Uploaded September 2022 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
The contemporary rise of authoritarian populism has sparked renewed debate on how state institutions may respond to perceived challengers to liberal democracy. Public media organizations find themselves at the core of these debates. They are regularly faced with dilemmas between pushing back at perceived anti-democratic challengers and safeguarding norms of impartiality and pluralism. In this talk Ludvig Norman presents recently collected data from a study of public broadcasting governance in 12 European countries, complemented by a more in-depth look at how public media organizations in Germany and Sweden have dealt with this dilemma. The presentation focuses on rules and guidelines that specify the democratic obligations of broadcasting organizations, as well as on debates prompted by how rules have been applied in particular cases. It finally raises questions of what these debates might tell us about the role of public media in contemporary democratic societies in Europe and beyond.
Ludvig Norman is Associate Professor at Stockholm University, Department of Political Science and Senior Fellow at the Institute of European Studies at UC Berkeley. His research focuses on European politics and democratic theory with a special focus on how democratic institutions respond to the emergence of anti-system political actors. He is the author of the books The Mechanisms of Institutional Conflict in the European Union (Routledge, 2016) and Robustness and Fragility of Political Orders (Cambridge University Press, 2022) which he co-edited with Richard Ned Lebow. Recent works have appeared in Journal of Common Market Studies, European Journal of International Relations, Political Studies, European Journal of Social Theory and Cooperation and Conflict.
The contemporary rise of authoritarian populism has sparked renewed debate on how state institutions may respond to perceived challengers to liberal democracy. Public media organizations find themselves at the core of these debates. They are regularly faced with dilemmas between pushing back at perceived anti-democratic challengers and safeguarding norms of impartiality and pluralism. In this talk Ludvig Norman presents recently collected data from a study of public broadcasting governance in 12 European countries, complemented by a more in-depth look at how public media organizations in Germany and Sweden have dealt with this dilemma. The presentation focuses on rules and guidelines that specify the democratic obligations of broadcasting organizations, as well as on debates prompted by how rules have been applied in particular cases. It finally raises questions of what these debates might tell us about the role of public media in contemporary democratic societies in Europe and beyond.
Ludvig Norman is Associate Professor at Stockholm University, Department of Political Science and Senior Fellow at the Institute of European Studies at UC Berkeley. His research focuses on European politics and democratic theory with a special focus on how democratic institutions respond to the emergence of anti-system political actors. He is the author of the books The Mechanisms of Institutional Conflict in the European Union (Routledge, 2016) and Robustness and Fragility of Political Orders (Cambridge University Press, 2022) which he co-edited with Richard Ned Lebow. Recent works have appeared in Journal of Common Market Studies, European Journal of International Relations, Political Studies, European Journal of Social Theory and Cooperation and Conflict.
