Ludger helms media and politics

Ludger Helms
Governing in the Media Age:
The Impact of the Mass Media on
Executive Leadership in Contemporary
Democracies1
ALTHOUGH POLITICAL RESEARCH ON MEDIA ISSUES REMAINS RATHER
patchy compared with the volume of research on other intermediary
institutions, such as parties or interest groups, it is now widely
acknowledged that realistic perspectives on the political process in
the contemporary advanced democracies cannot ignore the mass
media. Scholars following political developments in different estab-
lished democracies agree that politics has become ‘mediated’,2
and
that the news media have acquired the status of genuinely political
actors or institutions.3
That said, advances in researching the media,
and their roles in politics, have been rather uneven. Given the
notable general interest in the ‘medialization’ of political leaders and
leadership in contemporary democracies, it marks a curiosity that
mass media effects on executive leadership have largely failed to
attract a reasonable amount of scholarly attention, as is being under-
1
A previous draft of this paper was written while the author was a Visiting Fellow
at the Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo, Japan, early in 2006. The unique
hospitality of the Institute and the generous ﬁnancial support of the German Research
Council that made this visit possible are gratefully acknowledged. Thanks are also due
to the anonymous referees of this journal. All remaining errors are the sole responsi-
bility of the author.
2
W. Lance Bennett and Robert M. Entman (eds), Mediated Politics, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 2001.
3
Paolo Mancini and David L. Swanson, ‘Politics, Media, and Modern Democracy:
Introduction’, in David L. Swanson and Paolo Mancini (eds), Politics, Media, and
Modern Democracy, New York, Praeger, 1996, p. 11; Timothy E. Cook, Governing with the
News. The News Media as a Political Institution, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1998;
Michael Schudson, ‘The News Media as Political Institutions’, Annual Review of Political
Science, 5 (2002), pp. 249–69.
Government and Opposition, Vol. 43, No. 1, pp. 26–54, 2008
doi:10.1111/j.1477-7053.2007.00242.x
© The Author 2008. Journal compilation © 2008 Government and Opposition Ltd
Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main
Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

scored by the conspicuous absence of this issue in recent surveys of
political research on politics and the mass media.4
This is not to say that issues concerning the possible effects of the
mass media on governance and leadership in the advanced democ-
racies have completely stayed off the research agenda of comparative
government and politics. It is in fact even possible to identify some
kind of a dominant paradigm of understanding the role of the mass
media in relation to governments and within the leadership process.
While the mass media have been occasionally described as potential
veto players that can effectively constrain the leverage of govern-
ments,5
the mainstream perception of government–mass media rela-
tions in the West European parliamentary democracies has been one
that considers the media as powerful catalysts of a gradual con-
centration of political power in the hands of governments and chief
executives more particularly. The remarkably popular ‘presidential-
ization’ thesis in comparative executive research marks only the most
recent interpretation of the current state of governance and leader-
ship in the contemporary parliamentary democracies that builds
strongly on the changing role and the increased impact of the media
within the democratic process.6
It has been accompanied by ‘grand
narratives’ in recent media history, which consider the historical
evolution of the relationship between governments and the mass
4
See John Street, ‘Politics Lost, Politics Transformed, Politics Colonised? Theories
of the Impact of Mass Media’, Political Studies Review, 3 (2005), pp. 17–33; and John
Corner and Piers Robinson, ‘Politics and Mass Media: A Response to John Street’,
Political Studies Review, 4 (2006), pp. 48–54. Also, in an extensive review of the more
recent literature on media effects written by a team of American scholars, ‘effects on
politicians and policy makers’ are tackled on less than a full page; see Douglas M.
McLeod, Gerald M. Kosicki and Jack M. McLeod, ‘Resurveying the Boundaries of
Political Communication Effects’, in Jennings Bryant and Dolf Zillmann (eds), Media
Effects. Advances in Theory and Research, 2nd edn, Mahwah, NJ, Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates, 2002, p. 267.
5
In countries as different as Japan and Germany, the mass media have been
identiﬁed as veritable functional equivalents of a powerful opposition party. See Ellis
S. Krauss, ‘The Mass Media and Japanese Politics: Effects and Consequences’, in Susan
J. Pharr and Ellis S. Krauss (eds), Media and Politics in Japan, Honolulu, University of
Hawai’i Press, 1996, p. 360; Ralf Dahrendorf, ‘Regierungen ohne Opposition’, Süd-
deutsche Zeitung, 14 November 2002, p. 2.
6
Thomas Poguntke and Paul Webb (eds), The Presidentialization of Politics: A Com-
parative Study of Modern Democracies, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press,
2005.
27GOVERNING IN THE MEDIA AGE

media in liberal democracies to have been marked by a gradually
increasing ability of governments to manage the media, transforming
the latter into ‘fundamental tools of liberal democratic governance’.7
This article seeks to reconsider the issue of mass media effects on
governments, leaders and the leadership process from an interna-
tionally comparative perspective. Cross-national comparative inquiry
in media research tends to be viewed with notable suspicion. Indeed,
comparativists studying the political roles of the media have been
faced with stricter methodological, theoretical and empirical stan-
dards, and reservations, than scholars in many other fields of
comparative politics. There is widespread scepticism among media
scholars even against studies focusing on a single country. Its propo-
nents have argued that only case studies on individual decisions,
rather than countries, are useful in determining whether, how and to
what extent the media matter in terms of politics and policy.8
This is
no doubt a valid point. That said, it is obvious that case studies that
are both extremely detailed and correspondingly limited in focus are
needed most when it comes to refining our knowledge of the role of
the mass media in political decision-making, and their effect on
executive leadership more particularly. As things stand, though, we
have only just begun to identify some of the most fundamental ele-
ments of the government–mass media relationship. Thus it would
appear to be more appropriate and rewarding to adopt a broader
perspective on an issue whose centrality for a deeper understanding
of the current state of governance and leadership in the established
democracies cannot seriously be denied.
Though this piece’s primary aim is not to make a theoretical
contribution, some brief remarks on its theoretical basis would not
seem to go amiss. In liberal democracies, both governments and the
mass media are actors that can act freely, but they do so within the
existing institutional parameters that create specific opportunities
7
P. Eric Louw, The Media and Political Process, London, Sage, 2005, ch. 3, p. 54.
8
Sonia Livingstone, ‘On the Challenges of Cross-National Comparative Media
Research’, European Journal of Communication, 18 (2003), pp. 477–500; see also Michael
Gurevitch and Jay Blumler, ‘The State of the Art of Comparative Political Communi-
cation Research’, in Frank Esser and Barbara Pfetsch (eds), Comparing Political Com-
munication. Theories, Cases, and Challenges, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
2004, pp. 325–43.
28 GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION

and constraints and shape actors’ preferences and strategic choices.9
While institutions provide stability, they are not static. Generally, the
potential for actor-driven institutional change will be greatest in the
immediate institutional environment of an actor. Often, however,
the forces driving institutional change within a given sector are
located outside that sector. In the established democracies, most
manifestations of formal institutional (and in particular constitu-
tional) change across the political system originate from legislative
reforms to be initiated and enacted by elected governments. Courts
are another powerful initiator of formal institutional change in
different sectors of politics and society. However, cross-sectoral in-
stitutional change is an exceptionally complex process, and the insti-
tutions of government can, if often less directly, effectively be altered
by actors from outside the group of constitutionally acknowledged
actors. More specifically, there is ample evidence that the media have
had a rather powerful effect on the organizational evolution of execu-
tive branches.10
Many of the most important aspects of mass media effects on
political leadership in the established democracies relate to the world
of informal institutions, though. Informal institutions comprise a
host of different phenomena, such as values, behavioural rules and
patterns of interaction. Unlike their formal counterparts, informal
institutions can be neither enforced nor abolished by law. However,
this makes them not necessarily less important or less powerful.
Informal institutions (re)define and specify functional roles of actors
and relationships between actors within and across different sectors
of the political system.11
One final aspect to be highlighted in this
9
This is the essence of actor-centred institutionalism as suggested by Fritz W.
Scharpf, Games Real Actors Play: Actor-Centered Institutionalism in Policy Research, Boulder,
CO, Westview Press, 1997.
10
Indeed, many changes in executive organization came about in response to
changing external pressures, including in particular those produced by the media. For
the USA, see Stephen Hess with James P. Pfiffner, Organizing the Presidency, 3rd edn,
Washington, DC, Brookings Institution Press, 2002; for Britain, Dennis Kavanagh and
Anthony Seldon, The Powers Behind the Prime Minister, London, HarperCollins, 2000; for
a comparative perspective, B. Guy Peters, R. A. W. Rhodes and Vincent Wright (eds),
Administering the Summit: Administration of the Core Executive in Developed Countries,
London, Macmillan, 2000.
11
Gretchen Helmke and Steven Levitsky, ‘Informal Institutions and Comparative
Politics: A Research Agenda’, Perspectives on Politics, 2 (2004), pp. 725–39.

