Political Communication

ISSN: 1058-4609 (Print) 1091-7675 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/upcp20

Ten Years After Comparing Media Systems: What

Have We Learned?

Daniel C. Hallin & Paolo Mancini

To cite this article: Daniel C. Hallin & Paolo Mancini (2016): Ten Years After
Comparing Media Systems: What Have We Learned?, Political Communication, DOI:
10.1080/10584609.2016.1233158

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Political Communication, 00:1–17, 2016
Copyright © 2016 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1058-4609 print / 1091-7675 online
DOI: 10.1080/10584609.2016.1233158

Ten Years After Comparing Media Systems:

What Have We Learned?

DANIEL C. HALLIN and PAOLO MANCINI

In this article we review research published since the publication of Comparing Media
Systems which seeks to operationalize concepts discussed in that work and to test the
framework proposed there or to put forward alternatives or revisions. We focus on
works that deal with the original 18 countries covered in Comparing Media Systems,
and consider the progress made in developing quantitative measures across these cases
for key variables, research testing the grouping of cases in Comparing Media Systems,
research extending the comparative analysis of Western media systems to new media,
and research on convergence toward the Liberal Model. In the final section, we focus
on limitations of the research produced during the 10 years following the publication of
Comparing Media Systems, particularly the heavy emphasis on quantitative operatio-
nalization, and some of the difficulties in using quantitative analysis to investigate
complex, dynamic systems.

Keywords comparative analysis, convergence, media systems, QCA

In the closing pages of Comparing Media Systems we wrote, “The analysis presented here is a
very tentative, exploratory one…. We hope other scholars will follow up on many of the ideas
proposed here. We also fully expect that when they do not all of what we have argued will
prove to be correct or sufficiently developed” (Hallin & Mancini, 2004, p. 302). In the 10 years
plus since Comparing Media Systems, many scholars have indeed followed up on the ideas we
proposed. Many studies have attempted to operationalize, test, refine, modify, and clarify our
concepts and hypotheses; others have moved in parallel with our analysis, referring to it but
raising different questions. The volume of research that exists today, and in many ways the
quality, is vastly greater than it was at the time we were writing our book.
In this article, we take stock of what the field has learned over the past decade of
research, focusing on works that have attempted in some way to test or refine our analysis
in Comparing Media Systems. There have been a number of essays published over the
years offering general critiques of our approach, many of which we have already addressed
(Hallin & Mancini, 2012). Here we focus primarily on empirical research, commenting on
the ways in which our interpretive framework has been used and operationalized, on
elements of our framework that we see as having been confirmed or brought into question,
and on proposals for modifications or alternatives. Many of the studies covered here
involve efforts to operationalize the conceptual framework of Comparing Media Systems

Daniel C. Hallin is Professor, Department of Communication, University of California, San

Diego. Paolo Mancini is Professor, Facolta di Scienze Politiche, University of Perugia.
Address correspondence to Daniel C. Hallin, Department of Communication (0503), University
of California, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093. E-mail: dhallin@ucsd.edu.

1
2 Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini

for purposes of quantitative research, and one of our central goals is to assess these efforts
and to offer reflections on what they have contributed to comparative analysis, as well as
their limitations. The literature over the past 10 years is large enough that it is impossible
to cover it all. We have tried to focus on as many of the contributions that relate closely to
Comparing Media Systems as possible in a short journal article; we give less detailed
attention to other important works—Albaek, van Dalen, Jebril, and de Vreese (2014) or de
Vreese, Esser, and Hopman (2016) would be notable examples—which make reference to
Comparing Media Systems but look at different sets of relationships rather than endeavor-
ing to test or operationalize the framework of our book. We also focus on research dealing
with the original 18 “Western” media systems included in our analysis. Other works have
addressed the question of how to address a wider range of systems. Notable contributions
include Chakravartty and Roy (2013), Guerrero (2014), de Albuquerque (2013), Rantanen
(2013), Voltmer (2013), and Hallin and Mancini (2012b). These involve conceptual and
methodological issues we will not attempt to take up here.

Uses of the Conceptual Framework of Comparing Media Systems

Scholars have made reference to Comparing Media Systems for a number of different
purposes. These fall into four categories, which are worth distinguishing at the outset. One
purpose is theory development. Many studies scrutinize the theoretical framework of
Comparing Media Systems, suggesting revisions of the main concepts, identifying con-
cepts not included in our analysis or proposing alternative interpretations of the relation-
ships we hypothesize. One example would be Rolland (2008), who addresses the question
of whether media systems are converging toward the Liberal Model—a common focus for
research to which we will return. He argues that in Norway, the state has pushed back
against the tendency for media to exercise increasing influence over the political system,
increasing its role as a regulator of media in significant ways. He argues that our analysis
of the state in the Democratic Corporatist countries downplays the extent to which the state
acts to preserve its own power as an institution, and observes that as a result of these
efforts the regulation of media in the Nordic countries has become less technocratic and
more politicized. Another example would be Downey, Mihelj, and König (2012), who
develop a typology of public spheres based on normative theory, and then ask how this is
related to empirical variation in media systems, including our three types. Humphreys
(2012) proposes a number of variables he sees as left out of our analysis, including
federalism and the size of media markets.
Another frequent use of Comparing Media Systems—perhaps the simplest and most
common—is for purposes of case selection. It is common today among scholars working
on Europe to identify the cases they are studying as “belonging” to one or more of our
three models. This is done for various purposes: sometimes simply to position a case in
relation to other possible cases; sometimes to show that the sample is in some sense
“representative”; sometimes to test or to explore hypotheses about the impact of media
system context on particular variables—to determine, for example, whether our types
predict a media system’s value on some variable. In the latter cases the use of our
framework generally goes beyond case selection to hypothesis development. Many of
these studies provide valuable evidence about how the clusters of case analyses do or do
not differ on a variety of variables not included in our analysis (e.g., Albaek et al., 2014;
Boczkowski, Mitchelstein, & Walter, 2011; Goldman & Mutz, 2011). The practice of
identifying cases by reference to one of our types reflects a heightened sensitivity in media
studies to the importance of system-level context. In the many manuscripts we read for
 Ten Years After Comparing Media Systems 3

