Do Media Matter Rephrased: Media and Political Systems as Determinants of Media Influence on Public Opinion

Type: 
Lecture
Audience: 
Open to the Public
Speaker: 
Marina Popescu
Building: 
Nador u. 9, Faculty Tower
Room: 
309
Tuesday, December 1, 2009 - 5:30pm
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Date: 
Tuesday, December 1, 2009 - 5:30pm to 7:00pm

By moving away from the debate between the minimal vs. maximal media effects paradigms, this research uses an explicit definition and conceptualisation of media effects as contingent upon individual and contextual level characteristics. It explores how the type of media system and political context interact and condition the influence of the mass media on public opinion. The presentation builds upon ongoing research that links key characteristics of media systems, party-voter linkages and individual citizens to the ways in which media exposure can be expected to impact citizens’ political knowledge, attitudes and behaviour. Multilevel modeling of comparative survey data from several dozen countries is employed to test the propositions.

Marina Popescu (MA CEU, PhD Essex) is British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Essex, UK, and Research Director, MRC-Median Research Centre, Bucharest, Romania. Dr. Popescu is a co-author of Embodying Democracy: Electoral System Design in Post-Communist Europe (with Sarah Birch, Frances Millard and Kieran Williams, Palgrave 2002). Her most recent projects include the vote advice application TestVot in Romania and Moldova, the Eurequal FP6 Project and the FP7 deliberative poll project Europolis.