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"Mediatization" of Politics: A Challenge for Democracy?

Gianpietro Mazzoleni; Winfried Schulz
Online publication date: 06 August 2010
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“Mediatization” of Politics:
A Challenge for Democracy?
GIANPIETRO MAZZOLENI and WINFRIED SCHULZ
The growing intrusion of media into the political domain in many countries has led
critics to worry about the approach of the “media-driven republic,” in which mass
media will usurp the functions of political institutions in the liberal state. However,
close inspection of the evidence reveals that political institutions in many nations
have retained their functions in the face of expanded media power. The best descrip-
tion of the current situation is “mediatization,” where political institutions increas-
ingly are dependent on and shaped by mass media but nevertheless remain in control
of political processes and functions.
Keywords democracy, mass media, media power, mediatization, political commu-

nication, political parties
Downloaded By: [TÜBTAK EKUAL] At: 13:12 29 September 2010
“American politics tends to be driven more by political substance . . . than by the antics
of Media Politics.” This straightforward conclusion of John Zaller’s (1998, p. 187) analysis
of the impact of media coverage of the Lewinsky-Clinton affair might seem paradoxical
when set against the backdrop of much American political communication scholarship,
which in the last two decades has been distinguished by its severe criticism of the ex-
cessive intrusion of the media into the domestic political arena.
A similar position is held by W. Lance Bennett (1998), who concedes that “television
and related media of political communication are implicated in various political crimes
and misdemeanors” but does not think that the media should be blamed for a supposed
“death of civic culture” (p. 744), which in fact is not dead in American society.
The theses of Zaller and Bennett—that voters and public opinion are far from being
deeply affected in their political outlooks and behaviors by the media’s treatment of
political reality and are primarily and constantly concerned about “peace, prosperity,
and moderation”—are similar to conclusions reached by scholars who have investigated
the intriguing interactions between media and political actors in several other countries.
The ideas of the “irresistible” power of the mass media and of media power’s nega-
tive consequences for the democratic process often have been shared by the academic
community around the world. Cases such as candidate Fernando Collor de Mello’s re-
markable television-fueled victory in the 1989 Brazilian presidential elections; the suc-
cessful performance of Silvio Berlusconi, a media tycoon, in the 1994 Italian general
elections; and the 1997 electoral victory of Labour leader Tony Blair in the United
Kingdom, who employed shrewd communication strategies, all provided ammunition to
Gianpietro Mazzoleni is Associate Professor of the Sociology of Mass Communication at the

University of Genova, Italy. Winfried Schulz holds the Chair in Mass Communication and Politi-
cal Science at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany.
Address correspondence to Gianpietro Mazzoleni, DiSA-Dip. to di Scienze Antropologiche,
Università di Genova, Via Balbi 4, I-16126 Genova, Italy.
247
Political Communication, 16:247–261, 1999
Copyright ã 1999 Taylor & Francis
1058-4609/99 $12.00 + .00
248 Gianpietro Mazzoleni and Winfried Schulz
critics who blamed the “media complex” for distorting the democratic process. The catch-
words of the debate about media power triggered especially in European political com-
munication scholarship by such cases—“videocracy,” “démocratie médiatique,” and even
“coup d’état médiatique”—all are symbolic depictions of the feared consummation of
improper developments in the relationship of media and politics. In its concrete declen-
sion, a media-driven democratic system is thought to cause the decline of the model of
political organization born with the liberal state, as the political parties lose their links
with the social domains of which they have been the mirrors and with the interests the
parties traditionally have represented.
Critics’ concern for the excessive power of the media expanding beyond the bound-
aries of their traditional functions in democracies focuses mainly on the “irresponsible”
nature of the media complex: While the political parties are accountable for their poli-
cies to the electorate, no constitution foresees that the media be accountable for their
actions. Absence of accountability can imply serious risks for democracy, because it
violates the classic rule of balances of power in the democratic game, making the media
(the “fourth branch of government”) an influential and uncontrollable force that is pro-
tected from the sanction of popular will.

