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Television and Politics in Evolving European Democracies
Television and Politics in Evolving European Democracies Author:Lynda Lee Kaid Throughout the world, television has become an important part of the way in which political candidates and parties present their messages to voters during election campaigns. This is particularly true in campaigns at the national level where voters have little personal contact with candidates and must rely on experiencing candidates throug... more »h the media. Despite the importance of the media for voter-government interaction, however, many new reform governments in the post-communist era in Eastern European countries failed to appreciate the demands of creating workable new media systems. While the use of party and candidate-sponsored television messages has a long history in the United States and is now relatively common in most Western democracies, evolving Eastern and Central European states have only recently confronted the issues inherent in such political media use. As they were catapulted into quick elections in the early 1990s, Eastern and Central European States found themselves developing rules and producing television programs for voters with little prior knowledge of how such programs might affect voters or how they might make maximum use of the television medium for communicating their political agendas. The following countries are covered in this volume: Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Hungary, Turkey, Yugoslavia, Russia, the Czech Republic, Greece, and Eastern Germany. These countries were chosen because they have all undergone substantial changes in their media and electoral systems in the past decade, and each represented an opportunity to gather appropriate materials for study. Most are countries that have been facing the difficult transition from Communist domination to democracy. Others, such as Greece and Turkey, represent evolving democracies that have struggled with military coups and other threats to the maintenance of a stable political system.« less