-EL DERECHO A LA INFORMACIÓN

The institutional-based analysis in this research derives from the historical institutionalist approach. Although other institutionalist approaches are possible, several features of historical institutionalism are particularly apposite in terms of

illuminating the research questions and delivering the objectives of this research.

First, historical institutionalism features a perspective on historical development that is highly compatible with longitudinal research and provides scholars with ‘an avenue of looking at policy across time, while many other approaches are bound in time and even in space’ (Peters 2005: 85). As already noted, broadcast media is under a more rigid public control than other types of digital and print media. This control does not only feature formal statutory and regulatory structures – e.g. broadcasting legislation and regulation – but also covers informal rules, ideas, conventions and expectations, which are grounded to the institutional past. A PSB organisation is expected to operate to a certain, established and recognised PSB model, which bears traces of its own history. Thus, past institutional choices have a long-lasting effect on organisational structures, policy choices and operational strategies. Historical institutionalism’s concept of ‘path dependency’ provides an apt method to examine consistency and change in institutional practices and configurations, as it focuses its analysis on changes in the institutional continuity (‘critical junctures’), but also provides a plausible explanation for the persistence of certain institutional configurations that do not necessarily represent the most rational or beneficial options for broadcasting institutions.

Second, since historical institutionalists focus on structural features of institutions that constrain and influence actors’ behaviour and preference formation, historical institutionalism provides a particularly suitable analytical framework for a cross-national comparative study. Thelen and Steinmo (1992: 14) argue that historical institutionalism has been ‘especially helpful in illuminating cross-national differences’:

the approach explains ‘different policy outcomes in different countries with reference to their respective (stable) institutional configurations.’ Historical institutionalism rejects the argument of so-called grand theories (such as Marxism) that the outcome of certain social, political and economic forces can be predicted in any context, but stress the contextual nature of causality and the influence of sequencing and timing of events on outcomes. Thus, historical institutionalists focus their research on systemic features that explain why similar processes and forces result in different outcomes in different national environments. In so doing, they also identify features in national

institutional configurations that have acted as key agents in shaping process outcomes.

Third, historical institutionalism allows suitable theoretical flexibility to accommodate elements of analysis from other schools of political research, which is required to analyse complex processes involving institutions of the polity and society, human agents, and the broadcasting organisations themselves. Historical institutionalism is not a rigid theoretical structure, but historical institutionalists are eclectic and use elements from rational choice and sociological institutionalism (Hall and Taylor 1996:

939-40; Peters 2005: 71-72). Differences between the ways the institutionalist schools consider institutions to shape individual behaviour serve as an apt example.

While sociological institutionalists adopt a cultural approach in their analysis and consider human beings as norm-abiding rule followers, who act according to the logic of appropriateness (‘what should I do’), and rational choice institutionalists adopt a calculus approach and believe that people base their decisions on strategic calculation to maximise personal gain using the logic of instrumentality (‘what do I get out of this situation’), historical institutionalism use both these approaches to specify the relationship between institutions and action: human beings are both norm-abiding rule followers and self-interested rational actors. In such situations, individual behaviour is determined by the individual, the context and the rule. Historical institutionalists would use historical evidence to determine whether a political outcome stems from self-interest or altruistic/collective motives, or whether it reflects simply habitual behaviour (Hall and Taylor 1996: 939-40; Steinmo 2008). This theoretical synergy is particularly useful in analysing motives behind actions of broadcasting organisations, which are influenced by both their historical legacy and private, institutional interests (e.g. commercial aspirations).

Historical institutionalism lacks what one could call a ‘universal tool kit’ that can be applied to virtually any political setting, which proponents of theories of deductive logics such as rational choice theorists and Marxists have. Rather than ‘deducing hypotheses on the basis of global assumptions and prior to the analysis’, proponents of historical institutionalism ‘generally develop their hypotheses more inductively, in

the course of interpreting the empirical material itself’ (Thelen and Steinmo 1992: 12).

They are not bounded by one theory, but use different approaches to examine the relationships between institutions and action (Hall and Taylor 1996). Scholarly differences exist within historical institutionalism in the scope of the definition of institution, with scholars like Thelen and Steinmo (1992) and Immergut (1998) appearing to support a looser definition that accommodates formal and amorphous structures ranging from government institutions to social classes, including ‘formal rules of political arenas, channels of communication, language codes, or the logics of strategic situations’ (Immergut 1998: 20). Yet Lowndes (2002: 103-4) warns about the risks of adopting a ‘conceptually stretched’ definition of institution that includes implicit rules and vague understandings, as it prevents their distinction from other social facts. In line with this recommendation, this study adopts a slightly narrower definition of institutions, considering them ‘organizations and the rules or conventions promulgated by formal organizations’, including ‘the formal and informal procedures, routines, norms and conventions embedded in the organizational structure’ (Hall and Taylor 1996: 938). In the empirical analysis of this study, the units of analysis are the broadcasting organisations, whose operating policies, rules, strategies, norms and routines provide the institutional setting that constrain and corrupt actors’ behaviour and preferences.

