Ludger helms media and politics

Ludger Helms

Governing in the Media Age:The Impact of the Mass Media onExecutive Leadership in ContemporaryDemocracies1

ALTHOUGH POLITICAL RESEARCH ON MEDIA ISSUES REMAINS RATHER

patchy compared with the volume of research on other intermediaryinstitutions, such as parties or interest groups, it is now widelyacknowledged that realistic perspectives on the political process inthe contemporary advanced democracies cannot ignore the massmedia. Scholars following political developments in different estab-lished democracies agree that politics has become ‘mediated’,2 andthat the news media have acquired the status of genuinely politicalactors or institutions.3 That said, advances in researching the media,and their roles in politics, have been rather uneven. Given thenotable general interest in the ‘medialization’ of political leaders andleadership in contemporary democracies, it marks a curiosity thatmass media effects on executive leadership have largely failed toattract a reasonable amount of scholarly attention, as is being under-

1 A previous draft of this paper was written while the author was a Visiting Fellowat the Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo, Japan, early in 2006. The uniquehospitality of the Institute and the generous financial support of the German ResearchCouncil that made this visit possible are gratefully acknowledged. Thanks are also dueto the anonymous referees of this journal. All remaining errors are the sole responsi-bility of the author.

2 W. Lance Bennett and Robert M. Entman (eds), Mediated Politics, Cambridge,Cambridge University Press, 2001.

3 Paolo Mancini and David L. Swanson, ‘Politics, Media, and Modern Democracy:Introduction’, in David L. Swanson and Paolo Mancini (eds), Politics, Media, andModern Democracy, New York, Praeger, 1996, p. 11; Timothy E. Cook, Governing with theNews. The News Media as a Political Institution, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1998;Michael Schudson, ‘The News Media as Political Institutions’, Annual Review of PoliticalScience, 5 (2002), pp. 249–69.

Government and Opposition, Vol. 43, No. 1, pp. 26–54, 2008doi:10.1111/j.1477-7053.2007.00242.x

© The Author 2008. Journal compilation © 2008 Government and Opposition LtdPublished by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 MainStreet, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

scored by the conspicuous absence of this issue in recent surveys ofpolitical research on politics and the mass media.4

This is not to say that issues concerning the possible effects of themass media on governance and leadership in the advanced democ-racies have completely stayed off the research agenda of comparativegovernment and politics. It is in fact even possible to identify somekind of a dominant paradigm of understanding the role of the massmedia in relation to governments and within the leadership process.While the mass media have been occasionally described as potentialveto players that can effectively constrain the leverage of govern-ments,5 the mainstream perception of government–mass media rela-tions in the West European parliamentary democracies has been onethat considers the media as powerful catalysts of a gradual con-centration of political power in the hands of governments and chiefexecutives more particularly. The remarkably popular ‘presidential-ization’ thesis in comparative executive research marks only the mostrecent interpretation of the current state of governance and leader-ship in the contemporary parliamentary democracies that buildsstrongly on the changing role and the increased impact of the mediawithin the democratic process.6 It has been accompanied by ‘grandnarratives’ in recent media history, which consider the historicalevolution of the relationship between governments and the mass

4 See John Street, ‘Politics Lost, Politics Transformed, Politics Colonised? Theoriesof the Impact of Mass Media’, Political Studies Review, 3 (2005), pp. 17–33; and JohnCorner and Piers Robinson, ‘Politics and Mass Media: A Response to John Street’,Political Studies Review, 4 (2006), pp. 48–54. Also, in an extensive review of the morerecent literature on media effects written by a team of American scholars, ‘effects onpoliticians and policy makers’ are tackled on less than a full page; see Douglas M.McLeod, Gerald M. Kosicki and Jack M. McLeod, ‘Resurveying the Boundaries ofPolitical Communication Effects’, in Jennings Bryant and Dolf Zillmann (eds), MediaEffects. Advances in Theory and Research, 2nd edn, Mahwah, NJ, Lawrence ErlbaumAssociates, 2002, p. 267.

5 In countries as different as Japan and Germany, the mass media have beenidentified as veritable functional equivalents of a powerful opposition party. See EllisS. Krauss, ‘The Mass Media and Japanese Politics: Effects and Consequences’, in SusanJ. Pharr and Ellis S. Krauss (eds), Media and Politics in Japan, Honolulu, University ofHawai’i Press, 1996, p. 360; Ralf Dahrendorf, ‘Regierungen ohne Opposition’, Süd-deutsche Zeitung, 14 November 2002, p. 2.

6 Thomas Poguntke and Paul Webb (eds), The Presidentialization of Politics: A Com-parative Study of Modern Democracies, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press,2005.

27GOVERNING IN THE MEDIA AGE

© The Author 2008. Journal compilation © 2008 Government and Opposition Ltd

media in liberal democracies to have been marked by a graduallyincreasing ability of governments to manage the media, transformingthe latter into ‘fundamental tools of liberal democratic governance’.7

This article seeks to reconsider the issue of mass media effects ongovernments, leaders and the leadership process from an interna-tionally comparative perspective. Cross-national comparative inquiryin media research tends to be viewed with notable suspicion. Indeed,comparativists studying the political roles of the media have beenfaced with stricter methodological, theoretical and empirical stan-dards, and reservations, than scholars in many other fields ofcomparative politics. There is widespread scepticism among mediascholars even against studies focusing on a single country. Its propo-nents have argued that only case studies on individual decisions,rather than countries, are useful in determining whether, how and towhat extent the media matter in terms of politics and policy.8 This isno doubt a valid point. That said, it is obvious that case studies thatare both extremely detailed and correspondingly limited in focus areneeded most when it comes to refining our knowledge of the role ofthe mass media in political decision-making, and their effect onexecutive leadership more particularly. As things stand, though, wehave only just begun to identify some of the most fundamental ele-ments of the government–mass media relationship. Thus it wouldappear to be more appropriate and rewarding to adopt a broaderperspective on an issue whose centrality for a deeper understandingof the current state of governance and leadership in the establisheddemocracies cannot seriously be denied.

Though this piece’s primary aim is not to make a theoreticalcontribution, some brief remarks on its theoretical basis would notseem to go amiss. In liberal democracies, both governments and themass media are actors that can act freely, but they do so within theexisting institutional parameters that create specific opportunities

7 P. Eric Louw, The Media and Political Process, London, Sage, 2005, ch. 3, p. 54.8 Sonia Livingstone, ‘On the Challenges of Cross-National Comparative Media

Research’, European Journal of Communication, 18 (2003), pp. 477–500; see also MichaelGurevitch and Jay Blumler, ‘The State of the Art of Comparative Political Communi-cation Research’, in Frank Esser and Barbara Pfetsch (eds), Comparing Political Com-munication. Theories, Cases, and Challenges, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,2004, pp. 325–43.

28 GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION


and constraints and shape actors’ preferences and strategic choices.9

While institutions provide stability, they are not static. Generally, thepotential for actor-driven institutional change will be greatest in theimmediate institutional environment of an actor. Often, however,the forces driving institutional change within a given sector arelocated outside that sector. In the established democracies, mostmanifestations of formal institutional (and in particular constitu-tional) change across the political system originate from legislativereforms to be initiated and enacted by elected governments. Courtsare another powerful initiator of formal institutional change indifferent sectors of politics and society. However, cross-sectoral in-stitutional change is an exceptionally complex process, and the insti-tutions of government can, if often less directly, effectively be alteredby actors from outside the group of constitutionally acknowledgedactors. More specifically, there is ample evidence that the media havehad a rather powerful effect on the organizational evolution of execu-tive branches.10

Many of the most important aspects of mass media effects onpolitical leadership in the established democracies relate to the worldof informal institutions, though. Informal institutions comprise ahost of different phenomena, such as values, behavioural rules andpatterns of interaction. Unlike their formal counterparts, informalinstitutions can be neither enforced nor abolished by law. However,this makes them not necessarily less important or less powerful.Informal institutions (re)define and specify functional roles of actorsand relationships between actors within and across different sectorsof the political system.11 One final aspect to be highlighted in this

9 This is the essence of actor-centred institutionalism as suggested by Fritz W.Scharpf, Games Real Actors Play: Actor-Centered Institutionalism in Policy Research, Boulder,CO, Westview Press, 1997.

