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Comparing Media Systems Beyond the Western World, edited by Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini

Comparing Media Systems Beyond the Western World is a very rich and inspiring study from which the essential lessons about the comparative approach to political communication can be learned. The title clearly indicates that the book is a follow-up to the seminal work Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics (2004) that introduced a typology of Western European and U.S. media systems. At first glance, however, it is surprising to see that the largest part of the new volume refers to single-country studies. Did Daniel Hallin and Paolo Mancini not always join those scholars in the field who called for an end to the traditional approach of descriptive country studies? And was their original intention not exactly to develop a truly macro-analytical framework that allows us to compare many cases? The answer to these questions lies in the intellectual history of the book. The authors who set out in their 2004 study to overcome the outdated typology of Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm’s Four Theories of the Press (1956) had developed a new approach that allowed them to categorize 18 Western media systems into three models: a North Atlantic “liberal” model, a Northern European “democratic corporatist” model, and a Southern European “polarized pluralist” model. The 2004 study has truly advanced comparative political communication research and become a central reference point for the whole field. It was highly praised but also triggered a lively and controversial debate— particularly about the usefulness of typologies, its dimensions, the appropriateness of the models, and the question of whether they hold up in countries outside the Western world. A merit of the new volume is that it takes the many critical arguments seriously and in the best sense of the word organizes an intellectual discourse on the categories, the typology, and its applicability beyond Europe and the United States. Hallin and Mancini invited a group of scholars from countries that represent the most distant cases from the Western European and U.S. examples to contribute to this volume. Thus, the first part of the book contains chapters on the media systems of Israel, Poland, the Baltic countries, Brazil, South Africa, Russia, and China. The second part of the volume features four chapters on systematic questions of media system analysis. The book ends with a conclusion in which