2017 International Journal of Press/Politics Book Award to Katrin Voltmer

I’m happy to announce that Katrin Voltmer (University of Leeds) is the recipient of the 2017 International Journal of Press/Politics Book Award for her book The Media in Transitional Democracies (Polity Press, 2013).

Below is the official announcement of the award from the full award committee, which included Peter van Aelst (as Chair of the ICA Political Communication Division) Henrik Örnebring (as Chair of the ICA Journalism Studies Division), and myself (as editor of the journal).

2017 International Journal of Press/Politics Book Award to Katrin Voltmer

Political communication research and journalism studies has grown more international  and transnational in recent years, but the majority of English-language academic work still tends to focus on a small number of in a global perspective very unusual high income democracies, and many of our shared theoretical, methodological, and substantial assumptions are derived from research on these countries.

Everyone recognize that this – despite the evident progressive both fields have made – limits our ability to understand political communication and journalism more broadly, as it plays out in very different political, media, and social contexts across the world.

But pushing our shared understanding in a more truly international direction has often been left to area specialists and regional studies, and have not always been tied back to core underlying concerns about the relationship between media and politics.

Katrin Voltmer’s 2013 book The Media in Transitional Democracies marks a break with these implicit and explicit biases. The award committee, which this year consisted of Peter van Aelst, Henrik Örnebring, and myself, is proud to honor it with the 2017 International Journal of Press/Politics Book Award for its truly comprehensive synthesis of comparative politics, political communication, and journalism studies research on transitional democracies from across the world. The Media in Transitional Democracies develops an original and important argument about how media and politics develop in path-dependent ways depending on previous regime types, and provides a systematic overview of existing research that covers a broad set of case countries from all over the world.

The award was instituted by the journal in 2015 to honor “internationally-oriented books that advance our theoretical and empirical understanding of the linkages between news media and politics in a globalized world in a significant way.” It is sponsored by Sage.

Books published within the last ten years are eligible for the award, and we have again had a very strong field of candidates. This is a real testament to the theoretical creativity, methodological rigor, and growing internationalization of both political communication and journalism studies research.

The award committee agreed that Katrin’s book stood out as a particularly necessary work, a relevant book on understudied important topics, a book with a truly global orientation, and a book that combines synthesis and original argumentation with nuance and a humble recognition of how much remains to be done before our shared understanding of media and politics – as well as our theoretical, methodological, and substantial assumptions about how to study it – match the global nature of our objects of analysis and the importance of what we study.

I hope you’ll join me in congratulating Katrin for writing this book. The award is simply a way for the community to recognize and highlight her contribution.