Beyond Time and Space: The Impact of Autonomy from Politics and Commercialization Pressure on Mediatization in German and Austrian Newspapers—A Multilevel Approach

Abstract

Theorizing on mediatization of politics stresses the importance of structural conditions on different levels of media systems for explaining the increasing importance of media logic in media coverage. Levels of autonomy of media from politics and the extent of commercialization pressure are considered particularly important. However, most studies investigate differences between countries and the passing of time as proxies and qualitatively infer which structural conditions might account for the level of mediatization. The current study goes beyond these proxies. It reviews and systematizes how structural autonomy from political institutions and extent of commercialization pressure influences the importance of media logic in media coverage and operationalizes these influences in a comparative analysis of election campaign coverage in Germany and Austria over 60 years. A multi-level analysis finds that between-country differences and within-country changes in macro- and meso-level autonomy from politics/commercialization pressure account for a large part of the time/space (campaign/country) variation of the importance of media logic. It complements earlier research (1) by demonstrating that between-country differences and within-country changes in media coverage reflect underlying media structures; (2) by specifying which structural influences (representing the media’s autonomy from politics and commercialization pressure) are most important in shaping the importance of media logic in campaign coverage.

Keywords:

• campaign coverage
• comparative research
• mediatization of politics
• media structures
• multilevel modelling
• quantitative content analysis
• media autonomy
• commercialization

Supplemental Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website at https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2019.1608605.

Acknowledgments

We thank the authors of the German study, Jürgen Wilke, Carsten Reinemann, and Melanie Leidecker, as well as the authors of the Austrian study, Gabriele Melischek and Josef Seethaler, for providing the data.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. German data on circulations are from Schütz, 2012 (paid circulation); in Austria, newspaper circulations were not published systematically before 1994. We therefore rely on an unpublished collection of the scattered circulation data (from 1994: paid circulation; before 1994: printed circulation) by J. Seethaler and G. Melischek. We rely on official population data (Federal Statistical Office, 2018; Statistics Austria, 2018).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Austrian Science Fund [P20147-G14].

Notes on contributors

Melanie Magin

Melanie Magin is an Associate Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).

Stefan Geiß

Stefan Geiß is an Associate Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).