various journals, however, we have observed that this is sometimes done rather casually,
without much reflection on the relation of the particular case to our models—since many
cases do not coincide neatly with the ideal types—or on what elements of the type in
question, if any, are actually relevant to the research questions.

Quantitative Operationalizations
A third set of contributions is aimed at the operationalization of specific variables or
dimensions used in Comparing Media Systems, usually quantitative operationalizations.
Comparing Media Systems, as we have acknowledged, was thin in quantitative validation.
In contrast to some other areas of comparative analysis—voting behavior and party
systems, most notably—there were not a lot of comparable quantitative data available
for use in this kind of synthetic comparative analysis. We used what little we could find,
but for the most part built theory based on single-country studies, often qualitative in
character, and left it to later scholars to develop quantitative measures that could be used in
comparative analysis of our cases. Some expressed skepticism that this could be done.
Norris (2009) stressed the importance of developing quantitative measures of key con-
cepts, but doubted that many of our variables could in fact be measured. We think she is
right about the challenges inherent in quantifying many of the concepts we use, a point to
which we will return. But recent research suggests that a great deal can be done in this
direction.
The most extensive body of research has been devoted to operationalizing the concept
of political parallelism, an enterprise which Norris (2009, p. 335) warned would be a
“massive undertaking” but which has been addressed very successfully by many scholars
in recent years. Political parallelism is conceived as being manifested in four main types of
phenomena: structural ties between media and political organizations; political affiliations
of journalists, owners, and media managers; media content; and news consumption
patterns. van Kempen (2007) uses survey data from the 1999 European Election Study
measuring the relation between the party preferences and media consumption habits of
voters, demonstrating important patterns of difference across systems and finding that
media-political parallelism tends to increase voter turnout. Albaek and colleagues (2014)
use both content-based measures and measures based on surveys with journalists, includ-
ing items that measure journalists’ role conceptions and their perception of the influence of
political pressure on their work. Esser and Umbricht (2013) and Downey and colleagues
(2012) both use content-based measures, the former an index of objectivity in journalistic
style, and the latter in the form of indices of internal pluralism and of polarization. Popescu
and colleagues (2011) have developed measures of media partisanship based on surveys of
experts. Strömbäck and Luengo (2008), in a comparative study of election news in
Sweden and Spain, find that political reporting in Spain is more likely than in Sweden
to originate with and focus on the actions of political parties, which is consistent with a
high level of interconnection between media and politics. Ciaglia (2013), in a comparison
of Italy, Germany, and Britain, focuses on an interesting indicator of the journalist’s
political role—the representation of journalists in parliament—finding that journalists are
the most common occupational group in the Italian Parliament, and are represented in
much lower levels in Britain and Germany. Baumgartner and Bonafont (2015) find a high
level of political parallelism in Spanish news content, and show that this is manifest
primarily in negative coverage of the party a news outlet opposes, rather than positive
coverage of one it favors. These studies, taken together, confirm much of the broad pattern
of differences described in Comparing Media Systems, particularly the high levels of
4 Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini

