PhD History of Democracy

We offer a four-year, full-time PhD position as part of an NWO-funded VIDI project investigating the transformation of democracy in the final quarter of the twentieth century through the lens of media governance. We are looking for a curious, creative, and collaborative researcher with strong training in historical research methods to investigate the contestation of the public media model from below in the long 1970s.

Across Western Europe, democracy underwent profound changes during the final decades of the twentieth century. The postwar model of democracy, characterized by institutional trust, social cohesion, and political consensus, came under pressure, giving way to a more fragmented, polarized and contested democratic order.

The postwar democratic order was closely linked to a particular model of media governance, with the public service broadcasting monopoly at its core. But in subsequent decades, debates about the role, organization, and regulation of media became a key arena in which democratic ideals and institutions were contested and (re-)formed.

The NWO-funded VIDI project Democracy and the (de-)regulation of the media examines democracy’s contestation and transformation in the final quarter of the twentieth century through the lens of media governance.

Through a comparative Western European perspective, the project investigates how social movements, interest organisations, regulators and policy makers and their conceptions and practices of democracy shaped media governance reform from the 1970s to the 2000s. This enables us to understand the foundations of the liberalized and pluralized media model of the final quarter of the twentieth century and of the regulation of digital media which stand at the heart of concerns about democracy’s crisis today.

As a PhD-researcher, you will study the first and crucial phase of the challenge to the postwar model of democracy. You will investigate how social movements, alternative media initiatives, intellectuals and cultural pioneers challenged the institutional and normative foundations of public service broadcasting. These actors offered a stark critique of government control over media based on cultural cohesion, sociopolitical consensus and popular education;

and articulated new democratic ideals centring on participation, pluralism, autonomy, and freedom of expression. This contributed to broader transformations in democratic culture and governance – and to subsequent debates on media reform in political and policy circles.

Focusing on the long 1970s, a period marked by contestation of established democratic norms and hierarchies, your research project will analyse how alternative visions of the relationship between media and democracy emerged from below and challenged the public media monopoly. You will trace how and why dominant conceptions and practices of media regulation came under pressure and assess how ideas and practices from below reshaped and influenced public and political debates on media policy.

Through a comparative study of Western Europe, you will investigate interactions between social movements, ideas, and political change from a historical perspective. Your research will be based on extensive archival research and the critical analysis and contextualisation of primary sources from social movements, alternative media organisations, intellectuals and other relevant actors. You will examine how democratic concepts and forms of media governance evolved over time, paying particular attention to the circulation of ideas, actors and practices across national borders.

As a PhD-researcher, you will be part of the project team with a Postdoc and the Project Leader. The daily supervisor of…