Bringing History back into Media Systems Theory: Multiple Modernities and Institutional Legacies in Latin America

Introduction

In Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics (2004), Hallin and Mancini argue that there are three models of media systems that prevail in consolidated democracies: (a) the polarized pluralist of Mediterranean countries; (b) the democratic corporatist of Northern and Central Europe; (c) the liberal of Great Britain, Ireland, and North America. As their theory does not include emerging democracies, scholars from the Global South have tried to fit different regions and countries into one of the ideal typifications. Latin America has been no exception as its researchers have asked themselves if the region's media system is best understood as polarized pluralist or liberal.

Scholars applying Hallin and Mancini's approach to Latin America define the region's media system—as a whole, as a unit, and in singular—as polarized pluralist, due to the colonial imprint of France, Portugal, and Spain; as well as structural factors such as low newspaper circulation, high political parallelism, weak professionalization, and strong state intervention (Azevedo, 2006; Campos-Freire, 2009; Humanes, Mellado and Márquez-Ramírez, 2017). Even if some authors acknowledge diversity within the region (Campos-Freire, 2009) or the blind spots of Hallin and Mancini's initial theorization (Humanes, Mellado and Márquez-Ramírez, 2017), they still characterize the Latin American media system as polarized pluralist as its sui generis character does not seem to match the apparent functionality of democratic corporatist or liberal models.

An alternative to describing Latin American media systems as polarized pluralist, one that has gained prominence among the region's scholars during the last decade, is the captured-liberal model (Guerrero, 2014). This model establishes a link between the political economy of communication analysis and Hallin and Mancini's perspective of media systems, to stress “the predominance of private commercial media organizations and the conditions that hurdle states’ regulatory capacities” (p. 43). Its central argument is that the media system of this region is not merely polarized pluralist, as it presents some characteristics of the liberal model, though under conditions of corporate and State capture that hinder its development.

Fifteen years ago, Hallin and Mancini (2007) contended that Latin American media systems did not properly fit within the three models that they had originally conceptualized, and decided that they could be defined as a “hybrid type” (p. 91), as they presented certain polarized pluralist characteristics, but also several liberal traits. Latin American scholars, like De Albuquerque (2011) and Segura and Waisbord (2016), have also remarked that this region does not fit into any of the models, with the former even making a call to distinguish between central and peripheral media systems so as to be able to acknowledge the power relations in their structure. Recently, Hallin, Mellado and Mancini (2021) argued that all media systems are hybrid as they combine “‘unlike’ elements [through] mixing, borrowing and appropriation” (p. 2), and that we should focus on particular forms of hybridity by addressing hybridity cycles as periods in which emerging forms become stabilized and institutionalized.

Irrespective of the accuracy of such proposals, there are two issues with classifications such as these, one of them empirical and the other epistemic. The former pertains to short-term variations in patterns of relation between media and politics, and the latter to the surprising persistence of certain State-media interactions across very different political regimes. During the last four decades, Latin America has gone from supporting authoritarian regimes through the media in the 1970s to collusion between political elites and broadcasting companies in the 1980s, then to the neoliberal capture of politics by unaccountable media moguls in the 1990s, and back again into the grip of populist governments in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador in the 2010s (Vaca, 2018; Voltmer, 2013). Hence, considering such temporal variation, it is quite challenging to characterize a media model that is changing even as we theorize about it. However, at the same time, patterns of political and economic capture endure within those changes—such as clientelism and collusion—, and these cannot be easily explained through informality or an immediate path dependency. Therefore, a greater historical scope is needed to better understand stability and commonalities in the light of these changes.

Furthermore, there is an epistemic inadequacy underlying previous classifications, as they equate Western modernization processes and values to non-Western ones. In any nation, a modernization process might begin with elites and supranational organizations trying to impose a Western vision, but its outcome could be significantly different (George, 2013). Many cases all over the globe have consistently shown that rather than a homogeneous adoption, there has been a heterogeneous appropriation and “domestication” of the liberal model (De Albuquerque, 2019; Voltmer and Wasserman, 2014). This situation has been documented in the Latin American cases of Brazil (De Albuquerque, 2005; 2011), Mexico, and other South American countries (Waisbord, 2000).

