Suchergebnisse

The article charts the notion of statehood emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, considering the emotional repertoire and the themes addressed in the government's crisis communication. The conception and performance of statehood and power in Italy during the COVID-19 emergency rely on four interrelated nodal points: (1) the state's relationship to citizens, (2) the state's relationship to regions and local governments, (3) the state's relationship to politics and the Italian parliament, and (4) the state within international sphere. For each of those nodal points, we have analyzed relevant themes and rhetorical devices following a discourse-historical approach (DHA). Specific efforts have been made to identify the emotional repertoire mobilized by the Italian government in its communication. In the interplay between the dramatic context of crisis and an enduring trend toward the personalization of the government's leadership, the source of legitimacy has shifted from traditional democratic procedures to the use of emotional capital. The analysis of the Italian government's communication reveals the features of the emotional capital used during the pandemic, like the ability to display empathy toward citizens' sufferings, the will to engage in dialog with social stakeholders, confidence in expertise, and the pride and determination to negotiate within the EU. The article concludes that the performance of the prime minister in expressing his emotional states has nurtured the conception of post-COVID statehood, consolidating his individual leadership and flawing the spaces of political conflict.

This article examines counterdisinformation policies to investigate how European countries are shaping the meaning and boundaries of social platforms' accountability. We describe the cultural determinants of social platforms' accountability through a content analysis technique that considered principles, actors, and instruments, resulting in four models of social platform accountability: accountability set by law, codecided accountability, regulated self-regulation, and pure self-regulation. Our results suggest that most of the 11 countries in this study maintain specific positions on the role of digital media in society. At the same time, some patterns of convergence were evident: the weakening of State control in favor of freedom of information; the enhancement of transparency in social platforms' politics-related activities as a guiding principle to ensure public monitoring; and the standardization of a multistakeholder model of coregulation. The article also focuses on the technological dimension of social platform accountability, enabling us to recognize the degree to which different models rely on algorithms. It then problematizes the limitations and risks of social platforms' accountability.

In this article, we provide an overview of the main theoretical approaches to e-democracy, also considering that their history is intertwined with studies on e-government on the one hand and with research on digital communication on the other. In particular, we have explored the critical issues represented by the different models of e-government and e-democracy. Studies on digital activism have only recently met those on e-democracy, despite an apparent conceptual contiguity. The belated meeting between these two strands of research is to be found in the assimilation of many e-government/e-democracy practices in the context of neoliberalism and its tendencies toward depoliticization. The concept of platform arises at the intersection among studies on digital activism, e-democracy research, and the analysis of new forms of social organization: It seems to be able to constitute a common territory of research and mutual recognition.

In the last decade, the economic crisis and the mistrust in democratic institutions have contributed to a major crisis of political parties across Europe. These are some of the causes that led to the formation of political movements with purely populist characteristics as replacement of the traditional delegitimized intermediary bodies. The crisis of representation is the crisis of the post 1945 idea of representation as a tool to increase the people's participation. We have noted a convergence between some populist appeals to direct democracy and the more radical neo-liberal approaches that pretend to reduce people's participation, even if by appealing to some forms of "surrogate representation". The theoretical background of this paper is based upon the relationships between "surrogate representation" and the institutionalization of the neo-populist movements, quickly transformed in neo-populist parties. In other words, we can highlight the strange coming together of technological storytelling on direct democracy with technocracy myths and the overlap of technopopulism with direct democracy and "direct e-democracy" (that is profoundly different from deliberative and participatory e-democracy). The aim of the paper is to analyse the connections between the emerging forms of populism (such as techno-populism), the rhetoric on the importance of digital communication for the improvement of democracy, and the depoliticisation processes. ; En la última década, la crisis económica y la desconfianza en las instituciones democráticas han contribuido a una gran crisis de los partidos políticos en toda Europa. Estas son algunas de las causas que llevaron a la formación de movimientos políticos con características puramente populistas como reemplazo de los organismos intermediarios tradicionalmente deslegitimados. La crisis de la representación es la crisis de la idea de representación posterior a 1945 como una herramienta para aumentar la participación popular. Hemos notado una convergencia entre algunos llamamientos populistas a la democracia directa y los enfoques neoliberales más radicales que pretenden reducir la participación de la gente, incluso si apelamos a algunas formas de "representación sustituta". Los antecedentes teóricos de este documento se basan en las relaciones entre la "representación sustituta" y la institucionalización de los movimientos neopopulistas, que se transformaron rápidamente en partidos neopopulistas. En otras palabras, podemos destacar la extraña unión de narraciones tecnológicas sobre democracia directa con mitos de tecnocracia y la superposición de tecnopopulismo con democracia directa y "democracia electrónica directa" (que es profundamente diferente de democracia electrónica participativa y deliberativa). El objetivo del documento es analizar las conexiones entre las formas emergentes de populismo (como el tecopopulismo), la retórica sobre la importancia de la comunicación digital para el mejoramiento de la democracia y los procesos de despolitización.

Open government policies (on transparency, participation, and collaboration, but also on digital technology) are spreading across Europe as a new governance model, but are not homogeneous across different countries. By adopting a qualitative computer‐assisted analysis of policy documents from France, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom, we mapped the different meanings of open government by examining the specific measures and key motivations for their adoption in order to find out how different national governments frame the variables of open government. The article shows the emergence of competing models of open government: on the one hand, the hegemonic model of open government seems to stress innovation and openness in the sense of an enhanced transparency, and occasionally of public–private collaboration, but failing to achieve an open decision making. We have detected a paradox in the open government implementation: the economic lens, although softened by a drive toward innovation, anchors the policy‐making process in already‐consolidated mechanisms, rather than in substantive change. On the other hand, we can foresee the emergence of a different perspective on open government, which provides a proper policy framework for democratic innovations to develop.

Sve veća nepovezanost građana i donositelja odluka gura politiku u smjeru koji će dovesti do preoblikovanja institucionalnog aranžmana. Komunikacijski alati mogu imati važnu ulogu u razvijanju novih prostora za participaciju građana. Postoje različiti modeli kojima vlada i javna administracija mogu poduprijeti građansku participaciju: e-vlada, otvorena vlada i specifičan dizajn digitalne demokracije. Otvorena vlada može biti jedan od načina za ponovno povezivanje građana i političkih institucija, ali u isto vrijeme može biti i "privlačan" alat za institucionalizaciju participacije odozdo prema gore i njezino umrtvljivanje. Cilj je ovog rada predstaviti prva saznanja međunarodnog istraživačkog projekta na temu otvorene vlade i participacijskih platformi u četiri europske države (Francuskoj, Italiji, Španjolskoj i Ujedinjenom Kraljevstvu). Istraživanje nastoji otkriti mogu li platforme za participaciju poboljšati kvalitetu demokracije i može li otvorena vlada doprinijeti demokratizaciji demokracije. ; The growing disconnection between citizens and decision-makers is pushing politics towards a re-shaping of institutional design. New spaces of political participation are sustained and even reinforced by communication, especially by digital communication. Governments and public administrations can find and use different models to facilitate citizens' participation; e-government, open government and a specific design of digital democracy. In this respect, open government can constitute a way to re-connect citizens and political institutions, but at the same time, it can also be an "appealing" tool to institutionalize bottom-up participation and so anesthetizing it. The aim of this article is to present the first findings of an international research project about open government and participatory platforms in four European countries (France, Italy, Spain, the UK). The study tries to understand if participatory platforms can improve the quality of democracy, and if open government can contribute to democratizing democracy.