context is the triangular nature of political communication. Whereas
accounts of government–mass media relations, or the impact of the
media on governments and governmental leaders, may focus on one
or both of these two actors for analytical reasons, there is always a
third actor involved – the public, without which the very concept of
political communication in representative democracies is inconceiv-
able. Indeed, in democratic regimes the bulk of actions of, and
interactions between, governments and the mass media are ulti-
mately driven by considerations relating to the public. While both
governments and the media have a natural interest in reaching the
public and inﬂuence the public agenda, they consider and address
the public from different angles, as voters or customers. But citizens
are bound to combine these roles and may not always be able, or even
willing, to distinguish strictly between the different worlds they are
living in. This creates a huge challenge for all actors involved in
political communication, yet the implications are particularly serious
for governments seeking to strike a balance between democratic
responsiveness and leadership.
The following sections proceed to explore the impact of the
mass media on executive leadership in the contemporary established
democracies of North America and Western Europe. The general
hypothesis advanced in this article is a straightforward one: while
skilful political leaders and their supporters may at times be able to
use the media as a means for their political ends,12
there is more
evidence from a comparative inquiry that the media add to the
manifold constraints on executives and executive leadership in the
contemporary Western democracies, making leadership (even) more
difﬁcult than in the past.
THE BASIC INSTITUTIONAL PARAMETERS
Any serious inquiry into media effects on executive leadership has to
start with a brief consideration of the key institutional parameters at
12
Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and François Mitterrand are among those
who have been widely considered to represent prime examples of leaders with an
exceptional ability ‘to exploit the new dynamics of media-driven politics’; Gillian Peele,
‘Leadership and Politics: A Case for a Closer Relationship?’, Leadership, 1 (2005),
p. 191.

the level of political and media systems. At the political systems level,
the single most important institutional divide remains that between
parliamentary and presidential systems.13
Although this distinction
refers essentially to the relationship between the executive and the
legislature (‘fusion of powers’ vs. ‘separation of powers’), there is
ample evidence suggesting that parliamentary and presidential
systems do by no means differ only with regard to the basic param-
eters and manifestations of executive–legislative relations. They also
create speciﬁc incentives and constraints within the wider political
process that tend to have a strong bearing on the overall logic and
structure of policy-making under parliamentary and presidential gov-
ernment.14
This would appear to remain a valid contention, though
recent works, especially by authors drawing on the veto player
theorem, suggest that the parliamentary/presidential divide may
have somewhat less determining power than previously believed.15
There have been other attempts designed to cope with the enor-
mous institutional variety of liberal democracies. Among the more
relevant ones worth noting in our context are works seeking to
classify different systems according to the strength of the chief execu-
tive within the executive branch. In a major study by Thomas Baylis,
13
See Arend Lijphart, Parliamentary versus Presidential Government, Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 1992. Within the family of established liberal democracies, the United
States has remained the only uncontested case of presidential government, whereas all
West European countries (except Switzerland) belong to the rather heterogeneous
group of parliamentary systems of government. There has been growing consensus in
the more recent literature that the coexistence of a directly elected president with a
parliamentary responsible prime minister (which marks several of the West European
democracies) should be considered an institutional variation within the group of
parliamentary regimes, rather than an independent ‘semi-presidential’ type of repre-
sentative government. See Alan Siaroff, ‘Comparative Presidencies: The Inadequacy of
the Presidential, Semi-Presidential and Parliamentary Distinction’, European Journal of
Political Research, 42 (2003), pp. 287–312.
14
See Alfred Stepan and Cindy Skach, ‘Constitutional Frameworks and Demo-
cratic Consolidation: Parliamentarism versus Presidentialism’, World Politics, 46 (1993),
pp. 1–22; Juan Linz and Arturo Valenzuela (eds), The Failure of Presidential Democracy.
Vol. 1: Comparative Perspectives, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994; Fred
W. Riggs, ‘Presidentialism versus Parliamentarism: Implications for Representativeness
and Legitimacy’, International Political Science Review, 18 (1997), pp. 253–78.
15
George Tsebelis, Veto Players: How Political Institutions Work, Princeton, Princeton
University Press, 2002.

executives were ranked according to the degree of collegiality gov-
erning intra-executive relationships between different members of
the political executive.16
Not surprisingly, this list was headed by the
US president, who enjoys an amount of control within the executive
branch that is unmatched even by the powerful prime ministers of
Westminster-type parliamentary democracies. Other works focused
more specifically on the classification of West European prime min-
isters. In an important paper published in the mid-1990s, Anthony
King distinguished between prime ministers holding a weak, a
medium-strong or a strong position within the executive branch of
their respective country.17
According to King’s classifications, the
group of countries with a powerful chief executive includes, among
others, Britain, Germany and Spain. That with medium-strong prime
ministers comprises many of the smaller countries, such as Austria,
Belgium, Denmark and Sweden, whereas the third category of coun-
tries accommodating comparatively weak prime ministers is consid-
ered to include Italy, Norway and the Netherlands.18
France – in
many ways Western Europe’s most fascinating major democracy – has
been excluded from King’s assessment (and from other comparative
inquiries such as that conducted by O’Malley) for the obvious prob-
lems caused by the ‘semi-presidential’ feature of the Fifth French
Republic’s constitutional structure. The resources available to the
French president and prime minister depend very much on which
party or coalition holds the majority in the French National Assem-
bly. Whereas during times of ‘unified government’, French presi-
dents enjoy a tremendous amount of power, ‘cohabitation presidents’
16
Thomas C. Baylis, Governing by Committee: Collegial Leadership in Advanced Societies,
Albany, State University of New York Press, 1989, p. 147.
17
Anthony King, ‘“Chief Executives” in Western Europe’, in Ian Budge and David
McKay (eds), Developing Democracy. Comparative Research in Honour of J.F.P. Blondel,
London, Sage, 1994, p. 153. It should be noted that the focus of this evaluation is
on systemic properties (including the constitutional powers of office and the basic
political variables) rather than on the much more volatile power basis of individual
office holders.
18
There have been more recent attempts to evaluate the power of prime ministers,
including an expert survey focusing on the power of prime ministers within the
policy-making process. See Eoin O’Malley, ‘The Power of Prime Ministers: Results of
an Expert Survey’, International Political Science Review, 28 (2007), pp. 1–27. The rela-
tionship between King’s assessments and those produced by O’Malley’s country
experts has been notably strong, with significantly differing assessments being con-
fined to a small number of cases, such as Ireland and the Netherlands in particular.

