Political Structures and Broadcasting Marketisation: a Comparison of Britain and West Germany

Abstract

Until recently broadcasting policy in Britain and West Germany has been characterised by a longstanding commitment to public-service monopoly or duopoly service provision: commercial competition has not been a feature of either system (although private broadcasters have been allowed in Britain since 1955). However, in both countries neo-liberal party or coalition governments have come to power with very similar ideological convictions, aiming to break up these structures and replace them with more commercial and competitive ones. This ‘marketisation’ of the broadcasting sector has been propelled by commonly experienced technological and market pressures, and actively engineered by almost identical coalitions of domestic political actors pushing for regulatory change. Despite all these pressures for sectoral, cross-national policy convergence, a significant variation has occurred in policy-making ‘style’ between these two countries, pointing towards an important element of divergence of policy outcomes (the policy process is not quite complete in the British case at the time of writing).