Media-Political Parallelism as an Indicator in Studying Mediacracy

In media & political literature, media-political parallelism (MPP) has become an established media-political phenomenon. But there’s no academic consensus on aims of studying it or its methodological implications for democratic representation studies. Some scholars have pointed out to political parallelism as a negative perversion of politically relevant features of media systems; others have detected positive influence of partisan content on political mobilization. Recently, MPP has become a criterion in comparative media systems / political communication research – again, with no clear methodology on the background. We propose a re-thought methodology of quantitative measurement of MPP in a comparative perspective in the context of studies of mediacracy. Based on previous research, seven parameters of measurement are proposed. Four ‘primary’ parameters are measured by superposition of graphs of party parliamentary distribution within and media consumption figures within political spectrum. Three national cases (Germany 1998, UK 2005, Italy 2006) are compared. For estimation of party policy positions, The Manifesto Project dataset is used; in the media field, two models of political spectrum are proposed. Three clusters of hypotheses (national-level, comparative, methodological) are formulated. Research Results. Nationally, in all the cases except the right-hand side of the spectrum in Germany in 1998, media spread repeats political (electoral) spread. This may have two explanations: either papers follow the position of their ‘median voters’ or have a degree of influence upon voting behavior (which seems more probable). In Italy, political papers show results very different from general interest papers and illuminating in terms of national political discourse. Comparatively, the UK proves to have the highest parallelism but Germany equals Italy or shows even higher parallelism. Methodologically, secondary data on perceived media bias show results similar to data gathered by empirical research and may be used for comparative studies. In case of Britain, estimated readership figures do show better predictability.