10 Indeed, many changes in executive organization came about in response tochanging external pressures, including in particular those produced by the media. Forthe USA, see Stephen Hess with James P. Pfiffner, Organizing the Presidency, 3rd edn,Washington, DC, Brookings Institution Press, 2002; for Britain, Dennis Kavanagh andAnthony Seldon, The Powers Behind the Prime Minister, London, HarperCollins, 2000; fora comparative perspective, B. Guy Peters, R. A. W. Rhodes and Vincent Wright (eds),Administering the Summit: Administration of the Core Executive in Developed Countries,London, Macmillan, 2000.

11 Gretchen Helmke and Steven Levitsky, ‘Informal Institutions and ComparativePolitics: A Research Agenda’, Perspectives on Politics, 2 (2004), pp. 725–39.



context is the triangular nature of political communication. Whereasaccounts of government–mass media relations, or the impact of themedia on governments and governmental leaders, may focus on oneor both of these two actors for analytical reasons, there is always athird actor involved – the public, without which the very concept ofpolitical communication in representative democracies is inconceiv-able. Indeed, in democratic regimes the bulk of actions of, andinteractions between, governments and the mass media are ulti-mately driven by considerations relating to the public. While bothgovernments and the media have a natural interest in reaching thepublic and influence the public agenda, they consider and addressthe public from different angles, as voters or customers. But citizensare bound to combine these roles and may not always be able, or evenwilling, to distinguish strictly between the different worlds they areliving in. This creates a huge challenge for all actors involved inpolitical communication, yet the implications are particularly seriousfor governments seeking to strike a balance between democraticresponsiveness and leadership.

The following sections proceed to explore the impact of themass media on executive leadership in the contemporary establisheddemocracies of North America and Western Europe. The generalhypothesis advanced in this article is a straightforward one: whileskilful political leaders and their supporters may at times be able touse the media as a means for their political ends,12 there is moreevidence from a comparative inquiry that the media add to themanifold constraints on executives and executive leadership in thecontemporary Western democracies, making leadership (even) moredifficult than in the past.

THE BASIC INSTITUTIONAL PARAMETERS

Any serious inquiry into media effects on executive leadership has tostart with a brief consideration of the key institutional parameters at

12 Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and François Mitterrand are among thosewho have been widely considered to represent prime examples of leaders with anexceptional ability ‘to exploit the new dynamics of media-driven politics’; Gillian Peele,‘Leadership and Politics: A Case for a Closer Relationship?’, Leadership, 1 (2005),p. 191.



the level of political and media systems. At the political systems level,the single most important institutional divide remains that betweenparliamentary and presidential systems.13 Although this distinctionrefers essentially to the relationship between the executive and thelegislature (‘fusion of powers’ vs. ‘separation of powers’), there isample evidence suggesting that parliamentary and presidentialsystems do by no means differ only with regard to the basic param-eters and manifestations of executive–legislative relations. They alsocreate specific incentives and constraints within the wider politicalprocess that tend to have a strong bearing on the overall logic andstructure of policy-making under parliamentary and presidential gov-ernment.14 This would appear to remain a valid contention, thoughrecent works, especially by authors drawing on the veto playertheorem, suggest that the parliamentary/presidential divide mayhave somewhat less determining power than previously believed.15

There have been other attempts designed to cope with the enor-mous institutional variety of liberal democracies. Among the morerelevant ones worth noting in our context are works seeking toclassify different systems according to the strength of the chief execu-tive within the executive branch. In a major study by Thomas Baylis,

13 See Arend Lijphart, Parliamentary versus Presidential Government, Oxford, OxfordUniversity Press, 1992. Within the family of established liberal democracies, the UnitedStates has remained the only uncontested case of presidential government, whereas allWest European countries (except Switzerland) belong to the rather heterogeneousgroup of parliamentary systems of government. There has been growing consensus inthe more recent literature that the coexistence of a directly elected president with aparliamentary responsible prime minister (which marks several of the West Europeandemocracies) should be considered an institutional variation within the group ofparliamentary regimes, rather than an independent ‘semi-presidential’ type of repre-sentative government. See Alan Siaroff, ‘Comparative Presidencies: The Inadequacy ofthe Presidential, Semi-Presidential and Parliamentary Distinction’, European Journal ofPolitical Research, 42 (2003), pp. 287–312.

14 See Alfred Stepan and Cindy Skach, ‘Constitutional Frameworks and Demo-cratic Consolidation: Parliamentarism versus Presidentialism’, World Politics, 46 (1993),pp. 1–22; Juan Linz and Arturo Valenzuela (eds), The Failure of Presidential Democracy.Vol. 1: Comparative Perspectives, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994; FredW. Riggs, ‘Presidentialism versus Parliamentarism: Implications for Representativenessand Legitimacy’, International Political Science Review, 18 (1997), pp. 253–78.

15 George Tsebelis, Veto Players: How Political Institutions Work, Princeton, PrincetonUniversity Press, 2002.



executives were ranked according to the degree of collegiality gov-erning intra-executive relationships between different members ofthe political executive.16 Not surprisingly, this list was headed by theUS president, who enjoys an amount of control within the executivebranch that is unmatched even by the powerful prime ministers ofWestminster-type parliamentary democracies. Other works focusedmore specifically on the classification of West European prime min-isters. In an important paper published in the mid-1990s, AnthonyKing distinguished between prime ministers holding a weak, amedium-strong or a strong position within the executive branch oftheir respective country.17 According to King’s classifications, thegroup of countries with a powerful chief executive includes, amongothers, Britain, Germany and Spain. That with medium-strong primeministers comprises many of the smaller countries, such as Austria,Belgium, Denmark and Sweden, whereas the third category of coun-tries accommodating comparatively weak prime ministers is consid-ered to include Italy, Norway and the Netherlands.18 France – inmany ways Western Europe’s most fascinating major democracy – hasbeen excluded from King’s assessment (and from other comparativeinquiries such as that conducted by O’Malley) for the obvious prob-lems caused by the ‘semi-presidential’ feature of the Fifth FrenchRepublic’s constitutional structure. The resources available to theFrench president and prime minister depend very much on whichparty or coalition holds the majority in the French National Assem-bly. Whereas during times of ‘unified government’, French presi-dents enjoy a tremendous amount of power, ‘cohabitation presidents’

16 Thomas C. Baylis, Governing by Committee: Collegial Leadership in Advanced Societies,Albany, State University of New York Press, 1989, p. 147.

17 Anthony King, ‘“Chief Executives” in Western Europe’, in Ian Budge and DavidMcKay (eds), Developing Democracy. Comparative Research in Honour of J.F.P. Blondel,London, Sage, 1994, p. 153. It should be noted that the focus of this evaluation ison systemic properties (including the constitutional powers of office and the basicpolitical variables) rather than on the much more volatile power basis of individualoffice holders.

18 There have been more recent attempts to evaluate the power of prime ministers,including an expert survey focusing on the power of prime ministers within thepolicy-making process. See Eoin O’Malley, ‘The Power of Prime Ministers: Results ofan Expert Survey’, International Political Science Review, 28 (2007), pp. 1–27. The rela-tionship between King’s assessments and those produced by O’Malley’s countryexperts has been notably strong, with significantly differing assessments being con-fined to a small number of cases, such as Ireland and the Netherlands in particular.



are relatively weak political players, losing much of their power to theprime minister (who otherwise is often little more than the presi-dent’s ‘chief enforcer’).19

To the extent that executive leadership is understood to be aboutboth giving direction to the executive and providing leadership inthe wider political process, assessments of the institutional para-meters of leadership may not meaningfully be confined to the execu-tive territory. Systems differ from one another with regard to theoverall number and strength of counter-majoritarian institutions(such as powerful second chambers, constitutional courts or inde-pendent central banks) designed to constrain the power of the execu-tive within the political process.20 More recent works have drawnattention to the fact that there is no natural correlation betweenpower-concentrating executive structures and the scope of the chiefexecutive in the wider political process.21 There are, in particular,countries in which a largely monocratic executive structure coexistswith a set of exceptionally powerful institutional constraints on the

19 David S. Bell, Presidential Power in Fifth Republic France, Oxford, Berg, 2000; RobertElgie, ‘“Cohabitation”: Divided Government French-Style’, in Robert Elgie (ed.),Divided Government in Comparative Perspective, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp.106–26; Jack Hayward and Vincent Wright, Governing from the Centre: Core ExecutiveCoordination in France, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003.

