Panel 5: Media & Democracy: new concepts, sources and methodologies

Preliminary programme

 

Abstract

Information wars, fake news, and populist politics are at the forefront of current academic and public debates. Communication constitutes the lifeblood of democracy, and democratic debate, decision making, representation, and legitimacy all depend on the free exchange of information. Over the past centuries, as politics developed into a mass phenomenon, this exchange became increasingly mediated. Notably since the start of the twenty-first century, historians have begun writing this growing role of media in politics into political history. 

A range of new concepts have been introduced to interpret the symbiosis and tension between media and politics, such as the ‘personalisation of politics’, ‘entangled media histories’, ‘celebrity politics’, ‘hybrid media system’, ‘attention economy’, and ‘transnational public sphere’ – which included imperial media-political spaces. 

The availability of sources for studying this media-politics nexus has proliferated, as archives across countries have recently digitised large volumes of notably newspapers and parliamentary proceedings. These serial sources enable longitudinal and comparative analyses, and can show both sides of the media-politics relationship – which also allows us to investigate questions of framing and agenda setting in new ways. In addition, audio-visual sources have become increasingly accessible and searchable in recent years, and can now often be transcribed automatically, enabling large-scale textual analysis of originally spoken political discourse. Finally, scholars have increasingly studied material objects such as consumer goods (e.g. cigarettes, tea sets) to understand the broader mediation of politics, and how politics has operated within a diverse media ensemble. 

Concepts such as entanglement and the transnational public sphere have also affected methodologies for interrogating these new sources. Rather than adopting national or comparative perspectives, historians have begun to unravel how different forms of media and political actors from across political systems historically interacted in manifold ways. Digital history approaches such as topic modelling, collocation analysis, and sentiment analysis, moreover, make possible the distant reading of material to discover broader themes and patterns, as well as novel avenues for follow-up hermeneutic analyses. 

In this panel, we will show state-of-the-art studies on Britain, The Netherlands, the German Empire, and the Portuguese Empire, which apply the concepts of ‘ocular democracy’, ‘master forum’, ‘mediatisation’, ‘discursive institutionalism’, and ‘entangled media history’. Sources used include parliamentary debates, political party documents, memoirs, correspondences, newspapers, brochures, radio broadcasts, and television shows, which are analysed both digitally and hermeneutically. These case studies all centre around the relationship between evolving media ensembles and formal and informal processes of (de-)democratisation in modern history. The presentations will also demonstrate how these historical examples feed into current public debates on the mediatisation of politics.

 

Panelists

 

Chair: Huub Wijfjes

Professor in Journalism and Media History - Rijksuniversiteit Groningen

 

Discussant: Lucy Riall

Professor of History of Europe in the World (19th to 20th centuries) - European University Institute

 

Betto van Waarden holds a Marie Curie Individual Fellowship at Lund University, and specialises in the transnational history of politics and mass media. He received postdoctoral fellowships from the KU Leuven and Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History, exploring new digital methods for analysing large corpora of press and parliamentary data. Van Waarden obtained his PhD on ‘Public Politics: The coming of age of the media politician in a transnational communicative space, 1880s-1910s’ at the KU Leuven. He holds an MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and a BA from Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, USA. Van Waarden has a background in politics and media, having worked for the European Commission in Brussels, the World Affairs Council, United Nations Information Center, and Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, and the news magazine De Groene Amsterdammer in Amsterdam. He has written on media and politics in journals such as the English Historical Review, European Review of History, Media History, and Journalism History, as well as in media like The Conversation, Le Monde Diplomatique, De Volkskrant, Het Financieele Dagblad and De Morgen.

 

Solange Ploeg is a PhD candidate at the Political History department of Radboud University, the Netherlands. She is part of the international research project ‘The Voice of the People: Popular Expectations of Democracy in Postwar Europe’, led by Dr. Harm Kaal and funded by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung. Ploeg currently investigates the role of mass media and opinion polling in Dutch electoral culture between 1945 and the 1980s, focusing on how these developments impacted the relationship between citizens and politicians. Her research interests are British and Dutch twentieth-century political culture, political rhetoric and the relationship between science and politics. She was educated at Leiden University and the University of St. Andrews.

Maria Löblich is a Professor in Communication Studies in the Division for Communication History and Media Cultures at the Free University of Berlin. Her research focuses on communication history, the theory of communication history, media politics, and qualitative methods. She has published extensively on these topics, notably in multiple monographs and in journals such as Medien & Zeit, Global Media Journal, Historical Social Research, International Journal of Communication, Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft, Communication Theory, and the International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics.

 

Nelson Ribeiro is Associate Professor in Media History and Communication Studies at the Catholic University of Portugal, where he is the Dean of the School of Human Sciences and Coordinator of the PhD programme in Communication Studies. He is Chair of the History Section at the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR), and his main research interests are transnational broadcasting, media and colonialism, and political economy of the media. A member of the Board at the Research Centre for Communication and Culture, his latest research project focuses on the role of radio broadcasting in identity formation within the Portuguese Empire. His work has appeared in journals such as Media History, Journal of Radio & Audio Media, Journalism Studies, and The International Journal of Press/Politics. In 2022, he co-edited, with Christian Schwarzenegger, The Media and the Dissemination of Fear: Pandemics, Wars and Political Intimidation.