many observers, ‘media frenzies’ (Sabato, 1991) and the ‘mediatization’ of politics (Mazzoleni and Schulz, 1999) are challenging the quality of democracy and are even one of the root causes of the current ‘crisis of democracy’ (Keane, 2009; Patterson, 1993). However, new forms of communication also open up spaces for a more participatory, inclusive and responsive political process (Bennett and Entman, 2001; Brants and Voltmer, 2011; Cain et al., 2003).

Political communication scholars have sought to provide empirical evidence for the scope and consequences of these changes, in particular on the political attitudes, political behavior and knowledge of citizens (DelliCarpini, 2004; Norris, 2000), but also on the workings of political institutions and public policy making (Meyer, 2002; Koch-Baumgarten and Voltmer, 2010). However, the empirical findings as to the extent to which these developments can be attributed to the media remain inconclusive (Van Dalen et al., 2011). The reasons for the often-puzzling contradictions in empirical results are not only due to methodological problems with pinning down the effects of media and communication (Bartels, 1993; Zaller, 1996). Evidently, the relationship between media and politics is highly dependent on contextual factors, such as political institutions, regulatory regimes of the media and political culture.

Comparative research offers a conceptual and methodological framework that allows us to address issues of causality and contextualization in political communication processes, for example the effect of market competition on news content, the relationships between the structures of political institutions and campaign strategies, or the impact of public service broadcasting on political knowledge and participation. Political communication scholars have therefore called for more comparative research, across both space and time, and, after a slow beginning, comparative political communication research is now a flourishing field that has acquired methodological sophistication and theoretical reasoning. The present volume contributes to this body of knowledge by presenting new research from a broad range of thematic concerns and methodological approaches.

Comparative political communication research: the maturation of a field

Comparative research is widely regarded as one of the main intellectual tools in the social sciences for enhancing knowledge and conceptual understanding. As Dogan and Pelassy (1990: 8) state: ‘Comparison is the engine of knowledge’. Most evidently, comparative research broadens our horizons and prevents the type of parochial thinking that might prevail when studying a particular country, especially one’s own. Moreover, comparative research enables us to avoid unjustified generalizations from single-case observations when in fact individual and collective behavior differs widely depending on the political, social, economic and cultural contexts in which it takes place. Thus, systematically investigating the relationship between the macro and micro level of social processes across two or more countries helps us to understand how particular institutional arrangements shape human behavior (see Kohn, 1989; Newton and Van Deth, 2005).

More than three decades ago, Blumler and Gurevitch (1975) set the scene for comparative communication scholarship. However, unlike neighboring disciplines, such as political science or sociology, communication science has been rather slow in developing concepts and strategies for comparative research. This is now beginning to change. Scholars are more aware of the advantages of going comparative and today there are more opportunities and resources available for cross-national research. As the academic programs of the major international communication associations (ICA, IAMCR and ECREA) demonstrate, a vivid culture of comparative scholarship has emerged. Moreover, both national and international funding bodies, most notably the European Union, have increased the resources for international collaborations and comparative research. In this process, Hallin and Mancini’s (2004a) seminal book, ‘Comparing Media Systems’, has become a milestone in the conceptual development of studying media and politics from a comparative perspective. Their typology – or ‘models’– of media systems has provided scholars with a theoretical framework for developing hypotheses about the relationship between structural conditions of media and political systems on the one hand, and variations in political communication practices, and their effects, on the other.

Today, comparative political communication research can be regarded as ‘poised for maturity’ (Gurevitch and Blumler, 2004: 326). One indicator for the maturity of the field is the growing conceptual and methodological rigor of comparative research designs. Studies now clearly explicate the purpose and underlying assumptions of the comparative approach they take. Furthermore, an increasing number of studies systematically address the macro–micro link by interpreting the similarities and differences with reference to the distinct structural and cultural conditions of public communication that constitute specific system characteristics. Finally, large-N research is no longer an exception in political communication scholarship, thus broadening the opportunities for multilevel analysis. As Blumler (2012: xii) states in a summary overview, current comparative political communication research is both revisiting existing and producing new concepts, theories, paradigms and models.

