Democracy and the Media: A Comparative Perspective Edited by Richard Gunther and Anthony Mughan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 496p. $85.00 cloth, $29.95 paper. Media and the Presidentialization of Parliamentary Elections By Anthony Mughan. New York: Palgrave, 2000. 179p. $65.00.

Extract

The themes of crisis and transformation have fueled a miniexplosion of research on media and democracy in the last decade. Researchers within or close to the “media studies'' school have developed a burgeoning literature on questions of citizenship and the public sphere, in the context of deregulation, expanding media markets, and rising interest in the arguments of the deliberative democrats. Scholars more closely connected to political science have pursued an overlapping but different agenda. From the United States and western Europe, amid concern at signs of a crisis of citizen engagement, the focus increasingly is on media power to mobilize or demobilize voters. From Eastern and central Europe and Latin America there is an emerging corpus on the role of media in the transition and consolidation of democracy. Cross-cutting these various strands are the Internet revolution and the question of globalization and, more specifically, U.S. potency to lead or at least predict trends in political communication for the democratic world.