Moreover, various studies have noted several cases of structural incompatibilities between the dominant media systems of the West and those of the Global South. We can mention chiefly a weak media market; the opaque origins of media capital and transactions; extra market economic logics, like family and ethnic bonds; informal politics and polycentric elites; and diverging ideological allegiances beyond the typical left-right continuum—such as those related to ethnicity, religion or region—(Chakravartty and Roy, 2013; Voltmer, 2011).

We contend that the media divergences, journalistic pluralism, and the endurance of some media and state interactions in Latin America stem from the region's specific pattern of modernization. Hallin and Mancini (2004; 2012) proposed their three models of media and politics as an outcome of the particular Western modernization processes within certain regions (“historical roots,” as they have termed them) that unfolded into two main trajectories: those countries where liberal institutions and practices settled earlier (liberal and corporatist models), and others where feudal and patrimonial legacies lasted longer (polarized pluralist). These yielded different legacies and institutions—such as rational-legal authority in the former and clientelism in the latter—that paved the way for “specific forms of interaction between media and politics” (Hallin and Mancini, 2012, p. 281).

While some works address the impact on Latin American media of some components of modernization, such as post-colonialism (De Albuquerque, 2011), Hallin and Papathanassopoulos (2002) write about a “transplantation” of patrimonial structures from Spain to Latin America. On the other hand, Hallin and Mancini (2007) point out the resemblance of the late development of liberal institutions in Spain to that of the continent, without considering its specific modernization processes and legacies. Thus, most Latin American literature on media systems is devoid of such an epistemic approach, that is, a genetic explanation. This absence is remarkable since it precludes the development of a deeply contextualized theoretical scaffolding for the region's media systems that can explain the alleged mixture of models and the resiliency of some structures and interactions.

Accounting for modernization trajectories and legacies is crucial for the analytical development of media models, as Hallin and Mancini (2004) convincingly demonstrate. Hence, this paper sets out to answer how the historical patterns and institutional legacies of the specifically Latin American modernization—as an antecedent condition—constrain the structures and dynamics of the continent's media systems (Flew and Waisbord, 2015), as well as the workings of its components. For our analytical purposes, we utilize the multiple modernization theory, which contextualizes such a process in non-Western regions, far from the first generation of ethnocentric thinking.

Our interpretation of the trajectory of modernization and its contemporary consequences for media systems is informed by the theory of historical legacies: “durable causal relationships” between prior causes and later outcomes that continue even when the original cause no longer operates (Mahoney, 2001). Thus we locate some still rigid institutional arrangements that originated in the colonial and early modernization periods but still matter in Hallin and Mancini's scaffolding, and whose endurance helps us to locate core traits of Latin American media systems, resilient in the face of deep economic and political changes. While we do not suggest specific models, we provide a set of preliminary theoretical assumptions that are helpful for such an endeavor.

The paper unfolds as follows. First, we explain the theoretical bases for the theory of multiple modernities, the non-teleological strand we use to understand Latin American modernization, and set out their four main traits: centralized and patrimonialist access to power, a struggle between elites to lay claim to the modernization program that most resembles those of the West, state-driven differentiation, and deep intra-national inequalities and structural variation. Next, we develop the consequences of these assumptions for Latin American media systems: persistent clientelism and state instrumentalization even within democratic regimes, competing journalistic cultures with more than one ethos, constant state interference in media differentiation processes, and the existence of distinct subnational systems. While some of these characteristics have been discussed elsewhere, we integrate and deepen these isolated dimensions into an overarching view that can explain several Latin American commonalities and structures in the light of an articulated and coherent vision. Thus, we can generate assumptions and hypotheses that can be further researched.

Multiple modernities and political consequences in Latin America

The meaning of modernization and its link to the upsurge of news media has been signaled elsewhere (Thompson, 1995), and will not be explained at any great length here. However, despite its diversity, we must pinpoint some of the assumptions regarding its definition and its sociological trajectories. Thus, we can consider the term as referring to an ongoing process of social change. It involves social issues such as individual and social autonomy, agency and reflexivity, social differentiation, and the division of labor; economic issues such as market systems, industrialization, and capitalist growth; and political issues such as legal equality, the rule of law, state bureaucracies, and democracy. Also, rather than change per se, modernization can be considered a goal-oriented transformation by political or economic elites (Portes, 1973; Schmidt, 2010).