20 For an empirical overview of the different patterns of constitutional veto playersto be found in the established democracies see Manfred G. Schmidt, ‘The Impact ofPolitical Parties, Constitutional Structures and Veto Players on Public Policy’, in HansKeman (ed.), Comparative Democratic Politics, London, Sage, 2002, p. 178, table 8.2. Onthis basis, Schmidt distinguishes between ‘sovereign democracies’ and ‘semi-sovereigndemocracies’, which differ from one another in terms of constitutional and otherinstitutional constraints on democratic majorities and democratically elected govern-ments. Note that this differentiation is not a neat equivalent of the more influentialdistinction between majoritarian and consensus democracies suggested by ArendLijphart, Patterns of Democracy, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1999, that hasbeen readily adopted by scholars studying the institutional determinants of actors’political communication strategies in different national contexts; see Hanspeter Kriesi,‘Strategic Political Communication. Mobilizing Public Opinion in “Audience Democ-racies”’, in Esser and Pfetsch, Comparing Political Communication, pp. 201–2. The differ-ent character of the two indices becomes manifest in particular in the competingclassifications of the United States which may be considered either a classic example ofmajoritarian democracy or a power-sharing polity.

21 See Ludger Helms, Presidents, Prime Ministers and Chancellors: Executive Leadershipin Western Democracies, London and New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, pp. 11–15,table 1.2.



executive at the wider political system’s level. The prototype of thisspecific combination is obviously the United States – leading onescholar to characterize the American president as ‘a semi-sovereignprince’.22 In this regard, Germany clearly is the United States’ nearestequivalent among the parliamentary democracies of WesternEurope.23

The media systems of the established democracies are no lessdiverse than their respective constitutional orders, even though thishas attracted very little scholarly attention until recently. Somewhatironically, the notable hesitation of mainstream media scholarshipin acknowledging important cross-national differences has to someextent been approved by the historical dynamics of internationalmedia development. There has, in fact, been a more recent trendtowards convergence that moved many West European systems closerto the American model24 – whose key components include a clearlydominant position of a commercial press over other forms of pressorganization, the largely unchallenged prevalence of commercialbroadcasting, a high level of professionalization of journalism and astrong tradition of ‘fact-centred’ reporting, a limited amount of stateintervention in the media sector as well as a structural position of the

22 Sergio Fabbrini, ‘The Semi-Sovereign American Prince: The Dilemma of anIndependent President in a Presidential Government’, in Poguntke and Webb, ThePresidentialization of Politics, pp. 313–35.

23 Ludger Helms, ‘The Changing Chancellorship: Resources and ConstraintsRevisited’, German Politics, 10 (2001), pp. 155–68; for a comparative perspective, seealso Ludger Helms, Executive Leadership and the Role of ‘Veto Players’ in the United States andGermany, Working Paper No. 03.02, Program for the Study of Germany and Europe,Center for European Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 2003.

24 This marks one among several important theses developed and substantiated byDaniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini in their path-breaking comparative study on thehistorical evolution and change of Western media systems. See Daniel C. Hallin andPaolo Mancini, Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics, Cambridge,Cambridge University Press, 2004. It should be noted, however, that the authors do notidentify a purely unidirectional process of convergence. Whereas the more dominantmove has been towards ‘Americanization’, there have been several traces of ‘Europe-anization’ in the United States, including, for example, the belated emergence ofnationwide American newspapers. For a more detailed reconsideration of the ‘Ameri-canization’ thesis from a British perspective see also Jay G. Blumler and MichaelGurevitch, ‘“Americanization” Reconsidered: U.K.–U.S. Campaign CommunicationComparisons Across Time’, in Lance Bennett and Entman, Mediated Politics, pp. 380–403.



media that tends to be institutionally separate from political partiesand other organized political groups.

Manifestations of limited convergence notwithstanding, crucialdifferences persist not only between the media systems of the UnitedStates and the countries of Western Europe, but also between WestEuropean democracies. They relate to the quantitative level of presscirculation, the structure of the ‘press landscape’, the role and powerof commercial broadcasting in relation to public broadcasting, theextent of government control of the media, the degree of journalisticprofessionalism, and the amount of media autonomy from politicalparties and other public and private actors. The specific combinationof these (and several other) indicators in the Western democraciesled Hallin and Mancini to distinguish between three models of mediaand politics: a ‘Mediterranean or Polarized Pluralist Model’ (associ-ated with the comparatively young West European democracies ofSpain, Portugal and Greece, but also including Italy and, though withcertain qualifications, France), a ‘North/Central European or Demo-cratic Corporatist Model’ (considered to include Scandinavia and thethree mainly German-speaking countries of continental Europe, aswell as the Low Countries) and a ‘North Atlantic or Liberal Model’(including the United States, Canada, Britain and Ireland).25

It would appear useful to complement the picture drawn by Hallinand Mancini by also taking into account the regional proliferation ofthe internet in different countries. Much has been written about theso-called ‘digital divide’, i.e. the starkly differing proportions of citi-zens enjoying access to the internet in developed and developingcountries.26 The magnitude of the global North–South divide should,however, not blind us to the significant differences that exist withregard to the distribution of the internet amongst different economi-cally advanced and politically consolidated liberal democracies.According to recent surveys,27 the average proportion of internet

25 Hallin and Mancini, Comparing Media Systems.26 See, for example, Pippa Norris, Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information

Poverty and the Internet Worldwide, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2001. For acritique of the ‘digital divide’ paradigm, which has been considered to be misleadinglystatic, see Richard Rose, ‘A Global Diffusion Model of e-Governance’, Journal of PublicPolicy, 25 (2005), pp. 5–27.

27 The figures presented here are drawn from www.internetworldstats.com/stats2.htm#north and www.internetworldstats.com/stats9.htm#eu, accessed on 19August 2007.



http://www.internetworldstats.com

http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats9.htm#eu

users, as of June 2007, was exceptionally high throughout most ofScandinavia (especially in Iceland, 86.3 per cent, and Sweden, 75.6per cent) and, perhaps surprisingly, in Portugal (73.8 per cent).Figures for the United States and Canada hover in the high 60s (69.7and 67.8 per cent respectively). Further down the ladder are coun-tries such as the UK (62.3 per cent) and Germany (61.1 per cent).Overall, the figures largely frustrate ambitions to identify coherentregional clusters. For example, while the average score for theBenelux countries is 63.5 per cent, a difference of almost 25 percent-age points separates Belgium and the Netherlands from each other.Even shared borders combined with obvious parallels in recentdemocratization history and roughly similar levels of economic per-formance apparently do not lead to similar internet infrastructures.Whereas Portugal had a score of almost 75 per cent in mid-2007, thefigure for neighbouring Spain was less than 44 per cent. Arguably,the most striking feature is, however, to be seen in the marked dividethat separates the majority of North European countries from mostRomanian countries. Whereas the average score of the five Scandi-navian states was well above 70 per cent, internet users in countriessuch as France, Italy and Spain accounted for just above 50 per centof the population in 2007.

The regional patterns of internet distribution described appar-ently do not fit exactly into the three categories of countries con-strued by Hallin and Mancini. While one might expect to find thegreatest proportion of internet users within the countries represent-ing the ‘North Atlantic or Liberal Model’, the average score for theAnglo-Saxon democracies is actually slightly lower than that forthe ‘North/Central European or Democratic Corporatist’ countries.Also, with the notable exception of Portugal, the traditionally lowlevel of newspaper circulation and readership within the countriesrepresenting the ‘Mediterranean or Polarized Pluralist Model’ is byno means compensated for by a particularly high degree of ‘internetdensity’. By contrast, there is a rather strong correlation betweenhigh newspaper sales and a large share of internet users across coun-tries, with the Scandinavian countries heading both ranking tables.

