In Building Theory in Political Communication, Gadi Wolfsfeld, Tamir Sheafer, and Scott Althaus present the first generalizable conceptual framework for political communication that is also falsifiable, explaining how media performance contributes to successful political performance across nations, regime types, and information systems. The book identifies three tensions in the current literature that have thus far prevented a general theory of political communication. The first is a vague understanding of what it means for media to exercise independence from politics. The second is a focus on media in wealthy, Western, and democratic countries. The third is a tendency to build interpretive frameworks that pose as theories, but that cannot be tested. To address these three tensions, this book adapts, refines, and extends the Politics-Media-Politics (PMP) principle, which states that variations in political ecosystems have a major impact on media systems, values, practices, and resource
