Suchergebnisse

This article analyzes the structure of the Portuguese media system and perceptions regarding the performance of its normative roles from a comparative perspective. This analysis allows us to determine if the patterns identified in the Portuguese case follow a common trend found in other western democracies as well as the structural constraints associated with performance differences. The empirical data analyzed show that the Portuguese media system is characterized by structural patterns and normative roles identical to those of other polarized pluralist systems, and that in Europe media performances depend greatly on the levels of journalist professionalization. ; O presente artigo analisa a estrutura do sistema de media português e as perceções a respeito do desempenho dos seus papéis normativos em perspetiva comparativa. A análise comparativa permite perceber se os padrões identificados para o caso português seguem uma tendência comum noutras democracias ocidentais, e quais são os constrangimentos de natureza estrutural que estão associados a diferenças em termos de desempenho. Os dados empíricos analisados mostram que o sistema mediático português é marcado por padrões estruturais e de desempenho dos seus papéis normativos idênticos ao de outros sistemas pluralistas polarizados, e que, na Europa, o desempenho dos media depende em grande medida dos níveis de profissionalizaçãodos jornalistas.

Abstract
This article reports a comparative analysis of the media's political agenda setting capacity in 27 European media systems, aimed at testing the hypothesis that the magnitude of this phenomenon is moderated by factors such as development of the press markets, journalist professionalization, strength of public television or political pluralism. The empirical analysis relies on data collected by the expert survey European Media Systems Survey, the World Association of Newspapers, the European Audiovisual Observatory, and the research project Providing an Infrastructure for Research on Electoral Democracy in the European Union (PIREDEU). Results show that political agenda setting is perceived as more common in press markets in which newspapers work as means of horizontal communication (and are, as subsystem, politically imbalanced), but that journalist professionalization and strength of public broadcasting systems foster political agenda setting effects.

This article analyzes the structure of the Portuguese media system and perceptions regarding the performance of its normative roles from a comparative perspective. This analysis allows us to determine if the patterns identified in the Portuguese case follow a common trend found in other western democracies as well as the structural constraints associated with performance differences. The empirical data analyzed show that the Portuguese media system is characterized by structural patterns and normative roles identical to those of other polarized pluralist systems, and that in Europe media performances depend greatly on the levels of journalist professionalization. ; O presente artigo analisa a estrutura do sistema de media português e as perceções a respeito do desempenho dos seus papéis normativos em perspetiva comparativa. A análise comparativa permite perceber se os padrões identificados para o caso português seguem uma tendência comum noutras democracias ocidentais, e quais são os constrangimentos de natureza estrutural que estão associados a diferenças em termos de desempenho. Os dados empíricos analisados mostram que o sistema mediático português é marcado por padrões estruturais e de desempenho dos seus papéis normativos idênticos ao de outros sistemas pluralistas polarizados, e que, na Europa, o desempenho dos media depende em grande medida dos níveis de profissionalização dos jornalistas. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

The number of comparative studies in the field of political communication increased considerably after Daniel Hallin and Paolo Mancini's publication of comparing Media systems. In this book, four dimensions are used to distinguish between the media environments in western countries around the year 2000: press market development, parallelism between parties and media outlets, state intervention in the realm of media, and levels of journalist professionalization. The authors conclude that in western Europe and North America three types of media systems coexisted: a polarized pluralist model (in southern Europe), a democratic corporatist model (in scandinavia and some western European countries), and a liberal model (Canada, USA, Ireland, and the UK). Within this framework, both Portugal and Spain are described as polarized pluralist media systems, given their weak press markets and low patterns of journalistic professionalization, as well as strong state intervention in the realm of media and parallelism between media outlets and political parties.

Defence date: 20 November 2012 ; Examining Board: Professor Mark N. Franklin, European University Institute (Supervisor); Professor Alexander H. Trechsel, European University Institute (Co-supervisor); Professor Shanto Iyengar, Stanford University; Professor Susan Banducci, University of Exeter. ; First made available online 1 April 2019 ; The present dissertation aims at the comparative study agenda-setting (i.e., the impact that media content has on the importance people give to several political and social issues) in Europe. The focus is set in the 2009 European Parliament election campaign period, and one of the central goals is to observe whether the media agenda-setting capacity varies from country to country or not, and why. The hypothetical causes of cross-country variability are the nature of the several European media systems (in terms of development of press markets, freedom of press, journalist professionalization, state intervention, media partisanship) and their effects in the informational environment, both from the perspective of the supply (information quality) and demand (trust in the media). The results show that these macro-level dimensions vary considerably in Europe, and that there is a link between media system dimensions related to politics, information quality and agenda-setting.

What explains how citizens living in young democracies feel about their authoritarian past? While the impact of autocratic legacies on support for democracy and left–right placement has been thoroughly studied, we know less about the determinants of attitudes toward the past in post-authoritarian democracies. This study relies on survey data collected in Southern and Central European countries ten years after their transitions to democracy in order to test context-dependent variance in the relevance of ideology and party identification on citizen attitudes toward the past. The results show that classical factors such as regime type and mode of transition are not the main determinants of the politicization of attitudes toward the past and that the existence of a strong authoritarian successor party is associated with stronger politicization of the past.

Abstract
Economic crises and foreign interventions cause political actors to face a dilemma between responsiveness towards their electorate and responsibility vis-à-vis international institutions. In this article, we analyse how a seldom studied political actor in international affairs (the Head of State in a semi-presidential regime) dealt with this dilemma. We focus on Aníbal Cavaco Silva's (former president of the Portuguese Republic) discourse, and use of veto and constitutionality examination request powers in the 2011–16 mandate, and on his attitudes regarding the access to power of pro- and anti-austerity political forces in the aftermath of the 2015 legislative elections. We conclude that the Head of State was more concerned with international responsibility than with domestic responsibility and responsiveness, especially at the behavioural level, although he occasionally acted in ways that toned down this feature of his presidential mandate. We therefore suggest that in times of severe crisis the political conditions that usually partly explain variations in the use of the presidential powers in semi-presidential regimes interact with short-term factors related to the crisis that can reduce or even cancel out their effects.

Citation information: the chapters of this book were originally published in South European Society and Politics. volume 20, issue 3 (September 2015). When citing this material, please use the original page numbering for the article: Freire, A. & Santana-Pereira, J. (2015). More Second-Order than Ever? The 2014 European Election in Portugal. South European Society and Politics, 20(3), 381-401 ; Considering the potential impact of the economic crisis, the main goal of the article is to ascertain whether the second-order election model lost ground in Portugal during the 2014 election to the European Parliament. We conclude that this was a more second-order contest than ever. The explanation for the resilience of the model relies on a mismatch between the citizens' growing potential for contestation and the low politicisation of European Union (EU) issues at the party level. However, the election outcomes also reveal the significance of EU issues for the radical left.