Mediatization of Politics

During the last few decades, the world has witnessed a dual democratic transformation. On the one hand and beginning with the fall of communism, the number of electoral democracies worldwide almost doubled between 1989 and 2011 (Freedom House, 2012). The victory of democracy and capitalism may not have marked the “end of history” (Fukuyama, 1992), but today there is no alternative political system that enjoys the same worldwide support and legitimacy as democracy (Inglehart & Welzel, 2005; Inglehart, 2003). On the other hand, many established democracies have witnessed a transformation towards increasing complexity, less deferential and increasingly critical and dissatisfied citizens (Norris, 2011), lower electoral turnout and trust in politicians and political institutions (Franklin, 2004; Norris, 1999), and increasingly autonomous, market-driven and critical media (Hallin & Mancini, 2004; Hamilton, 2004; Patterson, 1993). National political institutions and actors thus find themselves under increasing pressure from both citizens and the media, while the need to find solutions to major challenges such as global warming, rising inequalities, weak growth and increasing deficits appears both more urgent and more difficult to tackle.

The concept of “mediatization” is doing heavy duty these days at several levels of communication analysis, many spheres of communication organization and various facets of political communication. A burgeoning literature of “mediatization-in-politics” has produced well-defined, well-analyzed and research-serviceable versions of the concept (see especially Chapter 1 of this volume; Strömbäck, 2008; Strömbäck & Esser, 2009; Schulz, 2004). Major works have treated mediatization as a prime axis on which the modern political communication process revolves (Brants & Voltmer, 2011; Kriesi et al., 2013).

The rapid development of communication technology and of the products of the culture industry has brought about a worldwide phenomenon that has taken shape particularly in the decades after World War II. Known as “mediatization”, this phenomenon involves various processes, such as (a) extending human communication beyond their natural limits, (b) replacing several social activities and institutions and above all (c) obliging social actors and organizations to accommodate themselves to the logic of the media (Schulz, 2004).

New media is not a new phenomenon. Printed publications, the mass press, radio and television were new media at the time when they emerged. However, what currently is new is that the new new media is referred to by a summary term instead of a proper name as was the case with the newspaper, the radio or television.¹ The established practice of referring to new media in the plural takes into account that recent innovations brought about diverse new communication means varying with respect to their modes of production, distribution, reception and utilization. New media are characterized by “underdetermination” (Poster, 1999). Symptomatic of this situation is the plurality of terms trying to capture new media developments: “digital media”, “information and communication technology” (ICT), “computer-mediated communication”, “Internet”, “social media”, even “new new media” (Levinson, 2013). “The Internet” often serves as a term for new media, although it is in itself a “bundle of different media and modalities” with various communication characteristics and manifold conditions of use (Lievrouw & Livingstone, 2002, p. 6).

This chapter aims to analyze “mediatization” as a societal phenomenon. In particular it deals with the question of what triggers the process of mediatization, what drives the process, and what consequences result from the process. Socio-theoretical contributions to the discourse on mediatization are few and far between. For example, American sociologist John B. Thompson (1995) sees the transformation of premodern agrarian societies into the functionally differentiated social formations of the modern era as the result of capacities for accumulating, communicating and storing information. For Thompson, these capacities were (initially) provided by the printed and (later) by the electronic mass media, and it is a process he calls “mediazation” (Thompson, 1995, p. 46). Building on Thompson’s work, Hjarvard (2008) conceives of “mediatization” as a process of modernization, at the center of which the organizational, technological, and aesthetic operating mode of the media (media logic) is shaping the forms of interactions between social institutions. In this paper, we adopt a systems theory perspective to supplement some of the socio-theoretical work that has been carried out in relation to the causes and consequences of mediatization. We understand mediatization here as a supra-individual phenomenon that occurs within non-media social systems. It results from the differentiation of a media system containing its own intrinsic logic and the need for public attention expressed in other social systems.

When we want to learn about the world around us, there are basically three perceptual sources of information: personal experiences, interpersonal communication and the media (Asp, 1986). We can learn things firsthand, by communicating with other people, or by taking part of different media.

