Online Political Participation in Italy

Hamburg.
The next speakers at ECREA 2010 is Emiliana de Blasio, whose focus is on Italian politics in the age of Web 2.0. Key themes here are access, interaction, and participation. Participation here means both participation in content production (co-deciding on content), in content producing organisations (co-deciding on production), and in technology producing organisations (co-deciding on technology).

Advantages of these shifts are greater interactivity, connectedness, participatory deliberation; disadvantages include a loss of control, and other negatives. The present research examined the information, fundraising, involvement, and mobilisation functions of Italian political Websites, to determine the interrelationships between social networking and political participation. This was done through questionnaires, interviews, focus groups, and participant observation.

Interviews discovered a engaged (committed) as well as lukewarm (cynical) political participants; lukewarm participants were merely symbolically involved, socially curious, and engaged in information exchange; committed participants were involved in producing information, and participated politically, with civic attention and social engagement.

This can be plotted across two intersecting axes spanning from trust to mistrust, and from mere access to full participation. Most of the people within this matrix simply constitute already existing participants whose political participation are merely reintermediated by new media platforms; but those with the greatest trust who merely access content can be regarded as new subjects for political mobilisation: a new ‘emotional public’ (which is also ripe for populist exploitation, however).