political parallelism in Southern Europe and low levels in the United States and Ireland. At
the same time, as van Kempen (2007) observes, it suggests plenty of nuance, of differ-
ences among systems we conceive as close to the same ideal type, with Denmark, for
example, measuring quite high in political parallelism and Finland very low.
Brüggemann, Engesser, Büchel, Humprecht, and Castro (2014) were able to find
multiple indicators of all four of the media system “dimensions” used in Comparing
Media Systems. They find that three of those four show high degrees of internal consis-
tency, and could be considered as single dimensions, while one, the role of the state,
should be considered multidimensional, with the strength of public service broadcasting,
press subsidies, and ownership regulation not necessarily varying together. These findings
on internal consistency are highly interesting, but we would caution against jumping too
quickly to the conclusion that journalistic professionalism, the structure of media markets,
and political parallelism are really unidimensional based on a single study, with a limited
number of cases and measures. We suspect that over a wider number of cases or time
periods all four of our dimensions are probably complex. Indeed, our use of the term
“dimensions” in Comparing Media Systems is perhaps misleading, in the sense that it risks
oversimplifying the processes and features involved. These are clusters of variables that
relate to certain domains; Voltmer (2013) notes insightfully that they can be seen as
focusing on the relation of the media system to the economy (structure of media markets),
the state, the party system or other system of political competition and representation
(political parallelism), as well as the internal structure of the media system (professional-
ism). There is no theoretical reason to expect that all the variables related to any of these
domains would vary together. In the case of journalistic professionalism, for example, we
put forward three central criteria—autonomy of journalism, consensus on ethics and
standards of practice, and ideology of public service—as well as various institutional
manifestations, like the strength of press councils and of unions of professional associa-
tions. These may often vary together, though the Liberal Model tends to be characterized
by a high degree of professionalism without strong press councils or journalists unions
(which are not included in the 2014 analysis of Brüggemann and colleagues). If we take a
wider range of cases, or of time periods, however, we will probably find more complexity
in the way these phenomena co-vary. Roudakova (in press), for example, argues that in the
Soviet Union, even if journalistic autonomy was low, there was a relatively strong
ideology of public service, and that it makes sense to speak of a form of journalistic
professionalism in the Soviet context. As Esser and Umbricht (2013) and de Vreese and
colleagues (2016) document, there are also important variations, even among Western
countries, in the forms journalistic professionalism takes—in the particular practices of
journalism.
Another approach to measurement in comparative analysis is the fuzzy-set approach
proposed by Downey and Stanyer (2010, 2013). Based on the work of Charles Ragin, this
involves assigning cases degrees of membership in sets, ranging from fully in the set to
fully out, and attaching numbers between 0 and 1 to the degrees of membership. If the full
method is used, these are then used in a kind of causal analysis which, rather than
assuming linear, additive statistical causality, looks for paths, or combinations of member-
ship conditions, that predict particular outcomes. Downey and Stanyer contrast the fuzzy-
set approach with ours, asserting that our approach requires “variables to be crisp, present
or not present, 0 or 1” (2010, p. 333). In fact, because our analysis involves the use of
ideal types which concrete cases only approximate, and because our concepts are complex,
and may be manifested in different cases in different ways, we would consider fuzzy-set
logic very compatible with our approach. It has the advantage, for one thing, of making it
 Ten Years After Comparing Media Systems 5

possible to summarize across a range of different manifestations of a phenomenon, some

of which may be easy to quantify and others not. Fuzzy-set analysis may be, as Downey
and Stanyer put it, “fundamentally interpretive” (p. 338), but we would consider inter-
pretive judgment by scholars essential to the conduct of social science.

Testing the Patterns

There are two main elements of the conceptual framework of Comparing Media Systems
(setting aside political-social system variables): the set of four “dimensions” of compar-
ison, and the typology of three models that summarizes what we see as the distinctive
patterns of media system development among our 18 cases. The latter are conceived as
ideal types in the sense that Weber used the term. A type concept involves a cluster of
characteristics, or as Stinchcombe (1968, pp. 43–47) puts it, a combination of values on
different variables, that we conceive of as co-occurring in a regular and patterned way.
One of the key issues in validating the argument of Comparing Media Systems is therefore
the question of whether it can be confirmed that these patterns actually exist. Many of the
studies just cited provide evidence relevant to this question, usually focused on a particular
dimension, showing, for example, that indeed, political parallelism, across a number of
indicators, tends to be high in the countries we conceive as close to the Polarized Pluralist
Model. Developing an empirical test of the whole pattern is extremely difficult, but some
creative efforts have been made in that direction.
Esser and Umbricht’s (2013) study of competing models of journalism is not directly
an empirical test of Comparing Media Systems. It focuses on styles of political journalism
and does not include many of the media system characteristics important in our analysis.
But it is highly interesting as an effort to look at patterns of similarity and difference across
many of the countries included in our analysis. Esser and Umbricht developed content-
based measures of opinion orientation; “objectivity”—a hard-facts style and an adherence
to norms of “balance”; and negativity in political journalism in the press in six countries.
Using correspondence analysis, their study produced a triangular representation resem-
bling a rotated version of our own, with the U.S. press in one corner, representing what
they called a “rational analysis” style of news, with critical, but fact-based reporting and
opposing viewpoints; the Italian press in another corner, representing a negative, conflict-
oriented and opinionated style; and Germany and Switzerland forming another cluster,
with a journalistic style that includes both news and opinion, but separates them, and is
less negativistic than the Italian. Britain and France fell between these clusters. “Taking
into account the nuances and the qualifications in the typology of Hallin and Mancini,”
they observe (p. 1004) “… and also their comments on France and Great Britain as mixed
cases, we find qualified support for their basic assumptions but also an opportunity for
further development.”
The most direct attempt to develop an empirical test of the patterns identified in
Comparing Media Systems is the article by Brüggemann and colleagues (2014) previously
quoted. Brüggemann and colleagues, drawing on considerable cross-national research that
has been done across Europe in recent years, developed or identified empirical measures to
operationalize important components of all of our four dimensions, gathered data on 17 of
our 18 cases (excluding Canada), and did a cluster analysis to identify empirical patterns
of similarity and difference. We consider this an exemplary effort to test our proposed
framework, and the results are worth detailed discussion. Their analysis confirms ours in
important ways, but it produces four clusters rather than three, and certain cases change
position. It produced a Southern cluster, including Spain, France, Greece, and Italy, which
6 Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini

corresponds closely to our Polarized Pluralist Model, and a Northern model including the
Nordic countries which we identify as close to the ideal type of the Democratic Corporatist
Model. Three other cases which we discussed as examples of the Democratic Corporatist
Model–Germany, Austria, and Switzerland—formed part of a separate cluster that
Brüggemann and colleagues refer to as the Central cluster, and the United Kingdom
clustered with them. Finally, their analysis produced what they called a Western cluster,
including the United States, Ireland, Netherlands, Belgium, and Portugal. The splitting of
our Democratic Corporatist Model is attributed by Brüggemann and colleagues largely to
differences in the role of the state. They measure the role of the state in terms of three
elements—strength of public service broadcasting, press subsidies, and ownership regula-
tion—and argue that these do not vary together. The Northern systems have strong press
subsidies but little ownership regulation; the Central countries the reverse. The Western
countries are characterized by a smaller role of the state across all three dimensions.
In later work (Büchel, Humprech, Castro-Herrero, Engesser, & Brüggemann, 2016),
the same team repeats the analysis using qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) rather
than cluster analysis, in an effort to incorporate a more “detailed, case-centered analysis.”
This study replicates the findings of the previous one in many ways, including the
separation of the Democratic Corporatist countries into two groups, though some marginal
cases do move—Austria to group with the Polarized Pluralist countries, Belgium and the
Netherlands to group with the Northern (in this version called “press-oriented”) system.
Brüggemann and colleagues’ findings make sense to us and suggest important
refinements in our understanding of European media systems. The splitting of our
Democratic Corporatist Model is not surprising: We were aware that the cases we
discussed in relation to that model were diverse, and we conceived that set of cases as
consisting of a core of Nordic countries relatively close to the ideal type, and another
group—Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium—which were more distant
from it and perhaps more heterogeneous; the absence of press subsidies in the latter was an
obvious difference. Other scholars (e.g., Humphreys, 2012; Rolland, 2008) have suggested
this distinction should be foregrounded more than it is in Comparing Media Systems, and
it has parallels in other comparative literatures that might suggest some of the deeper roots
of the difference. In Esping-Anderson’s (1990) classification of welfare state regimes, for
example, the countries of Brüggemann and colleagues’ Central cluster are also differen-
tiated from the Nordic countries.
The shift of certain cases toward the equivalent of our Liberal Model we would
interpret as evidence of change over time, with the Netherlands, for example, moving from
corporatism to liberalism as pillarization broke down. In the case of Portugal, the analysis
of Brüggemann and colleagues confirms what a number of Portuguese scholars told us
after the publication of the book: that our analysis was incorrect in assimilating Portugal to
the Polarized Pluralist Model. Portugal certainly did fit that model in the 1970s, after the
revolution, when its media were highly politicized. In contrast to neighboring Spain,
however, the level of political parallelism seems to have declined significantly in subse-
quent years. Humphreys (2012) makes the argument that the comparative research should
pay greater attention to the analysis of change and discontinuity in the development of
media systems, and the Portuguese case underscores his point. To understand why the
change took place it is important to look at the broader comparative literature on
Portuguese politics and society. Fishman (2011), for example, argues that, while Spain’s
pacted transition to democracy produced a political process centered around party elites,
Portugal’s revolution produced a much more participatory political culture. Journalists
responded to this culture and were also part of it, and the relative autonomy they achieved
 Ten Years After Comparing Media Systems 7

in the 1970s—at that time reflected in a highly activist orientation—seems to have been
converted over the years into a higher degree of professionalism than is found in other
Southern European countries.
While we consider the work of Brüggemann and colleagues outstanding, we do also
have some reservations. One point is very specific. Brüggemann and colleagues (p. 1057)
report that “in Southern countries, the state is not as much interventionist as attributed to
the Polarized Pluralist model by Hallin and Mancini.” But the three measures that they use
to measure the role of the state do not measure the kinds of things we had in mind when
we referred to an interventionist role of the state in Southern Europe. These include such
phenomena as the involvement of parastatal enterprises in media ownership and use of
state pressures of various kinds—tax investigations or manipulation of broadcast regula-
tion—to influence media ownership. Brüggemann and colleagues did an excellent job
identifying indicators of our dimensions, but many variables connected with them are also
left out. Other elements of the role of the state include regulation of journalistic practice
(what kinds of judicial information can be published, for instance), regulation of election
campaigns and coverage, right of reply and hate-speech laws, and regulation of content
produced in the national language. We also consider the role of the state to differ
qualitatively as well as quantitatively. It matters not just whether there is more or less
broadcast regulation or press subsidy in a particular political system, for example, but how
these are implemented, including, importantly, the degree of partisan intervention in the
process. Brüggemann and colleagues observe that they did not find a connection between
political parallelism and state intervention, as we hypothesize. But seeing this connection
requires looking at how and not only at how much the state intervenes.
More generally, we wonder how likely it is that the results of this kind of analysis
would be stable and robust. The replication of much of the original results by another
method (QCA) certainly increases our confidence. Nevertheless, it’s very difficult for even
the best and most ambitious quantitative study to include all the relevant variables in a
broad comparison of media systems. With a different set of indicators, or different break
points for inclusion in the sets in the case of QCA, or with other variables—journalistic
practices, for example, as in Esser and Umbricht (2013) or de Vreese and colleagues
(2016)—or with different cases, would the clusters come out the same? Would particular
cases move around? We must be cautious about drawing firm conclusions until more such
research has been done. Another general issue has to do with the conceptual status of the
clusters that result from this kind of analysis. Büchel and colleagues (2016) give the four
“empirical types” of the original article more substantive interpretation. In the absence of a
more extended discussion of the reasons for the evolution of these types, however, it seems
to us there is still a question of whether these groups should be interpreted as distinct types
in the sense that Weber, Sartori, or Esping-Anderson used the term, or simply as clusters of
what might be mixed cases.
Brüggemann and colleagues’ misinterpretation, as we see it, of our point about the
interventionist state in Southern Europe, points to a tendency common enough to be worth
noting: The existing research literature often gets Southern European media systems partly
wrong, probably reflecting the dominant role of Northern European researchers. Esser, de
Vreese and colleagues (2012), for example, in a generally excellent comparative study of
the supply of political information en European television, hypothesized that the supply
would be low in the countries of our Polarized Pluralist Model due to “savage deregula-
tion” and the resulting weaker commitment to public service in broadcasting. The fact is
that the prevalence of television over the print press in Southern Europe goes together with
a higher level of politicization of television itself and therefore with a strong control and
8 Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini

influence of political organizations that use (or try to use) the screen as a major instrument
to ensure consensus building. As other recent studies note, and as we observe in
Comparing Media Systems (p. 286), commercialization can quite easily go together with
a high level of politicization. This suggests that, consistent with the perspective of fuzzy-
set theory, we should think in terms of multiple sets of conditions that might produce high
levels of political programming on television, rather than in terms of linear causality.

Convergence
In the last chapter of Comparing Media Systems we observed that the differences among
the three groups of countries we studied had probably diminished considerably in the
decades before the publication of our book, and we went on to discuss the nature of these
changes. We noted that this process of change could be seen as a representing a conver-
gence toward the Liberal Model, in the sense that it involved an increasing role of
commercial media; the adoption of professional conventions similar to those of the
Liberal countries—informational, politically non-aligned, dramatized; and shifts in poli-
tical communication toward more personalized, marketing-oriented forms of political
communication. As we have noted in previous works (Hallin & Mancini, 2012a,
2012b), we were somewhat taken aback that this chapter was often interpreted as endor-
sing the prediction that this process would continue universally and inevitably until all
differences among media systems disappeared. It would not have made sense for us to
write the book we did, with its arguments about path dependence, or, more generally, to
advocate for comparative analysis of national media systems as a central approach in
political communication and media studies if this had been our view! A considerable
amount of research over the past 10 years has focused on assessing the degree to which
media systems have indeed converged toward the Liberal Model. This research paints a
complex picture of change and continuity in Western media systems, and makes clear that
differences among national media systems are in important ways quite resilient.
There is certainly evidence of convergence in the recent research—often convergence
toward the Liberal Model, and sometimes convergence following different patterns.
Umbricht and Esser (2014), for example, in one of the few studies that provides empirical
evidence about long-term change, found an increase across six Western countries in the
prevalence of conventions of “objective” reporting from the 1960s to the 2000s. They also
found convergence in the prominence of opinion in the print press; here convergence went
both ways, with the prominence of opinion declining in continental Europe and increasing
in the United States and Britain. The findings of Brüggemann and colleagues (2014) that
the Netherlands, Belgium, and Portugal all clustered with the United States and Ireland
seem best interpreted as a result of convergence toward the Liberal Model. Forty years ago
the Netherlands had a particularly strong form of political parallelism rooted in “pillariza-
tion”; today its mainly commercialized media show greatly diminished political paralle-
lism. Other recent research (Albæk et al., 2014; van Kempen, 2007) has often found
relatively low levels of political parallelism in Northern European countries where the
party press was once strong, again consistent with important elements of the convergence
hypothesis. Researchers in the Nordic countries have often commented on the “depoliti-
cization” (Strömbäck & Nord, 2008) of the press in these countries, where the party press
still had a central role in the 1970s. Rolland (2009), for example, in a discussion of the
takeover of a Norwegian newspaper by a British company, observes that “there is over-
whelming evidence that endogenous change, in the direction of commercialization and
 Ten Years After Comparing Media Systems 9

