The monograph Hybrid Media and Hybrid Regimes. Media Pluralism and the Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism in Contemporary Europe was published in 2023 by the “Arhipelag” Publishing House and the Institute of European Studies in Belgrade.
The 400-page study is based on a review of the latest theoretical and empirical literature on media, democratization and mixed regimes, as well as on a detailed empirical investigation of the normative framework and media independence in selected countries. The aim of this part is to study the basic difficulties and challenges faced by the concept of media pluralism in the context of growing competitive authoritarianism in contemporary Europe. The analysis in the broadest sense includes the field of the political system and the field of media, and in the narrower sense, as an interdisciplinary analysis, it uses cognitive aspects of scientific disciplines such as: political system, sociology, political sociology, law, media system, communication science, media sociology and media law . The author provides an overview of contemporary theoretical discussions from comparative media systems and comparative politics, especially comparative analysis of political regimes, and thus lays the basis for the analysis of empirical material, especially collected in an international research project led by researchers from the European University Institute in Florence (the author leads the research team for Serbia).
The monograph consists of six chapters, including introductory and concluding considerations. The theoretical framework of media pluralism and competitive authoritarianism, as well as their mutual connections, is laid out in chapters II-IV; followed by an empirical analysis in chapter V, from the perspective of the normative framework and political independence of the media, especially for selected cases – Hungary, Serbia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Albania and Turkey. The study concludes that the trend of the collapse of media pluralism in modern European states is expressed in the most severe form in mixed regimes, more precisely, in competitive authoritarian regimes in several states of the Balkans extended region, and that the key problems are the absence of the rule of law and political parallelism.
This scholarly monograph is an original scholarly work that makes a multiple contribution to the scholarly literature. First, the study provides an overview of contemporary theoretical discussions on media pluralism, both in democracies and in mixed regimes. Second, the latest debates in the literature on democratization and mixed regimes are presented, as well as trends in the development of political regimes, especially those below the threshold of democracy, based on influential international reports on the state of democracy in a large number of states and self-governing territories. Third, an overview of the latest debates in the scientific literature on the negative impact of mixed regimes on media pluralism is presented. Fourth, the study analyzes various aspects of the collapse of media pluralism in selected countries of Southeast and Central Europe in the last few years based on extensive empirical research within the framework of a large international project on media pluralism.
