During the last decennia media environments and political communication systems have changed fundamentally. These changes have major ramifications for the political information environments and the extent to which they aid people in becoming informed citizens. Against this background, the purpose of this article is to review research on key changes and trends in political information environments and assess their democratic implications. We will focus on advanced postindustrial democracies and six concerns that are all closely linked to the dissemination and acquisition of political knowledge: (1) declining supply of political information, (2) declining quality of news, (3) increasing media concentration and declining diversity of news, (4) increasing fragmentation and polarization, (5) increasing relativism and (6) increasing inequality in political knowledge. ARTICLE HISTORY

The authors examined perceived internal and external barriers to postsecondary educational plans among 140 Mexican American and 296 White high school students, attending to sex, socioeconomic, ethnic differences. Parent education was associated with educational plans. Girls anticipated encountering more barriers associated with financing postsecondary education than their male counterparts. Mexican American students anticipated encountering more postsecondary education barriers associated with ability, preparation, motivation, support, and separation, and expected those barriers to be more difficult to overcome, than their White counterparts. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

The overall purpose of this article is to review theory and research on interpretive journalism, one of the key concepts in research on the style and character of news journalism. While it is often claimed that news journalism over recent decades has changed from being predominantly descriptive to becoming increasingly interpretive, our review suggests that there is a lack of systematic research in this area. The literature is furthermore characterized by different conceptualizations and operationalizations of interpretive journalism, as well as by different normative assumptions. Taken together, this suggests not only insufficient conceptual clarity, but also problems related to the comparability and cumulativity of findings. To remedy this, and based on our review of how interpretive journalism has been conceptualized and operationalized, this article suggests how interpretive journalism should be conceptualized and operationalized in order to increase conceptual clarity, comparability across studies, and ultimately research cumulativity.

This study examines the supply of political information programming across thirteen European broadcast systems over three decades. The cross-national and cross-temporal design traces the composition and development of political information environments with regard to the amount and placement of news and current affairs programs on the largest public and private television channels. It finds that the televisual information environments of Israel and Norway offer the most advantageous opportunity structure for informed citizenship because of their high levels of airtime and a diverse scheduling strategy. The study contributes to political communication research by establishing “political information environments” as a theoretically and empirically grounded concept that informs and supplements the comparison of “media systems.” If developed further, it could provide an information-rich, easy-to-measure macro-unit for future comparative research.