In this concluding chapter we focus on a number of central issues that emerge from the contributions presented here. As with the volume as a whole, we take the conceptual framework of Comparing Media Systems as a point of departure, and to some extent we use this chapter to respond to issues the various contributors have raised about our concepts and argument. Beyond this, we try to summarize some of the central arguments put forward in this volume about how the field of comparative media studies can move forward with the study of media and politics across a wide range of media and political systems. Of course, the contributions included here are far too rich for us to summarize in more than a very selective way. This chapter deals with these four broad issues: (1) the nature of the Polarized Pluralist model put forward in Comparing Media Systems and the question of its relevance to understanding non-European systems; (2) the issue of whether world media systems are converging toward the Liberal model; (3) the conceptualization of the four dimensions proposed in Comparing Media Systems as a framework for comparison; and (4) a set of methodological issues, raised principally in Part II of this volume, which have to do with the use of “models” in Comparing Media Systems, the concept of “system,” the units of analysis for comparative analysis, and related issues of structure and agency.

The Polarized Pluralist Model as a Worldwide Model?

In the conclusion to Comparing Media Systems, we make the observation (p. 306) that our Mediterranean or Polarized Pluralist model, more than the other two we discuss, would be “most widely applicable to other systems as an empirical model of the relation between media and political systems.” We drew this parallel not because the concept of polarized pluralism in the narrow sense is likely to apply to a wide range of cases: As de Albuquerque points out in Chapter 5, Giovanni Sartori (1976), who coined the term “polarized pluralism,” had in mind a very specific type of political party system that does not even clearly fit all the cases in Southern Europe that we discuss under our Polarized Pluralist model. We borrowed Sartori's term because the broader pattern of political development associated with the party systems that Sartori calls polarized pluralist – including, among other characteristics, a later and more contested transition to liberal institutions; polarization, or broad differences among political parties about the basic shape and norms of the political order; clientelism; a stronger role of the state; and historically lower literacy rates – did indeed seem broadly relevant across Southern Europe, as it does also to many other systems worldwide. The analyses presented in this collection essentially confirm our observation about the broad prevalence of this pattern. Many of the authors note important parallels between the cases they study and the characteristics of our Polarized Pluralist model: a strong prevalence of partisan media, a tendency to instrumentalization of media by political and economic elites and their use as tools of bargaining and maneuvering among those elites, frequent state intervention and involvement in the media system, lesser development of journalistic professionalism, lower newspaper circulation, and so on. At the same time, many of our participants raised questions about the use of our Polarized Pluralist model in wider comparative analysis. These questions were essentially of two kinds. The first had to do with the concern that the Polarized Pluralist model would wind up being a catch-all residual model, lumping together diverse media systems under a category that comprised everything other than North America and Northern Europe; the second, with the question of whether the conceptualization of our Polarized Pluralist model involved negative normative implications that were problematic for comparative analysis.