are relatively weak political players, losing much of their power to the
prime minister (who otherwise is often little more than the presi-
dent’s ‘chief enforcer’).19
To the extent that executive leadership is understood to be about
both giving direction to the executive and providing leadership in
the wider political process, assessments of the institutional para-
meters of leadership may not meaningfully be confined to the execu-
tive territory. Systems differ from one another with regard to the
overall number and strength of counter-majoritarian institutions
(such as powerful second chambers, constitutional courts or inde-
pendent central banks) designed to constrain the power of the execu-
tive within the political process.20
More recent works have drawn
attention to the fact that there is no natural correlation between
power-concentrating executive structures and the scope of the chief
executive in the wider political process.21
There are, in particular,
countries in which a largely monocratic executive structure coexists
with a set of exceptionally powerful institutional constraints on the
19
David S. Bell, Presidential Power in Fifth Republic France, Oxford, Berg, 2000; Robert
Elgie, ‘“Cohabitation”: Divided Government French-Style’, in Robert Elgie (ed.),
Divided Government in Comparative Perspective, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp.
106–26; Jack Hayward and Vincent Wright, Governing from the Centre: Core Executive
Coordination in France, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003.
20
For an empirical overview of the different patterns of constitutional veto players
to be found in the established democracies see Manfred G. Schmidt, ‘The Impact of
Political Parties, Constitutional Structures and Veto Players on Public Policy’, in Hans
Keman (ed.), Comparative Democratic Politics, London, Sage, 2002, p. 178, table 8.2. On
this basis, Schmidt distinguishes between ‘sovereign democracies’ and ‘semi-sovereign
democracies’, which differ from one another in terms of constitutional and other
institutional constraints on democratic majorities and democratically elected govern-
ments. Note that this differentiation is not a neat equivalent of the more influential
distinction between majoritarian and consensus democracies suggested by Arend
Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1999, that has
been readily adopted by scholars studying the institutional determinants of actors’
political communication strategies in different national contexts; see Hanspeter Kriesi,
‘Strategic Political Communication. Mobilizing Public Opinion in “Audience Democ-
racies”’, in Esser and Pfetsch, Comparing Political Communication, pp. 201–2. The differ-
ent character of the two indices becomes manifest in particular in the competing
classifications of the United States which may be considered either a classic example of
majoritarian democracy or a power-sharing polity.
21
See Ludger Helms, Presidents, Prime Ministers and Chancellors: Executive Leadership
in Western Democracies, London and New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, pp. 11–15,
table 1.2.

executive at the wider political system’s level. The prototype of this
speciﬁc combination is obviously the United States – leading one
scholar to characterize the American president as ‘a semi-sovereign
prince’.22
In this regard, Germany clearly is the United States’ nearest
equivalent among the parliamentary democracies of Western
Europe.23
The media systems of the established democracies are no less
diverse than their respective constitutional orders, even though this
has attracted very little scholarly attention until recently. Somewhat
ironically, the notable hesitation of mainstream media scholarship
in acknowledging important cross-national differences has to some
extent been approved by the historical dynamics of international
media development. There has, in fact, been a more recent trend
towards convergence that moved many West European systems closer
to the American model24
– whose key components include a clearly
dominant position of a commercial press over other forms of press
organization, the largely unchallenged prevalence of commercial
broadcasting, a high level of professionalization of journalism and a
strong tradition of ‘fact-centred’ reporting, a limited amount of state
intervention in the media sector as well as a structural position of the
22
Sergio Fabbrini, ‘The Semi-Sovereign American Prince: The Dilemma of an
Independent President in a Presidential Government’, in Poguntke and Webb, The
Presidentialization of Politics, pp. 313–35.
23
Ludger Helms, ‘The Changing Chancellorship: Resources and Constraints
Revisited’, German Politics, 10 (2001), pp. 155–68; for a comparative perspective, see
also Ludger Helms, Executive Leadership and the Role of ‘Veto Players’ in the United States and
Germany, Working Paper No. 03.02, Program for the Study of Germany and Europe,
Center for European Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 2003.
24
This marks one among several important theses developed and substantiated by
Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini in their path-breaking comparative study on the
historical evolution and change of Western media systems. See Daniel C. Hallin and
Paolo Mancini, Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 2004. It should be noted, however, that the authors do not
identify a purely unidirectional process of convergence. Whereas the more dominant
move has been towards ‘Americanization’, there have been several traces of ‘Europe-
anization’ in the United States, including, for example, the belated emergence of
nationwide American newspapers. For a more detailed reconsideration of the ‘Ameri-
canization’ thesis from a British perspective see also Jay G. Blumler and Michael
Gurevitch, ‘“Americanization” Reconsidered: U.K.–U.S. Campaign Communication
Comparisons Across Time’, in Lance Bennett and Entman, Mediated Politics, pp. 380–
403.

media that tends to be institutionally separate from political parties
and other organized political groups.
Manifestations of limited convergence notwithstanding, crucial
differences persist not only between the media systems of the United
States and the countries of Western Europe, but also between West
European democracies. They relate to the quantitative level of press
circulation, the structure of the ‘press landscape’, the role and power
of commercial broadcasting in relation to public broadcasting, the
extent of government control of the media, the degree of journalistic
professionalism, and the amount of media autonomy from political
parties and other public and private actors. The specific combination
of these (and several other) indicators in the Western democracies
led Hallin and Mancini to distinguish between three models of media
and politics: a ‘Mediterranean or Polarized Pluralist Model’ (associ-
ated with the comparatively young West European democracies of
Spain, Portugal and Greece, but also including Italy and, though with
certain qualifications, France), a ‘North/Central European or Demo-
cratic Corporatist Model’ (considered to include Scandinavia and the
three mainly German-speaking countries of continental Europe, as
well as the Low Countries) and a ‘North Atlantic or Liberal Model’
(including the United States, Canada, Britain and Ireland).25
It would appear useful to complement the picture drawn by Hallin
and Mancini by also taking into account the regional proliferation of
the internet in different countries. Much has been written about the
so-called ‘digital divide’, i.e. the starkly differing proportions of citi-
zens enjoying access to the internet in developed and developing
countries.26
The magnitude of the global North–South divide should,
however, not blind us to the significant differences that exist with
regard to the distribution of the internet amongst different economi-
cally advanced and politically consolidated liberal democracies.
According to recent surveys,27
the average proportion of internet
25
Hallin and Mancini, Comparing Media Systems.
26
See, for example, Pippa Norris, Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information
Poverty and the Internet Worldwide, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2001. For a
critique of the ‘digital divide’ paradigm, which has been considered to be misleadingly
static, see Richard Rose, ‘A Global Diffusion Model of e-Governance’, Journal of Public
Policy, 25 (2005), pp. 5–27.
27
The figures presented here are drawn from www.internetworldstats.com/
stats2.htm#north and www.internetworldstats.com/stats9.htm#eu, accessed on 19
August 2007.

users, as of June 2007, was exceptionally high throughout most of
Scandinavia (especially in Iceland, 86.3 per cent, and Sweden, 75.6
per cent) and, perhaps surprisingly, in Portugal (73.8 per cent).
Figures for the United States and Canada hover in the high 60s (69.7
and 67.8 per cent respectively). Further down the ladder are coun-
tries such as the UK (62.3 per cent) and Germany (61.1 per cent).
Overall, the figures largely frustrate ambitions to identify coherent
regional clusters. For example, while the average score for the
Benelux countries is 63.5 per cent, a difference of almost 25 percent-
age points separates Belgium and the Netherlands from each other.
Even shared borders combined with obvious parallels in recent
democratization history and roughly similar levels of economic per-
formance apparently do not lead to similar internet infrastructures.
Whereas Portugal had a score of almost 75 per cent in mid-2007, the
figure for neighbouring Spain was less than 44 per cent. Arguably,
the most striking feature is, however, to be seen in the marked divide
that separates the majority of North European countries from most
Romanian countries. Whereas the average score of the five Scandi-
navian states was well above 70 per cent, internet users in countries
such as France, Italy and Spain accounted for just above 50 per cent
of the population in 2007.
The regional patterns of internet distribution described appar-
ently do not fit exactly into the three categories of countries con-
strued by Hallin and Mancini. While one might expect to find the
greatest proportion of internet users within the countries represent-
ing the ‘North Atlantic or Liberal Model’, the average score for the
Anglo-Saxon democracies is actually slightly lower than that for
the ‘North/Central European or Democratic Corporatist’ countries.
Also, with the notable exception of Portugal, the traditionally low
level of newspaper circulation and readership within the countries
representing the ‘Mediterranean or Polarized Pluralist Model’ is by
no means compensated for by a particularly high degree of ‘internet
density’. By contrast, there is a rather strong correlation between
high newspaper sales and a large share of internet users across coun-
tries, with the Scandinavian countries heading both ranking tables.
More importantly, what this stocktaking exercise also reveals is that
the classifications of individual countries suggested by comparative
media systems research and comparative executive research share
little common ground. There is, in particular, a notable amount of
incongruence with regard to the key features of countries’ executive