However, a celebration of the maturity of this field might have been somewhat premature, as there are still numerous caveats to be addressed. As Pfetsch and Esser (2012: 39) maintain, ‘[s]cholars still display some uncertainty about its conceptual and methodological foundations and its level of achievements’. According to Hallin and Mancini (2012), for comparative communication research to be more efficient, more data is needed and better use should be made of existing data collections. Comparative communication research still suffers from a lack of standardized measures, which impedes the accumulation of a reliable body of knowledge in the field. Most importantly, while most comparative research designs are still embedded in the conceptual boundaries of the nation state, more sophisticated theories and methodologies are needed to capture new developments in communication, such as the implications of globalization and the Internet for the communication of political messages both within and across national boundaries.

This volume addresses the challenges political communication is facing today from a comparative perspective, using principles and methods of comparison both across space (cross-national) and across time (longitudinal), thereby advancing the understanding of global trends and cultural differences. All chapters in the book aim to apply the key criteria that according to Esser and Hanitzsch (2012: 6–7) are essential for comparative research: the purpose of comparison is clearly laid out; the units of analysis as well as the contextual factors that are assumed to affect the object of analysis are identified; the study employs functionally equivalent variables for the comparative analysis; and a common theoretical framework is used.

The chapters of this book look at a wide range of countries and cultures covering advanced Western democracies and beyond. The analyses pursue different comparative approaches, as mentioned by Esser and Hanitzsch (2012: 8–9): two-country comparisons; ‘US and the rest’; Western/Western; Western/non-Western and global.

By using a diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches, and by encompassing both cross-national and longitudinal analyses, this volume is able to shed new light on issues that are of key concern in the literature on comparative political communication research (see Blumler and Gurevitch, 1975, 2001; Gurevitch and Blumler, 2004; Pfetsch and Esser, 2004, 2012; Esser and Pfetsch, 2004; Holtz-Bacha, 2004; Hallin and Mancini, 2004b; Wirth and Kolb, 2012; Hanitzsch and Donsbach, 2012). Concepts such as professionalization, personalization, the changing nature of journalism, and convergence versus divergence in the wake of globalization, to name but a few, are addressed from different cultural and political contexts and traced across time. The following section outlines in more detail how the chapters of this book address the challenges of comparative research.

Why and how to compare

While comparative research has its indisputable merits, it also bears particular risks. Most importantly, with the trend to increase the number of countries included in a study, the analysis inevitably moves to a more abstract level, thereby losing sight of the processes that underlie the patterns observed. Furthermore, over-generalizations that ignore the cultural meaning and historical background of institutions and individual choices can lead to misinterpretations of the findings and mistaken conclusions. Finally, even though institutions and behavior might be referred to by the same terms, their meaning and function often differ fundamentally across different contexts. Finding adequate equivalents is particularly difficult in comparative survey research where respondents interpret the wordings of questions in different ways (Schmitt-Beck, 1998), but is an equally perennial problem in institutional and structural research where it has frequently undermined the validity of comparative research (Sartori, 1994). As Hallin and Mancini (2012: 512) point out, it is therefore of crucial importance to clearly spell out why, for the research interest at hand, the comparative approach is the method of choice, and which tools are most suitable to achieve the objective of the study. Comparison is not an end in itself: nor is a study that compares two countries necessarily inferior to one that includes 20 countries.