More importantly, what this stocktaking exercise also reveals is thatthe classifications of individual countries suggested by comparativemedia systems research and comparative executive research sharelittle common ground. There is, in particular, a notable amount ofincongruence with regard to the key features of countries’ executive



structures and institutional properties, and the defining characteris-tics of their media systems. For example, the group of countries withpowerful prime ministers (Britain, Ireland, Germany, Spain andGreece) includes cases from all three of Hallin’s and Mancini’s cat-egories, though it may be noted that all countries representing the‘North Atlantic or Liberal Model’ (the United States, Canada, Britainand Ireland) accommodate rather powerful chief executives. There isalso no clear-cut correlation between the type of media system andthe number and strength of constitutional veto players to be foundwithin a country. ‘Semi-sovereign democracies’28 (systems with par-ticularly powerful institutional checks against majority rule, such asthe United States, Germany, Switzerland and Italy) can be found ineach of the three categories distinguished by Hallin and Mancini.

Needless to say, such mapping of some of the basic institutionalfeatures of different democratic regimes constitutes only the firststep towards a comparative assessment of the altering conditions ofexecutive leadership in the contemporary established democracies.The challenge is about grasping the complex interdependenciesthat mark government–mass media relations in different settings.Building on the previous observations, the next sections revisit theprevailing assessments of mass media effects in light of the im-portant cross-national differences between contemporary Westerndemocracies.

MASS MEDIA EFFECTS ON EXECUTIVE LEADERS AND LEADERSHIPIN CONTEMPORARY DEMOCRACIES REVISITED

In the more recent debate on the changing nature of democraticgovernance and leadership, the modern mass media, and televisionin particular, have been identified as the key protagonists behind thewidely attested tendency towards growing personalization in politics.Narrow notions of personalization relate to the changing structure ofelectoral campaigns and the electoral process. The impact of indi-vidual leaders’ personality on voting behaviour is considered to haveincreased significantly, which is attributed chiefly, though not exclu-sively, to the strongly personality-centred approach of contemporary

28 Schmidt, ‘The Impact of Political Parties’, p. 178.



media reporting on politics and electoral campaigns.29 Those advo-cating wider conceptions of personalization have contended that thepossible effects of ‘electoral personalization’ – such as the accumula-tion of personality-related political legitimacy in the hands of thesuccessful top candidate in particular – are not necessarily confinedto the electoral process, but may be carried over from the electoral tothe decision-making arena.

Power-boosting effects of media-induced personalization areassumed to exist both at the level of core executive decision-makingand in the wider political process. Electorally successful leaders areexpected to enjoy a particularly large amount of loyalty, and to fostercompliance, among their senior fellows within the executive branch,if only because the chief executive’s political success and sustainedpopularity with the electorate is deemed vital to the party’s continu-ous hold on power.30 In parts of the literature, personalization hasbeen considered more specifically to form a key component of ‘presi-dentialization’31 – a concept that is obviously based on the assump-tion that a high degree of personality centredness is part and parcelof the electoral and decision-making processes in the United States.

Overall, empirical evidence supporting these hypotheses hasremained rather thin on the ground.32 In what continues to be themost rigorous study on the subject to date, authors found preciouslittle evidence to support notions of ‘electoral presidentialization’ in

29 For a concise overview of different approaches see Anthony King, ‘Do Leaders’Personalities Really Matter?’, in Anthony King (ed.), Leaders’ Personalities and the Out-comes of Democratic Elections, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 1–44.

30 Michael Foley, The Rise of the British Presidency, Manchester, Manchester Univer-sity Press, 1993, p. 278.

31 See on this the groundbreaking study by Anthony Mughan, Media and the Presi-dentialization of Parliamentary Elections, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. ‘Electoralpresidentialization’, as described by Mughan, reappears in the work of Poguntke andWebb as ‘the electoral face of presidentialization’; see Thomas Poguntke and PaulWebb, ‘The Presidentialization of Politics in Democratic Societies: A Framework forAnalysis’, in Poguntke and Webb, The Presidentialization of Politics, pp. 10–11.

32 Even Poguntke and Webb in their conclusion readily acknowledge that theassumption of strong direct electoral effects of individual leaders ‘is probably theleast convincing aspect of the presidentialization thesis’. Paul Webb and ThomasPoguntke, ‘The Presidentialization of Contemporary Democratic Politics: Evidence,Causes, and Consequences’, in Poguntke and Webb, The Presidentialization of Politics,p. 345.



any of the countries covered.33 Perhaps most importantly, the findingssuggest that even US presidential elections are only rarely decided bythe performance and electoral appeal of individual candidates.34

Insights from empirical research have been complemented by morerecent developments in the electoral arenas of several West Europeanparliamentary democracies. In Britain, Labour won a third term in2005 largely despite, rather than because of, the ‘Blair effect’.35 Theparliamentary elections in Germany, Italy and Austria, held betweenSeptember 2005 and October 2006 respectively, were won by partiesled by top candidates (Angela Merkel, Romano Prodi and AlfredGusenbauer) who were judged by many as being strikingly uncharis-matic. Even though all three countries witnessed the introduction ofAmerican-style live televised showdowns between the incumbent headof government and his direct challenger for office more recently,there has remained scarce, if any, hard evidence for a decisive impactby the top candidates on the electoral result. In Germany, opinion polldata gathered during the run-up to the 2005 Bundestag electionrevealed that only 19 per cent of the electorate considered the chan-cellor question to be more important than the party composition ofthe government, whereas 72 per cent found the party compositionof the government more important than the chancellor candidate.Moreover, a majority of those following the television duel of 2September 2005 agreed that the incumbent chancellor, GerhardSchröder, had won the direct confrontation – which did not save himand his government from electoral defeat later the same month.36

Given the notably scarce evidence of a direct and decisive effect ofindividual leaders in the electoral process, it comes as no surprise thatthere have been few, if any, compelling examples of chief executivesbeing able to enhance significantly their decision-making powerwithin the executive territory on the basis of a powerful personalmandate. In neither of the two countries covered in the volume

33 See King, Leaders’ Personalities and the Outcomes of Democratic Elections.34 Larry M. Bartels, ‘The Impact of Candidate Traits in American Presidential

Elections’, in King, Leaders’ Personalities and the Outcomes of Democratic Elections,pp. 44–69.

35 Peter Kellner, ‘Clearing the Fog: What Really Happened in the 2005 ElectionCampaign’, Political Quarterly, 75 (2005), pp. 327–9.

36 Forschungsgruppe Wahlen e.V., Bundestagswahl. Eine Analyse der Wahl vom 18.September 2005, Berichte der Forschungsgruppe Wahlen e.V., 122, Mannheim, 2005,pp. 25–8, 45.



by Poguntke and Webb that stand out as representing the highestdegree of presidentialization within the executive branch in terms ofpower-concentration (Canada) or having experienced the strongesttrend towards presidentialization (Finland) respectively, does ‘elec-toral presidentialization’ appear to have been the major drivingforce.37 Even the case of Italy, widely accepted to mark the ultimateexample of a dramatic increase of chief executive power essentiallycaused by a media-driven personalization of the electoral and widerpolitical process, can hardly be accepted at face value. To be sure, thespectacular political career of Silvio Berlusconi, who managed tobecome the country’s longest-serving prime minister after 1945through his five-year hold on the premiership between 2001 and2006, cannot be imagined without the prominent role of powerfulsections of the Italian mass media supporting his cause. However, theconditions allowing the unlikely emergence of prime ministerial gov-ernment in Italy have been much more complex. The developmentsthat can be observed since the mid-1990s would certainly not havebeen possible without the previous breakdown of the old system of‘partitocrazia’, which left a political vacuum to be filled by a figure likeBerlusconi and his entourage.38 As Mauro Calise has rightly empha-sized in his succinct account of the dynamics driving the gradualtransformation of Italian core executive governance, though, the keyfactors at work also included a series of important organizationalreforms at the heart of the Italian executive. The newly createdgeneral secretariat of the president of the council of ministers (as theItalian Constitution refers to the prime minister) marks only the mostvisible product of this multifaceted reform process, designed to