structures and institutional properties, and the defining characteris-
tics of their media systems. For example, the group of countries with
powerful prime ministers (Britain, Ireland, Germany, Spain and
Greece) includes cases from all three of Hallin’s and Mancini’s cat-
egories, though it may be noted that all countries representing the
‘North Atlantic or Liberal Model’ (the United States, Canada, Britain
and Ireland) accommodate rather powerful chief executives. There is
also no clear-cut correlation between the type of media system and
the number and strength of constitutional veto players to be found
within a country. ‘Semi-sovereign democracies’28
(systems with par-
ticularly powerful institutional checks against majority rule, such as
the United States, Germany, Switzerland and Italy) can be found in
each of the three categories distinguished by Hallin and Mancini.
Needless to say, such mapping of some of the basic institutional
features of different democratic regimes constitutes only the first
step towards a comparative assessment of the altering conditions of
executive leadership in the contemporary established democracies.
The challenge is about grasping the complex interdependencies
that mark government–mass media relations in different settings.
Building on the previous observations, the next sections revisit the
prevailing assessments of mass media effects in light of the im-
portant cross-national differences between contemporary Western
democracies.
MASS MEDIA EFFECTS ON EXECUTIVE LEADERS AND LEADERSHIP
IN CONTEMPORARY DEMOCRACIES REVISITED
In the more recent debate on the changing nature of democratic
governance and leadership, the modern mass media, and television
in particular, have been identified as the key protagonists behind the
widely attested tendency towards growing personalization in politics.
Narrow notions of personalization relate to the changing structure of
electoral campaigns and the electoral process. The impact of indi-
vidual leaders’ personality on voting behaviour is considered to have
increased significantly, which is attributed chiefly, though not exclu-
sively, to the strongly personality-centred approach of contemporary
28
Schmidt, ‘The Impact of Political Parties’, p. 178.

media reporting on politics and electoral campaigns.29
Those advo-
cating wider conceptions of personalization have contended that the
possible effects of ‘electoral personalization’ – such as the accumula-
tion of personality-related political legitimacy in the hands of the
successful top candidate in particular – are not necessarily conﬁned
to the electoral process, but may be carried over from the electoral to
the decision-making arena.
Power-boosting effects of media-induced personalization are
assumed to exist both at the level of core executive decision-making
and in the wider political process. Electorally successful leaders are
expected to enjoy a particularly large amount of loyalty, and to foster
compliance, among their senior fellows within the executive branch,
if only because the chief executive’s political success and sustained
popularity with the electorate is deemed vital to the party’s continu-
ous hold on power.30
In parts of the literature, personalization has
been considered more speciﬁcally to form a key component of ‘presi-
dentialization’31
– a concept that is obviously based on the assump-
tion that a high degree of personality centredness is part and parcel
of the electoral and decision-making processes in the United States.
Overall, empirical evidence supporting these hypotheses has
remained rather thin on the ground.32
In what continues to be the
most rigorous study on the subject to date, authors found precious
little evidence to support notions of ‘electoral presidentialization’ in
29
For a concise overview of different approaches see Anthony King, ‘Do Leaders’
Personalities Really Matter?’, in Anthony King (ed.), Leaders’ Personalities and the Out-
comes of Democratic Elections, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 1–44.
30
Michael Foley, The Rise of the British Presidency, Manchester, Manchester Univer-
sity Press, 1993, p. 278.
31
See on this the groundbreaking study by Anthony Mughan, Media and the Presi-
dentialization of Parliamentary Elections, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. ‘Electoral
presidentialization’, as described by Mughan, reappears in the work of Poguntke and
Webb as ‘the electoral face of presidentialization’; see Thomas Poguntke and Paul
Webb, ‘The Presidentialization of Politics in Democratic Societies: A Framework for
Analysis’, in Poguntke and Webb, The Presidentialization of Politics, pp. 10–11.
32
Even Poguntke and Webb in their conclusion readily acknowledge that the
assumption of strong direct electoral effects of individual leaders ‘is probably the
least convincing aspect of the presidentialization thesis’. Paul Webb and Thomas
Poguntke, ‘The Presidentialization of Contemporary Democratic Politics: Evidence,
Causes, and Consequences’, in Poguntke and Webb, The Presidentialization of Politics,
p. 345.

any of the countries covered.33
Perhaps most importantly, the findings
suggest that even US presidential elections are only rarely decided by
the performance and electoral appeal of individual candidates.34
Insights from empirical research have been complemented by more
recent developments in the electoral arenas of several West European
parliamentary democracies. In Britain, Labour won a third term in
2005 largely despite, rather than because of, the ‘Blair effect’.35
The
parliamentary elections in Germany, Italy and Austria, held between
September 2005 and October 2006 respectively, were won by parties
led by top candidates (Angela Merkel, Romano Prodi and Alfred
Gusenbauer) who were judged by many as being strikingly uncharis-
matic. Even though all three countries witnessed the introduction of
American-style live televised showdowns between the incumbent head
of government and his direct challenger for office more recently,
there has remained scarce, if any, hard evidence for a decisive impact
by the top candidates on the electoral result. In Germany, opinion poll
data gathered during the run-up to the 2005 Bundestag election
revealed that only 19 per cent of the electorate considered the chan-
cellor question to be more important than the party composition of
the government, whereas 72 per cent found the party composition
of the government more important than the chancellor candidate.
Moreover, a majority of those following the television duel of 2
September 2005 agreed that the incumbent chancellor, Gerhard
Schröder, had won the direct confrontation – which did not save him
and his government from electoral defeat later the same month.36
Given the notably scarce evidence of a direct and decisive effect of
individual leaders in the electoral process, it comes as no surprise that
there have been few, if any, compelling examples of chief executives
being able to enhance significantly their decision-making power
within the executive territory on the basis of a powerful personal
mandate. In neither of the two countries covered in the volume
33
See King, Leaders’ Personalities and the Outcomes of Democratic Elections.
34
Larry M. Bartels, ‘The Impact of Candidate Traits in American Presidential
Elections’, in King, Leaders’ Personalities and the Outcomes of Democratic Elections,
pp. 44–69.
35
Peter Kellner, ‘Clearing the Fog: What Really Happened in the 2005 Election
Campaign’, Political Quarterly, 75 (2005), pp. 327–9.
36
Forschungsgruppe Wahlen e.V., Bundestagswahl. Eine Analyse der Wahl vom 18.
September 2005, Berichte der Forschungsgruppe Wahlen e.V., 122, Mannheim, 2005,
pp. 25–8, 45.