In sociological terms, modernization entails a process of differentiation of specialized subsystems that fulfill new social functions. The media integrate and interconnect the subsystems but are differentiated from them (Hallin and Mancini, 2004). From the mid-nineteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth century, the modernization process differentiated the press from political parties (who used it as an instrument of propaganda) and merchants (who utilized it as a vehicle for advertising and economic news) (Habermas, 1981), to make it a more or less autonomous activity to serve the public interest (McQuail, 1998).

Although this theoretical strand was developed in media studies in the 1990s, it is still cogent as it makes it possible “to explain international variation in the application of modern media” (Esser and Stromback, 2012b, p. 185). It also links macro-level or structural changes (political and media structures) and their adaptive responses at the micro-level (journalists’ values and practices). Nonetheless, its shortcoming is that it proposes a single, ethnocentric trajectory of modernization, in which some communications components take root at “different rates” and in “favorable contextual conditions” (Esser and Stromback, 2012a, p. 293; Mancini and Swanson, 1996). The assumptions of the multiple modernization paradigm counter this view.

Eisenstadt (2000) defines multiple modernities as “the appropriation by non-Western societies of specific themes and institutional patterns of the original Western modern civilization societies [and the] continuous selection, reinterpretation, and reformulation of these imported ideas” (p. 15). The ideas of the ‘modern program of the West’, which consist of the features mentioned in the definition, encounter and interact with other civilizational dynamics in distant geographies, so they are contested, selected, reinterpreted, adapted, combined, and hybridized (Gallegos, 2013). Thus, the formation of an idiosyncratic modern program is heavily influenced by a given society's cultural premises, traditions, and historical experiences (Eisenstadt, 2013). At the same time, resistance, tensions, and conflict might arise within and between elites and peripheral actors, and social movements regarding the reinterpretation and institutionalization of the modern program, based on the contradictory nature of the original program and its openness and reflexivity (Kaya, 2004). Its contested nature is a key to understanding the multiple modernization process since it can be understood as the unstable and “continual development and formation, constitution, and reconstitution of multiple, changing and often contested” rival versions of modernity (Sachsenmaier and Riedel, 2002, p. 53).

Eventually, these processes can create several trajectories or paths to modernity (modernizations) and several outcomes (modernities), such as idiosyncratic socio-political arrangements, novel ideologies, different institutional patterns, or specific interactions between exogenous and endogenous forces (Costa, 2018; Spohn, 2010). Far from suggesting a linear or “pseudo” modernization, the theory of multiple modernities underlines the openness and continuous reinterpretation of modern ideas, as well as the uncertainty, contingency, and anti-teleological character of the process. Thus, “differences manifest in the world [are] not archaic differences that [can] disappear through gradual modernization” (Bhambra, 2013, p. 301), but different outcomes of the cultural program of modernization.

Latin American modernity is one of these multiple modernization paths. It has four general traits of socio-political development which are relevant to understanding media structures: (a) there is a centralized access to power, (b) a continuous struggle between elites who try to impose their own notions of modernity, (c) state-driven differentiation, and (d) a diverse set of local and regional subsystems. With regard to the first, the cultural program that the Spanish empire imposed on the colonies, based on the beliefs of Counter-Reformation Catholic Europe, was essentially that of a centralized patrimonial State that precluded access by the population to the centers of power and resources, in an attempt to weaken local elites and prevent insurgency (Coatsworth, 2008). In the absence of proper representative institutions and a hierarchical, anti-egalitarian order imposed by Church and State, “that access was built on connections and clientelistic avenues that developed across class lines in highly stratified communities” (Eisenstadt, 2002, p. 50). Independence from the empire and further industrialization did not change these relations since a “conservative modernization” took place: the old landed elites, rather than the new urban ones, transformed the economic relations—from rural agrarian to urban industrial—without changing power asymmetries or altering the distribution of power resources within society, therefore, maintaining their privileges (Lopez, 2018).

