What is Political about Political Economy: A Rejoinder to the Fuchs-Winseck Debate

This paper uses the Winseck-Fuchs debate as a case study in assessing how value preferences shape definitions, predicate logic, and axiomatic reasoning, and in turn influence the analysis of institutions. The study identify and contrast the explanatory power behind different modes of institutional analysis often applied in the study of communication in advanced capitalist societies. Thereafter the study attend to how these modes account for capacity, frame collective actions problems, take account of trade-offs and coalition building, as well as describe behaviour of and within institutions. In the second half of the paper, the study use critical political economic methodologies to examine the ideological coloring of these modes. The study highlight features often overlooked in reductive treatments of states and corporate conglomeration and seek to supplement them with a more sensitive political economic analysis. In this respect, the researchers think there is much scope for communication researchers to contribute to the general analysis of the advantages and problems of political assessment of governance as it relates to the media more broadly.