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Abstract
It is often argued that the politics of Central Eastern European countries revolve around political leaders. This can inhibit the development of fragile political institutions and the process of democratisation in general. This article examines patterns of media representation of political actors in the transition from a communist to a post-communist setting in the case of Yugoslavia and Croatia. The results show that, although there are significant similarities between the prominence of leaders in the communist and early post-communist eras, in the process of democratisation media attention has shifted significantly from leaders to parties as collectives.
Notes
Research for this article was conducted during doctoral study at the University of East Anglia.
1 Communist and post-communist systems and the process of democratisation are understood in this article as comprehensive and not only political concepts. Accordingly, a communist system is considered to be a one-party system with tendencies towards state and common ownership and deferential, politically controlled media (Furtak Citation1986; Voltmer Citation2008; Lauk Citation2009). Democratisation is understood as ‘the introduction and extension of citizenship rights and the creation of a democratic state’ through reforms of a country’s political, economic, cultural and social system (Grugel Citation2002, p. 5). Consequently, post-communist systems are defined as new systems formed after the fall of communism that have undergone, or are still undergoing, the process of democratisation (Grugel Citation2002; Voltmer Citation2008).
2 For a rare insight into personalisation in a non-Western context, see the following studies of personalised politics in Israel: Rahat and Sheafer (Citation2007), Balmas et al. (Citation2014).
3 See Dalton and Wattenberg (Citation2000).
4 A rare study that confirms this theory of person-centred media output is Martensson’s analysis of three major Soviet newspapers in 1964, which found that Soviet newspapers pursued a person-centred rather than structural reporting style (Galtung & Ruge Citation1965, p. 87).
5 Stromback (Citation2008) argues that there are four phases of the mediatisation of politics. In the first phase, the media becomes the most important source of information, making politics mediated. In the second phase, the media gains more independence from political actors and starts to be governed by media logic. The third phase is characterised by the growing importance of media, due to which political actors start to adapt to media logic in order to ensure their politics are mediated. In the final phase, political actors adopt media logic as their own, which means that the media has colonised politics.
6 See also Velikonja (Citation2008).
7 In the 1990s Croatia had a semi-presidential system in which the president was head of the executive. From 2000, when the parliamentary system was introduced, the president and the prime minister switched roles, with the prime minister or his/her government gaining most executive powers. Hence, since 2000 prime ministers have been heads of the executive and are included in the analysis.
8 Exceptions were made in the cases of Tito and Tuđman, whose first years in office were not included in the analysis. In the case of Tito, the materials (newspaper archives) were not available for his first years in office (1945–1948). Instead, the year in which Tito was appointed president for the last time (1974) was chosen as the first year of analysis, since two newspapers’ archives were available from this point in time. The second exception was made in relation to Tuđman: although he acted as president of Croatia from 1990, Croatia did not formally declare independence until 1991, so the 1992 presidential elections can be seen as the first formal elections in the independent state. Therefore, the last week of the 1992 presidential campaign was included as representative of Tuđman’s first year in office.
9 The inter-coder reliability score was calculated according to Holsti’s (Citation1969) method of agreement—2A/(N1 + N2)—where A is the number of units in which coders agree and N1 and N2 are the number of units coded by each of the coders.
10 Kosor is the most media-prominent post-2000 leader according to the percentage of articles she was mentioned in. Also, among post-2000 heads of executive, she has the highest ratio of leader-to-party mentions.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Maja Šimunjak
Maja Šimunjak, Department of Media, Middlesex University London, The Burroughs, London, NW4 4BT, UK. Email: [email protected]