In relation to the second trait, the continuous struggle between elites, the modernization process promoted by the politically and economically powerful groups after the first wave of decolonization, had as its reference the fixed time-space configuration of Western Europe during the eighteenth century and, later, of the United States (Costa, 2018). These elites upheld an imaginary of modernity, an idealization of the values, ideals, and forms of organization of the West that still apply today; they continually oriented themselves to the centers of Western civilization and associated themselves with the “universal values” of the West, from which they could claim cultural and political authority (De Albuquerque, 2019). Through this vision, they would try to reject and overcome local obstacles and resistances (the uncivilized side) that continually made them concerned about “being at the margins of modernity” and in a constant state of deficit; that is, with an unfinished or uneven modernization (Costa, 2018; Whitehead, 2006, p. 33). This situation generated an unstable and persistently contested process between different elites or interest groups arguing about which “advanced” (Western) ideas might resolve that deficit (Whitehead, 2006).

About the third aspect, state-driven differentiation, the Latin American process of modernization is somewhat distinct from that of Western countries. This historical process refers to the way in which societies divide themselves internally into subsystems (institutional politics, religion, and economy) that keep up special functions (specialization) developed to adapt to complexity in the environment (Mancini and Swanson, 1996). In most Western societies, functionally differentiated subsystems are the predominant form of division that has overcome previous ones, such as stratification (nobility-based social orders) or center-periphery relations (empires and city-states). Each subsystem is more or less autonomous in respect of the others, although they communicate for coordination purposes, and their individuals and organizations function in their respective roles. Transgressions between subsystems, when they occur, are frequently scandalized in legal or ethical terms. In this sense, on a regular basis, “political power does not automatically translate into an economic advantage, and religious affiliation does not signify a different legal status” (Kleinschmidt, 2018, p. 12).

However, in Latin America, (a) pre-modern forms of differentiation are still important, such as ethnic or tribal authorities, undercutting through functional differentiation (Kleinschmidt, 2018). And (b) a dominant subsystem, politics, and particularly the State, have established a hierarchy between systems and have controlled their evolution and functioning during the nineteenth (“progress”) and twentieth centuries (“development”) so other subsystems understood their functioning with regard to the central system. The latter condition hindered the process of specialization, and both, in tandem, made subsystems vulnerable to interference and transgressions from others; that is why their autonomy is weak and even negotiated. Although economic reforms from the 1980s onwards displaced the State from its hegemonic position, the path dependence of these arrangements (institutional designs and cultural legacies) left politics as a dominant force (Cortés, 2014; Mascareño, 2003).

Finally, Latin America is characterized by the existence of intra-national inequalities that foster the regional unevenness of modernization efforts and outcomes regarding economic development and political democratization. Concerning the former, economic historians have long observed that in new post-colonial nations, economic growth appears first in one region (national development is regionalized). Hence, a differential between richer and poorer regions tends to increase and grow exponentially as the State invests heavily in the former to cope with infrastructure demand (Williamson, 1965). To improve local economies, states have to gradually invest in the development of poor regions.

However, the modernization path of Latin America accelerated concentration and precluded this last process. By the late nineteenth century, recently independent Latin American nations desperately needed to draw on capital and investments to restore their ailing economies. At the same time, the aggressive industrialization of Europe and the United States created a demand, to which those nations responded by specializing in the export of natural resources (Coatsworth, 2008). This booming export economy made governments invest heavily in those inner regions that: (a) produced the commodities that the international markets needed, (b) developed small industries that were close to transportation channels such as borders and ports, or (c) were a high value, location fixed target for tax collection (Coatsworth, 2008) such as the big urban settlements that served as administrative centers for the State and the Church during the colony (Lomelí, 2012). States did not invest in regions excluded from those dynamics: provinces with strong seasonal agriculture that neither exported nor needed technology or a specialized workforce, and where “feudal” land relations persisted (Appendini, Murayama, and Domínguez, 1972). Low investments in those regions were also reinforced by ethnical prejudice since they were densely populated by indigenous people, where governments invested less in education (Thorp, 2012).

These early trends towards modernization continued throughout the twentieth century after different regional development policies had failed (Lomelí, 2012). For example, economic disparities between Northern and Southern Brazil (São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Brasilia) were established in the nineteenth century as a political project of regional subservience to the federal government. The disparities were large until the reforms of the first decade of the twenty-first century ameliorated them (Pinto, 2017). Furthermore, while general income rose, Mexican regional inequalities remained roughly the same through the 1900s, 1960s, and 2010s in per capita GDP (Aguilar Ortega, 2019; Appendini, Murayama and Domínguez, 1972).

