Democracy, discourse and the public sphere: the deliberative approach

Opinion-leading media as indicators of a democracy at risk: The press and the rise of National Socialism between 1927 and 1932

“…Another rather surprising result is worth mentioning. For both capitals, the analyses to test the first hypothesis show that almost only newspapers affiliated with the elites were attributed an opinion-leading function during the whole period under study, while, at the lower end of the sociometric scales, a relatively stable group of newspapers exists, which were seldom cited and , in most cases, refrained from following other media outlets – a phenomenon that has been called ‘discursive closure’ of the elites (Häussler, 2018: 121), which, however, were themselves becoming increasingly fractured. Among the newspapers, which were largely isolated from public discourse, are tabloids and other high-circulation newspapers such as the Illustrierte Kronen-Zeitung and the Kleine Volks-Zeitung in Vienna and the Berliner Morgenpost, the B.Z.…”

“…When, however, the worldviews of the group members are in serious conflict, the cohesion of the group is lessened, and consensus-building is jeopardized in fragmented and politically polarized environments – a process that media environments with high press–party parallelism are particularly prone to (Van Aelst et al, 2017). Therefore, a diminishment of reciprocal orientation can be understood as an indication of an increasingly disrupted public communication (Häussler, 2018), thus indicating a crisis of democracy. The second hypothesis refers to this phenomenon:H2: In the crisis years of the Weimar Republic and the First Austrian Republic, the reciprocal orientation among German and Austrian newspapers and particularly among opinion-leading media diminishes.…”

Mixed Methods

“…In this section, we explore methodological strategies related to the first approach. Assuming that public debates are processes that unfold over time Häussler 2018;, our research group (Maia 2009(Maia , 2012a2012b;Cal and Maia, 2012;Mendonça and Maia, 2012) have developed a set of indicators for capturing different dimensions of media debates.…”

“…Yet, the participation of civil society actors in many important debates occurring in the media arena is not as marginal as is usually thought. A number of studies have demonstrated a greater presence of civil society actors in challenger debates and the importance of the themes, claims, and criticisms they address to political and economic elites (Häussler 2018;Peter et al 2008;Schneider 2008). Content analysis is also valuable for investigating the types of arguments displayed in public communication, as related to values, interests, vocabularies, and performances of different categories of speakers.…”

“…By sequencing justifications offered by actor categories in the news media over time, conflictual or co-operative relations become apparent (Nerlich and Jaspal 2013;Michailidou 2015). One can assess whether speakers make explicit reference to other actors' arguments, and shift emphasis or re-balance their positions in the face of other actors' claims (Häussler 2018;Maia 2009Maia , 2012a. In the aggregate level, the voices, claims or discourses that either grow stronger or decline throughout the analyzed period can also be observed Schneider 2008;Kirilenko and Stepchenkova 2012;Saraisky 2015).…”