37 As Bakvis and Wolinetz maintain, ‘the basis for labelling the Canadian system aspresidentialized . . . can be found . . . in the political rather than the electoral face ofthe phenomenon.’ Herman Bakvis and Steven B. Wolinetz, ‘Canada: Executive Domi-nance and Presidentialization’, in Poguntke and Webb, The Presidentialization of Politics,p. 217. In Finland, the major constitutional reform of the late 1990s clearly stands outas the key factor responsible for the rise of prime ministerial government. See HeikkiPaloheimo, ‘Finland: Let the Force Be with the Leader – But Who is the Leader?’, inPoguntke and Webb, The Presidentialization of Politics, pp. 246–68; see also JaakkoNousiainen, ‘From Semi-presidentialism to Parliamentary Government: Political andConstitutional Developments in Finland’, Scandinavian Political Studies, 24 (2001),pp. 95–109.

38 Guiseppe Gangemi and Gianni Riccamboni (eds), Le elezione delle transizione. Ilsistema politico italiano alle prova del voto 1994–1996, Turin, UTET, 1997; Paul Ginsborg,Silvio Berlusconi: Television, Power and Patrimony, London and New York, Verso, 2004.



increase the leverage of the inhabitant of Palazzo Chigi.39 Moreover,the prime minister and the executive as a whole benefited signifi-cantly from other institutional reforms and ensuing changes, such asthe introduction of a (limited) majoritarian electoral system and theemergence of a more-or-less bipolar party system in particular.40 Bothwere widely supported but hardly caused by the media.

Additional counter-evidence comes, again, from Germany. Duringthe extended reign of Helmut Kohl in the German chancellery twodevelopments – rather unlikely to join together from the perspectiveof the presidentialization thesis – reached a height. The first was Kohl’sexceptionally tight grip on his Christian Democratic Party and thegovernment, which prompted some observers to apply the ‘presiden-tialization’ label to Germany.41 The second development, however,was hardly the emergence of a particularly strong personal mandate ofthe chancellor; rather, Kohl’s popularity with the voters remainedstrikingly moderate for the better part of his tenure. Indeed, inhistorical perspective Kohl stands out as the only German chancelloron record who conspicuously failed to secure a reasonable ‘chan-cellor bonus’, leaving him considerably less popular than his party, intwo out of five Bundestag elections held between 1983 and 1998.42

39 See Mauro Calise, ‘Presidentialization, Italian Style’, in Poguntke and Webb, ThePresidentialization of Politics, pp. 91–6. For a more detailed study on this subject seeCristina Barbieri and Luca Verzichelli, Il governo e i suoi apparati: l’evoluzione del casoitaliano in prospettiva comparata, Genoa, Name, 2003. Other assessments by Calise havebeen somewhat less compelling. In particular, the increased powers of the executive asa whole vis-à-vis parliament do not mark a systemic feature that may be meaningfullyjudged as a move towards presidentialization, or certainly not as a feature that wouldmove the new Italian model closer to the structures and logics marking presidentialgovernment in the USA.

40 See on this Stefano Bartolini, Alessandro Chiaramonte and Roberto D’Alimonte,‘The Italian Party System between Parties and Coalitions’, West European Politics, 27(2004), pp. 1–19.

41 Clay Clemens, ‘Party Management as a Leadership Resource: Kohl and theCDU/CSU’, in Clay Clemens and William E. Paterson (eds), The Kohl Chancellorship,London, Frank Cass, 1998, p. 108.

42 See Helms, Executive Leadership in Western Democracies, p. 215. The Kohl experiencehas prompted some innovative theoretical reflections on the possibility of maintaininga high degree of control in the absence of a strong personal mandate and publiccharisma. One of the most inspiring contributions of this kind is Christopher K. Anselland Steven M. Fish, ‘The Art of Being Indispensible: Noncharismatic Personalism inContemporary Political Parties’, Comparative Political Studies, 32 (1999), pp. 282–312.



Whereas the existence of media-induced leader effects on votingbehaviour and their claimed ramifications on the leader’s positionwithin the executive have remained contested, it cannot be deniedthat the visibility of chief executives in the public political processhas indeed increased significantly over the past decades. However,enhanced visibility of the chief executive can hardly be explained interms of media effects alone. With the rise of ‘summitry’ in theinternational arena, there has been at least one major factorbeyond the media that has – not only in terms of visibility, but alsoin terms of substance – effectively enhanced the status of seniormembers of the political executive in public policy-making.43 Themedia’s role in increasing the visibility of chief executives withinthe public political arena would thus appear to be better describedas that of effective amplifiers rather than that of genuine creators ofchange.

There are other aspects worth considering. Somewhat ironically,as much as the media develop the status of independent ‘personal-izers’ – by creating the impression that chief executives are at thecentre of decision-making not only when acting internationally, butalso in the domestic arena – they can in fact add to the long-term

43 While the position of the head of government as a country’s ‘chief executive’ inthe international arena has long become a familiar feature, the establishment of suchde facto prerogative powers of the chief executive in international relations actuallymarks a comparatively recent historical occurrence. This holds true not only for someof the smaller West European countries with their notably collegial executive struc-tures, but even for world powers such as the United States or Britain. As Richard Rose,The Postmodern President, 2nd edn, Chatham, NJ, Chatham House, 1991, p. 21, haspointed out, until the early twentieth century not a single American president had evertravelled abroad while in office, and it was even argued that presidents lacked the legalauthority to do so. In Britain, too, foreign policy was very much perceived to be a tasksolely of the foreign secretary before the Second World War. Churchill’s lengthy andunsuccessful battle with his cabinet for permission to go to Russia to ease East–Westtensions suggests that, even in the first decades after 1945, the personal involvement ofthe prime minister in foreign affairs was still far from being generally accepted. SeeGraham P. Thomas, Prime Minister and Cabinet Today, Manchester, Manchester Univer-sity Press, 1997, pp. 103–4. In many West European countries, the growing importanceof ‘summit politics’, and the accumulation of power in the hands of the executive, wasto some considerable degree a direct result of European integration. One of the firstto elaborate on this has been Andrew Moravcsik, Why the European Community Strength-ens the State: Domestic Politics and International Cooperation, Working Paper 52, Center forEuropean Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 1994.



strains on governments and governmental leaders. This is becausenotions of centrality and pre-eminence of the chief executive inpublic policy-making inevitably breed expectations that may proveextremely difficult to meet. To some extent, this would appear toapply to any democratic regime that allows citizens to hold govern-ments accountable on the basis of their judgements of governmentefficiency and policy delivery. Needless to say, the danger of publicdisappointment with the performance of governments and govern-mental leaders increases with the boldness of promises made andexpectations raised by administrations and their leaders, whichexplains why there are major differences not only between countriesbut also between different administrations and leaders within coun-tries. Nevertheless, whenever it comes to explaining the emergenceof what Raichur and Waterman have labelled an ‘expectations gap’,44

i.e. a structural mismatch between expectations and performancethat threatens to undermine public trust and support in governmentsand governmental leaders, institutional differences between coun-tries are to be considered. Other things being equal, the negativeeffects of public perceptions of a seemingly ubiquitous and omnipo-tent chief executive are likely to be most severe in countries thatspecifically invite such notions by establishing a strongly leader-centred executive branch, which is, however, tightly constrained bypowerful institutional checks and balances. The United States andGermany, but also France during periods of ‘cohabitation’, wouldseem to offer themselves as the most obvious cases in point.

The strong international trend towards commercialization of thebroadcasting media, which was driven by a host of different factors,45

44 Arvind Raichur and Richard W. Waterman, ‘The Presidency, the Public, and theExpectations Gap’, in Richard W. Waterman (ed.), The Presidency Reconsidered, Itasca,IL, F. E. Peacock, 1993, pp. 1–21.

