This volume intends to assess the state of the art of comparative research in political communication and to make reference to potential ways in which political communication could and should develop. When Jay Blumler and Michael Gurevitch urged political communication to adapt to the perspective of international comparison more than 25 years ago they were able to refer to only a few studies (Blumler and Gurevitch 1975). At the time, the neglect of comparative work in communication research was even more blatant as this approach had been well established in neighboring social sciences such as political science. However, scholars in comparative politics were never really interested in the mass media and political communication. In communication science on the other hand, political communication has always been a central subject; though it was believed for a long time that it would suffice to describe singular phenomena in the realm of national politics or to subscribe to historical studies. Thus, until the early 1990s communication research lacked an international orientation comparable to that of political science (Kaase 1998; Schoenbach 1998).

From today's point of view it is surprising how long it took for the comparative approach to be acknowledged as a necessary and useful strategy and tool of communication research. Doris Graber (1993, 305) rightly points out that political communication cannot be suitably studied without comparative research “as its form varies between cultures, which makes it necessary and instructive to analyze it from different cultural perspectives.”