CULTURAL SOCIOLOGY AND MEDIATIZED POLITICS; A COMPARATIVE CASE STUDY OF US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS AND IRANIAN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS

After information and communication revolution, social and political life has been deeply mediatized. Besides, the diverse and conventional interpretations made for Mediatization so far, this paper has been developed based on a particular interpretation of mediatized politics which describes a situation in which the media‘s expanding role and presence in the political life of societies has provided the possibility of Special political activism for ordinary people. This research seeks to answer the main question that whether mediatization of politics affects all societies regardless of their specific capacities and context or it is a contextual phenomenon that has different outcomes in different societies. In this regard two cases, “Joe the Plumber” in US presidential election of 2008 and Mirza Agha in Iranian presidential election 2017 are chosen as ordinary citizens that mediatization of politics enabled them to emerge as a political active subject. By choosing cultural sociology as a theoretical framework, and a comparative study between these two cases in three indices included the dynamics of political subjectivity, media typology and the survival of political subjectivity, this paper has shown that mediatization of politics is a contextual phenomenon, in the sense that in developed democratic society, will lead to the maximum dynamics of political subjectivity in all levels of macro-scale, medium-scale , and micro-scale media and long term durability of subjectivity, while in developing society and pseudo-democracies it would be limited to the durations of holding election and just the minimal dynamics of political subjectivity only in micro-scale media is visible. Keywords: mediatization of politics, Cultural Sociology, Joe the plumber, Mirza Agha, Presidential election.

Issue Salience in the U.S. Elections: “Partisan Domestication” between South Korean Newspapers

This study examines how two newspapers in South Korea, one conservative and one liberal, covered the U.S. presidential election of 2008. The study found that there was a significant divergence in the emphasis placed on certain types of issues between the two ideologically polarized newspapers. While the liberal Hankyoreh Daily placed more emphasis on social justice issues –such as racial equality and the abolition of social discrimination, the conservative Chosun Daily highlighted “human interest” issues, focusing on more trivial topics such as the candidates’ gender, family, and fashion preferences. There was also a difference in the types of news sources used by the two newspapers. The Hankyoreh Daily sought to represent the voices of the South Korean elite, while The Chosun Daily used American politicians as one of its major source of information. This study argues that a news organization’s ideological orientation is an important factor, which influences South Korean newspapers’ “domestication” of the U.S. election, which was staged in a distant region.