by Poguntke and Webb that stand out as representing the highest
degree of presidentialization within the executive branch in terms of
power-concentration (Canada) or having experienced the strongest
trend towards presidentialization (Finland) respectively, does ‘elec-
toral presidentialization’ appear to have been the major driving
force.37
Even the case of Italy, widely accepted to mark the ultimate
example of a dramatic increase of chief executive power essentially
caused by a media-driven personalization of the electoral and wider
political process, can hardly be accepted at face value. To be sure, the
spectacular political career of Silvio Berlusconi, who managed to
become the country’s longest-serving prime minister after 1945
through his five-year hold on the premiership between 2001 and
2006, cannot be imagined without the prominent role of powerful
sections of the Italian mass media supporting his cause. However, the
conditions allowing the unlikely emergence of prime ministerial gov-
ernment in Italy have been much more complex. The developments
that can be observed since the mid-1990s would certainly not have
been possible without the previous breakdown of the old system of
‘partitocrazia’, which left a political vacuum to be filled by a figure like
Berlusconi and his entourage.38
As Mauro Calise has rightly empha-
sized in his succinct account of the dynamics driving the gradual
transformation of Italian core executive governance, though, the key
factors at work also included a series of important organizational
reforms at the heart of the Italian executive. The newly created
general secretariat of the president of the council of ministers (as the
Italian Constitution refers to the prime minister) marks only the most
visible product of this multifaceted reform process, designed to
37
As Bakvis and Wolinetz maintain, ‘the basis for labelling the Canadian system as
presidentialized . . . can be found . . . in the political rather than the electoral face of
the phenomenon.’ Herman Bakvis and Steven B. Wolinetz, ‘Canada: Executive Domi-
nance and Presidentialization’, in Poguntke and Webb, The Presidentialization of Politics,
p. 217. In Finland, the major constitutional reform of the late 1990s clearly stands out
as the key factor responsible for the rise of prime ministerial government. See Heikki
Paloheimo, ‘Finland: Let the Force Be with the Leader – But Who is the Leader?’, in
Poguntke and Webb, The Presidentialization of Politics, pp. 246–68; see also Jaakko
Nousiainen, ‘From Semi-presidentialism to Parliamentary Government: Political and
Constitutional Developments in Finland’, Scandinavian Political Studies, 24 (2001),
pp. 95–109.
38
Guiseppe Gangemi and Gianni Riccamboni (eds), Le elezione delle transizione. Il
sistema politico italiano alle prova del voto 1994–1996, Turin, UTET, 1997; Paul Ginsborg,
Silvio Berlusconi: Television, Power and Patrimony, London and New York, Verso, 2004.

increase the leverage of the inhabitant of Palazzo Chigi.39
Moreover,
the prime minister and the executive as a whole benefited signifi-
cantly from other institutional reforms and ensuing changes, such as
the introduction of a (limited) majoritarian electoral system and the
emergence of a more-or-less bipolar party system in particular.40
Both
were widely supported but hardly caused by the media.
Additional counter-evidence comes, again, from Germany. During
the extended reign of Helmut Kohl in the German chancellery two
developments – rather unlikely to join together from the perspective
of the presidentialization thesis – reached a height. The first was Kohl’s
exceptionally tight grip on his Christian Democratic Party and the
government, which prompted some observers to apply the ‘presiden-
tialization’ label to Germany.41
The second development, however,
was hardly the emergence of a particularly strong personal mandate of
the chancellor; rather, Kohl’s popularity with the voters remained
strikingly moderate for the better part of his tenure. Indeed, in
historical perspective Kohl stands out as the only German chancellor
on record who conspicuously failed to secure a reasonable ‘chan-
cellor bonus’, leaving him considerably less popular than his party, in
two out of five Bundestag elections held between 1983 and 1998.42
39
See Mauro Calise, ‘Presidentialization, Italian Style’, in Poguntke and Webb, The
Presidentialization of Politics, pp. 91–6. For a more detailed study on this subject see
Cristina Barbieri and Luca Verzichelli, Il governo e i suoi apparati: l’evoluzione del caso
italiano in prospettiva comparata, Genoa, Name, 2003. Other assessments by Calise have
been somewhat less compelling. In particular, the increased powers of the executive as
a whole vis-à-vis parliament do not mark a systemic feature that may be meaningfully
judged as a move towards presidentialization, or certainly not as a feature that would
move the new Italian model closer to the structures and logics marking presidential
government in the USA.
40
See on this Stefano Bartolini, Alessandro Chiaramonte and Roberto D’Alimonte,
‘The Italian Party System between Parties and Coalitions’, West European Politics, 27
(2004), pp. 1–19.
41
Clay Clemens, ‘Party Management as a Leadership Resource: Kohl and the
CDU/CSU’, in Clay Clemens and William E. Paterson (eds), The Kohl Chancellorship,
London, Frank Cass, 1998, p. 108.
42
See Helms, Executive Leadership in Western Democracies, p. 215. The Kohl experience
has prompted some innovative theoretical reflections on the possibility of maintaining
a high degree of control in the absence of a strong personal mandate and public
charisma. One of the most inspiring contributions of this kind is Christopher K. Ansell
and Steven M. Fish, ‘The Art of Being Indispensible: Noncharismatic Personalism in
Contemporary Political Parties’, Comparative Political Studies, 32 (1999), pp. 282–312.

Whereas the existence of media-induced leader effects on voting
behaviour and their claimed ramifications on the leader’s position
within the executive have remained contested, it cannot be denied
that the visibility of chief executives in the public political process
has indeed increased significantly over the past decades. However,
enhanced visibility of the chief executive can hardly be explained in
terms of media effects alone. With the rise of ‘summitry’ in the
international arena, there has been at least one major factor
beyond the media that has – not only in terms of visibility, but also
in terms of substance – effectively enhanced the status of senior
members of the political executive in public policy-making.43
The
media’s role in increasing the visibility of chief executives within
the public political arena would thus appear to be better described
as that of effective amplifiers rather than that of genuine creators of
change.
There are other aspects worth considering. Somewhat ironically,
as much as the media develop the status of independent ‘personal-
izers’ – by creating the impression that chief executives are at the
centre of decision-making not only when acting internationally, but
also in the domestic arena – they can in fact add to the long-term
43
While the position of the head of government as a country’s ‘chief executive’ in
the international arena has long become a familiar feature, the establishment of such
de facto prerogative powers of the chief executive in international relations actually
marks a comparatively recent historical occurrence. This holds true not only for some
of the smaller West European countries with their notably collegial executive struc-
tures, but even for world powers such as the United States or Britain. As Richard Rose,
The Postmodern President, 2nd edn, Chatham, NJ, Chatham House, 1991, p. 21, has
pointed out, until the early twentieth century not a single American president had ever
travelled abroad while in office, and it was even argued that presidents lacked the legal
authority to do so. In Britain, too, foreign policy was very much perceived to be a task
solely of the foreign secretary before the Second World War. Churchill’s lengthy and
unsuccessful battle with his cabinet for permission to go to Russia to ease East–West
tensions suggests that, even in the first decades after 1945, the personal involvement of
the prime minister in foreign affairs was still far from being generally accepted. See
Graham P. Thomas, Prime Minister and Cabinet Today, Manchester, Manchester Univer-
sity Press, 1997, pp. 103–4. In many West European countries, the growing importance
of ‘summit politics’, and the accumulation of power in the hands of the executive, was
to some considerable degree a direct result of European integration. One of the first
to elaborate on this has been Andrew Moravcsik, Why the European Community Strength-
ens the State: Domestic Politics and International Cooperation, Working Paper 52, Center for
European Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 1994.

strains on governments and governmental leaders. This is because
notions of centrality and pre-eminence of the chief executive in
public policy-making inevitably breed expectations that may prove
extremely difficult to meet. To some extent, this would appear to
apply to any democratic regime that allows citizens to hold govern-
ments accountable on the basis of their judgements of government
efficiency and policy delivery. Needless to say, the danger of public
disappointment with the performance of governments and govern-
mental leaders increases with the boldness of promises made and
expectations raised by administrations and their leaders, which
explains why there are major differences not only between countries
but also between different administrations and leaders within coun-
tries. Nevertheless, whenever it comes to explaining the emergence
of what Raichur and Waterman have labelled an ‘expectations gap’,44
i.e. a structural mismatch between expectations and performance
that threatens to undermine public trust and support in governments
and governmental leaders, institutional differences between coun-
tries are to be considered. Other things being equal, the negative
effects of public perceptions of a seemingly ubiquitous and omnipo-
tent chief executive are likely to be most severe in countries that
specifically invite such notions by establishing a strongly leader-
centred executive branch, which is, however, tightly constrained by
powerful institutional checks and balances. The United States and
Germany, but also France during periods of ‘cohabitation’, would
seem to offer themselves as the most obvious cases in point.
The strong international trend towards commercialization of the
broadcasting media, which was driven by a host of different factors,45
44
Arvind Raichur and Richard W. Waterman, ‘The Presidency, the Public, and the
Expectations Gap’, in Richard W. Waterman (ed.), The Presidency Reconsidered, Itasca,
IL, F. E. Peacock, 1993, pp. 1–21.
45
One of them was the growth of strong lobbies pressing for change in media
policy, in particular the advertising lobby, which pushed hard in many countries for
access to the electronic media. From a different corner of the political spectrum,
various social movements also pushed towards private broadcasting, often finding their
first new platform in pirate radio stations. In addition, public demands for a greater
number and diversity of television programmes also played a role. From the early
1980s, the introduction of private broadcasting appeared as the only way to expand
television beyond the limited number of channels that could be funded by licence fee
revenues from public broadcasting. Finally, the emergence of transnational private

