Explaining the de facto independence of public broadcasters

British Journal of Political Science

Volumn 40, Issue 1, 2010, Pages 75-89

  Hanretty, Chris ^a  

^a EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE   (Italy)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77957135968     PISSN: 00071234     EISSN: 14692112     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S000712340999024X     Document Type: Article

References (67)

1. Emilio Lledó Iñigo et al., 'Informe para la reforma de los medios de comunicación de titularidad del estado', Report for the Consejo para la reforma de los medios de comunicación de titularidad del estado (February 2005);
2. Paolo Gentiloni, 'Linee guida per la riforma delia Rai', available online at www. comunicazioni.it (2007).
3. Ellis S. Krauss, Broadcasting Politics in Japan: NHK and Television News (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000);
4. Ken Inglis, This is the ABC: The Australian Broadcasting Commission 1932-1983 (Melbourne: Black, 2006);
5. Jean-Claude Burgelman, 'Political Parties and Their Impact on Public Service Broadcasting in Belgium', Media, Culture & Society, 11 (1989), 167-93.
6. Eva Etzioni-Halevy, National Broadcasting under Siege: A Comparative Study of Australia, Britain, Israel, and West Germany (London: Macmillan, 1987).
7. Robert Picard, 'Assessing Audience Performance of Public Service Broadcasters', European Journal of Communication, 17 (2002), 227-35.
8. Vittorio Grilli, Donato Masciandaro and Guido Tabellini, 'Political and Monetary Institutions and Public Financial Policies in the Industrial Countries', Economic Policy, 6 (1991), 341-92.
9. Erik Herron and Kirk Randazzo, 'The Relationship between Independence and Judicial Review in Post-Communist Courts', Journal of Politics, 65 (2003), 422-38.
10. Robert Elgie and Iain McMenamin, 'Credible Commitment, Political Uncertainty, or Policy Complexity? Explaining the Discretion Granted to Independent Administrative Authorities in France', British Journal of Political Science, 35 (2005), 531-48;
11. Fabrizio Gilardi, 'Policy Credibility and Delegation to Independent Regulatory Agencies: A Comparative Empirical Analysis', Journal of European Public Policy, 9 (2002), 873-93.
12. Lars Feld and Stefan Voigt, 'Economic Growth and Judicial Independence: Cross Country Evidence Using a New Set of Indicators', European Journal of Political Economy, 19 (2003), 505-6;
13. Alex Cukierman and Steven B. Webb, 'Political Influence on the Central Bank: International Evidence', World Bank Economic Review, 9 (1995), Table 3.
14. Michael Coppedge and Wolfgang H. Reinicke, 'Measuring Polyarchy', in Alex Inkeles, ed., On Measuring Democracy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1991), p. 50,
15. emphasis added; Robert A. Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 70;
16. Robert A. Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1971), pp. 2-3.
17. Carina S. Bischoff, 'Political Competition and Contestability: A Study of the Barriers to Entry in 21 Democracies' (doctoral dissertation, European University Institute, 2006), pp. 112, 117.
18. Gentiloni, 'Linee guida per la riforma délia Rai', §2.6.
19. Alex Cukierman, Central Bank Strategy, Credibility, and Independence: Theory and Evidence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992);
20. Cukierman and Webb, 'Political Influence on the Central Bank'.
21. Information on executive turnover was obtained from broadcasters directly and from LexisNexis news coverage. The most recent chief executive of each PSB has been omitted where including their tenure would reduce the value of TOR. Data on government changes was taken from Ian Budge, Jaan Woldendorp and Hans Keman, 'Party Government in 20 Democracies: An Update (1990-1995)', European Journal of Political Research, 33 (1998), 125-64;
22. Ferdinand Müller-Rommel, Katja Fettelschoss and Philipp Harfst, 'Party Government in Central Eastern European Democracies: A Data Collection (1990-2003)', European Journal of Political Research, 43 (2003), 869-94;
23. and subsequent issues of the European Journal of Political Research, except for Chile (Dieter Nohlen, 'Chile', in Dieter Nohlen, ed., (F'note continued) Elections in the Americas, Volume 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)), and for the French language community and the Flemish community in Belgium.
24. MORI, 'Quantitative Research to Inform the Preparation of the BBC Charter Review 2004', report of a research study conducted on behalf of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2004.
25. COMPAS, 'Attitudes Toward Broadcast Issues, Canadian Content and the CBC, survey carried out for the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, 1999, p. 7.
26. CSA/Marianne, 'L'image des journalistes et l'objectivité des médias' (27 February 2003).
27. Istituto Eurisko and Maria Pia Montesi, 'Immagine della RAI' (internai company document, 1988).
28. Johan P. Olsen and James G. March, 'The Logic of Appropriateness', Arena Working Paper 04/09 (Centre for European Studies, University of Oslo, 2004).
