The Grounds of the European Democracy–Media Nexus: Four Conditions of Possibility

This theoretically informed re-reading of existing empirical literature focuses on the understudied area of the conditions of possibility for democratic media in Europe. For the research, an adjusted version of the integrative literature review method was applied to empirical literature spanning 24 years. The review was guided by Carpentier and Wimmer’s framework (2025) that studies the democracy–media nexus through a discursive-material approach. Four main conditions of possibility for democratic media (in Europe) are elaborated in this study: communication technologies, economic resources and stability, democratic media culture, and the legitimacy of democratic regulation. As it is presented throughout the review, these conditions of possibility are the enabling frameworks for media to perform their democratic roles, permitting but also conditioning media’s performance. The ‘conditions of possibility’ lens of the study facilitated the attentiveness to the complex and contingent relationships of media and democracy, but also to democracy’s embeddedness in the social realm and its dependency on particular societal processes for its survival.