Building Empirical Typologies with QCA

Abstract

Typologies are omnipresent both in everyday life as well as in the sciences. Epistemologically, there are several systematic ways to build typologies, such as qualitative, theory-based descriptions on one end and quantitative, exploratory statistical means on the other end of the spectrum. Both have their specific advantages and disadvantages, which can be bridged by applying set-theoretic methods, such as Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). The contribution of this paper is substantial and methodological: First, we show how QCA can enhance our understanding of media systems by building a typology that draws on Hallin and Mancini’s framework. The main improvement of QCA is the ability to identify ideal types as well as border cases. In our analysis, we move beyond the widely discussed case of Great Britain and take a closer look at further border cases such as Austria, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and Portugal. Second, QCA has been scarcely applied to build typologies and if so, only in neighboring disciplines. Thus, we aim at familiarizing comparative political communication scholars with this method.

Resilience to Online Disinformation: A Framework for Cross-National Comparative Research

“…The bulk of these countries have been described as democratic-corporatist media systems, whereas Canada, Ireland, and the United Kingdom have many features of liberal media systems Hallin and Mancini (2004). However, several authors have stressed that the three Anglo-Saxon countries in many ways resemble the corporatist European systems, for instance, with respect to welfare expenditure, support for public broadcasting, and regulations of media ownership, advertising, and electoral coverage (Büchel et al 2016; Lawlor 2015; Simpson et al 2016). Because we still find a minimum of political and public support for the public service ethos in these countries as well as a comparatively high level of media trust, supplemented by comparatively low audience fragmentation and polarization, this cluster can be described—with all due caution—as media-supportive and more consensual .…”

“…The polarized cluster consists of Southern European countries that have a long history of stark partisan or ideological divides (Brüggemann et al 2014; Büchel et al 2016; Hallin and Mancini 2004). The conditions found in our analysis fit this description: high levels of polarization, populist communication, social media news use, and low levels of trust and shared media consumption are key features of the information environments in this cluster.…”

Fake news and its impact on trust in the news. Using the Portuguese case to establish lines of differentiation

“…It also has characteristics in common with eastern European and former socialist countries as part of the peripheral cluster (Peruško, Vozab & Čuvalo, 2017). They show features such as less developed media markets or the merging of political and economic power and are also recognised as a hybrid media system, showing features of several models (Büchel et al, 2016), having less political parallelism than the countries of the polarized-pluralist model and more press subsidies than the liberal media system.…”

Scholars as European public intellectuals? Media interventions in the 2014 European Parliament election campaign

“…When examining national differences another topic arises, which deserves clarification. Research demonstrated the existence of different types of national media systems in Europe and beyond (Brüggemann et al 2014;Büchel et al 2016;Hallin and Mancini 2017). We cannot, however, enter the debate on the construction and validation of these types here, as the empirical data are too specific regarding its focus on public intellectuals and too restrained to characterize the media landscape of entire countries.…”