ABSTRACT
The preceding chapters provide compelling evidence that modern elections are indeed mediated events, experienced by politicians and parties and by their public audiences through a lens that reflects differences in political systems and media alignments around the world. In the initial framework chapter of this volume, we described the assumptions of the mediatization of politics. The analyses provided for each country discussed in the chapters that followed our framework establish clearly that these assumptions have generally been met for most of the countries covered. Mediated communication clearly dominates the channels of information and persuasion in these countries, and most exhibit media systems that are, at least in part, independent of government control. There is certainly no lack of evidence that the third phase of mediatization has arrived as most parties and candidates in most countries have not hesitated to adapt their campaign styles to media logic. How well this media logic has become internalized and integrated into the political systems is perhaps less clear in every situation and country. Nonetheless, we suggest that the trend is clearly in this direction, and thus, we use the elements of these assumptions in this concluding chapter to organize, illustrate, and compare news coverage of elections around the world.
