Public Television – Public Good? A Cross-National Analysis of Public Broadcasting Characteristics and Televisions News Consumption

The democratic role of public service broadcasting systems has been at the heart of political communication research for a long time (Humphreys, 1996; Tracey 1998). Most commonly, several single-country studies have compared the influence of news broadcasted on public service and commercial television channels, on citizens’ political trust, knowledge, interest and engagement (Aarts & Semetko, 2003; Holtz-Bacha & Norris, 2001; Newton, 1999) – in order to answer fundamental questions concerning the consequences of different broadcasting arrangements for citizen competence and involvement. More recently, cross-national comparative research has moved beyond these single-country studies in order to highlight the influence of various macro-level factors on political communication practices. These efforts – triggered by the seminal work by Hallin and Mancini (2004) – have substantially shaped and improved current academic thinking regarding media and political system influences on individual-level behavior. At the same time, more theoretical and empirical work is needed in order to understand the what, how and why that links media system characteristics to citizen competence and involvement. For instance, two recent comparative studies showed that citizens living in countries with “public service-based” broadcasting systems were provided more hard television news than people in “market-based” systems, and were also more knowledgeable about politics and current affairs (Curran et al., 2009; Iyengar et al., 2010). However, in order to understand why such differences exist, we need to go beyond the Hallin and Mancini (2004) framework, as well as broad classifications of countries as either public service-oriented or marked-oriented, to specify what characteristics of broadcasting systems that matter for citizen competence and involvement. We also need multilevel data that combines information on these media system variables from a large number of countries with individual-level data from public opinion surveys conducted in these countries. Against this background, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how various national public broadcasting characteristics influence patterns of television news consumption in Europe. The basic research question addressed is whether state arrangements to provide public television really matter for the amount of television news about politics and current affairs that citizens are exposed to. More specifically, this paper investigates the combined influence of two country-level public television characteristics on individual news consumption: (1) the market strength of public television, measured as audience market shares and (2) the political strength of public television, measured as the autonomy of public television from state governance. In doing so, this paper contributes to the research field in three distinct ways. First, we develop and provide a theoretical account that attempts to link specific public television system characteristics to individual-level television news consumption. Thereby the study adds to the growing scholarly interest for analyzing news consumption as a function of both contextual and individual-level factors (Althaus et al, 2010; Elvestad & Blekesaune, 2008; Shehata & Strömbäck, 2011). Second, we gather both country-level data on public television systems as well as individual-level data from different sources, into a single dataset that enables a more comprehensive empirical analysis of the linkages between the macro- and micro-level. While the country data is collected from various publicly available sources, individual-level data comes from the European Social Survey conducted in more than 25 countries. Third, we employ multilevel modeling to estimate the relative impact of factors at different levels of analysis. In sum, we hope to develop comparative research further by suggesting refined dimensions suitable for cross-national comparisons, formulate a set of hypotheses and test them using multilevel data from a large number of countries.