According to critics, the media have distorted the political process also by turning
politics into a marketlike game that humiliates citizens’ dignity and rights and ridicules
political leaders’ words and deeds (Entman, 1989; Jamieson, 1992; Patterson, 1993;
Sartori, 1997). Critics argue that the media’s presentation of politics in the United States
as well as in many other countries—as “show-biz” based on battles of images, conflicts
between characters, polls and marketing, all typical frenzies of a journalism that is
increasingly commercial in its outlook—has diminished if not supplanted altogether
debate about ideas, ideals, issues, and people’s vital interests and has debased voters by
treating them not as citizens but rather as passive “consumers” of mediated politics.
Critics’ concerns extend to the newest media to enter the arena of political commu-
nication (see the review by Street, 1997). Because they create the possibility of direct
and instant “electronic democracy,” the new media have given rise to several fears de-
scribed by critics: Traditional democratic institutions of representation will be under-
mined or made irrelevant by direct, instant electronic communication between voters
and officials; the new media will fragment the electorate, eroding the traditional social
and political bonds that have united the polity; political parties will lose their function as
cultural structures mediating between the people and the government; shrewd, unprin-
cipled politicians will find it easier than before to manipulate public opinion and build
consensus by using new information technologies and resources; and the new media can
facilitate the spread of populist attitudes and opinions.
In short, critics’ regard conventional mass communication and new communication
technologies as sharing what could be described as a “mutagenic” impact on politics,
that is, the ability to change politics and political action into something quite different
from what traditionally has been embodied in the tenets of liberal democracy.
Without depreciating the validity of the critical, somewhat apocalyptic positions of
those who see the media as one of the most crucial factors in the crisis of politics and
political leadership in postmodern democracies, it is our argument here that the increas-
ing intrusion of the media in the political process is not necessarily synonymous with a
media “takeover” of political institutions (governments, parties, leaders, movements).
Moreover, media intrusion cannot be assumed as a global phenomenon, because there
are very significant differences between countries in this respect. Recent changes that
have occurred in the political arenas around the world cannot be explained as reflecting
“Mediatization” of Politics 249
some common pattern of “media-driven democracy.” Instead, the concept of “mediati-

zation” of politics is a more sensible tool for addressing the question of whether the
media complex endangers the functioning of the democratic process.
Mediatization is, in fact, a phenomenon that is common to the political systems of
almost all democratic countries, where it has taken different shapes and developed at
different speeds. However, it has in all cases proved impossible to contain because the
media have assumed the character of “necessity” in the political domain. The mass
media are not mere passive channels for political communicators and political content.
Rather, the media are organizations with their own aims and rules that do not necessar-
ily coincide with, and indeed often clash with, those of political communicators. Be-
cause of the power of the media, political communicators are forced to respond to the
media’s rules, aims, production logics, and constraints (Altheide & Snow, 1979). One of
the most significant results is that politicians who wish to address the public must nego-
tiate with the media’s preferred timing, formats, language, and even the content of the
politicians’ communication (Dayan & Katz, 1992). Some even hypothesize that legiti-
macy of the exercise of power increasingly might lie in the ability of rulers to communi-
cate through the media (Cotteret, 1991).