Multiple modernities also help us to understand the uneven democratic performance of subnational units throughout Latin American countries. While most of them achieved a more or less national democracy, Latin American countries have not overcome the illiberal—less than democratic—structures and practices deeply rooted in some subnational units. These entail dynasties, local political machines, dependent clienteles, systems of economic privilege and inequality, the veto power of pre-established elites, and the strength and nature of civil society, all of which end up displacing, capturing, or destabilizing formal institutions (Behrend and Whitehead, 2016; 2021). These surges from the entanglement of federal democratic structures with local and informal extra-institutional dynamics and power holders (bound to historical legacies, elite families, and societal cleavages). Powerful actors excluded from the rule-making process—traditional rulers, faction leaders, business elites, or crime lords—tend to prevent the enforcement of formal rules. Against the weakness of formal authorities and the unevenly distributed enforcement procedures and state capacities across the national territory, the established subnational institutional arrangements entrenched in the community are durable and resilient in the face of the democratizing reforms from the center (Behrend and Whitehead, 2016; 2021).

Since territorial variance is ample, these subnational variations are likely in larger nations—such as many in Latin America. Empirically, case studies from Mexico (Durazo-Herrmann, 2016), Argentina (Gervasoni, 2016), and Brazil (Souza, 2016) demonstrate the failure or almost complete absence of democratic rule in certain subnational units of those countries. Moreover, broader empirical evidence shows significant subnational variation in Latin America's state capacity—for public goods provision, enforcing regulations, and securing order—(Luna and Soifer, 2017).

In tandem, these profound economic and political regional inequalities in Latin American countries make inner differences as substantial as differences between nations.

This modernization path and the four factors already mentioned are not historical vestiges but have a staying power via institutional legacies; that is, a “durable causal relationship” (Mahoney, 2001) between prior cause and a later effect that continues even in the absence of the original cause. Institutions endure over time and are difficult to reverse (hence, path-dependent) for two reasons. First, the advantages of maintaining them increase over time due to the “benefits of learning effects, coordination effects and adaptive expectations, and the costs of irretrievable investments” (Mahoney, 2001, p. 64). Hence, they become self-sustainable. Secondly, continuities also stem from coalitions of elites that benefit from the asymmetrical cost-benefits they have established, and will not want anyone to change (Simpser et al., 2018). Scholars refer to this process for understanding Latin America's current politics. The suboptimal institutions crafted by powerful merchants during colonial rule and the elites in later independence and early modernization persist nowadays through their vested interests in an asymmetrical distribution of resources and rights, and the workings of path dependency (Lopez, 2018).

These legacies are so firm that they traverse strong political transformations (Simpser et al., 2018), such as decolonization processes, revolutions, and regime changes, and have to do with the remarkable resilience of authoritarian practices after the demise of the dictatorships in Latin America. Thus, they can be considered antecedent conditions in which news media have arisen and performed, and they might also explain the endurance of some of their structures.

The consequences of modernization on Latin American media systems

The theory of multiple modernities has hardly ever been applied to the region's media systems (De Albuquerque, 2019; González and Echeverría, 2017; Reyna, Echeverría and González, 2020), but we can elucidate how the aforementioned four broad conditions (struggle between elites, centralized and patrimonialist access to power, state-driven differentiation, and intra-national inequalities) are linked to their structures and dynamics.

In general terms, emergent democracies set up a modernization program once the earliest breakthroughs to modernity had proved their worth in more established democracies, particularly in the United States (Schmidt, 2010). Since the liberal model of American democracy—and of journalism—was consolidated by the mid-twentieth century, it was enthusiastically promoted worldwide by the American government and other supranational, agencies, such as UNESCO and the World Bank (De Albuquerque, 2019). Therefore, it was adopted by news outlets in emerging democracies as the definitive model of a democratic press, and as a way to contribute to the ongoing democratization process (Voltmer, 2013).

