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.1
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 are a wealth of existing examples to choose from.
