Marco normativo institucional

This background chapter has outlined the status of the political and media systems in Chile, paying particular attention to dimensions of the democratisation process that are relevant to understanding the local political culture.

Central to this analysis is the recognition that the quality of the political and economic model built over the last two decades is currently being called into question. This questioning transcends the legal-procedural dimension, where it is certainly possible to evidence how authoritarian enclaves have been progressively removed in order to offer greater guarantees of representativeness to the population. Still, political elites who have guided the process and who still populate the public sector appear deeply questioned in their ability to mediate between the state and society at large. In addition, recent events lend support to

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the idea that civil society has regained a vocation to impact political processes, mainly by challenging the elite and their arrangements.

With regards to news media institutions, the diagnosis is similar. Important regulatory changes such as the Press Law of 2001 or the Transparency and Information Access Law of 2008 have created a regulatory framework that formally protects access and dissemination of public information. Nonetheless, these changes have not necessarily translated into a better assessment of the democratic performance of news organisations. This is initially explained because of structural conditions: a prominent commercial orientation and patterns of media ownership that have not favoured political diversity or pluralism. Additionally, while the journalistic field has experienced a process of professionalisation, at the same time it appears responsive to pressures and a professional group with feeble working conditions.

The analysis of the transitional process evolves, therefore, to incorporate second- generation problems of democracy, highlighting democratic deficits that pose new challenges. Crucial in this regard is recognizing that the configuration of the news media system, together with the ways in which political elites communicate with the public, is also one of these challenges, one that is usually overlooked.

The relationship between politics and the media appears therefore as a relationship between two institutions under scrutiny, particularly in terms of their ability to represent the interest of the majority of Chileans. In this context, how can research better understand the process of adaptation of political elites to the centrality of mass media? In the next chapter, the theoretical foundations of the

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mediatization theory will be discussed, in order to define an argument about the mediatization of political elites in Chile.

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CHAPTER 3

MEDIATIZATION OF POLITICS:

LOGICS OF ACTION, AUTONOMY AND CONTROL

As already stated in the Introduction Chapter (sections 1.1 and 1.3), this thesis adopts an institutionalist understanding of mediatization. The institutionalist approach is a variant within a wider debate on the idea of mediatization, an emergent theory that conceptualises and studies the media as vectors of social change (Hjarvard 2008; Schrott 2009; Hepp et al. 2015). The institutionalist variant of mediatization pays particular attention to journalistic news media as institutions with more or less stable sets of rules, interacting with political institutions that operate according to different sets of rules.25 _{In this vein, this} study focuses on how the mediatization of political elites has developed in Chile, understanding this process as the result of the interactions between actors inhabiting both institutional domains. This chapter develops a theoretical framework to understand this relationship.

In order to advance the argument about the mediatization of political elites in Chile, the first section of the chapter (3.1) establishes the theoretical foundations of the mediatization of politics process, paying special attention to the process of emergence of the news media as a social institution (Thompson 1995; Hallin & Mancini 2004). Later, it argues that an institutionalist perspective appears well suited to the inspection of relationships between the news media and political

25 _{Some of the main proponents identified within this tradition and regular contributors to current}

scholarship are Mazzoleni & Schulz (1999), Schulz (2004), Strömbäck (2008), Kunelius and Reunanen (2011), Hjarvard (2013), Esser (2014), Asp (2014).

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actors, by paying attention to the institutional frameworks or logics of action that inform actors’ interactions (Friedland & Alford 1991; March & Olsen 2006), as well as bridging micro, meso and macro levels of analysis (Thornton et al. 2012; Hjarvard 2013).

The second section of the chapter (3.2) discusses four key dimensions of the mediatization of politics debate: (1) institutional logics of action, (2) the concept of institutional autonomy, (3) institutional resources and (4) the adaptive responses of political actors and institutions. Out of this discussion, a working definition of mediatization of politics will be formulated as:

Using this definition as a baseline, the third section (3.3) of the chapter will argue that there are elements lending support to the idea that the communication practices of Chilean political elites have become mediatized. Nonetheless, some under-explored areas will be identified, in particular those related to the adaptive practices of political elites, activated as a result of this process. This is the specific research gap this thesis will address.

The main contention of the chapter is that the framework provided by mediatization theory is useful to understand recent changes in Chilean politics, and to analyse political elites’ relationships with the media as a subject that has been seriously under-explored.

Mediatization of politics is the process activated within political institutions as a result of increasing institutional autonomy of the news media (1) and the necessity of mediated visibility (4), in which the actions and decisions of political actors, organisations and institutions are adjusted (3) to news media logics (2).

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3.1 What is the mediatization of politics: theoretical foundations