professionalization that Hallin and Mancini associate with the Liberal model, had already
taken place by the time Mecom entered the Norwegian market” (p. 274).
At the same time, a number of recent studies have documented the persistence of
important differences among Western media systems. Nielsen (2013) looked at indicators
of structural differences among media systems (newspaper and commercial television
revenue per capita, Internet penetration and public-sector support for public service
media) and found no evidence of convergence by these measures from 2000 to 2009.
Aalberg, van Aelst, and Curran (2010) looked at the “political information environment,”
and in particular at the supply of news and current affairs programming on television, from
1987 to 2007, and found peak-time supply of such programming remaining high in five
European countries, in contrast to the United States. “What strikes us,” they conclude, “is
how strongly resistant some countries have been to subordinating the needs of democracy
to profit-making” (p. 267). Numerous studies have also documented the persistence of
high levels of partisanship in Southern European media systems. Albaek and colleagues,
for example, found that the differences in indicators of political parallelism between Spain,
the only polarized pluralist country in their sample, and the rest of Europe “seem to have
widened” (2014, p. 173). Allern and Blach-Ørsten (2011), meanwhile, argue that research
on Scandinavian media systems suggests a complex pattern of change and consistency,
with important elements of the past, including remnants of political parallelism, remaining
despite elements of convergence. All of the works cited here that confirm significant
patterns of difference among Western media systems—either consistent with our three
models, or different from them—obviously cast doubt on a strong version of the conver-
gence hypothesis.
There are limitations to the existing body of research on convergence. The conver-
gence hypothesis is about change over time, and few studies are based on over-time data;
the principal exceptions are Umbricht and Esser (2014), Aalberg and colleagues (2010),
and Benson and Hallin (2007). Nielsen (2013) has data for 2000–2009, but that is a short
time period for assessing an hypothesis about long-term change. There are also many
variables that have not been studied empirically across multiple cases and, especially,
across time. The volume of public-affairs content on television, for example, may not have
gone down with the introduction of commercial television in Europe, as Aalberg and
colleagues (2010) show. But has the form and content changed? Has it become more
dramatized, more personalized, more journalist-centered, more visual, more oriented
toward “soft” news? Umbricht and Esser (2016) provide evidence on some of these
variables for political coverage in newspapers in six countries, finding parallel movements
toward personalization, scandalization, and popularization in all six counties, but not a
reduction in the differences among them. Magin (2015) provides over-time evidence for
German and Austrian newspapers. For the most part, however, we do not have empirical
evidence about change in the content of European television on these kinds of dimensions,
and there are many methodological issues of finding comparable samples across time and
systems—with party papers, for example, important in some periods and nonexistent in
others.
In our view, it is silly to deny that an important degree of convergence of Western
media systems toward the Liberal Model has taken place. The decline of the party press,
which began in the 1950s and took place over several decades, and the introduction of
commercial television were huge changes in the structure of European media systems, and
they were clearly associated with more subtle changes in such things as journalistic
practices. Clearly these changes affected the balance between political logics, on the one
hand, and commercial and journalistic logics, on the other, in European media systems.
10 Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini

That said, it seems time to abandon the strong version of the convergence hypothesis, the
view that national differences among media systems are actually disappearing. That view
was present in the literature and in public discussion at the time we were completing
Comparing Media Systems, though it had not been formulated in a very coherent way. We
made what was probably a mistake in articulating it as a hypothesis, but didn’t mean to be
taken as endorsing it. We wrote, “it is possible to imagine a complete convergence of
media systems in the United States and Europe toward something close to the Liberal
Model. But history does not usually move in straight lines, and there are many reasons to
doubt whether it makes sense to project the trend toward homogenization of the past
couple of decades indefinitely into the future” (Hallin & Mancini, 2004, pp. 282–283). We
went on to outline a critique of modernization theory, which we saw as the intellectual root
of the unilinear view of media system change. Today there is a strong accumulation of
research documenting the persistence of important differences among Western media
systems, an even wider range of differences beyond them, and complex patterns of change
in different directions. It is important to study the effects of commercialization and
globalization on media systems, but it is probably no longer necessary to debunk the
hypothesis of complete convergence toward the Liberal Model, and it is time to move on
to more sophisticated hypotheses about media system change.

Online Media
Discussions of convergence and media system change increasingly raise the issue of the
effect of the Internet, which was not considered in Comparing Media Systems. The
existing comparative literature on on-line media remains limited, but the beginnings of a
research literature in this area are present. Several hypotheses are possible about how
Internet-based media might relate to existing patterns of variation in media systems. One is
that Internet-based media might be a force for convergence, introducing logics rooted in
technology or in globalized economic models or cultural practices that would undermine
existing national differences. Boczkowski and colleagues' (2011) research on online news
choices finds this pattern. Another possibility is that we might expect continuity: that
Internet media would vary by system, shaped by the already-existing structures and
practices. Two recent case studies suggest something like this. Vaccari (2011) argues
that new media, and in particular online petitions, may reinforce political parallelism in
Polarized Pluralist systems. He investigates two Italian cases: that of the newspaper La
Repubblica and that of Michele Santoro, a well-known leftist anchorman. Both demon-
strate that new media may represent an important instrument of collective action, thus
reinforcing political parallelism in the Italian news media. Ostertag and Tuchman (2012),
in a study of the New Orleans Eye, find that this organization, which originated as a
blogging platform outside the standard conventions of American journalism, eventually
came to be strongly influenced by them. Both authors see the creation of hybrid media
forms, producing some degree of media system change, but with considerable continuity.
A third possibility is that new media would develop differently in different media systems,
but in a way that might be discontinuous with previous patterns, depending on niches
available in the existing media ecology. Powers and Benson (2014), for example, found
that online media tended to increase external pluralism in media content in the United
States, but not in Denmark or France, and attributed this to the fact that online media
nationalized the market in the United States, while it was already nationalized in the other
countries. Benson, Blach-Ørsten, Powers, Willig, and Zembrano (2012) find a mix of these
three kinds of relationships—medium determinism, continuous system determinism, and
 Ten Years After Comparing Media Systems 11

discontinuous system determinism, we might call them—across different dimensions of

online content.

