Comparative Political Communication Research: The Undiminished Relevance of the Beginnings

Jay Blumler deserves credit for introducing the comparative approach to the communication discipline. He and his long-time colleague, Michael Gurevitch, described comparative communication research as ‘an extending frontier of the field that deserves yet more intensive cultivation’ (Blumler and Gurevitch, 1995, p. 73). Their early pleadings have borne fruit, and the comparative approach has now extended to many subfields of the communication discipline, as the recent publication of the ICA Handbook of Comparative Research demonstrates (Esser and Hanitzsch, 2012a). Originally labelled as being in its ‘infancy’ (Blumler and Gurevitch, 1975), the state of comparative analysis has now reached ‘late adolescence’ (Gurevitch and Blumler, 2004). Although it has not yet attained mature adulthood (Mancini and Hallin, 2012), one may agree with Hardy’s assessment that comparative communication research has advanced significantly, and is producing ‘a common body of knowledge, theories and concepts’ (2012, p. 202). Uninformed comparison by convenience is becoming less and less defendable. Although comparative research has made more progress in some subject areas than in others (see Esser and Hanitzsch, 2012a), we are observing the gradual emergence of comparative communications as a recognized subdiscipline, comparable to comparative politics in political science.