Historical institutionalism has a distinctive perspective on historical development, which rejects the traditional postulate that the same operative forces will generate the same outcomes in all institutional settings. Instead, it argues that ‘the effect of such forces will be mediated by the contextual features of a given situation often inherited from the past’ (Hall and Taylor 1996: 941). This view, commonly referred to as ‘path dependency’ (Hall and Taylor 1996; Thelen 1999; Campbell 2004; Peters 2005;

Capoccia and Kelemen 2007), asserts that the policy choices made when an institution is being established – through complex struggles and bargaining among organised groups – or, when a policy is being initiated, create a path which the institution follows until some significant forces intervenes to divert them from the established direction. This path will ‘constrain the range of events that is possible at later stages’ (Tilly 2009: 525). While the path may be altered, it requires a good deal

of pressure to produce this change (Peters 2005: 71). Thus, there is an inertial tendency for those initial policy choices to persist. Even when institutional change takes place, experiences of these past policy choices continue to constrain and corrupt future institutional configurations, as they serve as ‘signals, models, threats, and/or aspirations for later actors’ (Tilly 2009: 525).

As the phrase suggests, there is an expectation in the punctuated equilibrium model that for most of its existence an institution will exist in an equilibrium state, functioning in accordance with the decisions made at its initiation, or perhaps those made at the previous point of punctuation (Peters 2005: 77). Historical institutionalists focus their research on how institutions produce such paths; that is, what kind of institutional responses they make to new challenges. Patterns of institutional change and stability are frequently explained by a model of punctuated equilibrium. This model posits that relatively long periods of institutional stability and continuity are punctuated by short bursts of change: moments when substantial and critical institutional change takes place thereby creating a ‘branching point’ from which historical development moves onto a new path (March and Olsen 1989; Thelen and Steinmo 1992; Hall and Taylor 1996). During these ‘rapid bursts of institutional change’ (Peters 2005: 77), ‘public policy is assigned new objectives, new priorities are established, and new political and administrative coalitions evolve to sustain those new policies’ (Peters et al. 2005:

1276). These short periods of significant change that are hypothetised to produce distinct legacies⁶ are referred to as critical junctures, that represent the choice points when a particular option is adopted among two or more alternatives (Capoccia and Kelemen 2007: 347). Critical junctures are characterised by a situation, in which ‘the structural (that is, economic, cultural, ideological, organizational) influences on political action are significantly relaxed for a relatively short period, with two main consequences: the range of plausible choices open to powerful political actors

6 In their study on critical junctures, Capoccia and Kelemen (2007: 352) demonstrate that change is not a necessary element of a critical juncture, but contingency of such change may result in re-equilibration of an institution. However, since this study is primarily interested in institutional changes, such critical junctures that result in a re-equilibration deserve lesser attention in this study.

expands substantially and the consequences of their decisions for the outcome of interest are potentially much more momentous’ (Capoccia and Kelemen 2007: 343).

Historical institutionalists often stress the impact of crisis in particular, e.g. economic depression, civil unrest or military conflict, in triggering these junctures (Hall and Taylor 1996: 942). Accordingly, historical institutionalism considers the nature of institutional change to be more contingent and dependent on past policy choices, rather than a consequence of conscious process initiated by failure of an existing institution to meet the requirements for which it was formed, as argued by advocates of rational choice institutionalism (Peters 2005).