marks another aspect of our subject to be accounted for. There is a
broad scholarly consensus about the manifestations and effects of
commercialization within the media sector. Major and minor differ-
ences between countries apart, commercialization has been basically
marked by two features. The more obvious one is a signiﬁcant
increase in the number of channels and programmes (though, need-
less to say, the number of available channels and programmes does
not always correspond neatly with the overall level of media pluralism
in terms of content diversity46
). Secondly, commercialization has led
to appreciable changes in the structure of broadcasting programmes.
Politics, even in its softer formats, is increasingly being sidelined by
different forms of entertainment. This development can to a large
extent be seen as a direct effect of the increasing market share of the
private media, though there have been signs that the public media
have, if often grudgingly, partially adapted their programme agendas
to meet the challenge posed by their private counterparts.47
Unlike its structural manifestations within the media sector, the
effects of commercialization on political leadership have remained
very much open to debate. Some leading experts have speculated
about the positive effects that the structural changes accompanying
commercialization may have on the room for manoeuvre of govern-
ments and governmental leaders. As Raymond Kuhn has argued in a
recent article on political communication in France, a high level of
fragmentation and diversity of television may provide governments
with welcome opportunities to pursue a ‘pick and mix’ approach
designed to reach different target groups through different chan-
nels.48
On a more general level Gianpietro Mazzoleni has argued that
broadcasting in particular was facilitated by processes of economic globalization,
including the project of European integration. See Hallin and Mancini, Comparing
Media Systems, pp. 274–6.
46
This is an important point to be elaborated in a comparative context by Katrin
Voltmer, Structures of Diversity of Press and Broadcasting Systems: The Institutional context of
Public Communication in Western Democracies, Discussion Paper FS 00-201, Wissen-
schaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB), March 2000.
47
See, with further references, Trine Syvertsen, ‘Challenges to Public Television
in the Era of Convergence and Commercialization’, Television & New Media, 4 (2003),
pp. 158–9.
48
Raymond Kuhn, ‘Where’s the Spin? The Executive and News Management in
France’, Modern and Contemporary France, 13 (2005), p. 309.

Television, as it becomes more and more a fragmented and multi-faceted
entity, controlled by a myriad of senders and fuelled by a myriad of services,
loses some of its traditional assets and powers in the political arena. . . . Per-
haps, as the media industry is increasingly cutting back on politics, for
increasingly fiercer competitive constraints, then politicians are eventually
going to be less harassed . . . by television(s).49
These are intriguing perspectives. The dominant trend to be
observed in the bulk of contemporary Western democracies would
seem to have been in the opposite direction, though. The concrete
effects of multichannel television on the opportunity structure for
public leadership in contemporary democracies have rarely been
studied empirically; there is in particular a serious lack of compara-
tive research. However, case studies on presidential leadership in the
United States leave no doubt that the significant increase in television
channels and outlets that followed the emergence of American cable
television has reduced, rather than expanded, the outreach capacity
of presidents.50
There is also little, if any, evidence suggesting that a development
imagined by Mazzoleni has actually been underway in any of the
major Western democracies. To the contrary, the overall trend would
appear to have been towards an ever-closer monitoring of the actions
and behaviour of politicians, and of political leaders in particular,
and a steady expansion of the outer limits of ‘political’ reporting well
into the private sphere of office holders.51
To some considerable
extent, this is even true for the majority of countries representing
the ‘Mediterranean or Polarized Pluralist Model’ in Hallin’s and
Mancini’s major study that were historically (and partly continue to
be) marked by an unusual amount of deference by the media in their
relations to political elites.52
There has been a strong international
49
Gianpietro Mazzoleni, ‘Political Communication and Television’, in Philippe J.
Maarek and Gadi Wolfsfeld (eds), Political Communication in a New Era. A Cross-National
Perspective, London and New York, Routledge, 2003, pp. 36–7.
50
See Matthew A. Baum and Samuel Kernell, ‘Has Cable Ended the Golden Age of
Presidential Television?’, American Political Science Review, 93 (1999), pp. 99–114; Martin
P. Wattenberg, ‘The Changing Presidential Media Environment’, Presidential Studies
Quarterly 34 (2004), pp. 557–72.
51
See Jean Seaton, ‘Public, Private and the Media’, Political Quarterly, 74 (2003),
pp. 174–83; see also James Stanyer and Dominic Wring (eds), Public Images, Private
Lives: The Mediation of Politicians around the Globe, a special issue of Parliamentary Affairs,
57: 1 (2004).
52
Hallin and Mancini, Comparing Media Systems, pp. 123–5.

move towards an ever-greater emphasis on uncovering political scan-
dals and misbehaviour of any kind, which can be chiefly explained by
the growing levels of commercialization and professionalization of
the media.53
Some of the most notable differences between countries
relate to the specific manifestations of media monitoring of the
political class. Sensationalist popular newspapers in countries such as
Britain, Germany or Austria largely find their functional equivalent in
many of the Southern European countries in sections of the broad-
casting sector, which is simply because a tabloid press never really
developed in much of the Mediterranean region.
Whereas close public scrutiny of political office holders has been
widely considered to constitute an essential element of democratic
government, the race for uncovering scandals and spotting public
and private misbehaviour of politicians in media reporting contrib-
utes little to the noble cause of facilitating democratic control over
public officials. It may, in fact, rather undermine the ability of the
political class to govern effectively, an aspect to be acknowledged as a
central component of good governance even in Madisonian concep-
tions of representative democracy. As Blumler and Kavanagh have
maintained: ‘The relentless scrutiny and “unmasking” of the mani-
pulative strategies and devices of politicians and their advisers by
skeptical journalists compromise the authority of the politician as
spokesperson. But governments may need deeper and more lasting
public support to cope with certain problems that arise from the
press of social change.’54
From the viewpoint of presidents and prime ministers, the prevail-
ing focus of large parts of the media on any possible manifestation of
political scandal has more specific implications. It may limit the pool
of political talent from which suitable candidates for political office
may be chosen. Whereas ministers or eligible candidates for ministe-
rial office usually do not face quite the same standards as would-be
prime ministers or presidents do in terms of media skills expected,
they still find themselves confronted with an amount of media atten-
tion and scrutiny that may bring them more easily into public disre-
gard and, eventually, to fall than, say, 30 years ago. Moreover, some
53
Ibid., pp. 278–9; see also John B. Thompson, Political Scandal: Power and Visibility
in the Media Age, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2000.
54
Jay G. Blumler and Dennis Kavanagh, ‘The Third Age of Political Communica-
tion: Influences and Features’, Political Communication, 16 (1999), p. 217.

