Rethinking Democracy in the Current Political Context

From the excitement of a thoroughly inspiring AoIR 2012 conference, I've now made my way to Istanbul for this year's European Communications Conference, ECREA 2012. We open the conference with a keynote on e-democracy by Donatella dells Porta, considering the types of democracy which new social movements are envisaging.

Donatella begins by highlighting questions over the traditional role of parties – the have been seen as distancing MPs from the electorate, which are no longer strictly necessary in an era of more direct communication between voters and politicians. Political activists at the beginning of the current millennium have also aimed to become more directly involved in policy-making, rather than just in petitioning politicians for policy change.

By contrast, European Council President Herman van Rompuy has noted the importance of convincing public opinion of the policies proposed by the political class – politics as made by a few, to be marketed to the masses. Finally, movements such as the Indignados and Occupy are attempting a transparent exercise of direct democracy. Each of these four approaches represent different conceptions of politics and political communication.

Communication research must still come to terms with such different views on communication and democracy; it has been too fragmented to fully address them. The transformations of recent years have been insufficiently described – what is emerging here can be seen as a democracy of the public (replacing a parliamentary democracy, or a democracy of parties), perhaps, but exactly what that may mean remains unclear. The dangers of populism must be especially highlighted and understood here.

Electoral campaigning has also changed – and not necessarily in a favourable direction. Electors tend to be considered more and more as consumers; politics has become a market through which political ideas are sold to voters. This also means that what is successful often is not the better product, but the better promoted product; and at the same time, outside advertising (by third parties) is now also able to affect the political process.

Research on social movements can also highlight some more optimistic perspectives, however – especially in how communication technologies are used. They may give voice to previously voiceless actors and groups, and this is related to the rise of different conceptions of democracy. There are now a least four models of democracy: liberal democracy (delegated and majoritarian), radical and participatory democracy (participatory and majoritarian), liberal deliberative democracy (delegated and consensual), and participatory deliberative democracy (participatory and consensual).

The first of these, liberal democracy, is seen to be in crisis, as political communication are increasingly perceived as a controlled, top-down form of persuasion by political elites; other conceptions of democracy have emerged to counter this tendency, highlighting electoral accountability and demanding a more permanent form of bottom-up control of elected governments by citizens. Democracy consists not only of representation, but participation, in his view.

Indeed, part of the push moves away from a conception of democracy as constituted mainly by the ability of the public to vote – deliberative theories stress the importance of discursive aspects of democracy. This links back to Habermas's vision of communicative rationality, of course; it highlights the potential not of marketing existing ideas, exogenous to the democratic system, but of forming new ideas through and within the communicative democratic process.

But this is complicated by the fact that communication does not take place within one single, unified public sphere, but in multiple overlapping public spheres and spaces – including physical spaces, as embodied by the public squares occupied by protest movements around the world, from Wall St through Tahrir to Syntagma. In addition to these physical spaces, online and social media spaces also play a role here, of course – the movement builds on a combination of different technologies of communication.

Such movements correct existing conceptions of democracy, then, or put forward new ideas – the suggest that political communication is not performed by an existing class of actors, but by a multiplicity of participants who no longer simply use, but also produce content and ideas.