The paper sets out to identify the specific milieus in which political communication in Western European democracies takes place and thereby develop a typology of political communication cultures. We compare perceptions and attitudes of politicians, political spokespeople and political journalists in Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland to map out typical national and professional political communication cultures across Europe. Our analysis proceeds in two steps. First, we identify attitudinal dimensions that can be used to describe political communication cultures. More specifically, we ask which dimensions constitute national political communication cultures, and which constitute professional cultures that transcend national boundaries. Second, when the national context proves to matter, can we identify different types of political communication cultures, and if so, can the emerging types of political communication cultures be traced back to structural conditions of the media/political system and/or cultural traditions, such as ‘families of nations’? The empirical study is based on survey data including 2,500 political and media elites. Similarity of differences between groups and countries are researched with respect to four main dimensions: (1) the perception of the systemic context of political communication, such as media’s fulfilment of democratic functions, processes of mediatization, political influence of media, as well as perceived political and economic pressures on political reporting; (2) the attitudes towards public opinion of citizens, as expressed in the perceived importance and evaluation of public opinion polls; (3) the assessment of the impact and strategies of political agenda setting; and finally (4) the professional role perceptions of political and media elites. The attitudinal patterns allow us to assess professional vs. national cultures of the relationship between media and politics: For the emergence of professional cultures, we would expect to find similar attitudinal patterns among European journalists on the one hand and European politicians and spokespersons on the other hand. In contrast, national political communication cultures emerge when the differences in the attitudes of the country aggregates are larger than the differences between the professional groups within each country. Finally, we develop a typology of European political communication cultures applying cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling.
