This volume has presented an in-depth examination of the relationship between politics and the mass communications media in ten countries at different stages in their democratic evolution. Some have just made the transition to democracy; one, Italy, has undergone profound change in many of its most important political institutions; and the remainder have long-established democratic traditions and practices. Patterns in this relationship have emerged that are much too complex and varied to be captured satisfactorily by the conventional wisdoms that have held sway in this field of study for decades. Strongly and equally contradicted are the authoritarian/totalitarian image of the media as an all-powerful vehicles of manipulation that enable despotic politicians to mold public attitudes and behaviors, and the “minimal effects” thesis that emerged from the first individual-level studies of media impact in the 1940s and 1950s. Other notions are equally untenable: while all of the evidence presented in this volume reaffirms that media liberalization is a necessary prerequisite for successful democratization, for example, it would be unwarranted to jump to the conclusion that the freer the media from government regulation and the more they are embedded in a market economy, the stronger their contribution to the quality of democracy. Here, again, the picture that emerges is much more subtly nuanced and is conditional on a number of characteristics of individual countries.

Even our more modest and eclectic search for the “general” – patterns that apply in all social and political settings – has been frustrated by a reality that defies simple analysis.