Discussion
The field of comparative analysis of media systems has advanced dramatically in the years
since we wrote Comparing Media Systems. The most significant progress has been made
in the development of quantitative indicators of key system-level variables, which permit
comparison and exploration of relationships across cases and over time. Much of this
research coincides with our analysis and can be seen as confirming, even while also
completing or modifying it. Much of it also suggests alternative perspectives on patterns of
similarity or difference among cases, or on what variables are important and how they
should be seen as related to one another. Weber (1949, p. 90) described an ideal type as a
concept formed by “the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the
synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and sometimes absent
concrete individual phenomena.” The models of Comparing Media Systems, like any ideal
types, involved focusing on patterns of interrelationship among particular sets of phenom-
ena. We have stressed before that we do not think that any variable a researcher may
choose to examine should be expected to show patterns of variation that coincide with our
three types, and we have no doubt that other analyses accentuating other points of view
will show patterns that suggest other types or groupings of cases. We suspect many of
these, like those of Esser and Umbricht, Brüggemann and colleagues, or Albaek and
colleagues, will show resemblances to ours. But it is certainly not desirable to reify our
three types and assume that they will encompass all patterns of difference among Western
media systems or all important relationships among variables of interest to scholars doing
comparative research.
Extensive efforts to develop quantitative research on Western media systems have
accomplished a lot, and we are very gratified at the extent to which they have included
operationalizations and tests of our analytical framework. At the same time, we have been
troubled by the imbalance in recent comparative research, which has been heavily domi-
nated by quantitative methods with limited development of other approaches. We suspect
this is related to the contemporary political economy of academia, the strong emphasis on
funded research following natural science models, and the measurement of research
productivity in terms of regular production of journal articles. But it seems to us there
are limitations in producing a kind of academic monoculture in our field, and there are
elements of the approach of Comparing Media Systems we would like to see taken up
much more extensively than they have been. Comparing Media Systems was holistic in its
theoretical approach, and synthetic in its methodological approach. It was also historical,
looking at media systems, not at particular moments, but as they developed over long
periods of time. It involved an effort to synthesize a wide range of literatures, produced
according to many methods, dealing with many different variables and often defining them
in different ways. It has been criticized for this, most famously by Norris (2009, p. 334),
who referred to Comparing Media Systems as “fuzzy, impressionistic and unscientific.” To
some extent, we are willing to acknowledge that there is a degree of “fuzziness” in
Comparing Media Systems that resulted from its preliminary character, including the
fact that so little comparable data across cases were available for key variables. But to
some extent we think that what Norris takes as fuzziness is actually the opposite: it is the
result of an effort to take into account as much of the relevant research as possible, to take
careful note of what we know about differences of context, and to try to represent media
12 Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini

systems in their full complexity; and we would argue that it is actually much more
rigorous in its own way than approaches that choose to bracket context and complexity.
Any given quantitative study necessarily involves a great deal of abstraction: it
focuses on particular cases, variables, and time periods, throwing out others because it is
too difficult to get quantitative indicators of them. It operationalizes them in particular
ways, and it brackets many potential issues about the comparability of measures across
cases. This isn’t a fault of the researchers: This is how quantitative research has to be done,
and the studies reported here for the most part do this in sophisticated and self-conscious
ways. Still, we have to be aware that any given study provides only a very limited picture
of the overall pattern, and often the “fuzziness” begins to creep back in as we start to
compare them, and see that with other methodological choices they might have gotten
somewhat different results. Just to take one small example, van Kempen’s (2007) oper-
ationalization of political parallelism finds Denmark scoring quite high, while Albaek and
colleagues (2014, p. 85), using different measures, find it scoring low. This is, again, not to
suggest that quantitative research is not important. But it does suggest that we should
interpret it cautiously and be wary of deriving big conclusions from particular studies. It
also suggests that other methods should not be dismissed, even if on the surface they might
seem “fuzzy” compared with quantitative methods. Case studies, for example, and field-
based methods are often extremely important for getting at things like journalistic practices
and routines that cannot easily be studied by quantitative methods, and they provide the
depth of knowledge that is essential to judging the validity of quantitative measurements
of many kinds. Case studies allow the kind of process tracing (George & Bennet, 2005)
that is often crucial to making links between causes and consequences and thus to move
beyond recognizing patterns to explain them.
Most importantly, it seems to us that the kind of synthetic approach represented by
Comparing Media Systems is crucial, in the end, for making sense of the accumulation of
results from particular, more narrowly focused studies, whether quantitative or not.
Humphreys (2012) argues for greater attention in comparative research on media and
politics to the “historical institutional” approach (closely related to the comparative
historical approach outlined in Mahoney & Rueschemeyer, 2003) which has played a
central role in the development of comparative analysis in sociology and political science,
and we concur with his argument on this point (see also Bannerman & Haggart, 2015;
Bastiansen, 2008).
The strong emphasis in recent research on quantitative operationalization has involved
an emphasis, as Albaek and colleagues (2014) put it, on “standards to guide the oper-
ationalization of key concepts,” which they see as “prerequisite to move the field toward
more cumulative knowledge” (p. 182). We certainly agree that the use of common
indicators across multiple studies can play an important role in advancing the field, and
efforts like the recent special issue of Journalism on “Standardization of Core Concepts”
(Esser, Strömbäck, & de Vreese, 2012) have been very useful, though perhaps less in
literally standardizing operationalizing than in encouraging researchers to be clear about
the effect of methodological choices on the kinds of research questions that can be
addressed and on comparability with other research. At the same time, we think it
makes sense to introduce a note of caution here. It seems to us there is some danger
that the development of measures will become detached from conceptual development
rooted in broader scholarship on media systems, and that our concepts themselves may
become overly narrowed and simplified. There is particular danger if the measures in
question are developed within scholarship based on a relatively small number of European
 Ten Years After Comparing Media Systems 13

