Audiences as a Source of Agency in Media Systems: Post-socialist Europe in Comparative Perspective
All the most important theoretical models developed for comparing media systems stress the importance of the structural aspect in defining the main dimensions that shape the media field. In this text we focus on audience behaviour in media systems as an aspect of agency, understood in sociological terms as part of the structuration process, and we expand the boundaries of media systems theory by including phenomena related to media use. We apply a cluster analysis to structural variables of media systems and to audience practices in terms of media use in order to find out how similar or different are media structures and practices in different European countries, in relation to Hallin and Mancini’s (2004) theoretical model of media systems. The study finds that European audience practices show a clear North/South, rather than the expected East/West, differentiation. The expectation that all post-socialist European countries belong to the same model is also not supported in relation to structural media variables; some post-socialist countries are more similar to countries in the other two models of media systems in their structural aspects. The study interestingly re-groups European countries into three distinctive structural models which differ somewhat from the original Hallin and Mancini (2004) classification.
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