Governance, medierna och makten: Föreställningarna om mediemakt i regeringskansliet

Abstract

How Poltitical and Administrative Elites Assess the Influence of the Media in Democratic Governance. This article reports a study on the role of the media in democratic governance. Interestingly, this issue has not been given much attention by researchers, neither by media scholars with little interest in governance, nor by governance scholars with little knowledge about how the media works. Yet, as this study substantiates, the media is a key actor in governance. Theoretically, the paper aims at providing a cross-fertilization of perspectives on the role of the media in governance by drawing on governance research as well as on research on political communication and the public sphere. The empirical aim of the paper is to analyze how policy makers assess the importance of the media in governance. A key question addressed is the significance of fostering good media relations in order to be successful in governance in different policy areas. In addition, the paper analyzes the media strategies of policy makers’ in terms of the intensity of the media contacts and of whether or not the policy makers themselves initiate the contacts. The study draws on a unique dataset, comprising questionnaire responses from the corporate, political, cultural and administrative elites (policymakers within the central government office) in Sweden.