When the Logics of Media, Law, and Politics Collide: The Mediatization of Finnish Constitutional Review

Mediatization scholarship has extensively analyzed how media logic affects societal institutions. Media logic is, however, not the only powerful institutional logic at play in modern societies. Other institutions have their respective logics that reciprocally impact processes of mediatization. In this article, we show how the logics of the media, law, and politics collide in constitutional review at the heart of democratic politics. Constitutional rights are playing increasingly visible roles in societies as charged political issues of high newsworthiness. Via an institutionalist approach to mediatization, we illustrate how media, legal, and political logics coexist and compete within constitutional review. By building on sixty-four interviews carried out between autumn 2019 and spring 2021 with key actors-political journalists, members of parliament, secretaries, and legal experts-involved in the work of the Constitutional Law Committee of the Finnish Parliament, we show how journalists, politicians, and legal experts advance their own logics as constitutional actors and seek to manage and mitigate the interinstitutional conflict between law, politics, and the media. We demonstrate how various formal and informal practices regulate Constitutional Law Committee members' interactions with journalists and social media behavior and legal experts' relationship with the media. We thus concur with the analyses suggesting that mediatization is a dynamic process in which various institutional logics collide, struggle for power, and recede to make room for different logics.