The Influence of Media-Politics-Parallelism on Political Participation and Pluralism

The concept of political parallelism is one of the key dimensions in describing the relationship between the media and politics in Western societies (Seymour-Ure 1974; Blumler/Gurevitch 1995; Hallin/Mancini 2004; Blum 2005). Historically it can be understood through the parallel development of parties and the press in the 19th century and is in the theory divided into five aspects: media content, organizational connections, the political attitude of journalists, editors and owners, the partisanship of the media audiences and broadcasting regulations. But there are only a few attempts to measure it quantitatively and show the influence of political parallelism on the political process. According to Van Kempen (2006, 2007) a high degree of political parallelism increases the level of voter turnout. This study examines the degree of media exposure and party preference in the 27 member states of the European Union and changes through time (2004, 2009). My hypothesis is that the aggregated data can be used as a context variable and explanatory factor not only of the national electoral participation, but has also a positive effect on the political participation in general. Furthermore, this is interesting to internal and external media pluralism which affects the political knowledge and institutional trust.