45 One of them was the growth of strong lobbies pressing for change in mediapolicy, in particular the advertising lobby, which pushed hard in many countries foraccess to the electronic media. From a different corner of the political spectrum,various social movements also pushed towards private broadcasting, often finding theirfirst new platform in pirate radio stations. In addition, public demands for a greaternumber and diversity of television programmes also played a role. From the early1980s, the introduction of private broadcasting appeared as the only way to expandtelevision beyond the limited number of channels that could be funded by licence feerevenues from public broadcasting. Finally, the emergence of transnational private



marks another aspect of our subject to be accounted for. There is abroad scholarly consensus about the manifestations and effects ofcommercialization within the media sector. Major and minor differ-ences between countries apart, commercialization has been basicallymarked by two features. The more obvious one is a significantincrease in the number of channels and programmes (though, need-less to say, the number of available channels and programmes doesnot always correspond neatly with the overall level of media pluralismin terms of content diversity46). Secondly, commercialization has ledto appreciable changes in the structure of broadcasting programmes.Politics, even in its softer formats, is increasingly being sidelined bydifferent forms of entertainment. This development can to a largeextent be seen as a direct effect of the increasing market share of theprivate media, though there have been signs that the public mediahave, if often grudgingly, partially adapted their programme agendasto meet the challenge posed by their private counterparts.47

Unlike its structural manifestations within the media sector, theeffects of commercialization on political leadership have remainedvery much open to debate. Some leading experts have speculatedabout the positive effects that the structural changes accompanyingcommercialization may have on the room for manoeuvre of govern-ments and governmental leaders. As Raymond Kuhn has argued in arecent article on political communication in France, a high level offragmentation and diversity of television may provide governmentswith welcome opportunities to pursue a ‘pick and mix’ approachdesigned to reach different target groups through different chan-nels.48 On a more general level Gianpietro Mazzoleni has argued that

broadcasting in particular was facilitated by processes of economic globalization,including the project of European integration. See Hallin and Mancini, ComparingMedia Systems, pp. 274–6.

46 This is an important point to be elaborated in a comparative context by KatrinVoltmer, Structures of Diversity of Press and Broadcasting Systems: The Institutional context ofPublic Communication in Western Democracies, Discussion Paper FS 00-201, Wissen-schaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB), March 2000.

47 See, with further references, Trine Syvertsen, ‘Challenges to Public Televisionin the Era of Convergence and Commercialization’, Television & New Media, 4 (2003),pp. 158–9.

48 Raymond Kuhn, ‘Where’s the Spin? The Executive and News Management inFrance’, Modern and Contemporary France, 13 (2005), p. 309.



Television, as it becomes more and more a fragmented and multi-facetedentity, controlled by a myriad of senders and fuelled by a myriad of services,loses some of its traditional assets and powers in the political arena. . . . Per-haps, as the media industry is increasingly cutting back on politics, forincreasingly fiercer competitive constraints, then politicians are eventuallygoing to be less harassed . . . by television(s).49

These are intriguing perspectives. The dominant trend to beobserved in the bulk of contemporary Western democracies wouldseem to have been in the opposite direction, though. The concreteeffects of multichannel television on the opportunity structure forpublic leadership in contemporary democracies have rarely beenstudied empirically; there is in particular a serious lack of compara-tive research. However, case studies on presidential leadership in theUnited States leave no doubt that the significant increase in televisionchannels and outlets that followed the emergence of American cabletelevision has reduced, rather than expanded, the outreach capacityof presidents.50

There is also little, if any, evidence suggesting that a developmentimagined by Mazzoleni has actually been underway in any of themajor Western democracies. To the contrary, the overall trend wouldappear to have been towards an ever-closer monitoring of the actionsand behaviour of politicians, and of political leaders in particular,and a steady expansion of the outer limits of ‘political’ reporting wellinto the private sphere of office holders.51 To some considerableextent, this is even true for the majority of countries representingthe ‘Mediterranean or Polarized Pluralist Model’ in Hallin’s andMancini’s major study that were historically (and partly continue tobe) marked by an unusual amount of deference by the media in theirrelations to political elites.52 There has been a strong international

49 Gianpietro Mazzoleni, ‘Political Communication and Television’, in Philippe J.Maarek and Gadi Wolfsfeld (eds), Political Communication in a New Era. A Cross-NationalPerspective, London and New York, Routledge, 2003, pp. 36–7.

50 See Matthew A. Baum and Samuel Kernell, ‘Has Cable Ended the Golden Age ofPresidential Television?’, American Political Science Review, 93 (1999), pp. 99–114; MartinP. Wattenberg, ‘The Changing Presidential Media Environment’, Presidential StudiesQuarterly 34 (2004), pp. 557–72.

51 See Jean Seaton, ‘Public, Private and the Media’, Political Quarterly, 74 (2003),pp. 174–83; see also James Stanyer and Dominic Wring (eds), Public Images, PrivateLives: The Mediation of Politicians around the Globe, a special issue of Parliamentary Affairs,57: 1 (2004).

52 Hallin and Mancini, Comparing Media Systems, pp. 123–5.



move towards an ever-greater emphasis on uncovering political scan-dals and misbehaviour of any kind, which can be chiefly explained bythe growing levels of commercialization and professionalization ofthe media.53 Some of the most notable differences between countriesrelate to the specific manifestations of media monitoring of thepolitical class. Sensationalist popular newspapers in countries such asBritain, Germany or Austria largely find their functional equivalent inmany of the Southern European countries in sections of the broad-casting sector, which is simply because a tabloid press never reallydeveloped in much of the Mediterranean region.

Whereas close public scrutiny of political office holders has beenwidely considered to constitute an essential element of democraticgovernment, the race for uncovering scandals and spotting publicand private misbehaviour of politicians in media reporting contrib-utes little to the noble cause of facilitating democratic control overpublic officials. It may, in fact, rather undermine the ability of thepolitical class to govern effectively, an aspect to be acknowledged as acentral component of good governance even in Madisonian concep-tions of representative democracy. As Blumler and Kavanagh havemaintained: ‘The relentless scrutiny and “unmasking” of the mani-pulative strategies and devices of politicians and their advisers byskeptical journalists compromise the authority of the politician asspokesperson. But governments may need deeper and more lastingpublic support to cope with certain problems that arise from thepress of social change.’54

From the viewpoint of presidents and prime ministers, the prevail-ing focus of large parts of the media on any possible manifestation ofpolitical scandal has more specific implications. It may limit the poolof political talent from which suitable candidates for political officemay be chosen. Whereas ministers or eligible candidates for ministe-rial office usually do not face quite the same standards as would-beprime ministers or presidents do in terms of media skills expected,they still find themselves confronted with an amount of media atten-tion and scrutiny that may bring them more easily into public disre-gard and, eventually, to fall than, say, 30 years ago. Moreover, some

53 Ibid., pp. 278–9; see also John B. Thompson, Political Scandal: Power and Visibilityin the Media Age, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2000.

54 Jay G. Blumler and Dennis Kavanagh, ‘The Third Age of Political Communica-tion: Influences and Features’, Political Communication, 16 (1999), p. 217.



capable personalities may even feel altogether discouraged to jointhe game of politics, and prefer to look for less absorbing alternativecareers. Only a rather superficial, and largely misguided, assessmentcould take this as a potential advantage for an incumbent chiefexecutive in terms of keeping the risk of facing leadership challengesfrom capable and powerful fellows reasonably low. Politics in parlia-mentary democracies remains very much a team sport (which flowsessentially from the fusion-of-powers construction at the heart ofthe constitution and the presence of more-or-less coherent politicalparties across the various arenas of public policy-making), and theoverall performance of a government will always be influenced tosome extent by the performance of senior members of the politicalexecutive.55 But even American presidents, while operating underfundamentally different conditions, have an obvious interest in secur-ing the collaboration of a reasonable number of able and publiclyrespected figures who can be entrusted with high political office.56

Some other media effects on executive leaders and leadership aresomewhat more elusive than those described above, but neverthelesswell worth looking into. As has been noted in different nationalcontexts, the virtual ubiquity of competitive commercial media in thepublic arena has led to a contagion of the logic of politics by the logicof the media.57 The manifestations and implications of this processare numerous and complex, and have only recently become thesubject of systematic political research. Among the more tangibleeffects of this silent transformation is an effective constraint on theroom for manoeuvre of governments. Unlike their historical prede-cessors, contemporary administrations have to make a continuousand systematic effort to ensure that their actions win the attention of

55 For a convincing demonstration of this point in the British context, see PhilipNorton, ‘Barons in a Shrinking Kingdom: Senior Ministers in British Government’, inR. A. W. Rhodes (ed.), Transforming British Government. Volume 2: Changing Roles andRelationships, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000, pp. 101–24.

