For as long as there have been mass media, they have reported political events, but across most of the globe the central role of the media in elections is a very recent development.
In many countries, free elections are themselves a new phenomenon. For large parts of Asia and Africa that were once under colonial rule, free and sovereign elections are a development of the second half of the twentieth century, while for those countries in the former Communist bloc they are even more recent than that. Even the countries of Western Europe and Latin America only fully democratized in the years shortly before or after the Second World War with the extension of the franchise to women. The United States only finally ended limitations on the franchise in the 1960s. Latin America's democratic tradition was blighted by a history of military dictatorship, particularly from the 1960s to the 1980s, a development that was echoed in many countries of Africa and Asia. Some countries, particularly in Europe and North America, had a vigorous free press even when the franchise was limited. Others developed independent media only as they were struggling to install a system of elected government.
Europe, North America, and Latin America evolved a theory of the media as a "Fourth Estate", offering a check on the activities of governments. This approach has increasingly been incorporated into international law, although the practice has fallen short of the ideal. Generally, an independent press evolved in parallel with the more general development of political freedoms.
Until relatively recently, the printed press was the sole mass medium. It had a limited reach, simply because functional literacy only extended to a minority. Thus the development of broadcasting was potentially revolutionary in communicating political ideas to a mass audience. Yet in many instances, the very potential of radio and television was frightening to those responsible for administering broadcasting. The British Broadcasting Corporation operated a "14-day rule" that prohibited coverage of any issue within two weeks of it being debated in Parliament. It was not until 1951 that the first party election broadcasts were screened. The compulsory blackouts of coverage in the days before an election that continue in countries like France are a relic of that period - when the media seemed to go out of their way not to influence the outcome of an election.
Times have changed. Received wisdom is that contemporary elections are dominated by television, a development that can be traced back to around 1960 - the date of the historic first television debate between United States presidential candidates. But this view is only partly accurate. The majority of the world's population do not watch television - they do not have electricity or they could not afford the set. Nor is this only a phenomenon of dictatorships - the world's largest democracy, after all, is India. For such countries, radio remains the most important medium.
But even in countries where television dominates political debate, this has been a fairly recent phenomenon. In many Western European countries, commercial broadcasting was only legalized in the 1980s, and television coverage of elections remains highly regulated as a legacy of the long years of state control of broadcasting.
For all the talk of "spin doctors" and "globalization", much of what passes through the media at election times would be readily recognizable to a previous generation of voters, accustomed to a style of political campaigning through public meetings and hustings. The American tradition of paid television advertising, drawing upon the most sophisticated techniques of Madison Avenue, is an important one, but not dominant worldwide. The more regulated tradition of European broadcasting still enjoys wide adherence, at election time more than at any other. This tends to favour lengthier policy messages and debate over quick sound bites.
The "medium is the message", according to a celebrated media theorist. But there is no doubt that during elections a variety of different types of message are communicated through the same medium. The most celebrated debates in American campaign history were between Kennedy and Nixon in 1960 and between Lincoln and Douglas a century earlier. The former was the harbinger of the age of television elections. But the striking thing is that the similarities between the two exchanges were greater than their differences.
What remains to be seen is the long-term impact of the most recent developments in media technology. The Internet has already transformed the way in which elections are reported. It has effectively ended, for example, the practice of “news blackouts” or “reflection periods”, since it operates largely beyond the reach of regulators. But if the majority of the world’s population still does not have television sets, still fewer have personal computers. The precise impact on election coverage remains to be seen.
Potentially even more significant is the future role of mobile telephony as a news medium. In many parts of the world, access to telephones has skipped a technological generation. Many relatively poor people who have no land line own a mobile telephone. Text messages have already been used in political campaigning and for distributing news. The next stage, which is already developing fast, is the use of “Podcasting”, broadcasting audio and video files.
Probably no aspect of the administration of elections is more determined by the political and social context than the functioning of the media. This is principally to be seen in two overlapping dimensions:
- The level of social and economic development of the country, with its consequences for the structure of media audience and ownership - and where people get their political information from.
- The extent to which the media have experience in reporting democratic elections - and how far media freedom has prevailed in the past.
It has become commonplace to talk about the globalization of information. Equally many bemoan the "Americanization" of election campaigning - meaning the use of slick televisual images with little substantive content. Both these viewpoints, although apparently coming from different political standpoints, make the same assumption: that a certain type of media and certain type of campaign language prevail throughout the world. Yet this is far from the case. Very large numbers of voters are excluded from access to television through poverty. Many others are excluded from newspaper readership through a combination of poverty and illiteracy. (Although interestingly newspaper readership is higher than television viewing in many countries of sub-Saharan Africa.) So although the information order is no doubt more globalized than in the past - more than when Marshall McLuhan coined the term "global village" in the 1960s - national particularities are still very important. And at no time are they more important than in elections, which are quintessentially national events.
Countries with recent histories of authoritarian rule will often have in common that the publicly-funded media operate under tight government control. Elsewhere, in most of Western Europe for example, there is a strong history of public broadcasting being independent of government and enhancing media pluralism. But in countries with a weak culture of political pluralism, state journalists will not usually be bold or independent. This may require a greater degree of intervention from the regulatory body to ensure that they discharge their public service functions properly.
Another similar circumstance in which the regulatory authority may be called upon to intervene more regularly is when there is a history of "hate speech" and incitement to violence by partisan media representing different political or ethnic groups.
But in these circumstances, the role of the regulatory authority is to guarantee a plurality of voices in the media, not to silence anyone.
Some of the more practical questions may be more difficult to address in a new democracy than in a well-established one. For example, how do you decide how much free broadcasting time to give each party when there was no previous democratic election as a means of gauging their popular support? But even this difficulty - or difference - should not be overstated. Many advanced democracies - the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway, for example - take little or no notice of previous election results when they allocate broadcasting time. They do it on the basis of equality between the parties. So for administrators from new democracies planning a regulatory system, there is a wealth of existing examples to choose from.
