Media Systems and the Quality of Democracy: Testing the Link

Abstract

Having derived theoretical expectations with regard to the impact of media performance in terms of the vertical and horizontal function on four aspects of democratic quality in Chapter 7, this chapter moves on to examine whether multivariate regressions provide empirical evidence to support these assumptions. This will hopefully give some insight into how important mass media are for the well-functioning of democracy and thus whether the debate about the state of democracy in today’s media societies between ‘pessimists’ and ‘optimists’, as outlined in the introductory Chapter 1, is actually relevant at all. While the former argue that today’s mass media generally harm democracy, the latter hold the opposite position.