Audience capital vs. power capital: The dynamic relationship of media and politics
Miklos Sukosd

Abstract

This presentation is based on a theoretical paper (co-authored with Marton Bene, Hungarian Academy of Sciences) in which we suggest a novel conceptual framework for the systematic analysis of the dynamic relationship between media and politics in different political regime types. Utilizing the theory of ‘fields’ and ‘capitals’ by Pierre Bourdieu, we differentiate the ‘political field’ and the ‘media field’, respectively. The political field is defined by the central concept of “power capital” and three poles or components of political logic (politics, polity, policy)”. Similarly, we define the media field by three poles or components of media logic (the autonomous pole, the economic pole and the political pole). As a conceptual innovation, we propose ‘audience capital’ as the key concept characterizing the media field. Audience capital of a particular media organization is defined by its audience size, the trust of its audiences/users, and its relative political content. This conceptual framework may be suitable for analyzing the relationship between media and politics (including different types of mediatization of politics), in a dynamic, non-linear, and comprehensive way. It also makes possible to include in the analysis online and social media which are often relatively ignored by more traditional media systems approaches. We argue that our model can be operationalized for empirical, historical and comparative research in democratic as well as hybrid (semi-democratic) political regimes by using qualitative and quantitative methods.