29. Etzioni-Halevy, National Broadcasting under Siege, pp. 8-9.
30. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, 'Availability: A Heuristic for Judging Frequency and Probability', in Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic and Amos Tversky, eds, Judgement under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
31. International Institute for Management Development, IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook 2006 (Lausanne: International Institute for Management Development, 2006). In so far as PSBs are public services, respondents' answers to this question may be affected by the independence of the PSB, causing endogeneity problems. However, the context of the question, which is preceded and followed by questions on state administration and bureaucracy, suggests that respondents' primary focus when answering will be on state bureaucracy.
32. UNESCO, 'Daily newspapers: Total average circulation per 1,000 inhabitants', http://stats.uis. unesco.org/ (2007).
33. Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini, Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 64.
34. James Hamilton, All the News That's Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information into News (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004).
35. Maria Petrova, 'Newspapers and Parties: How Advertising Revenues Created an Independent Press'. Unpublished working paper (2007), available from http://fir.nes.ru/en/people/professors/Documents/ newspapers-parties-12-12-08 .pdf.
36. In Alessandro Mazzanti, L'obiettivita giornalistica: un ideale maltratto (Naples: Liguori, 1991), p. 14.
37. Mazzanti, L'obiettivita giornalistica, pp. 49, 91, 189.
38. Daniel Hallin and Styliano Papathanassopoulos, 'Political Clientelism and the Media: Southern Europe and Latin America in Comparative Perspective', Media, Culture & Society, 24 (2002), 175-95.
39. Thomas Patterson and Wolfgang Donsbach, 'News Decisions: Journalists as Partisan Actors', Political Communication, 13 (1996), 455-68.
40. Ullswater Committee on. Broadcasting, Report of the Broadcasting Committee 1935, Cmd. 5091 (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1936).
41. Valerio Castronovo, Luciana Giacheri Fossati and Nicola Tranfaglia, La stampa italiana nell'eta liberale (Bari: Laterza, 1979), p. 64.
42. Data for the Baltic countries were taken from Svennik Hoyer, Epp Lauk and Peeter Vihalemm, eds, Towards a Civic Society: The Baltic Media's Long Road to Freedom (Tartu: Baltic Association for Media Research/Nota Baltica, 1993);
43. data for the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Flanders and the French language community in Belgium were imputed from parent countries. It is likely that the model fit would have improved had separate 1975 data for these latter four areas been available; the Belgian French-language broadcaster has lower levels of independence than predicted, and the French language community reads fewer newspapers than Flanders; the same is true for Slovakia compared with the Czech Republic.
44. It might be thought that this control variable is in fact be an independent variable in its own right, reflecting either the legacy of a Leninist philosophy of the press (cf. Andrew Milton, 'Bound but Not Gagged: Media Reform in Democratic Transitions', Comparative Political Studies, 34 (2001), 493-526) or turbulence related to processes of democratization. First, for all that they were under Soviet influence, it would be a mistake, however, to think that a Leninist philosophy of the press applied equally well in Poland, Estonia and Russia; or to think that stated commitments to such a philosophy were incompatible with the development of professional norms
45. (see Jane Lefwich Curry, Poland's Journalists: Professionalism, and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)). Secondly, it is not the case that democratization-related turbulence led to inflated values of TOR or VUL: of the shortest-serving executives in each of the nine post-Communist countries included in the analysis, six started as chief executive after 1999; the remaining three started between 1991 and 1994.
46. Hallin and Mancini, Comparing Media Systems, pp. 59, 61.
47. Ruggero Orlando, 'Letter to Harman Grisewood, Director, BBC Spoken Word', BBC Written Archives Centre File E1/1008/3 (11 July 1954).
48. Quoted in Asa Briggs, Governing the BBC (London: BBC, 1979), chap. 1, p. 20.
49. Hallin and Mancini, Comparing Media. Systems, p. 61.
50. Ari Heinonen, 'The Finnish Journalist: Watchdog with a Conscience', in David Weaver, ed., The Global Journalist (Cresskills, N.J.: Hampton Press, 1998).
51. John Huber and Ronald Inglehart, 'Expert Interpretations of Party Space and Party Locations in 42 Societies', Party Politics, 1 (1995), 73-111.
52. Therefore, it is entirely possible that the low correlation observed in previous works between de jure and de facto independence results from a mis-specification of those legal features which affect de facto independence.
53. Powers of dismissal may, of course, also be interpreted as a method of sanctioning.