cases, and then scholars working on media systems in very different contexts are expected
to adopt them.
These methodological issues are closely connected with theoretical issues related to
the nature of a “system.” There is a strong temptation, particularly when scholars are
trying to do quantitative research involving a significant number of cases, to assume that it
should be possible to represent a media system by a single value on any given variable.1
But this is a misunderstanding of the nature of a system (Hallin, 2015). Systems, for one
thing, are not homogeneous. As the previous discussion of new media suggests, different
elements of a system—different sectors of the media, for example—may operate according
to logics that are at least in part different, and indeed often in conflict or competition. To
say that they are part of a system is not to say that they all operate in the same way, but to
say that they interact in ways that mean their roles and characteristics cannot be under-
stood without reference to their place within the whole system. Some of the studies
covered here do take these kinds of differences into account. de Vreese and colleagues
(2016), for example, look systematically at differences among newspapers, television
(commercial and public service), and online media. But often, single aggregate measures
are used.
Media systems are also not static. They undergo long-term change, and as we have
seen much of the recent research has shed important light on the nature of some of these
changes. But they also are characterized by a great deal of short- and medium-term internal
variation. Journalists, for example, do not act in the same way in all situations; they may
be more active or responsive to different kinds of sources in one kind of political
conjuncture than in another. A system is not an entity with a fixed set of characteristics,
but a pattern of variation. de Vreese and colleagues (2016) argue that the “event environ-
ment” needs to be taken into account along with system-level factors in order to explain
journalistic performance, and we certainly concur. This, along with the fact noted earlier,
that patterns of media performance—a high level of political coverage, for example, or of
negativity—might be produced by different combinations of media system characteristics
are reasons we should not necessarily expect to find neat, one-to-one patterns of relation-
ship between media system types and media performance variables. This is also one of the
reasons case studies are essential to the wider enterprise of comparative analysis, as a
corrective to studies that attempt to characterize systems by aggregate summary measures
that abstract from this variation.
Finally, a fundamental element of the systems perspective is the idea that systems are
not reducible to their component parts. In the introduction to his classic work on what he
calls “welfare regimes,” Esping-Anderson (1990, p. 3) notes that “most studies have
assumed a world of linearity: of more or less power, industrialization or spending.” He
goes on to explain why he believes it is necessary to think in terms of types rather than just
quantities, and warns that the “crystalization and subsequent development” of these types
“can hardly be explained with analytical parsimony.” Esping-Anderson certainly makes
extensive and central use of quantitative data (the relevant data are easier to come by when
you are studying welfare states than media systems). But his fundamental theoretical
perspective is essentially a systems perspective; he sees welfare state regimes as irreduci-
ble patterns that must be understood in their interrelation, and cannot be reduced to linear
relations among discrete variables. One important element of his approach to understand-
ing these patterns is “to embed our explanations in the political histories of nations.” We
worry that this sociological-historical approach to scholarship, which understands social
formations holistically as historically embedded patterns of relationship, is for the most
14 Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini

part poorly developed in our field, and that as a result advances in measurement outstrip
the quality of theoretical analysis.

Conclusion
The field of comparative analysis of media systems has advanced dramatically in the
10 years or so since we published Comparing Media Systems. This body of research has
resulted partly from a surge of funding available for comparative work within Europe, and
relatively little has been done outside of Europe to date. Nevertheless, the accomplish-
ments of this body of research are impressive, and it is probably fair to say that most of the
systematic research done in this field has come out over the past few years. Particularly
strong progress has been made in developing quantitative indicators of key concepts.
These have made it possible to look in systematic ways at patterns of similarity and
difference among media systems, at change over time in these patterns, and at the effects
of system-level variables on such diverse phenomena as political knowledge and the
occurrence of mediated scandals. The field of comparative analysis of media systems is
a mature field in a way it was certainly not at the time we did our initial work, with new
research building coherently on earlier work. At the same time, some important elements
of the approach we hoped to inspire with Comparing Media Systems seem to us mostly
missing in the research of the past decade. We would like to see greater methodological
pluralism and greater theoretical reflection on the nature and development of systems, and
the ways in which we might put together the diverse results of the particular quantitative
studies discussed here into broader understandings of the evolution of contemporary media
systems.

Note
1. We would see the expectation of Downey and colleagues (2012) that there would be a one-to-
one correspondence between normative conceptions of the public sphere and media system
types as an example of this tendency.

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