The mediatization process has been under way for many years, stretching from the
“first age” of political communication (see the article by Blumler and Kavanagh in this
issue), when communication systems were based on few press and electronic channels
and cohabited with political systems, through the second age of tumultuous changes in
the nature of both systems and of relations between them.
In the third age of multichannel communication, the mediatization of the political
sphere has accelerated to the point that the subordination of the media system to the
political system in the first age seems to have changed into the acquisition by the media
of great power in the public sphere and the political arena. However, this power, al-
though far-reaching, is not so pivotal that it puts the media complex in the place of the
political parties, narcotizes the public, or diverts citizens from civic engagement, as Zaller
and Bennett have demonstrated for the American milieu.
Critics’ argument that the media are taking over political actors in the political
process calls for an assessment of the empirical evidence in a variety of national con-
texts in order to determine whether the general trend is toward a “media-driven repub-
lic,” as critics claim, or toward innocuous forms of “mediatized democracy,” as we
argue.
Mediatization Processes
The process of mediatization of political actors, political events, and political discourse
is a major trend in political systems of the 1990s. It is a phenomenon that dates back at
least to the introduction of television, but it has certainly gained speed with the expan-
sion and commercialization of media systems and the modernization of politics.
The term mediatization denotes problematic concomitants or consequences of the
development of modern mass media. It is distinguished from mediation, which refers in
a neutral sense to any acts of intervening, conveying, or reconciling between different
actors, collectives, or institutions. In this sense, mass media can be regarded as a medi-
ating or intermediary agent whose function is to convey meaning from the communi-
cator to the audience or between communication partners and thereby sometimes sub-
stitute for interpersonal exchanges. As an intermediary or mediating system, mass
media have the potential for bridging the distance between actors in both a physical
sense and a social psychological sense, that is, reconciling unacquainted or even con-
flicting parties.
To speak of modern politics as being mediated is merely a descriptive statement.
Communication, including mass mediated communication, is a necessary prerequisite
for the functioning of any political system (Almond & Powell, 1966). Inputs to the
political system—the demands of citizens as well as their expressions of system sup-
port—must be articulated by communication, channeled into the political arena by mass
media, and converted into system output. In a similar way, system output—political
decisions and actions—has to be communicated to the public, and in modern societies
the mass media are essential for this function.
Nowadays more than ever, politics cannot exist without communication. Some scho-
lars even hold that politics is communication (Deutsch, 1963; Meadow, 1980). Politics
increasingly has been molded by communication patterns. There is no doubt that much
“politics of substance” is still practiced away from media spotlights, behind the scenes,
in the discreet rooms of parliament and government. Yet, politics by its very nature, and
independent of its substantive or symbolic value, sooner or later must go through the
“publicity” stage, which entails use of the media (for example, to make known the terms
of a policy decision), resort to the means of persuasion, and exposure to scrutiny by the
press.
To characterize politics as being mediatized goes beyond a mere description of sys-
tem requirements. Mediatized politics is politics that has lost its autonomy, has become
dependent in its central functions on mass media, and is continuously shaped by inter-
actions with mass media. This statement of the mediatization hypothesis is based on
observations of how mass media produce political content and interfere with political
processes. Walter Lippmann’s seminal work set the tone for what became one of the
most fertile areas of communication research (Lippmann, 1922). Of the processes that
have been identified as contributing to the mediatization of politics, the following are
among the most important.
First, in their news reporting, mass media present only a highly selective sample of
newsworthy events from a continuous stream of occurrences. Events are identified as
“newsworthy” when they satisfy certain rules, commonly understood as the criteria for
determining “news value.” Only part of the criteria of news value are intrinsic to the
news events. Often the selection process is determined more strongly by journalistic
worldviews and by media production routines. However chosen, the media’s selective
sample of events that are reported defines what appears to be the only reality for most
citizens and often also for the political elite, particularly in those domains of activity
where most people have no direct, personal access to what has happened. Almost every-
thing that happens in the political world, except for a few aspects of local affairs,
composes one such domain that is distant from the day-to-day experience of ordinary
citizens. Moreover, news value criteria such as proximity, conflict, drama, and personal-
ization not only determine what events come to the attention of the media and hence of
the public through news reports; these criteria also impose a systematic bias upon the
media reality of politics because news reports typically accentuate the features that make
an event newsworthy (Galtung & Ruge, 1965).
Second, in contrast to the ancient Greek polis where every citizen was able to par-
ticipate in public life in the agora, as we are told by romantic histories that glorify
democracy, modern democratic states are characterized by mediatized participation. Mass
media construct the public sphere of information and opinion and control the terms of
their exchange. A media-constructed public sphere sharply differentiates the roles of
actors and spectators. Political protagonists on the media stage act in front of more or
less passive audiences and consumers of politics. It is left to the media to decide who
will get access to the public. In the same way that media select and frame events, the
media select which actors will receive attention and frame those actors’ public images.
This is one aspect of the mediatization of politics through a media-constructed public
sphere. A second aspect consists of the agenda-building and agenda-setting functions of
mass media. In addition to conferring status upon actors by giving them attention, the
media also assign political relevance and importance to social problems by selecting and
emphasizing certain issues and neglecting others.
Third, “media logic” (Altheide & Snow, 1979), the frame of reference within which
the media construct the meaning of events and personalities they report, increasingly has
come to reflect the commercial logic of the media industry, mixing the structural con-
straints of media communication with the typical aims of commercial communication
activity. One major implication for politics is the “spectacularization” of political com-
munication formats and of political discourse itself. The adaptation of political language
to the media’s commercial patterns has been observed in three domains: (a) the commu-
nication “outlook” of political actors, be they the government, the parties, leaders, or
candidates for office; (b) the communication techniques that are used; and (c) the con-
tent of political discourse. For instance, U.S. politicians almost became voiceless on
television during recent decades; in television news coverage of political campaigns, the
soundbites of presidential candidates shrunk dramatically as journalists appeared to speak
for the politicians by presenting paraphrases and summaries of the politicians’ remarks,
while the tone of the journalists’ interpretative coverage became increasingly negative
(Hallin, 1992). In Europe, however, the “soundbite syndrome” is still uncommon among
the media and politicians. On the contrary, the news media carry significant amounts of
political content, so much so that at times it is a nuisance to readers and viewers. Never-
theless, the adoption and use of high doses of media-borne communication elements,
such as television techniques and production styles, in the information agencies of gov-
ernments and in the propaganda machines of political parties bring along with them
revision of the old communication tools and habits. In a number of European countries,
especially the largest countries, election campaigns increasingly have come to resemble
U.S. campaigns (Swanson & Mancini, 1996). Today, the resort to external campaign
expertise, to professional consultancy, is normal practice for many European parties and
candidates. Television debates and talk shows, spot ads, staged events on the campaign
trail, marketing research techniques, growing propaganda expenditures, and the like are
common features. In short, the language of politics has been married with that of ad-
vertising, public relations, and show business. What is newsworthy, what hits the head-
lines, what counts in the public sphere or in the election campaign are communication
skills, the style of addressing the public, the “look,” the image, even the special effects:
All are typical features of the language of commercial media.
Fourth, since the mass media’s attention rules, production routines, selection crite-
ria, and molding mechanisms are well known in the world of politics, thanks not least to
the efforts of communication scholars, political actors know and are able to adapt their
behavior to media requirements. Such reciprocal effects may be seen as a special kind
of media impact on reality (Lang & Lang, 1953). If political actors stage an event in
order to get media attention, or if they fashion an event in order to fit to the media’s
needs in timing, location, and the framing of the message and the performers in the
limelight, we can speak of a mediatization of politics. The same measures also may be
seen as attempts by political actors to gain control over the media. In other words, we
are facing a symbiotic relationship that is characterized by a mediatization of politics