Whenever we examine the mediatization of politics, we address inherently normative and fundamental issues concerning the quality of democracy (Kriesi, 2013). So far, it seems that media system analyses at the macro level with links to democracy theory have tended to be conceptual and only rarely include empirical tests, such as analyses of media structures and content. At the same time, the empirically rich mediatization research that focuses on the media logic reflected in the media content (the third dimension of mediatization, according to Strömbäck, 2008) relies on sophisticated analyses to explain how structural features, such as the degree of media autonomy (the second dimension of mediatization), shape news coverage. However, this research tends to concentrate on finding mechanisms for specific types of news outlets and devotes less attention to the media system as a whole and the (normative) social implications of these mechanisms. For instance, although it may be possible to explain why a certain media type shows more signs of media logic over the course of time, it would also be useful to know whether this media type becomes more or less representative in the context of a specific media system over time and what this may mean for the quality of democratic debate.

If mediatization, like globalization and modernization, is a meta-process of societal change (Krotz, 2008) whereby “the media have become integrated into the operations of other social institutions [and] acquired the status of social institutions in their own right” (Hjarvard, 2008, p. 113), then, arguably, this is nowhere more evident than in contemporary election campaigns. In most Western democracies, there are reciprocal dependencies — mutual need but different goals — between media organizations and the political parties and campaign organizations that vie for votes during elections (Gurevitch & Blumler, 1990). To be sure, the nature of these interdependencies is shaped by structural and cultural features of the media and political institutions within a country (Blumler & Gurevitch, 2001; see Strömbäck & Esser, 2009, pp. 217–218 for a useful summary). However, on the whole, mediatization theorists and researchers are interested in the processes and mechanisms through which these interdependencies typically tilt over time towards the media (Strömbäck, 2008). News organizations lie at the center of interest in work on the mediatization of politics (Esser, 2013). Accordingly, in election settings, the concern is with how the media logic of commercial imperatives, professional routines and message formats not only comes to dominate the content of campaign news, but also how it gets integrated into the political logic of political rules, organizational structures and routines, and self-presentational strategies that political parties and campaign organizations must follow in order to campaign effectively (Strömbäck, 2008; Strömbäck & Esser, 2009).

This chapter analyzes the mediatization of politics at the meso level of political organizations. According to the theoretical framework of this book, our issue is located on the fourth dimension of mediatization, “the degree to which political actors are governed by a political logic or by media logic” (Strömbäck, 2008, p. 234; see also Strömbäck & Dimitrova, 2011). Our theoretical argument will challenge the idea of a single and homogenous media logic and of a clear dichotomy of political “versus” media logic. Instead, we want to argue that political organizations are influenced by a diversity of political as well as media logics. To develop our argument, we will first discuss what kind of actors political organizations like parties and interest groups are and what we can learn about them from organizational theories. Secondly, we will propose that we should broaden our scope by natural and open system views of organizations. Thirdly, we will reformulate the concept of mediatization at an organizational and institutional level. Fourthly, we will present some empirical results from surveys of party and interest-group organizations to illustrate our theoretical argumentation.

Agenda-setting is one of the most influential theories on the media’s political influence (Graber, 2005). While often focusing on the media’s impact on public opinion, another equally important facet of agenda-setting theory has the media’s influence over the agendas of political actors and policy makers as its central object of investigation. Scholars use the term “political agenda-setting” and in some instances “agenda-building” to refer to the transfer of media priorities to political priorities. Despite the growing popularity and importance of political agenda-setting research, it has seldom been conceptualized as part of or related to the mediatization of politics.

As stated in the Introduction, the twofold purpose of this book is first to bring together state-of-the-art chapters on the mediatization of politics, thereby assessing what we know and providing a framework for further research; and second to move research on the mediatization of politics forward towards a more fully developed theory. For this reason, we invited leading scholars in this field to comment in their chapters on basic and more advanced questions and to develop various topics and perspectives. The scope in content and the depth of analysis of their contributions underscore the many different ways in which mediatization research can augment the literature of political communication and how stimulating the impulses are that it evokes.