ABSTRACT
The introduction of Democracy and Media in Europe outlines the book's intellectual framework and its relevance. The introduction first argues that the need for permanent attention to the interplay between democracy and media is legitimated by their always contingent articulations and changing contexts. Moreover, the introduction explains that the book aims to balance the attention spent on democracy (often from a Political Studies approach) and on media (often from a Communication and Media Studies approach). The reconciliation of these two academic fields allows for a more in-depth approach towards the democratic role of media, without bracketing democratic theory, while simultaneously showing the importance of media and communication for democracy. The introduction then highlights the importance of its constructionist approach, and more particularly, its discursive-material approach. In this part of the introduction, some of the basic concepts of this reconciliation of discourse theory and new materialism are explained, including discourse-as-ideology, contingency, political struggle, hegemony, materiality, assemblage and entanglement. In the last part of the introduction, a short description of the structure of the book is given.
