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The final chapter is composed as a dialogue between a sociologist of architecture and a science studies scholar as they discuss the opportunities and limitations of enriching the sociology of architecture with concepts, approaches and terms from science and technology studies (STS). The dialogue comprises two alternate parts: one is scientific in tone and elaborates at length the arguments that are the basis for our theses on the actions of architecture. Here, we trace how material objects are conceptualized in STS and focus on the question of how we can fruitfully integrate STS insights into a new sociology of architecture. The other part of the dialogue, formally emphasized by italics, is held in a more colloquial tone and connects the single elements of the scientific parts by summarizing and emphasizing their central conclusions.

The German foreign intelligence service — the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) — plans to move its headquarters from the small town of Pullach near Munich in the south of Germany to the capital, Berlin, probably in 2017. Reportedly, about 4000 BND staff will change their offices and an unknown number of secret files, documents, recordings, weapons and instruments will have to be brought across Germany from the Bavarian countryside to the pulsating centre of Berlin. Whereas the old base was about 600 kilometres away from the German Federal Chancellor and the German Parliament, in future it will be only about one kilometre away from the central political buildings of Germany.

Having derived theoretical expectations with regard to the impact of media performance in terms of the vertical and horizontal function on four aspects of democratic quality in Chapter 7, this chapter moves on to examine whether multivariate regressions provide empirical evidence to support these assumptions. This will hopefully give some insight into how important mass media are for the well-functioning of democracy and thus whether the debate about the state of democracy in today’s media societies between ‘pessimists’ and ‘optimists’, as outlined in the introductory Chapter 1, is actually relevant at all. While the former argue that today’s mass media generally harm democracy, the latter hold the opposite position.

While the previous chapter was concerned with the structural performance of mass media, that is, how well media systems are designed to comply with democratic goals, Chapter 6 focuses on media content. Again, by means of a mostly inductive research strategy, I explore how the newspapers selected from ten countries perform with regard to the measures defined in Chapter 4. The empirical approach chosen in this chapter is very similar to the study of structural media performance in Chapter 5 although the order of the analyses is somewhat reversed. First, as in the previous chapter, factor analysis is used to find out whether the nine indicators for democratic media performance on the content level relate to each other as proposed in the conceptualization of the vertical and the horizontal media function. Because of the low number of countries, the units of analysis in Chapter 6 are always the 50 newspapers. For this reason, the second step is to test whether these newspapers’ fulfillment of the vertical and the horizontal function with regard to their news coverage significantly varies between countries or whether it merely depends on their outlet-specific characteristics. Both descriptive and regression analysis can help finding answers to this question. Finally, I study more comprehensively whether and what kind of patterns can be identified in terms of newspapers’ democratic performance on the content level. Scatter plots and cluster analysis give insight as to how the media functions interact and which configurations of the two can be observed across newspapers and especially across countries.