Media/politics connections: beyond political parallelism

Abstract

Used by Seymour-Ure and by Blumler and Gurevitch the concept of “political parallelism” gained further prominence after Hallin and Mancini took it as one of their key variables in the comparison of media systems. The concept seems to work well for analyzing western societies, but how useful is it for dealing with the rest of the world? This article suggests that the concept of political parallelism only can be productively used when two conditions are satisfied. There must be a competitive political system, with political cleavages clear enough to allow the media to reproduce them, and an institutionalized relationship between media and political agents that is sufficiently stable to allow the observer to identify recurrent patterns of interaction. However, these requirements are not met everywhere. By “provincializing” the concept of political parallelism – taking it as a product of specific circumstances, rather than as a universally applicable category – this article proposes a new and more globally applicable framework for studying political communication