56 This is at least what the history of the American executive branch suggests. SeeShirley Anne Warshaw, Powersharing: White House-Cabinet Relations in the Modern Presi-dency, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1996; Anthony J. Bennett, TheAmerican President’s Cabinet: From Kennedy to Bush, London, Macmillan, 1996; Ronald C.Moe, ‘The President’s Cabinet’, in James P. Pfiffner and Roger H. Davidson (eds),Understanding the Presidency, 2nd edn, New York, Longman, 2000, pp. 173–93.

57 One of the more substantive studies on this phenomenon is Thomas Meyer,Media Democracy: How the Media Colonize Politics, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2002.



the media – a breed of media, after all, that follows political devel-opments from a perspective focused on the commercial and en-tertainment value of political news. While satisfying the specificdemands of the media is hardly the ultimate goal of governments, ithas very much become an effective precondition for gaining theattention and support of the wider public, without which there isneither responsible government nor democratic leadership. Themore recent history of presidential and prime ministerial communi-cations suggests that the too-ready adoption of media styles andstrategies by governmental leaders may do little to increase theirleverage. This appears to apply in particular to defensive strategies ofpublic leadership. Perhaps the most compelling evidence relates tothe early stages of the premiership of Britain’s Tony Blair, whoproved a master of adopting media strategies not only for selling hispolicies, but also to fight criticism from the media – only to find theunique authority and resources of his high public office eventuallybeing devalued and diminished.58

Another aspect of the encroachment of the media logic on politicsrelates to the significant acceleration of political communication andleadership to be observed in all established democracies. The alteredpace of democratic decision-making, which is, precariously enough,accompanied by a growing demand for political time,59 cannot exclu-sively be blamed on the mass media. To some extent the mountingtime pressure that all administrations face is caused by the dramati-cally increased workload of governments, which flows from thehistorical expansion of public policy agendas around the globe.However, the media have no doubt played a crucial part within thislarger process. The two most important elements of change at thelevel of the media, with direct relevance to the altered speed ofpolitics, have been the technological revolution in the media sector

58 A. Rawnsley, ‘Mr Blair versus the Barons’, Observer, 16 June 2002.59 There are several reasons as to why the amount of time required for practising

effective and responsible democratic decision-making has increased over the pastdecades. Perhaps most importantly, issues become more and more complex, oftenextending well beyond the horizon of the present generation of citizens and decisionmakers, as is particularly obvious in such fields as genetic research and nuclear energy.At the same time, the capacity of contemporary pluralist societies to draw on tradi-tional consensus, which could form the basis of bold and forward-looking decision-making, has largely declined. See Hartmut Rosa, ‘The Speed of Global Flows and thePace of Democratic Politics’, New Political Science, 27 (2005), pp. 445–59.



(especially the emergence of the new digital media) and the signifi-cantly increased competition between different media actors forcommercial advantage.60 A widespread dedication to ‘real-time jour-nalism’ has largely undermined traditional standards of politicalreporting. The altered pace of politics inevitably has a constrainingeffect on the time frame of governmental decision-making and lead-ership. Even if governments manage to ease part of this constantpressure by enlarging their administrative and political support base,there remains a chronic lack of time, which increases the structurallikelihood of poor decision-making and immediate policy failuresthat are bound to generate new constraints in terms of both politicsand policy.

A related question concerns the wider, but also more specific,effects that the challenges and changes just described have on thepolitical executive. Many scholars tend to consider executives asthe beneficiaries of these ongoing structural transformations.61 Suchassessments may be tenable if the focus is strictly confined to the fieldof executive–legislative relations. There is, in fact, evidence fromcross-national analysis that the executives of many contemporarydemocracies have gradually expanded their power in relation to, andat the expense of, the legislative branch.62 The overall effect of thechanging conditions of democratic governance in the advanceddemocracies would, however, hardly seem to have been a substantialincrease in the executive’s capacity to act, let alone to act autono-mously. Rather than being able to concentrate decision-makingpower in their hands, governments have long felt compelled todevolve and share power not only with other public actors, such asconstitutional courts in particular,63 but also with powerful non-state

60 Benjamin R. Barber, ‘Which Technology and Which Democracy?’, in HenryJenkins and David Thorburn (eds), Democracy and New Media, Cambridge, MA, MITPress, 2003, pp. 36–7.

61 See in this vein, for example, William E. Scheuerman, Liberal Democracy and theSocial Acceleration of Time, Baltimore and London, Johns Hopkins University Press,2004, p. 50.

62 Nicolas Baldwin (ed.), Legislatures and Executives: An Investigation into the Relation-ship at the Heart of Government, London and New York, Taylor and Francis, 2004.

63 Alec Stone Sweet, Governing with Judges: Constitutional Politics in Europe, Oxford,Oxford University Press, 2000.



actors like interest groups or global firms.64 There is a growing pro-portion of public policies whose viability and effectiveness dependlargely on the support and specific resources of private sector actors.As those cannot be decreed by governments, they have to be securedthrough extensive informal negotiations between the state and non-state actors.65

Given the complexity of these multilevel transformations, thefuture of political communication and public leadership can only bespeculated upon. If even the growing fragmentation of increasinglycommercialized television markets has been considered to mark adevelopment powerful enough to challenge the very concept of masscommunication and undermine the structural basis of effectivepublic leadership,66 how much more serious are the combined effectsof the internet?

No doubt, the internet represents a force to be reckoned with.Today, countries with a proportion of three-quarters of their popu-lations having access to the internet lead the field, but there will befew advanced democracies with significantly lower scores only tenyears from now. Moreover, this development will be accompanied bythe further spread of broadband technology allowing users to exploitinternet resources more intensively. This notwithstanding, it wouldappear rather unlikely that the internet will supersede, let alone fullysubstitute, the traditional media any time soon. Case studies suggestthat television has remained the primary source of national politicalinformation for a majority of citizens.67 Moreover, whereas newspa-per readership is declining in many countries, it is the major news-papers that have made by far the largest investment in making

64 Ludger Helms, ‘The Changing Parameters of Political Control in WesternEurope’, Parliamentary Affairs, 59 (2006), pp. 88–90.

65 In fact, this perception has been the driving force behind the spectacular rise ofthe governance paradigm in international political research. For a concise overview ofthe competing approaches see Anne Mette Kjær, Governance, Cambridge, Polity, 2004,and Kers van Kersbergen and Frans van Waarden, ‘“Governance” as a Bridge betweenDisciplines: Cross-Disciplinary Inspiration Regarding Shifts in Governance and Prob-lems of Governability, Accountability and Legitimacy’, European Journal of PoliticalResearch, 43 (2004), pp. 143–71.

66 Mazzoleni, ‘Political Communication and Television’, pp. 33, 37.67 Birgit van Eimeren and Christa-Maria Ridder, ‘Trends in der Nutzung und

Bewertung der Medien 1970 bis 2005’, Media Perspektiven, 10/2005, p. 503; JacquesGerstlé, ‘Les campagnes présidentielles depuis 1965’, in Pierre Bréchon (ed.), Lesélections présidentielles en France, Paris, La documentation française, 2002, p. 94.



content available on the internet, and which can draw on a uniqueexperience and expertise in editing information and making itdigestible for users.