and, at the same time, politicians’ instrumental use of mass media for particular political
goals. The use of methods for engineering public opinion and consent, such as political
opinion polling, marketing strategies, proactive news management, and spin doctoring—
which have been studied and discussed extensively in recent years—is indicative of this
phenomenon.
Finally, the mass media have genuine, legitimate political functions to perform in
voicing a distinct position on an issue and engaging in investigative reporting to per-
form their watchdog or partisan role. News partisanship is a European tradition that
goes back to the close linkages between newspapers and political parties in the 19th
century. It is still quite common that a newspaper’s editorial position colors its news
coverage, and broadcast journalism has adopted this style in many European countries.
However, journalistic partisanship becomes particularly problematic under two condi-
tions: (a) when the political beliefs of journalists deviate substantially from the beliefs
of their news audiences, which seems to be the case in countries like Italy and Germany
where journalists view themselves as more liberal than their audience (Patterson & Dons-
bach, 1996), and (b) when the mass media exaggerate their control functions and focus
excessively on the negative aspects of politics, which also is an obvious trend on the
European scene.
Societal Trends and Changing Political Cultures

Two societal trends—the crisis of the party system and the rise of a sophisticated citi-
zenry—are independent variables in the changing conditions between mass media and
political institutions and are factors that relativize, or shape in different ways within
different contexts, the effects of excessive mediatization. Both have strong bearing on
the structure and content of political communication in society. Since the latter trend has
to a certain degree affected the former, we look first at the different species of homo
politicus and the social changes that gave rise to their evolution.
Self-Mobilized Citizens and Volatile Voters

The process of transformation that Western industrial societies have been undergoing in
recent decades is characterized, among other things, by a change of value orientations
and an increase of political skills among the population. Inglehart’s postmodernization
hypothesis is one of the most recognized conceptions of these changing value priorities.
In a number of studies he has provided empirical evidence of a shift from material to
postmaterial values (Inglehart, 1977, 1997). Inglehart contends that the growing economy
and the establishment of a comprehensive welfare system altered the value preferences
of certain segments of the population. As people’s basic subsistence needs were met
in advanced industrial societies, material values receded into the background. Political
issues linked to economic growth, crime prevention, and national defense became less
salient. Instead, people placed higher priority on postmaterial values such as individual
freedom, self-expression, and participation.
Because social values are the most basic structuring principles of human behavior,
political processes, including political participation and communication, have to accom-
modate to changing value orientations if political systems are to remain stable and continue
to function. In many Western European countries there has been, in fact, an obvious shift
in the issues featured in political debates, a shift that reflects, to some extent, structural
changes in the belief systems particularly of the younger, higher educated urban popula-
tion. “Postmodern” concerns for environmental protection, individual freedom, social
equality, civic participation, and a higher quality of life have been added to the traditional
political agenda of economic and security issues (Dalton, 1996). The mass media, which
are strongly committed to topicality and constantly are in search of new trends, are the
pacesetters of these developments.
A second trend contributes to the change in value preferences and at the same time
has an independent effect on the political culture. All industrial societies have been
experiencing an enormous expansion of higher education. Between 1950 and 1975, uni-
versity enrollment increased by about 350% in the United States. An even more dra-
matic increase took place in Europe, where the figures in Britain, West Germany, and
France, for instance, are in the range of 500% and more (Dalton, 1996). As a result of
higher education, many more people than ever before develop higher cognitive skills
and a higher degree of political sophistication. Political sophistication determines a person’s
capacity to process information and to make meaning of the political issues encountered
in mass media. Political sophistication also expands the horizon of people’s interests
and raises their level of attention to public affairs and participation in politics.
Empirical data provide a mixed picture of the development of the public’s political
sophistication and attention over the past decades. On the one hand, the level of political
information holding has not increased considerably, as measured by factual questions
asked of samples representative of the U.S. population (Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1996).
Levels of voter turnout in national elections have even declined in most liberal democ-
racies since the 1960s. On the other hand, measures of interest in politics have been
going up during the same period, as have civic engagement, especially on the commu-
nity level, and unconventional modes of political participation such as signing petitions,
taking part in demonstrations, and joining boycotts (Bennett, 1998; Dalton, 1996).
These seemingly contradictory trends fit together if they are interpreted as symp-
toms of a general change in the public’s orientation to political institutions. Because of
their increased political skills, major parts of the population have been emancipated
from traditional political institutions. The “self-mobilized” citizens, as Dalton (1996)
calls this new species, formulate their stance on current issues independently of the
positions of the political parties. Sophisticated citizens have included unconventional
modes in their repertoire of political participation and, for instance, may judge referen-
dums as more important than elections and protest as more effective than party support.
Thus, over time, election turnout has become a weak indicator of political participation.
For the same reason, conventional survey questions measuring the public’s political knowl-
edge—factual questions about traditional political institutions—which have changed little
since they were first introduced in U.S. surveys in the 1940s, may have lost their rel-
evance, and it is doubtful that such questions are indicative of people’s understanding of
politics (Graber, 1994).
In addition to political sophistication, the ubiquitous availability of information via
mass media is an important resource that self-mobilized citizens use for developing their
political orientation individually and independently of party ideology. As a result of an
ever-expanding media system, the press, radio, and television provide a steadily increasing
abundance of politically relevant information. Recently, the diffusion of the Internet has
prompted a number of mutations in the domain of political communication as the new
media join the “old” media in molding a new public sphere (Verstraeten, 1996) and raising
the possibility of “electronic democracy” (Street, 1997). Because the Internet represents
a shift from mass media to interactive media, and from monological to dialogical com-
munication, it can be seen as an important enlargement of the possibilities for participation.
As studies of media use behavior show, well educated and politically sophisticated citizens
are the early adopters of these new media.
Although societal changes gave rise to a growing segment of “self-mobilized” citi-
zens, there remains a large group of people who are poorly informed and not much
interested in politics, the “chronic know-nothings” who have worried political scientists
since they were discovered by Hyman and Sheatsley in 1947 (for more recent accounts,
see Bennett, 1988; Neuman, 1986). Because of their low level of education and motiva-
tion, these people lack the cognitive resources for more active participation in politics.
In previous times, the majority of this group relied on political parties to relieve them of
the need for individually deliberated choices. By aligning themselves with social cleav-
ages and prevailing group interests, the parties acquired a profile that served as evidence
of political competence for many voters. However, with the general trend toward declin-
ing party identification in advanced industrial democracies, the parties have lost much
of their former orientation function, particularly for apolitical citizens.