One of the key issues comparative political communication is concerned with is to describe and explain processes of change and transformation. Concepts such as Americanization, Europeanization, globalization, hybridization, democratization and commercialization all imply trends of change, either towards an existing model (the US, Europe) or towards new forms that emerge from the amalgamation of different strands of development (see Pfetsch and Esser, 2004: 11; Esser and Hanitzsch, 2012: 5–6). For instance, the study of recent trends in election campaigning often refers to the ongoing changes as ‘Americanization’, which assumes that countries around the globe adopt the techniques and styles of electioneering that have been developed in the US However, further systematic comparative research, alongside single-country studies, shows more diverse patterns that involve both convergence towards American-style campaigning and divergence resulting from the specific cultural and political circumstances of individual countries and even individual parties (see Plasser, 2000). Authors such as Swanson and Mancini (1996) therefore prefer to talk about the ‘modernization’ of election campaigns, which leaves parties and candidates to adapt as they choose to the changing electoral environment. What seems to be a battle over labels is in fact a reflection of the growing unease among political communication scholars regarding the dominance of anglo-saxon research in the field that often assumes US-specific developments to be universal. Blumler and Gurevitch (1995) point at the fallacy of this – usually implicit – assumption:

Although many theoretical propositions about the social and political functions of the mass media are couched in universal terms, the evidence adduced in support of them is almost always culture-specific. (Blumler and Gurevitch, 1995: 75)

Although employing different research strategies and theoretical approaches, several of the studies compiled in this volume investigate processes of change and transformation, such as ‘negativization’ of campaigns (Johansson), internationalization of campaign coverage (Ghanem), professionalization of government communication (Canel and Sanders), democratization (Voltmer), commercialization of the media (Nord and Strömbäck) and transnationalization of national public spheres (Ivanova, Schmidt and Schäfer).

Two of these chapters compare political communication across time, and attempt to explain the evolution of campaigns and news coverage in Sweden. In Chapter 5 Johansson focuses on the negativization of campaigns. He analyses how election posters have evolved over a period of one hundred years (1911–2010) by examining whether changes can be explained by an increased ‘mediatization’. The chapter challenges general claims of the Americanization of campaigns, arguing that changes in negative campaigning on election posters in Sweden can be better interpreted in terms of political and societal changes rather than increased mediatization. Thus, levels and trends of negative campaigning, Johansson argues, are not as global as might be expected because these trends are dependent on political system differences.

Different developments resulting from U.S. campaigns are also found in Nord and Strömbäck’s analysis of the commercialization of Swedish media. The authors compare television news journalism in Sweden between 1998 and 2010, and conclude that there are no clear indicators of commercialization that could be correlated with changes in political journalism reporting styles. In sum, these two chapters show that the comparative logic of inquiry helps us to understand that processes of change in election campaigns and political journalism in Sweden do not follow the pattern that has been described for the US.

Methods and research strategies for comparing political communication

Edited volumes and handbooks on comparative research have identified methods and research strategies as key issues for discussion (see for instance Kleinsteuber, 2004; Esser and Hanitzsch, 2012). Research designs include, among others: the selection of units of comparison, the establishment of functional equivalences and the selection of research tools. The present book brings together a wide variety of methodological approaches, ranging from large-N studies employing multilevel statistical tools of analysis to state-of-the art qualitative studies. The research tools employed by the authors of this book include quantitative and qualitative content analysis (media content, election campaign material), comparative case studies, document analysis (constitutions, legal texts, government reports, party programs, etc.), opinion surveys, elite interviews and a combination of various methods.

Because of the costs involved in collecting cross-national data, the availability of comparable data is a recurrent problem in comparative research (Norris, 2009; Hallin and Mancini, 2012; Sanders and Canel, 2013). Some chapters of this volume present new data; others use data from existing databases, such as Freedom House and the World Value Survey. Schemer, Kühne and Matthes address the problem of measurement equivalence when comparing across contexts, cultures or over time. The authors demonstrate that measurement invariance m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Comparing Political Communication across Time and Space: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges in a Globalized World An Introduction
• Part I  Challenges of Comparative Political Communication Research: Design, Methods and Measurement
• Part II  Communicating with Citizens: Campaigns, Political PR and the Media
• Part III  Journalism and Media Realities: Journalistic Cultures, the Market and Political News
• Index