Mediatization of Politics ─ Understanding the Transformation of Western Democracies

The first book-long analysis of the 'mediatization of politics', this volume aims to understand the transformations of the relationship between media and politics in recent decades, and explores how growing media autonomy, journalistic framing, media populism and new media technologies affect democratic processes. As politics becomes increasingly mediatized, the role of the media becomes more important in political processes, overlaying and subsuming political logic. This affects not only the presentational aspects of politics but, it is feared, also policymaking processes. This may in turn have far-reaching implications as to how well democracy works. Against this background, Mediatization of Politics brings together state-of-the-art chapters written by leading scholars in the field of political communication. It synthesizes relevant concepts and arguments, identifies core components of the mediatization paradigm, and sets the agenda for subsequent work on the changing relationship between media and politics in general, and on the mediatization of politics in particular.

Frank Esser is Professor of International and Comparative Media Research at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. After studies in Mainz and London, he taught at the Universities of Oklahoma, Missouri and Texas-Austin. His research focuses on cross-national studies of news journalism and political communication. His co-edited books include Comparing Political Communication (2004), the Handbook of Comparative Communication Research (2012) and Democracy in the Age of Globalization and Mediatization (2013).

Jesper Stromback is Ludvig Nordstrom Professor and Chair in Journalism and Professor in Political Communication at Mid Sweden. His research focuses on political communication, political news journalism, political public relations and marketing, and public opinion formation. His co-edited books include Opinion Polls and the Media. Reflecting and Shaping Public Opinion (2012), Political Public Relations. Principles and Applications (2011), and Political Communication in European Parliamentary Elections (2011).