Dalton (1996) presents survey data that show that over a period of four decades
“ritual partisans,” as he labels the less sophisticated citizens who feel attached to one of
the political parties, have declined from 42% to 20% of the U.S. population. During the
same period the “new independents”—highly mobilized citizens without a party identifi-
cation—increased from 16% to 24%, while apolitical citizens remained stable at 16%.
In addition to their weak or nonexistent party identification, the apoliticals and the
sophisticated citizens have one other thing in common: They turn to the mass media for
political orientation and guidance. There is a plethora of empirical evidence that mass
media—and especially television—some time ago became the “main source” for politi-
cal information in general and for opinion formation during election campaigns in par-
ticular (Chaffee & Kanihan, 1997; Corbetta & Parisi, 1997; Robinson & Levy, 1986).
When citizens rely heavily or exclusively on the media for their political nourish-
ment, there is a metamorphosis in the ways they approach and do politics. In recent
years, first public opinion and then electorates have become more volatile, more sensi-
tive to current issues, to images of political leaders, and to the changing zeitgeist. Be-
cause a party’s showing in elections increasingly has come to depend on its ability not
only to activate the traditional party supporters but also to win the volatile citizens of
both types, the apoliticals as well as the new independents, voter mobilization has be-
come a primary goal of modern election campaigns. Voters have to be re-won in every
election by use of sophisticated communication means and messages, and with public
opinion management tied in with the world of communication and the news media. And
in all of this, it is obvious that the polls have become highly important oracles for party
leaders and government officials. They serve as a basis for shaping the political agenda
and framing campaign issues.
These changes are seen by some critical analysts as a deformation of rational citi-
zenship. Increasingly, we have to deal with a society composed of a majority of what
Schudson (1995) calls “informational citizens,” those who are “saturated with bits and
bytes of information” abundantly and chaotically provided by the media, and a minority
of “informed citizens,” who have “not only information but a point of view and prefer-
ences to make sense of it” and who appear “in a society in which being informed makes
good sense, and that is a function not of the individual character or news media perfor-
mance, but of political culture” (pp. 27, 169).
The Crisis of Political Parties

