| The Mediatization of Politics: Towards a Conceptual Framework While mediatization as a concept has been used for at least two decades (Asp, 1986), it is only during the last few years that it has become a key concept in research trying to understand the impact of media on various political, cultural and social processes (Lundby, 2009). Although the term mediatization is commonly used in the academic literature, it is however rarely defined well and oftentimes no clear distinction is made between mediation and mediatization (Livingstone, 2009).
To further empirical research on the mediatization of politics, there is a need for a conceptual framework that both captures the multidimensionality of the concept and is possible to operationalize. Based on this, I have previously (2008) suggested that the mediatization of politics should be conceived of as a process where four major, although interrelated, dimensions can be identified. The first dimension is concerned with the extent to which the media constitute the most important source of information and channel of communication. The second dimension is concerned with the media’s independence from other social institutions, not least political institutions. Although all institutions should be perceived of as interdependent, for the media to have an independent impact on other social or political actors or institutions, they have to form an institution or a social system in their own right. The third dimension is concerned with media content and the degree to which media content is governed by media logic or political logic. The fourth dimension focuses on political actors and the degree to which they are governed by media logic or political logic.
The talk at Karlstad University will focus on this conceptualization of mediatization of politics, and also provide the first results of a comparative study of mediatization along the third dimension. More specifically, this study compares the mediatization of election news coverage on US and Swedish network news in the context of the 2006 Swedish and the 2008 US elections.
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Karlstads universitet