In Latin America, nonetheless, this was not a linear process, but one that proceeded in a way that was openly contested between and within media elites (owners and high-ranking journalists). Some features of the liberal canon were adopted, yet others were eschewed. Some of these were reinterpreted, adapted, or combined either with other Western traditions, such as the French (“belle lettre”), Mediterranean, and even Leninist models (De Albuquerque, 2019; Waisbord, 2000), or with previous authoritarian customs; for example, the political culture of centralist and subservient access to power, a legacy from the colonial era. No single canon—that “dictates practices across the board” (Waisbord, 2005, p. 68)—was adopted. The outcome was the rise of “multiple journalisms” in countries that might share the same liberal reference, but have a distinct and idiosyncratic way of understanding and practicing journalism. However, the ongoing struggle between and within political and media elites regarding the “best” (Western) media model, through which actual deficits could be overcome, makes this region highly diverse and unstable with regard to the ethos and practices of professional journalism.

In Argentina, for example, there is an ongoing dispute to define what journalism is and should be. Self-proclaimed “independent” journalism—oriented by the norm of objectivity and championed by corporate news organizations like Clarín or La Nación—and “militant” journalism—inclined towards Peronism and its populist understanding of public communication—contend around journalism's attachment or detachment from political parties and economic elites (Baldoni, 2012). With the rise of populism in the twenty-first century in Latin America and the entailing polarization, this phenomenon also expresses itself in countries like Mexico and El Salvador, where critical journalism is currently under fire both through government stigmatization and from stigmatization among journalists (Ávalos, 2021).

On the other hand, the rooted centralized patrimonial State explains, at least in part, why Latin American media are prone to clientelist and patrimonialist dynamics, as the political elites use the media for their profit in an attempt to control public discourse (Hallin and Papathanassopoulos, 2002; Waisbord, 2000). Rational legal authority is weak or scarcely developed for the media sector and is replaced by particularistic politics where strong actors approach the media as “a prolongation of their personal power” (Waisbord, 2012, p. 442), exercising discretion and secrecy in their decisions (Hallin and Papathanassopoulos, 2002). Consequently, political parallelism is fickle in the region (in Brazil, for example) since clients change, and political allegiances are short-term (Pimentel and Marques, 2021). Also, state intervention tends towards instrumentalization: a hostile legal climate (Hughes and Lawson, 2005) pervades Latin America and selectively enforces regulation against “unfriendly” journalists. Media concentration is high, based on the arbitrary allocation of broadcast frequencies in the hands of colluding patron-clients or tailor-made legislation that favors media barons (Becerra and Mastrini, 2017). For example, even in the poor regions of Mexico and Brazil, many outlets are owned by politicians or their families and are instrumentalized to their benefit (Pinto, 2017).

The differentiation process in Latin America also had consequences for media systems. While Hallin and Mancini (2004) do not support the idea that differentiation is sociologically determined, they understand the changes in their core categories and within their models—particularly the apparent convergence of the European models towards the liberal one—in reference to the Western macro-historical process. According to their theory, the specialization and autonomy of social systems are key processes linked to the rise of professionalism, political parallelism, and State intervention, as historically the media differentiated first from parties and later from the State to gain occupational autonomy for journalism. Yet a process of de-differentiation seems to be at play in some instances when the media have gotten closer to commercial interests than to public ones (and have assumed market rather than civic functions).

Nevertheless, in Latin America, functional differentiation co-exists in tandem with stratified differentiations and center-periphery relations, which make the media vulnerable to vested forces outside the differentiation continuum. The old hierarchy, with the political system ruling over other subsystems, has hindered the autonomy of the media and delayed the development of the profession, which is constantly vulnerable to interference from other systems. Thus, State intervention—formal or informal—is more likely to occur in Latin America than in Western countries. Even in liberalized countries, de-differentiation from the market forces is likely to occur, given the weak systemic autonomy of the news media and of the profession of journalism. This is easily recognized in the investments that the State has made in communications infrastructure, which established ties between political and media elites, as well as in how easily television networks have prioritized infotainment coverage and inhibited watchdog journalism, to the detriment of journalists’ autonomy (Hughes, 2006). In Colombia and Chile, for example, in the midst of recent social unrest, these tendencies made traditional news outlets protect the interests of the economic and political elites (Ameglio, Espejo and Ariza, 2021; Lazcano, Gálvez and Zuleta, 2021).