An obvious consequence of changing value preferences and the emergence of the self-
mobilized citizen is a change in the political orientation and voting behavior of major
parts of the population. The traditional social cleavages—conflicts between social classes,
the center versus the periphery, and the State versus the Church—that gave rise to po-
litical ideologies and parties in the 18th and 19th centuries have been leveled or have
lost much of their formative influence. This is manifested, for example, in the continu-
ous decline of class-based party choice, which for a long period was a distinctive voting
pattern in many countries. As can be seen from a comparative analysis of party pro-
grams of 10 democracies over four decades, party systems have adjusted only reluc-
tantly to social changes (Klingemann, Hofferberg, & Budge, 1994). Despite all of the
changes in citizens’ orientations to politics and political institutions, the traditional left-
right dimension is still the dominant dimension along which parties try to differentiate
themselves from each other, even though some socialist and social-democratic parties
have moved slightly to the center.
Although the weakening of party ties affects most advanced democracies, this gen-
eral trend has different roots and has taken different paths in different countries. Com-
paring the United States and West Germany, Klingemann and Wattenberg (1992) dis-
tinguished between decaying and developing party systems. The United States is the
prototype of a decaying system in which the candidates no longer need the parties to
reach the voters but instead rely completely on the mass media (Patterson, 1993). In
contrast, in nonmajoritarian democracies such as Germany and other European countries
(with the exception of Great Britain), local institutional settings allow for some accom-
modation of the party system to societal changes. The decline of the mass parties in
many countries, which was under way long before the fall of the Berlin Wall, combined
with the latest changes, generating new and sometimes unprecedented forms of political
consent-gathering and power-managing structures. It became quite common to see the
rapid rise (and rapid disappearance) of new political movements, single-issue parties,
and “light parties” (the major example being Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, assembled in a
few weeks of heavy media build-up) holding very loose organizational ties with their
grass roots. The environmental movements and peace activists of the 1970s, which can
be seen as manifestations of the postmaterialist turn, have in some countries crystallized
to “Green” party organizations and now participate in political coalitions, mostly on the
community level but also on the national level as in France and Germany. On the other
side of the political spectrum, right-wing and racist parties found their constituencies
among adherents of old materialist values who have been suffering from economic inse-
curity or decline. The success of Le Pen in France, of Fini in Italy, and of the Flemish
Neo-Fascists may be mentioned as examples.
Despite such developments, European party systems are facing a severe crisis of
legitimacy. The extreme case is Italy, where the party system has become almost com-
pletely detached from the electorate, is seeking a stable structure, and is continuously
challenged by Berlusconi’s populist movement. Anti-party sentiments are rising in the
electorates of most countries, and party affiliation, including party membership, is
declining. To illustrate the current situation, Table 1 presents a Eurobarometer result
from 1997 data that shows that in each member state of the European Union, people’s
trust in the political parties is lower than their trust in other political institutions. Trust in
parties often falls appallingly far behind the trust given to nonpolitical institutions, par-
ticularly to television, a fact that has been noticed for quite some time in the United
States (Wattenberg, 1990) and that seems to have become global (Inglehart, 1997).
Table 1
Trust in institutions, by country
Question: I would like to ask you a question about how much trust you have in certain
institutions. For each of the following institutions, please tell me if you tend to trust it or
tend not to trust it.
Percentage of European
respondents Union:
who tend Average of United
to trust . . . 15 countries France Germany Italy Netherlands Spain Kingdom
The government 37 37 29 27 67 41 46
The parliament 40 38 35 29 64 45 46
Political parties 16 12 13 13 40 20 18
The church 50 36 47 55 43 49 54
Justice, legal
system 43 36 50 31 54 39 48
Trade unions 38 36 39 29 62 36 36
The press 40 51 42 34 61 50 15
Radio 63 62 62 49 78 68 67
Television 56 46 59 42 75 49 65
Note. Figures for four other institutions—the European Union, civil service, the police, and the
army—have been omitted to make the table less complex. EU averages for trust in these institu-
tions are, respectively, 37%, 40%, 62%, and 61%. Data were derived from European Commission
(1998).
The crisis of the parties has only expanded the political function of the mass media.
Referring to the U.S. situation, to take an extreme example of the processes under ex-
amination, Grossman (1995) describes vividly what is happening in the political arena:
Voters no longer have to rely on the parties to signal who stands for what
and to tell them what they should be for or against. And people no longer
look to the parties to provide them with parades, marching bands, and Thanksgiving
turkeys. Nor do the parties offer their constituents soapboxes on which to air
their views. Television and talk radio have taken on that job. (pp. 121–122)
The “demise of political parties,” as Kalb (1992) has described the American party
system, gives rise to candidate-centered and highly personalized campaigns that rely
heavily on the mass media. In the U.S. system, a candidate can run for office virtually
independent of any party, but the candidate is completely dependent on support by mass
media. The situation in Europe is different. Although political leaders may run indepen-
dently of the traditional party system, as the Berlusconi case demonstrated in a spec-
tacular way, the usual pattern is still that candidates are nominated by party organiza-
tions and that the campaigns depend to a high degree on the party organizations. Even
Berlusconi, after he won the elections, found it necessary to establish a partylike organi-
zation with his Forza Italia. European parliamentary systems allow much less room
than the American presidential system for personalization of election campaigns focused
on individual leaders or candidates (Kaase, 1994).
Parties still play an important role in the typical European campaign. But the mass
media have appropriated several of their functions and have transformed traditional party
campaigns into media campaigns, at least to some extent. Deep mutations that post–
Cold War political systems in Europe are facing go beyond the context of electoral
campaigning and contribute to a weakening of the traditional party-centered politics.
The disappearance of strong ideological tenets from the forefront of political debate has
forced the parties to reshape their outlooks and practices, and even their names and
symbols.
Trends in the News Business and Profession