More importantly in our context, the negative impact of the inter-net on public leadership by presidents and prime ministers will prob-ably be considerably less dramatic than has been widely assumed. Tobegin with, there is little, if any, empirical evidence to bolster anxiousassumptions that the internet will enhance the information of citi-zens to an extent that would make them significantly less amenable tothe mobilization efforts of governments. It is even more questionablewhether citizens drawing mainly or exclusively on the internet actu-ally have more or better information than others. Also, the popularthesis contending that the internet adds to the constraints on gov-ernments, by strengthening civil society and the principle of account-able government,68 would appear to apply mainly to non-democraticand democratizing countries with few alternative sources of informa-tion and channels for voicing dissent. Even if we look at more specificcontexts, convincing proof of a major independent impact of theinternet on the basic parameters of political leadership remains inshort supply. There is, for example, precious little evidence that theinternet has transformed the distribution of power within parties infavour of the rank-and-file69 – which could have truly major implica-tions for the state of party government within a given system.70 Partymembers may have lost less influence than medium-rank party elites,but the dominant trend among the majority of parties in Western

68 Mazzoelini, ‘Political Communication and Television’, p. 47; see also Rose, ‘AGlobal Diffusion Model of e-Governance’, pp. 16–22.

69 This is a point made by Vedel, who argues that ICT (information and commu-nication technologies) ‘allow party members to be provided with more information onwhat their leaders are doing and thus can allow a better accountability of parties’ elites.Besides the redistribution of power between local members and elites, ICTs mightresult in the decentralization of political forces. Minority groups within parties maycommunicate their view independently to the other members and express dissent, andlink up with other minority groups to challenge party elites.’ Thierry Vedel, ‘PoliticalCommunication in the Age of the Internet’, in Maarek and Wolfsfeld, Political Com-munication in a New Era, p. 44.

70 Jean Blondel and Maurizio Cotta (eds), Party and Government: An Inquiry into theRelationship between Governments and Supporting Parties in Liberal Democracies, London,Macmillan, 1996; Jean Blondel and Maurizio Cotta (eds), The Nature of Party Govern-ment. A Comparative European Perspective, London, Palgrave, 2000.



democracies would clearly seem to have been towards the centraliza-tion of intra-party power at the party leadership.71 Such observationsare in line with the findings of recent studies suggesting ‘that becauseof the resource and power advantages existing elites and organisa-tional headquarters are more likely to dominate the e-agenda and useit to strengthen their position of power’.72

CONCLUSIONS

Whereas the more recent history of political leadership includes anumber of presidents and prime ministers evincing a remarkableability to govern with the media, a comparative inquiry suggests thatthe mass media generally rather function as a major constraint onexecutives and executive leadership in many of the contemporarydemocracies. However, even a sceptical reassessment of recent devel-opments does not arrive at a doomsday scenario. If the bad news forgovernment leaders in the established democracies is that managingthe traditional media looks likely to become even more difficultthan in the past, the good news is that the possible constraints onpublic leadership posed by the internet seem to have been largelyoverestimated.

Many features that have come to characterize the more recenthistory of government–media relations, and the structural conditionsof executive leadership, can be attributed to structural changes at thelevel of media systems (in particular the strong international trendtowards commercialization) and changing patterns of behaviouramong media actors (especially the gradual decline in journalisticdeference to the political class). Such changes at the level of the massmedia have been accompanied, and in fact functionally intensified,by changing expectations and increased demands of the public.

While the factors influencing governing and public leadership areobviously not confined to institutionalized rules and institutionaldevices, institutions and institutional differences between countries

71 Peter Mair, Wolfgang C. Müller and Fritz Plasser (eds), Political Parties andElectoral Change, London, Sage, 2004.

72 Stephen Ward and Thierry Vedel, ‘Introduction: The Potential of the InternetRevisited’, Parliamentary Affairs, 59 (2006), p. 217.



matter. Differences at the level of political systems and the offices ofpresidents and prime ministers have by no means been renderedirrelevant by the sweeping challenge of the mass media. This isbecause the mass media of different contemporary democracies haveremained scarcely less different from each other than the constitu-tional frameworks and political settings of countries. It is no surprise,then, that particularly the structural and functional differencesbetween political leadership in the United States and in the parlia-mentary democracies of Western Europe have largely persisted.73 Butno sensible analysis can ignore the fact that – even in the face of thepowerful repercussions of European integration – political leader-ship in different European parliamentary democracies has alsoremained highly diverse.74

Transatlantic comparison, in particular, suggests that futureresearch on media and politics would be well advised to focus morestrongly on the functional dimensions of public leadership in dif-ferent institutional settings. Different institutions not only createdifferent opportunities and constraints for political actors, they alsoinfluence the effects of political strategies and actions at the politi-cal system’s level. The widely debated phenomenon of ‘goingpublic’ may serve as a case in point. While it is a valuable observa-tion that, other things being equal, majoritarian democraciesseem to provide stronger institutional incentives for ‘going public’than do consensus democracies,75 it is not sufficient tolink actor preferences for certain communication strategies to

73 This is also the central argument in a recent study by Richard Rose, ‘GivingDirection to Government in Comparative Perspective’, in Joel D. Aberbach andMark A. Peterson (eds), The Executive Branch, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005,pp. 72–99.

74 Jack Hayward and Anand Menon (eds), Governing Europe, Oxford, Oxford Uni-versity Press, 2003; Wolfgang C. Müller and Kaare Strøm (eds), Coalition Governments inWestern Europe, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000. There remains in particular amajor gulf separating the leadership experience of Western Europe from that ofCentral and Eastern Europe; see Vesselin Dimitrov, Klaus H. Goetz and HellmutWollmann, Governing after Communism: Institutions and Policymaking, Lanham, MD,Rowman & Littlefield, 2006; Jean Blondel, Ferdinand Müller-Rommel and DarinaMalova, Governing New European Democracies, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007;Thomas A. Baylis, ‘Embattled Executives: Prime Ministerial Weakness in East CentralEurope’, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 40 (2007), pp. 81–106.

75 Kriesi, ‘Strategic Political Communication’, pp. 202–3.



specific institutional parameters of political leadership.76 ‘Goingpublic’, if exercised with reasonable skill, may help chief executivesin both presidential and parliamentary democracies to get theirway. But the systemic effects of ‘going public’ in presidential andparliamentary regimes vary significantly. For whatever may be saidabout the wider, and possibly problematic, political implications ofpresidential public appeals,77 ‘going public’ in the United States fitsin nicely with the basic constitutional parameters of presidentialleadership. At least, it does little to challenge the constitutionallyenshrined balance between the executive and the legislativebranches.

Something different holds true for public leadership in parliamen-tary democracies, though. Because parliamentary government, evenin many of its ‘un-Westminster’ variants,78 tends to concentrate powerin the hands of the executive, there are both important pragmaticand normative reasons as to why efforts of prime ministers to mobi-lize support for their policies should be firmly rooted in the parlia-mentary arena. ‘Going public’ challenges parliamentary governmentfrom different angles. Where extended ‘going public’ activities ofprime ministers provoke serious opposition and dissent among MPs,this may lead to legislative gridlock and government instability. If,alternatively, MPs, however grudgingly, tolerate pseudo-plebiscitarymoves by the prime minister, especially those designed to mobilizepublic support for policies that have not been agreed with the lead-erships of the majority parliamentary party group(s), policies willsuffer from a lack of parliamentary scrutiny and reduced democraticlegitimacy. Rather than turning a blind eye to such fundamentalsystemic differences for the sake of easier-to-handle research designs,future research on the changing parameters of executive leadershipin contemporary democracies should be more ambitious about inte-grating institutional and functional, as well as normative, aspectsmore systematically.

76 Even though this may prove difficult enough at times, see note 20.77 For a carefully balanced discussion see Brandice Canes-Wrone, Who Leads Whom?

Presidents, Policy, and the Public, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2006.78 Aurelia George Mulgan, ‘Japan’s “Un-Westminster” System: Impediments to

Reform in a Crisis Economy’, Government and Opposition, 38 (2003), pp. 73–91.



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