Mediatization of the Modern Publicity Process

Political communication research during its history of more than 100 years has been highly fixated on mass media influences on politics.1 More specifically, the dominant paradigm has centred on: (1) causal explanations of media-politics relationships; (2) micro-level phenomena; (3) isolated media and personality variables; and (4) single-country studies (Blumler, forthcoming). Jay Blumler has been passionately committed to exposing these deficits and to call for broadening the research perspective. With his own research activities, he has inspired many colleagues to pursue new directions, in particular to look at political communication in a systems perspective and to design cross-national comparative research.