The media industry is undergoing epochal changes both on the global level and in indi-
vidual countries. The rapid spread of the new information and communication technolo-
gies (ICTs) and the industrial and financial interests of the media and telecommu-
nication trusts are prompting a revolution also in the conventional mass media. The
adjustment by the news media and journalism to the new scenarios is progressing at
different speeds in different national and continental contexts, but some changes have
already occurred that are significant for our discussion of the mediatization of politics.
First, the news business in Europe was characterized in the past by the strong pres-
ence of public service broadcasting, which meant there was some form of governmental
control, direct or indirect, over the entire newsmaking process, from recruitment of jour-
nalists to production policies. In the late 1970s, public television monopolies in many
countries began to be challenged by newly born local, private, community, and mostly
commercial radio and television channels that familiarized the domestic audiences with
alternative and often successful news offerings. Today, this process is much broader and
more dramatic: New information outlets, such as satellite and cable channels, are in-
creasing in number and engage in fierce competition with public broadcasting channels.
One important side effect of the rush to commercialized communication and news has
been a decrease (but not the disappearance) of the formerly high level of politicization
of both the public media organizations and the outlook of news professionals.
Second, the process of commercialization of the public and private news media
industry is clearly seen in the preferences noted earlier of news organizations for spec-
tacular and sensationalistic coverage of political events and leaders. The “game schema”
(Patterson, 1993), election reporting focused on the “horse race,” and the gusto for cam-
paign hoopla are but two examples of the increasing drift of journalism toward “infotain-
ment” and the disenchanted, superficial treatment of politics.
Third, in addition to a widespread journalism that pursues commercial objectives
and frames political reality accordingly, we can also observe in various national con-
texts the rise of an adversarial type of news media that does not fit the traditional model
of the role relationships linking the press and politicians (Blumler & Gurevitch, 1981).
There is growing evidence that a number of news media organizations try to compete
with the political parties and political actors for public consent and legitimation in the
same political arena. The signs of anti-party or anti-politics sentiments and of attention
to neo-populist issues are numberless in almost all countries. Bill Clinton’s “sexgate”
affair also could be seen as an example of this development. In some cases, such as
Italy during the 1992–1994 investigations of political corruption, the revitalization of
the media’s activism in civil society suggests that the news media are keen to undertake
typical party functions as they engage in direct struggle with government, parties, and
presidents. Another sign is the bullying of political candidates and paranoia by certain
media in election campaigns (Patterson, 1993). The effects of this conduct can be seen
in dramatic events such as the resignation of high public figures, the angry libel suits by
the personalities who have been attacked by the media, the embarrassed reactions of the
powerful, and even suicides (like that of the former French premier P. Bérégovoy). This
trend in the news profession is well captured by the concept of “démontage of politics”
discussed by Kleppinger (1998).
Finally, the new media, the Internet, and the information superhighway are literally
revolutionizing the news industry and profession and represent a serious challenge to its
survival. They could undermine the traditional mediation function of journalism, bypass-
ing the crucial phases of media selection and interpretation of events. For the most part,
the information that circulates on the Internet is not produced by journalists and news
media; it is directed to special publics whose information needs are not fulfilled by
conventional mass media. A significant effect of this new situation is that political actors
can circulate their messages directly to the public without having to come to terms with
the constraints and logics of traditional news organizations. Increasingly in election cam-
paigns, political candidates and parties reach voters directly by resorting to the “back
channels” (Selnow, 1994) that are not under the editorial control of the news media.
Trends in the news media show a mixed picture in which there are, on one hand,
signs of political activism and a search for greater media independence from political
institutions by means of commercialism, and on the other hand, evidence of the tradi-
tional media’s decreasing influence and power over politics.
Conclusion
Do such transformations in the societal, political, and media domains provide evidence
to support the concerned alarms of an irresistible drift toward a “media-driven democ-
racy”? Or do these trends provide evidence for our hypothesis that the “third age” of
political communication witnesses an intense yet harmless process of mediatization of
politics?
As we have seen, the evidence is far from clear cut; it seems to offer support for
both interpretations. However, the core of the phenomenon allows us to argue that crit-
ics’ apocalyptic views are probably based on misinterpretation of the real latitude or
extent of certain key trends. In other words, some of the scholarly research in political
communication that has led to critics’ alarm seems too focused on the distortions pro-
duced by the “media-politics complex” in the United States and tends to infer from the
U.S. experience that there is a global decline of democratic institutions assaulted by
intrusive media. In fact, despite general trends, the experiences of other countries have
been significantly different from the experience of the United States. Moreover, some
proponents of critical perspectives seem to have difficulty in distinguishing between
phenomena that reflect the sheer “mediatization” of politics and phenomena that raise
legitimate concerns.
Our brief account of trends in the European context shows a simple but significant
reality, that the media systems and political systems in European countries interact with
patterns that protect each from excessive influence of the other. The existence of un-
doubted media power is counterbalanced and quite often exceeded by the power of
political parties and institutions. In the European experience, there is some limited evi-
dence that politics has migrated from the old party-centered arena to party-free arenas.
But in both the old and the new arrangements, political forces still retain their monopoly
of the political game, much like in previous times.
In addition, there is no convincing evidence of the existence of a global “party of

