The mass communications media are the connective tissue of democracy. They are the principal means through which citizens and their elected representatives communicate in their reciprocal efforts to inform and influence. Despite the widespread acknowledgment of the paramount importance of this “political communications” function, however, the literature in political science is notable for the general absence of rigorous comparative analyses of the mutually influencing interaction between the flow of political information, on the one hand, and the basic democratic character of political regimes and individual political attitudes and behavior, on the other. As one student of politics and the media has recently bemoaned: “The state of research on media effects is one of the most notable embarrassments of modern social science” (Bartels 1993,267).

An important obstacle to a deeper understanding of the relationship between the media and the democratic political process has long been the lack of an integrated research agenda. Compartmentalization and fragmentation have resulted not only from the scattering of scholars among different academic disciplines (mainly sociology, political science, social psychology, and communications) that rarely interact with one another, but also from a puzzling and seemingly unnecessary bifurcation into distinct schools of analysis. One scholarly approach has been for media analysts to adopt a micro perspective in their focus on the questions of how, and in what ways, the media matter. They have restricted themselves to investigations of the individual-level effects of political communications, usually during election campaigns.