Book Reviews

exemplary study of comparative political communication, a relatively new field of inquiry that deserves greater attention from scholars in comparative politics. In recent years, political communication research has become increasingly compara-tive, but most research in comparative politics continues to underemphasize, if not completely ignore, the importance of the media as an exogenous variable capable of explaining important political phenomena (see e.g., Munck and Snyder’s [2007] data on the “scope of study ” in comparative politics). According to Pippa Norris (2004), a likely reason for this omission has to do with the fact that unlike other research areas in comparative politics (e.g., the study of parties, electoral systems, or constitutions), the subfield of political communication has never developed “strong and well-established conceptual typologies ” (p. 122). The development of just such a media–politics typology is the main contribution that Hallin and Mancini make to the field of comparative politics in their book. Building on Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm’s (1956) outdated but still influential Four Theories of the Press, Hallin and Mancini introduce a schema centered on three models of medi