the media,” that is, a planned organization of political consent by the news media. This
is not to deny that consent is organized through the media. To argue that the polls can
be means of manipulation of opinion does not mean that they are in all cases and in all
places. In other words, opinion trends in society can be initiated by the media and
through the media, but they find political representation only through and in political
organizations, whether they be the old parties (as the CDU-CSU and SPD in Germany
and PSF in France), the reconceived and reorganized parties (such as the Labour Party
in the United Kingdom and the DS in Italy), the newly born parties, or coalitions that
gather a number of single-issue movements. According to Zaller (1998), even “Ameri-
can politics . . . continues, as much in the past, to be dominated by political parties” (p.
1). In U.S. presidential elections, the Republican and Democratic National Conventions
are certainly events staged according to media production patterns, but the real power
game that takes place there is not in the hands of the media. So, much of the alleged
king-making power of the media is fictional. “Critics look at the press and see Super-
man when it’s really just Clark Kent,” comments Michael Schudson (1995, p. 17).
The tendency of politics to turn into a sort of mediatized politics, of parties to turn
into mediatized parties, is not going unchallenged by the existing political institutions.
In certain political systems, a number of factors strongly withstand the process, as in the
British case where, according to Blumler, Kavanagh, and Nossiter (1996), there exist
sensible signs of politics’ resistance to being absorbed by the media. This means that
certain political cultures have the capacity to hold media pressures in check and to
maintain the centrality that politics has traditionally held in a nation’s life.
Moreover, the growing hostility of many news media to political leaders and parties
is not universal, and it is countered by other evidence that shows that, at least in Europe,
the typical patterns of media-politics relations are more those of alliance than of war
(Morgan, 1990), of sacerdotal service to politics rather than pragmatic independence
from it (Blumler & Gurevitch, 1987). The several cases of harsh conflict can be seen
easily as normal dialectics in the political arena, not as rehearsals of an imminent “me-
dia dictatorship.” It is significant that cases in which governments and politicians are
implementing effective news management policies are increasing in number, including
in the United States.
Finally, if we concede that the new communication technologies may weaken po-
litical institutions’ traditional functions of socialization and organization of consent, we
should also admit two contextual processes: a diminished effectiveness of the traditional
mass media in mobilizing mass audiences (Bennett, 1998) and a weakening of the tradi-
tional editorial and critical functions and roles of the news media themselves due to the
diffusion of interactive communications and the growing preference of the news indus-
try for “instrumental journalism” (Bardoel, 1996). This evidence combines with that
previously noted to invalidate the interpretation of the trends in the political, social, and
communication worlds as indicating a possible takeover of politics by the media.
In conclusion, political systems in most liberal democracies are facing momentous
changes on the communication front that raise serious challenges to the old order. The
risks of downfall of many founding institutions, sucked in by ersatz agents of political
dynamics, are real and should not be minimized. Excessive mediatization of political
leadership and political practice, citizens forced to become consumers and spectators,
and fragmentation of political participation induced by the new information and com-
munication technologies all can distort the proper functioning of democracy. But to
maintain that we are heading toward a media-driven democracy, that is, toward the
dissolution of the primacy of politics in the polis, is an unwarranted conclusion relying

on erroneous estimates of phenomena that are simply connatural to modern politics,
largely and deeply interwoven with communication. In brief, “media politics” does not
mean “politics by the media.”
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"Mediatization" of Politics: A Challenge for Democracy?

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GIANPIETRO MAZZOLENI and WINFRIED SCHULZ

Keywords democracy, mass media, media power, mediatization, political commu-

Gianpietro Mazzoleni is Associate Professor of the Sociology of Mass Communication at the

tected from the sanction of popular will.

some common pattern of “media-driven democracy.” Instead, the concept of “mediati-

cate through the media (Cotteret, 1991).

are facing a symbiotic relationship that is characterized by a mediatization of politics

Societal Trends and Changing Political Cultures

Self-Mobilized Citizens and Volatile Voters

of their former orientation function, particularly for apolitical citizens.

The Crisis of Political Parties

Trends in the News Business and Profession

In addition, there is no convincing evidence of the existence of a global “party of

dissolution of the primacy of politics in the polis, is an unwarranted conclusion relying

In D. Nimmo & K. R. Sanders (Eds.), Handbook of political communication (pp. 467–493).

der, CO: Westview Press.

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