capable personalities may even feel altogether discouraged to join
the game of politics, and prefer to look for less absorbing alternative
careers. Only a rather superficial, and largely misguided, assessment
could take this as a potential advantage for an incumbent chief
executive in terms of keeping the risk of facing leadership challenges
from capable and powerful fellows reasonably low. Politics in parlia-
mentary democracies remains very much a team sport (which flows
essentially from the fusion-of-powers construction at the heart of
the constitution and the presence of more-or-less coherent political
parties across the various arenas of public policy-making), and the
overall performance of a government will always be influenced to
some extent by the performance of senior members of the political
executive.55
But even American presidents, while operating under
fundamentally different conditions, have an obvious interest in secur-
ing the collaboration of a reasonable number of able and publicly
respected figures who can be entrusted with high political office.56
Some other media effects on executive leaders and leadership are
somewhat more elusive than those described above, but nevertheless
well worth looking into. As has been noted in different national
contexts, the virtual ubiquity of competitive commercial media in the
public arena has led to a contagion of the logic of politics by the logic
of the media.57
The manifestations and implications of this process
are numerous and complex, and have only recently become the
subject of systematic political research. Among the more tangible
effects of this silent transformation is an effective constraint on the
room for manoeuvre of governments. Unlike their historical prede-
cessors, contemporary administrations have to make a continuous
and systematic effort to ensure that their actions win the attention of
55
For a convincing demonstration of this point in the British context, see Philip
Norton, ‘Barons in a Shrinking Kingdom: Senior Ministers in British Government’, in
R. A. W. Rhodes (ed.), Transforming British Government. Volume 2: Changing Roles and
Relationships, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000, pp. 101–24.
56
This is at least what the history of the American executive branch suggests. See
Shirley Anne Warshaw, Powersharing: White House-Cabinet Relations in the Modern Presi-
dency, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1996; Anthony J. Bennett, The
American President’s Cabinet: From Kennedy to Bush, London, Macmillan, 1996; Ronald C.
Moe, ‘The President’s Cabinet’, in James P. Pfiffner and Roger H. Davidson (eds),
Understanding the Presidency, 2nd edn, New York, Longman, 2000, pp. 173–93.
57
One of the more substantive studies on this phenomenon is Thomas Meyer,
Media Democracy: How the Media Colonize Politics, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2002.

the media – a breed of media, after all, that follows political devel-
opments from a perspective focused on the commercial and en-
tertainment value of political news. While satisfying the specific
demands of the media is hardly the ultimate goal of governments, it
has very much become an effective precondition for gaining the
attention and support of the wider public, without which there is
neither responsible government nor democratic leadership. The
more recent history of presidential and prime ministerial communi-
cations suggests that the too-ready adoption of media styles and
strategies by governmental leaders may do little to increase their
leverage. This appears to apply in particular to defensive strategies of
public leadership. Perhaps the most compelling evidence relates to
the early stages of the premiership of Britain’s Tony Blair, who
proved a master of adopting media strategies not only for selling his
policies, but also to fight criticism from the media – only to find the
unique authority and resources of his high public office eventually
being devalued and diminished.58
Another aspect of the encroachment of the media logic on politics
relates to the significant acceleration of political communication and
leadership to be observed in all established democracies. The altered
pace of democratic decision-making, which is, precariously enough,
accompanied by a growing demand for political time,59
cannot exclu-
sively be blamed on the mass media. To some extent the mounting
time pressure that all administrations face is caused by the dramati-
cally increased workload of governments, which flows from the
historical expansion of public policy agendas around the globe.
However, the media have no doubt played a crucial part within this
larger process. The two most important elements of change at the
level of the media, with direct relevance to the altered speed of
politics, have been the technological revolution in the media sector
58
A. Rawnsley, ‘Mr Blair versus the Barons’, Observer, 16 June 2002.
59
There are several reasons as to why the amount of time required for practising
effective and responsible democratic decision-making has increased over the past
decades. Perhaps most importantly, issues become more and more complex, often
extending well beyond the horizon of the present generation of citizens and decision
makers, as is particularly obvious in such fields as genetic research and nuclear energy.
At the same time, the capacity of contemporary pluralist societies to draw on tradi-
tional consensus, which could form the basis of bold and forward-looking decision-
making, has largely declined. See Hartmut Rosa, ‘The Speed of Global Flows and the
Pace of Democratic Politics’, New Political Science, 27 (2005), pp. 445–59.

(especially the emergence of the new digital media) and the signifi-
cantly increased competition between different media actors for
commercial advantage.60
A widespread dedication to ‘real-time jour-
nalism’ has largely undermined traditional standards of political
reporting. The altered pace of politics inevitably has a constraining
effect on the time frame of governmental decision-making and lead-
ership. Even if governments manage to ease part of this constant
pressure by enlarging their administrative and political support base,
there remains a chronic lack of time, which increases the structural
likelihood of poor decision-making and immediate policy failures
that are bound to generate new constraints in terms of both politics
and policy.
A related question concerns the wider, but also more specific,
effects that the challenges and changes just described have on the
political executive. Many scholars tend to consider executives as
the beneficiaries of these ongoing structural transformations.61
Such
assessments may be tenable if the focus is strictly confined to the field
of executive–legislative relations. There is, in fact, evidence from
cross-national analysis that the executives of many contemporary
democracies have gradually expanded their power in relation to, and
at the expense of, the legislative branch.62
The overall effect of the
changing conditions of democratic governance in the advanced
democracies would, however, hardly seem to have been a substantial
increase in the executive’s capacity to act, let alone to act autono-
mously. Rather than being able to concentrate decision-making
power in their hands, governments have long felt compelled to
devolve and share power not only with other public actors, such as
constitutional courts in particular,63
but also with powerful non-state
60
Benjamin R. Barber, ‘Which Technology and Which Democracy?’, in Henry
Jenkins and David Thorburn (eds), Democracy and New Media, Cambridge, MA, MIT
Press, 2003, pp. 36–7.
61
See in this vein, for example, William E. Scheuerman, Liberal Democracy and the
Social Acceleration of Time, Baltimore and London, Johns Hopkins University Press,
2004, p. 50.
62
Nicolas Baldwin (ed.), Legislatures and Executives: An Investigation into the Relation-
ship at the Heart of Government, London and New York, Taylor and Francis, 2004.
63
Alec Stone Sweet, Governing with Judges: Constitutional Politics in Europe, Oxford,
Oxford University Press, 2000.

actors like interest groups or global firms.64
There is a growing pro-
portion of public policies whose viability and effectiveness depend
largely on the support and specific resources of private sector actors.
As those cannot be decreed by governments, they have to be secured
through extensive informal negotiations between the state and non-
state actors.65
Given the complexity of these multilevel transformations, the
future of political communication and public leadership can only be
speculated upon. If even the growing fragmentation of increasingly
commercialized television markets has been considered to mark a
development powerful enough to challenge the very concept of mass
communication and undermine the structural basis of effective
public leadership,66
how much more serious are the combined effects
of the internet?
No doubt, the internet represents a force to be reckoned with.
Today, countries with a proportion of three-quarters of their popu-
lations having access to the internet lead the field, but there will be
few advanced democracies with significantly lower scores only ten
years from now. Moreover, this development will be accompanied by
the further spread of broadband technology allowing users to exploit
internet resources more intensively. This notwithstanding, it would
appear rather unlikely that the internet will supersede, let alone fully
substitute, the traditional media any time soon. Case studies suggest
that television has remained the primary source of national political
information for a majority of citizens.67
Moreover, whereas newspa-
per readership is declining in many countries, it is the major news-
papers that have made by far the largest investment in making
64
Ludger Helms, ‘The Changing Parameters of Political Control in Western
Europe’, Parliamentary Affairs, 59 (2006), pp. 88–90.
65
In fact, this perception has been the driving force behind the spectacular rise of
the governance paradigm in international political research. For a concise overview of
the competing approaches see Anne Mette Kjær, Governance, Cambridge, Polity, 2004,
and Kers van Kersbergen and Frans van Waarden, ‘“Governance” as a Bridge between
Disciplines: Cross-Disciplinary Inspiration Regarding Shifts in Governance and Prob-
lems of Governability, Accountability and Legitimacy’, European Journal of Political
Research, 43 (2004), pp. 143–71.
66
Mazzoleni, ‘Political Communication and Television’, pp. 33, 37.
67
Birgit van Eimeren and Christa-Maria Ridder, ‘Trends in der Nutzung und
Bewertung der Medien 1970 bis 2005’, Media Perspektiven, 10/2005, p. 503; Jacques
Gerstlé, ‘Les campagnes présidentielles depuis 1965’, in Pierre Bréchon (ed.), Les
élections présidentielles en France, Paris, La documentation française, 2002, p. 94.

