The Role of Research in Developing New Visions for Democracy

Finally for this ECREA 2018 session, Natalie Fenton asks how we as academics might therefore need to reconsider our own work in political communication. If we are considering different ways of doing democracy, this is inevitably also a question of power, of course, and it has immediate and critical implications for societies in which the gaps between the powerful and the powerless are rapidly widening.

As the institutions – especially at local levels – in which publics have traditionally sought to engage are being hollowed out and shut down (for instance as a result of austerity policies such as those of the U.K.), place-specific neglect is being felt very acutely, and the very future of civil society appears under threat. Natalie’s work has examined this in the U.K. through participatory action research, and this research generates an imperative for activists to address and arrest this decline.

In such situations, public discontent does not have anywhere to go. Locals are trying to find ways to address the decline of public services, and there are many activists who highlight it, but it is difficult to get from there to the next step of envisioning and offering alternative solutions: where is our vision of a better world, and has utopian thought especially on the left stalled? Is this really a consequence of the end of the Cold War, or of other transformations in recent decades?

Research is doing politically useful work, certainly; it is documenting current transformations, but comes to a standstill when it comes to envisaging and shaping further developments. A much broader, holistic understanding of political communication would be necessary for this, and we must reprioritise the social in our thinking in order to unleash our political imaginations. What can we do to produce more prospects for hope, rather than finding hope in order to have an impetus to act?

This requires a rethinking of intellectual method, including a reconsideration of Marxist thought but extending well beyond a slavish adherence to such theory. This must also move beyond mere wishful thinking, melding utopian longing to realist thinking. Natalie’s work n the U.K. has identified a number of potential principles: there is a need for strong egalitarianism, a form of distributed power, a model of politics that transcends identity politics; for an emphasis on the quality of work over mere employment, especially in the context of debates about universal basic income; for the pursuit of substantively meaningful democracy; and for a transcendence of the inherently broken current political system through the embrace of innovative new approaches. This also reemphasises the social in socialism, beyond the more limited vision that current socialists embrace.