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Democracy and the Media: A Comparative Perspective. Edited by Richard Gunther and Anthony Mughan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 496p. $85.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.
Media and the Presidentialization of Parliamentary Elections. By Anthony Mughan. New York: Palgrave, 2000. 179p. $65.00.
Margaret Scammell, London School of Economics
The themes of crisis and transformation have fueled a miniexplosion of research on media and democracy in the last decade. Researchers within or close to the "media studies" school have developed a burgeoning literature on questions of citizenship and the public sphere, in the context of deregulation, expanding media markets, and rising interest in the arguments of the deliberative democrats. Scholars more closely connected to political science have pursued an overlapping but different agenda. From the United States and western Europe, amid concern at signs of a crisis of citizen engagement, the focus increasingly is on media power to mobilize or demobilize voters. From Eastern and central Europe and Latin America there is an emerging corpus on the role of media in the transition and consolidation of democracy. Cross-cutting these various strands are the Internet revolution and the question of globalization and, more specifically, U.S. potency to lead or at least predict trends in political communication for the democratic world.
Mughan and Gunther's edited collection is a substantial contribution to these more identifiably political science themes. With the one notable, if understandable, absence of the Internet, the book brings together admirably the concerns of established and establishing democracies. A strong cast of scholars analyzes the contemporary contribution of media to democracy in 10 countries: the United States (Thomas Patterson), Japan (Ellis Krauss), the United Kingdom (Holli Semetko), Germany (Max Kaase), The Netherlands (Cees van der Eijk), Spain (Günther et al.), Italy (Carlo Marletti and Franca Roncarolo), Russia (Ellen Mickiewicz), Hungary (Miklós Sükösd), and Chile (Eugenio Tironi and Guillermo Sunkel). The various individual parts are knitted together by Mughan and Gunther's introductory and concluding chapters. They establish the organizing principle, which is to combine micro-level analysis of media impact in specific circumstances and elections with a macro focus on media systems and their inferences for the distribution of power.
Comparative volumes usually work best when a clear overarching hypothesis is tested against the experience of the individual cases (for example,...