Finally, the uneven modernization of some countries’ inner regions introduces territorial variation in national media systems. Media markets are highly centralized in big urban capitals, the sites of most of the capital-intensive media, followed by industrial complexes. In contrast, the underdeveloped subnational units are weak—with poor advertising revenues and an insufficient news audience or educated readership—, journalistic professionalization is lacking—because of low wages or deficient training institutions—and guarantees of freedom of the press may not be enforced by the government. In these places, a dynamic emerges that is so divergent that it cannot be considered an outlier to the national media system but as a subsystem in its own right. That is, it has many characteristics of the national system since it is governed by the same constitutional and regulatory framework (and interacts with it, sometimes contentiously), yet analytical assumptions are not enough for understanding its structure and performance. For example, illiberal subnational practices might range from the link of the media to—or outright ownership by—local political elites or non-media business groups, national media moguls holding office (the case of President Sebastián Piñera in Chile being one of the most prominent examples), and the influence of unions and universities as leading sources of information (Behrend and Whitehead, 2021).

There is some evidence of the existence of subnational media systems in Latin America. The democratic performance of the Brazilian subnational units Bahia and Distrito Federal led to divergent media dynamics concerning civic representation (or business interests in the agenda), media property, and parallelism (or lack thereof) (Durazo-Herrmann and Pereira, 2022). Also in Brazil, steep differences in the strength of the economy of the Northern and Southern regions undermine the autonomy of the media markets. An economically robust Southern media system creates local content independent from the government in radio and print, whereas the Northern media are limited to reproducing journalistic content from the national networks (Pinto, 2017). There is also qualitative evidence of great variations in Mexican media performance, mainly between Mexico City and the regional provinces, in terms of greater autonomy and professionalism in the former, and clientelism and instrumentalization in the latter (González, 2013; Salazar, 2019). On the other hand, there is some evidence of structural differences: De León and García-Macías (2022) pose five subsystems within the Mexican media, each integrated by several local states and each corresponding to distinctive trends of democratic development. In those examples, market size and local power structures differentiate subnational units into media subsystems.

These four modernization patterns not only make some media system variables more salient in the region (such as clientelism or instrumentalization), but also help to explain other features of the media, and offer further lines of research.

Discussion and conclusions

The paradigm of multiple modernization brings a new explanation to the post-colonial theories used in research about non-Western media systems. It rejects a teleological understanding of modernization, and proposes that the process is not an imposition, but a contested and conflicting mixture of several exogenous and endogenous traits, which opens the possibility of several modernization programs. Since the Western media models of Hallin and Mancini (2004) are based on the institutional legacies and modernization trajectories of the West, we contend that the multiple modernization processes of other nations and regions will produce media models that might resemble those of the West, but would acquire specific traits that stem from their particular modernization programs.

Applying this paradigm to Latin American media systems gives an overarching explanation of some previously observed features of the region. In doing so, we have used four broad aspects for analyzing the media modernization process: (a) centralized access to power, (b) struggle between elites, (c) state-driven differentiation, and (d) intra-national inequalities. That is, this framework identifies a colonial commonality behind widespread practices across the region such as clientelism and patrimonialism. The paradigm also offers a post-colonial explanation of the divergent appropriations of the liberal canon, other journalistic traditions, local values, and even the constant bargaining between the adoption of commercial, or public service, broadcasting models. It provides a partial explanation for why this region is highly diverse and unstable in terms of professional journalism: the latter is a peripheral institution that is constantly looking to the center to update its practices, frightened of becoming obsolete, and yet this search is conducted amidst fierce competition between elites to establish their program. Given the top-down differentiation processes, the news media have little autonomy and are prone to constant de-differentiation from the government, parties, and the market. Finally, deep intra-national differences and subsystems are perhaps what makes it challenging to classify national media systems, as it depends on the point of observation adopted: capitals and big cities tend to resemble the liberal model, whereas provinces are closer to the polarized pluralist one.

Moreover, an institutional legacy perspective on Latin American modernization is crucial to understanding the resilience of some practices and structures of the countries’ media systems, such as instrumentalization and media-government collusion. Many of the works that examine the former end up with the assessment that these are changing, moving from the polarized pluralist to the liberal model, yet some studies note otherwise (Azevedo, 2006; Campos-Freire, 2009; Humanes, Mellado, and Márquez-Ramírez, 2017; Hallin and Mancini, 2007). However, another common observation is the persistence of some of the polarized pluralist practices in the face of broad economic and political change. For example, media-government collusion is said to be a byproduct of the authoritarian regimes of the 1970s and 1980s (Voltmer, 2013). However, its long endurance throughout several democratic and populist governments might signal historical collusion between patrimonialistic elites that goes beyond such a period. So it is uncertain whether prominent forces of change such as liberalization or the left-populist governments of many of the region's countries will be able to break up solidified, centuries-old elite coalitions and path-dependent institutional arrangements in the media systems.

