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

Gholam Reza Haddad
Assistanat professor, Facoulty of law and Political Sciences, Allameh Tabataba'I University,Iran, haddad@atu.ac.ir

Abstract

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 citizzens 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.