content available on the internet, and which can draw on a unique
experience and expertise in editing information and making it
digestible for users.
More importantly in our context, the negative impact of the inter-
net on public leadership by presidents and prime ministers will prob-
ably be considerably less dramatic than has been widely assumed. To
begin with, there is little, if any, empirical evidence to bolster anxious
assumptions that the internet will enhance the information of citi-
zens to an extent that would make them significantly less amenable to
the mobilization efforts of governments. It is even more questionable
whether citizens drawing mainly or exclusively on the internet actu-
ally have more or better information than others. Also, the popular
thesis contending that the internet adds to the constraints on gov-
ernments, by strengthening civil society and the principle of account-
able government,68
would appear to apply mainly to non-democratic
and democratizing countries with few alternative sources of informa-
tion and channels for voicing dissent. Even if we look at more specific
contexts, convincing proof of a major independent impact of the
internet on the basic parameters of political leadership remains in
short supply. There is, for example, precious little evidence that the
internet has transformed the distribution of power within parties in
favour of the rank-and-file69
– which could have truly major implica-
tions for the state of party government within a given system.70
Party
members may have lost less influence than medium-rank party elites,
but the dominant trend among the majority of parties in Western
68
Mazzoelini, ‘Political Communication and Television’, p. 47; see also Rose, ‘A
Global Diffusion Model of e-Governance’, pp. 16–22.
69
This is a point made by Vedel, who argues that ICT (information and commu-
nication technologies) ‘allow party members to be provided with more information on
what their leaders are doing and thus can allow a better accountability of parties’ elites.
Besides the redistribution of power between local members and elites, ICTs might
result in the decentralization of political forces. Minority groups within parties may
communicate their view independently to the other members and express dissent, and
link up with other minority groups to challenge party elites.’ Thierry Vedel, ‘Political
Communication in the Age of the Internet’, in Maarek and Wolfsfeld, Political Com-
munication in a New Era, p. 44.
70
Jean Blondel and Maurizio Cotta (eds), Party and Government: An Inquiry into the
Relationship between Governments and Supporting Parties in Liberal Democracies, London,
Macmillan, 1996; Jean Blondel and Maurizio Cotta (eds), The Nature of Party Govern-
ment. A Comparative European Perspective, London, Palgrave, 2000.

democracies would clearly seem to have been towards the centraliza-
tion of intra-party power at the party leadership.71
Such observations
are in line with the findings of recent studies suggesting ‘that because
of the resource and power advantages existing elites and organisa-
tional headquarters are more likely to dominate the e-agenda and use
it to strengthen their position of power’.72
CONCLUSIONS
Whereas the more recent history of political leadership includes a
number of presidents and prime ministers evincing a remarkable
ability to govern with the media, a comparative inquiry suggests that
the mass media generally rather function as a major constraint on
executives and executive leadership in many of the contemporary
democracies. However, even a sceptical reassessment of recent devel-
opments does not arrive at a doomsday scenario. If the bad news for
government leaders in the established democracies is that managing
the traditional media looks likely to become even more difficult
than in the past, the good news is that the possible constraints on
public leadership posed by the internet seem to have been largely
overestimated.
Many features that have come to characterize the more recent
history of government–media relations, and the structural conditions
of executive leadership, can be attributed to structural changes at the
level of media systems (in particular the strong international trend
towards commercialization) and changing patterns of behaviour
among media actors (especially the gradual decline in journalistic
deference to the political class). Such changes at the level of the mass
media have been accompanied, and in fact functionally intensified,
by changing expectations and increased demands of the public.
While the factors influencing governing and public leadership are
obviously not confined to institutionalized rules and institutional
devices, institutions and institutional differences between countries
71
Peter Mair, Wolfgang C. Müller and Fritz Plasser (eds), Political Parties and
Electoral Change, London, Sage, 2004.
72
Stephen Ward and Thierry Vedel, ‘Introduction: The Potential of the Internet
Revisited’, Parliamentary Affairs, 59 (2006), p. 217.

matter. Differences at the level of political systems and the offices of
presidents and prime ministers have by no means been rendered
irrelevant by the sweeping challenge of the mass media. This is
because the mass media of different contemporary democracies have
remained scarcely less different from each other than the constitu-
tional frameworks and political settings of countries. It is no surprise,
then, that particularly the structural and functional differences
between political leadership in the United States and in the parlia-
mentary democracies of Western Europe have largely persisted.73
But
no sensible analysis can ignore the fact that – even in the face of the
powerful repercussions of European integration – political leader-
ship in different European parliamentary democracies has also
remained highly diverse.74
Transatlantic comparison, in particular, suggests that future
research on media and politics would be well advised to focus more
strongly on the functional dimensions of public leadership in dif-
ferent institutional settings. Different institutions not only create
different opportunities and constraints for political actors, they also
influence the effects of political strategies and actions at the politi-
cal system’s level. The widely debated phenomenon of ‘going
public’ may serve as a case in point. While it is a valuable observa-
tion that, other things being equal, majoritarian democracies
seem to provide stronger institutional incentives for ‘going public’
than do consensus democracies,75
it is not sufficient to
link actor preferences for certain communication strategies to
73
This is also the central argument in a recent study by Richard Rose, ‘Giving
Direction to Government in Comparative Perspective’, in Joel D. Aberbach and
Mark A. Peterson (eds), The Executive Branch, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005,
pp. 72–99.
74
Jack Hayward and Anand Menon (eds), Governing Europe, Oxford, Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2003; Wolfgang C. Müller and Kaare Strøm (eds), Coalition Governments in
Western Europe, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000. There remains in particular a
major gulf separating the leadership experience of Western Europe from that of
Central and Eastern Europe; see Vesselin Dimitrov, Klaus H. Goetz and Hellmut
Wollmann, Governing after Communism: Institutions and Policymaking, Lanham, MD,
Rowman & Littlefield, 2006; Jean Blondel, Ferdinand Müller-Rommel and Darina
Malova, Governing New European Democracies, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007;
Thomas A. Baylis, ‘Embattled Executives: Prime Ministerial Weakness in East Central
Europe’, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 40 (2007), pp. 81–106.
75
Kriesi, ‘Strategic Political Communication’, pp. 202–3.

specific institutional parameters of political leadership.76
‘Going
public’, if exercised with reasonable skill, may help chief executives
in both presidential and parliamentary democracies to get their
way. But the systemic effects of ‘going public’ in presidential and
parliamentary regimes vary significantly. For whatever may be said
about the wider, and possibly problematic, political implications of
presidential public appeals,77
‘going public’ in the United States fits
in nicely with the basic constitutional parameters of presidential
leadership. At least, it does little to challenge the constitutionally
enshrined balance between the executive and the legislative
branches.
Something different holds true for public leadership in parliamen-
tary democracies, though. Because parliamentary government, even
in many of its ‘un-Westminster’ variants,78
tends to concentrate power
in the hands of the executive, there are both important pragmatic
and normative reasons as to why efforts of prime ministers to mobi-
lize support for their policies should be firmly rooted in the parlia-
mentary arena. ‘Going public’ challenges parliamentary government
from different angles. Where extended ‘going public’ activities of
prime ministers provoke serious opposition and dissent among MPs,
this may lead to legislative gridlock and government instability. If,
alternatively, MPs, however grudgingly, tolerate pseudo-plebiscitary
moves by the prime minister, especially those designed to mobilize
public support for policies that have not been agreed with the lead-
erships of the majority parliamentary party group(s), policies will
suffer from a lack of parliamentary scrutiny and reduced democratic
legitimacy. Rather than turning a blind eye to such fundamental
systemic differences for the sake of easier-to-handle research designs,
future research on the changing parameters of executive leadership
in contemporary democracies should be more ambitious about inte-
grating institutional and functional, as well as normative, aspects
more systematically.
76
Even though this may prove difficult enough at times, see note 20.
77
For a carefully balanced discussion see Brandice Canes-Wrone, Who Leads Whom?
Presidents, Policy, and the Public, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2006.
78
Aurelia George Mulgan, ‘Japan’s “Un-Westminster” System: Impediments to
Reform in a Crisis Economy’, Government and Opposition, 38 (2003), pp. 73–91.

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