ABSTRACT
Dur ing the past four decades, sizeable efforts have been under taken to demonstrate how mass communica t ion shapes the beliefs, opinions, atti tudes, values, and behaviour of audiences . 2 Interest in and the productivity of political communication research differ widely a m o n g countries. Most of the work has been done in the Uni ted States, but British, G e r m a n , and Canad i an studies have contr ibuted impor tan t findings. However, in most other Western democracies political communica t ion has tended to be ignored by the social sciences (Semetko 1996a). As a consequence, there is a massive bias to political communica t ion research, and what we know about the political consequences of mass communication is connected to a small n u m b e r of nat ional contexts. 'Thus , a l though many theoretical proposit ions about the social and political functions of the mass media are couched in universal terms, the evidence adduced in support of them is almost always culture-specific' (Gurevitch and Blumler 1990: 308). It remains an open question whether and to what extent these results can be generalised to other political systems.
