Media-Party Parallelism and Its Effects: A Cross-National Comparative Study

In 1974, Seymour-Ure introduced the concept of press-party parallelism into mass media studies. Many agree on the importance of this concept for describing media systems, but thus far little systematic comparative research of press-party parallelism and its possible effects has been conducted. The concept remained mainly theoretical. To overcome this lacuna, the present article introduces a measure of the extent of media-party parallelism in the 15 countries of the European Union in 1999. The study employs survey data from the European Election Study 1999, and shows that media-party parallelism varies considerably between countries and that it structures citizens' political behavior such as electoral participation. The article shows that media-party parallelism mobilizes citizens to vote, especially those who are not politically interested.