54. Gilardi, 'Policy Credibility and Delegation to Independent Regulatory Agencies';
55. Elgie and McMenamin, 'Credible Commitment, Political Uncertainty, or Policy Complexity?'
56. Tomas Coppens and Frieda Saeys, 'Enforcing Performance: New Approaches to Govern Public Service Broadcasting', Media, Culture & Society, 28 (2006), 261-84.
57. In cases where the number of members was large and the methods used to appoint them divergent, I have assigned different scores for some part of the board, and averaged these scores. For example: in Italy following the passage of the 1975 reform of Rai, six members of the sixteen member administrative council were nominated by the majority shareholder (the state, coded here as the executive), whilst the remaining ten members were nominated by a parliamentary committee. The score is therefore equal to [(6 × 0.25) + (10 × 0.75)]/16.
58. Information on legislative standing was taken from: Australia: The Australian Broadcasting Corporation Act 1983, as amended; Austria: 1966 Broadcasting Act; Belgium (Flemish-language community): 'Décret relatif à la transformation de la BRTN en une société anonyme de droit public' (29th April 1997) (French-language translation); Belgium (French language community): 'Décret du 14 juillet 1997 portant statut de la Radio-Télévision belge de la Communauté française (RTBF)'; Bulgaria: The (F'note continued) Radio and Television Law of 1998; Canada: the 1991 Broadcasting Act; Chile: law 19/132 of the 30th March 1992; Czech Republic: 483/1991 Coll., Act of the Czech National Council of 7 November 1991 on Czech Television and Metykova (2005, ch. 4); Denmark: Law no. 215 of the 11th June 1959, law no. 421 of the 15th June 1973, and law no. 374 of the 10th June 1987; Estonia: The Broadcasting Act of 1994, as amended; Finland: Act on Yleisradio Oy of 1993, as amended; France: Loi ordinaire 74-696 du 07/08/ 1974 relative à la radiodiffusion et télévision, loi no 82-652 du 29 juillet 1982 sur la communication audiovisuelle; Germany: Statute of ZDF (April 1962), as amended; Hungary: Act on Radio and Television Broadcasting, act I of 19th May 1996; Israel: Israel Broadcasting Authority Law, no. 5725 - 1965; Japan: The Broadcast Law, no. 132 of 2nd May 1950, as amended; Latvia: Radio and Television Law (consolidated); Lithuania: Law on the National Radio and Television, No 1-1571 of October 1996, as amended; New Zealand: The Television New Zealand Act 2003; Norway: The Broadcasting Act of 4 Dec. 1992 no. 127, as amended; Poland: The Broadcasting Act of the 29th December 1992; Portugal: the Television Broadcasting Act, Law no. 32/2003; Republic of Ireland: The Broadcasting Act, 2001; the Broadcasting Act, 1976; the Broadcasting Authority Act, 1960; Romania: Law no. 41 of June 17 1994, 'On the Organization and Operation of the Romanian Broadcasting Corporation and of the Romania Television Corporation'; Slovakia: The Act on Slovak Television and Monika Metykova, 'Regulating Public Service Broadcasting: The Cases of the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Ireland' (doctoral dissertation, Masaryk University, Brno, 2005), chap. 4; Slovenia: The Law on Radio and Television of 1994; South Africa: the Broadcasting Act 1999; Sweden: Information made available by SVT; Switzerland: 'Statuto delia Società svizzera di radiotelevisione (SRG SSR idée suisse)', of 22 November 1991, as amended; United Kingdom: Successive Royal Charters and Agreements with the BBC; United States of America: The 1967 Public Broadcasting Act, as amended.
59. Brian Gran and Robin Patterson, 'Law and Weak Links of Independence: A Fuzzy-Sets Analysis of Children's Ombudspersons' (unpublished working paper), available from http://www.northwestern.edu/ rc19/Gran.pdf;
60. Garry Goertz, Social Science Concepts: A User's Guide (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 129-39.
61. Werner Rumphorst, 'Model Public Service Broadcasting law' (Geneva: UNESCO, 1999).
62. Results from the regression without imputation did not differ significantly; they are available on request.
63. Georgia Chondroleou, 'Policy Networks in Comparative Perspective: Media Policy Networks in Britain and Greece' (paper presented at the ECPR General Conference, 2001).
64. Stefano Bartolini, 'On Time and Comparative Research', Journal of Theoretical Politics, 5 (1993), 131-67, at p. 148.
65. An additional model including audience share - on the basis that politicians may avoid interfering in PSBs which dominate the market lest they be seen as engaged in a power grab - was also tested, but the effect of 'share' was not significant. I thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this possibility. Results are available on request.
66. Bootstrapped estimates after 1,000 iterations obtained using Zelig, by Kosuke Imai, Gary King and Olivia Lau, 'Zelig: Everyone's Statistical Software', http://gking.harvard.edu/zelig (2006).
67. William Riker, 'Implications from the Disequilibrium of Majority Rule for the Study of Institutions', American Political Science Review, 74 (1980), 432-46, at p. 445.