This idea of punctuated equilibrium, however, has come under increasing criticism from a number of scholars (e.g. Thelen and Steinmo 1992; Thelen 2000; Campbell 2004; Peters 2005; Streeck and Thelen 2005) for its inability to explain incremental change. Some scholars suggest that the periods of equilibrium occurring between punctuations are better characterised as incremental-evolutionary than static. The punctuated evolution model considers that there may be two different types of change, each driven by different dynamics. In this model, evolutionary periods, that are characterised by social learning during which self-reflexive actors gradually adjust their institutions in ways that are constrained by already-given institutional practices, rules, routines, and cognitive schema, are punctuated occasionally by crises that involve open struggles over the very core of the institutional status quo and that eventually result in truly fundamental institutional transformations (Campbell 2004:

34). Campbell (2004: 69) presents the process of bricolage – the process of crafting new institutional solutions by recombining existing institutional principles and practices with new ones – as an example of such an incremental-evolutionary process of change. Substantive bricolage involves the recombination of already existing institutional principles and practices to achieve various substantive goals that include such things as reducing transaction costs, increasing market share, improving product quality, and so on. As Fligstein (1991) demonstrates, new institutions existing in already existing fields may provide an example for other institutions: ‘[o]nce some set of organizations in a field has changed its strategies, and once others perceive that the change has resulted in some allegedly superior results, then other actors will

follow suit’ (Fliegstein 1991: 316). Institutional models may travel from one country to another, occasionally with a coercive push from powerful states (Campbell 2004: 26;

Peters 2005: 78).

Historical institutionalism challenges the ability of the political sciences to form ‘grand theories’ that provide explanations to various phenomena of political life in a universal context. It represented a shift away from concepts that tended to homogenise whole classes of nations, towards concept that capture diversity amongst them (Thelen and Steinmo 1992: 5-6). Reacting against such ‘grand theorising’ tendencies in behaviouralism and Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s, historical institutionalists have, often by using comparison, demonstrated that ‘large-scale social, economic and political forces can produce divergent outcomes in different countries as a result of the diversity of their institutional arrangements’ (Hopkin 2002: 263). Explaining such differences requires more explicit attention to the institutional landscape in which the forces take effect. While historical institutionalism shares the concern for building theory with behaviouralism and Marxism, its scholars emphasise the particularities and specificities of individual cases that these theories had obscured (Thelen and Steinmo 1992: 5-6).

Much of the work of historical institutionalism has been developed in a macro-level comparative context, and consists of cross-national comparisons of public policy (Hall and Taylor 1996: 938; Campbell 2004: 23). As Thelen and Steinmo (1992: 14) note, historical institutionalism has been particularly helpful in illuminating cross-national differences and the persistence of patterns or policies over time within individual countries. Though not initially branded as historical institutionalist as the use of the term itself was not coined until the early 1990s, Skocpol’s (1979) study on the sources and patterns of social revolutions in France, China and Russia provides an example of early use of the historical institutionalist approach in a cross-national comparative context. It challenged the preceding orthodoxy that class structure and elite power (rather than the structure of state institutions in the pre-revolutionary period, as new institutionalists would argue) would explain different patterns between the nations. Hall’s (1986) comparative analysis of the development and direction of

economic policy in the UK and France provides another example of early utilisation of the approach by explaining economic policy with an institutional model that focuses on socio-economic organisation of a nation. Immergut (1990, 1992), in turn, applied the approach in her comparative studies on health policies of France, Sweden and Switzerland, illustrating how the institutionalisation of ‘veto points’ within political systems explained the influence of pressure groups in health policy-making rather than the initial strengths of the ‘veto groups’ themselves. In the field of mass media research, Jääsaari (2007) has, more recently, utilised the approach in her comparative case study on the impact of marketisation on national broadcasting policy paradigms in Finland and Canada during the broadcasting digitalisation process. In particular, her study demonstrates that institutional structures and policy paradigms of the past shaped policies for the introduction of the digital television in the 1990s and 2000s. The critique by Humphreys (2012: 170-2) on the methodological weaknesses of the study by Hallin and Mancini (2004) highlights the benefits of historical institutionalism’s utilisation in comparative studies on national media systems to better understand the relationship between media systems and the socio-cultural and political system in which they are embedded.

This study, too, demonstrates through a comparative study that institutional transformations in the UK and Finland can be explained through the model of punctuated equilibrium, and new institutional configurations and policy choices are shaped by ideas and institutional structures from the past. As per the analytical framework of historical institutionalism, this study considers that behaviour can be best analysed and explained through the institutional setting in which it takes place; in other words, institutions constrain and corrupt individual behaviour. Thus, changes in institutional policies and practices with regards to the provision of children’s and religious programming are considered to emanate from institutional changes rather than to represent outright changes in viewing demographics that could be explained by a straightforward supply-demand box office model. For this reason, this study does not examine changes in demographics or audience data in detail, nor does it examine changes in the culture realms of the UK and Finland; while such changes may contribute to institutional change to a minor extent, historical institutionalists do not

believe that they represent punctuations powerful enough to punctuate the powerful institutional equilibria of broadcasters’ programming policies.

3.2.3. The Industrial Equilibrium Model and its contribution in analysing