New Book by Carpentier and Wimmer Explores the Intersections of Democracy and Media in Europe

The interplay between democracy and media has long been a critical subject of study, especially in the face of 21st-century political, societal and technological transformations. The recently published book Democracy and Media in Europe: A Discursive-Material Approach by Nico Carpentier (ISCJ FSV UK) and Jeffrey Wimmer (University of Augsburg and ISCJ FSV UK) offers an innovative and up to date exploration of this dynamic relationship, delving into its challenges and opportunities.

Performed democracy, legitimizing media

„The relationship between democracy and media is strong, important and contingent. The diversity of media (...) that together constitute the European media landscape has a central role to play in contemporary democracies. It is, in other words, hard to conceive of contemporary democracy without this media landscape,“ write Carpentier and Wimmer in the book.

How does this manifest itself in our world? Democracy is enacted through practice, with discourse shaping key democratic activities, even how we think about elections. Media serve as a crucial conduit in this process - they not only transmit discourses, they also coordinate, synchronise, harmonize, legitimize, authorize and validate them. At the same time, media are also one of the arenas of legitimate struggle over democracy itself, and what democracy is.

The book employs a constructionist perspective to analyze the contemporary political struggles over democracy and the media’s multifaceted responsibilities within these debates. One of the book’s significant contributions is also its combination of democratic and media theories. This brings out a detailed theoretical analysis of the core characteristics of the mosaic created jointly by democracy and the media, their conditions of possibility and the threats to both democracy and media’s democratic roles. In the current era, these threats are considerable, and they include the frustration caused by democracy’s inability to fulfil all its promises, the attempts of more authoritarian actors to (re)centralize power, the lack of trust, and the increase of symbolic violence and polarization, in particular in the online realm.

„We like to believe that democracy is forever, a given reality, but it's not. It is an endless societal negotiation how to think and do democracy. Democracy requires constant work, to protect it, and to enhance it. Media can play a key role in supporting democracy, but neither this is a given, as media can also do a lot of damage, either because of the way they function, or because of the way they become abused themselves,“ Carpentier explains.

Collective responsibility

As such, the volume will be of interest to scholars of media and communication and related fields in the social sciences and humanities. At the same time, the authors were careful not to use a language that is too hard to access. At its heart, the book argues that preserving democracy’s vitality is a collective responsibility, one that extends beyond the political system—though the latter plays a vital role. „Because our work also implies that the democratic health of European democracies needs to be protected, and that's a responsibility for all its peoples,“ Carpentier adds, but he also warns that „without care for democracy and without understanding that how we think and practice democracy fundamentally matters, we might, in the end, lose democracy itself“.

Preventing such a loss is the book’s ultimate aim. „Academic theory formation is not outside discourse, and it is not outside the political. As the careful reader has undoubtedly noticed, we wish democracy a very long continuation of its existence, but we also hope that the future will bring—as Giddens (...) calls it—a further democratization of (media) democracy,“ the authors conclude in their book.

Find out more

​​The Open Access version of this book has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license. You can freely download the book here.

You can also watch an interview in which Nico Carpentier introduces the context of the book and other research that is part of the European research project MeDeMAP. What is the purpose of the theory? In what ways does it make the invisible visible? What does it tell us about the world? How will it further help his research team?

Praise

"Democracy is the ultimate essentially contested concept and at the same time a never to be ultimately fulfilled or realised promise. This excellent and very necessary book not only makes this apparent in an understandable as well as sophisticated manner but also discusses the consequences of this for the role of media and communication within the competing articulations of democracy.”

- Bart Cammaerts, Professor of Politics and Communication, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK

"The topic of media and democracy is currently highly relevant because democracy and media are developing apart. With this in mind, the authors of this book systematically describe possible and existing problems of democracies in connection with the media, and then just as thoroughly examine the question of where the media can develop and how they can be kept on a democratic course. This is why this book is important for theorists, empirical reseachers and practitioners, as well as anyone else who works or wants to work in the fields concerned."

- Friedrich Krotz, Professor of Communication and Media Sciences, University of Bremen, Germany

"Heterogeneity and turbulence characterize democracy in Europe; the convoluted media landscape is in constant evolution. Both domains are contingent, shaped by changing contexts, as are the relations between them. Analyzing such moving targets can be a bewildering task. This important volume by Nico Carpentier and Jeffrey Wimmer equips the reader with an elegant analytic framework to grapple with these challenges. From a discursive-materialist perspective the authors provide a very lucid toolkit, one to make use of, to work with. For many it will become a close companion."

- Peter Dahlgren, Professor emeritus, Lund University, Sweden. His latest book is Media Engagement (Routledge, 2023, with Annette Hill)

"Nico Carpentier and Jeffrey Wimmer have written a hopeful book that offers a map of the often confusing landscape of current democracy and media. Everything you want to know about the state of 21st-century democracy and media is here. The book’s learned, yet clear and concise, voice shows how theory can help us tackle the great challenges of our times and build democratic societies that do not succumb to declarations of decay and pessimism."

- Anu Kantola, Professor of Media and Communication Studies, University of Helsinki

"This book is groundbreaking in many ways. It is the first comprehensive investigation in a long time on what is arguably today’s most important socio-political issue – in Europe and elsewhere: Without media that respects democratic standards there is no modern democracy; without democracy there is no politics that respects fundamental human rights. Consequently, the book combines approaches from communication and media studies and political science. But, moreover, it interlinks the material(ist) and the discursive component of media and democracy in a way that the struggles over what is expected from both are revealed. Highly recommended."

- Josef Seethaler, Research Group Leader “Media, Politics and Democracy”, Austrian Academy of Sciences

"This groundbreaking book by Nico Carpentier and Jeffrey Wimmer provides a powerful and innovative response to a pressing issue of our time: the thorny relationship between democratic politics and the media in Europe. In so doing, the book elaborates a distinctive discursive-material approach, neatly reconciling themes in discourse theory and new materialism, which foregrounds the primacy of politics in our understanding of the contemporary forms and articulations of democracy and the media. Delineating and representing the complex intersections between different democratic and media assemblages, the book sets the agenda for future explorations and interventions in this critical field of study and practice."

- David Howarth, Professor in the Department of Government and Co-Director of the Centre for Ideology and Discourse Analysis, University of Essex, UK

About the authors

Nico Carpentier is Extraordinary Professor at Charles University (Prague, Czech Republic) and Visiting Professor at Tallinn University (Estonia) and at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (Suzhou, China). He was Vice-President of the European Communication Research and Education Association (2008–2012) and President of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (2020-2024). His theoretical focus is on discourse theory, his research is situated in the relationship between communication, politics and culture, especially in social domains as war and conflict, ideology, participation and democracy. His latest monographs are The Discursive-Material Knot (2017) and Iconoclastic Controversies (2021). His last exhibition was The Mirror of Conflict photography exhibition, in October 2023 at the Energy Museum, Istanbul in Türkiye, and in October 2024 at the Hollar Gallery, Prague, in the Czech Republic.

Jeffrey Wimmer is Professor of Communication Science with an emphasis on media reality at the University of Augsburg, Germany. From 2008 to 2014, he was chairing the ‘Communication and Democracy’ section of the European Communication Research and Education Association, and from 2009 to 2015, the ‘Sociology of Media Communication’ section of the German Association of Communication Science. His research and teaching focuses on the sociology of media communication, public sphere and participation, mediatization and media change, digital games and virtual worlds. Recent edited book publications include (Mis-)Understanding Political Participation (2018, Routledge) and The Forgotten Subject (2023).