Rodney Benson "A Conceptual and Methodological Framework for International Comparative Media Ownership Research" Theoretical Introduction to Paper Prepared for Remote Video Presentation to the French Political Science Association Annual Conference (Association française de science politique/AFSP), Lille, July 6, 2022 © Rodney Benson Abstract International comparative research has demonstrated its value for a deeper understanding of the news media and political communication (Hallin and Mancini 2004), but with a few notable exceptions (e.g., Noam et al. 2016) the question of media ownership has not been fully developed. Drawing on ongoing international comparative research on media ownership in the U.S., France, and Sweden, this paper aims to identify the potential strengths and contributions as well as challenges for international comparative research about media ownership. In particular, I argue that international comparative research can discover "new" ownership forms or sub-forms present in one national context but not in others, help develop and refine new theoretical models and empirical indicators (including etic concepts of “ownership forms,” "ownership complexes," and “modes of power”), and ultimately create larger samples with multiple axes of structural variation that can be used to test causal hypotheses. What can international comparative research accomplish for our understanding of media ownership? First of all, similar to historical research, it can help us see our immediate social environment in a new way. It can help us relativize the taken-for-granted assumptions and categories that have emerged to analyze a given regional/national/local context and simply show that things can be and are different elsewhere. It can also introduce us to empirical variation that extends beyond that which exists in any given nation-state. Second, closely related, it can help in the development and refinement of concepts, categories, and theoretical frameworks adequate to capture the complexity of social phenomena across nation-states. Third, it can be used to test premature claims of either “generalizability” or “specificity.” Do conclusions based on one or two national cases actually extend to other milieu? Conversely, while every case is at some level unique, are claims of specificity going too far and not adequately acknowledging similarities with other cases? And finally, with caution, it can be used for causal inference to test hypotheses about how media ownership variables are associated with different dimensions of journalistic content. The larger and more varied sample enabled by multiple-country research can facilitate this process. In conducting comparative research, there are particular conceptual and methodological challenges that if adequately met provide opportunities to innovate in conceptual models, sampling methods, and quantitative measurement. I now turn to these challenges.