Scope and objectives
The objective of the study is to analyze the attitudes, norms, and values that drive the relationship between political elites and the media and thereby detect the underlying patterns of political communication behaviors in nine Western modern democracies. The orientations of actors in political communication are conceptualized as political communication culture, which forms part of the general political culture of a country.
While a political communication culture, understood as the orientations that guide the interaction between political actors and political journalists, can generally be identified for all countries, it is nevertheless related to country specific national contexts engrained in the particula political and media systems.
It is the aim of our study to investigate the political communication culture in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Slovenia, France and Spain by surveying the relevant actors. Eventually, the aim of the study is to systematically map out the types of political communication cultures in Europe and detect similarities and differences across countries.
Research Design and Methods
Our study aims at assessing political communication cultures in nine Western European democracies. Our key hypothesis is that features of the media and political systems influence political communication culture. As we attempt to test this hypothesis for a homogenous set of countries, our study is committed to a most similar systems design (Przeworski/Teune 1970: 32), which considerably reduces the crucial problem of comparative cross-country research: many variables and few cases (Lijphart 1971; Collier 1993). Concerning the measurement of attitudes, we developed a survey instrument that allows for systematically describing and comparing the opportunity structures of political communication systems as it becomes manifest in the cognitions, evaluations, and feelings of the key actors of political communication.
As interviewees, we target the 300 most important elites of political communication at the national level, i.e. 150 politicians selected from government and political parties, and 150 political journalists from the most important media outlets. As we want to include the top decision makers from both sides, we follow a positional approach to identify elites, i.e. select the top positions within the selected organizations. Statistical data analysis using multivariate methods will be used for describing, structuring and explaining attitudes.