Finally, the institutional legacy perspective helps with developing a pattern that might explain the mixture of media systems in the region, between liberal and polarized pluralist, and their recurring shifts (Hallin, 2020). There seems to be an ongoing tension between some elites oriented to the West, that drive the State—the primary differentiating institution—to adopt liberal institutions, and other elites rooted in legacies of patrimonialism, clientelism, and centralized power. This tension gives media systems an oscillating and changing mixture of characteristics of the liberal and plural polarized models. Moreover, the ample territorial heterogeneity of media subsystems complicates stabilization since it pulls the nation as a whole away from any national modernization project.

Our proposal is to engage with earlier theoretical strands and open up some possibilities for future theoretical development. First, it goes beyond the “linear theories of converging cross-country modernization” (Vaccari, 2013, p. 14), which homogenize the processes and outcomes of modernization in public communication. Second, it contradicts the teleological understanding of journalistic change—which asks what change is for and answers to the traditional functions of the press in the West—in favor of a genetical one where the history of Latin American modernization has established path-dependencies able to explain several contemporary features. And third, we question some of the assumptions of the liberal captured model (Guerrero, 2014). Under our proposal, journalists might willingly choose not to appropriate the liberal model and might not necessarily be coerced or forced to join against it. On the other hand, the adoption of the liberal model by the State does not seem strongly rooted (it is rather de jure), in line with the significant regulatory changes that come from time to time, and depends on the elites in power and the arbitrary enforcement of such regulations.

For further elaboration, our main assumption and proposed heuristic—that specific modernization trajectories and legacy institutions should be considered when inferring media systems—can be explored in other regions. Eisenstadt (2000), for example, has developed specific modernization trajectories for the Middle East that might be helpful in such endeavors. This proposal could go hand in hand with exploring how the four categories proposed by Hallin and Mancini (2004) work and interact with each other in those specific modernization programs and what other relevant political institutions not considered by them could be at play.

On the other hand, our rationale for media subsystems can also be used to locate them in other regions according to the size of the state, the complexity of its modernization trajectories, and how recently it occurred. These variables might help with understanding divergent findings in India, where Chakravartty and Roy (2013) found four regional subsystems could be explained by intra-national divergences in the relationship between media and politics, while in Canada, Thibault et al. (2020) found no evidence of them. Observing the uneven economic development subnational units and their democratic illiberalism is crucial to determining differences that might constitute sub-systemic media entities in their own right.

Then, there is the matter of the feasibility of variation within Latin American media systems; that is, a plurality of models. As in Eastern Europe, for example (Castro et al., 2017), we think that a plurality is likely, for obvious political and subtler historical reasons. In terms of democratization, some countries nearer to being regimes of electoral authoritarianism (El Salvador, Nicaragua, or Venezuela) while others have reached a status close to that of the Global North (The Economist, 2021). However, in terms of economic history, Mahoney (2010) contends that three blocks can be differentiated in sustained development, from the post-colonial period onwards: Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, and Costa Rica (tier 1), Venezuela, Paraguay, Colombia, and Mexico (tier 2) and Bolivia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Peru (tier 3). These strata are formed partially by the efficacy of a racial myth, either as a homogenous European nation with equal rights—or as a plurality of ethnic groups with “different status and entitlements” (p. 136). These in turn either distributed, or concentrated, literacy, citizens’ rights, and development goods through ethno-racial communities. In the light of these political and economic variations, the rise of media markets or of a journalistic profession could be diverse. More research is needed for these historical trajectories to grow into specific media models, e.g., applying the multiple modernities paradigm to observe how the layers of the general Latin American modernization process interact with the local conditions of the nations of the continent and the patterns that arise between these.

Our key proposal and major endeavor are to delve into the underlying historical conditions and exogenous and endogenous interactions of a given country or region when inferring media systems, particularly in the least understood non-Western regions.