Bridging research on democracy, social movements and communication

Donatella della Porta

The democratic challenge: an introduction

It has become common for reflections on the 'state of democracy' to point to the ineffectiveness of elected politicians' interventions and citizens' growing dissatisfaction with the performance of elected members (Crouch, 2005). Empirical research shows repeatedly that trust in current democracies as regimes based on electoral accountability is being limited by the decline in electoral participation and deep transformations to the most important actors in representative democracy: the political parties. The falls in party membership and, especially, activist numbers (and the related spread of memberless and personalized parties) and the weakening of party loyalties (and increased electoral volatility and opinion voting) are tangible signs of these transformations (della Porta, 2009c).

Although less common than assessments of the challenges to democracy, there are growing calls for a balancing of the perceived crisis in the representative (electoral) conception of democracy. This happens by considering other concepts, which although far from being hegemonic, belong to deep-rooted traditions in democratic thinking and democratic institutions, that go beyond electoral accountability. As Rosanvallon (2008: 12) observes:

[T]he idea of popular sovereignty found historical expression in two different ways. The first was the right to vote, the right of citizens to choose their own leaders. This was the most direct expression of the democratic principle. But the power to vote periodically and thus bestow legitimacy to an elected government is almost always accompanied by a wish to exercise a more permanent form of control over the government thus elected.

Rosanvallon notes that, in the historical evolution of democracy, alongside the growth of institutions of electoral accountability, a circuit of oversight anchored outside state institutions was consolidated. In fact, an understanding of democratic experiences requires simultaneous consideration of the 'functions and dysfunctions' of electoral representative institutions and the organization of distrust. The different elements in what Rosanvallon defines as counter-democracy do not represent 'the opposite of democracy, but rather a form of democracy that reinforces the usual electoral democracy, a democracy of indirect powers disseminated through society – in other words, a durable democracy of distrust that complements the episodic democracy of the usual electoral representative system' (Rosanvallon, 2008: 8).

Thinking in terms of other conceptions of democracy paves the way to addressing contemporary transformations as not only challenges to, but also opportunities for democracy. If mistrust is the disease, it might also be part of the cure as 'a complex assortment of practical measures, checks and balances, and informal as well as institutional social counter-powers has evolved in order to compensate for the erosion of confidence, and to do so by organizing distrust' (Rosanvallon, 2008: 4, emphasis in the original). In the same vein, other scholars have stressed both the crisis in the traditional, liberal (representative) conceptions of democracy and the revival of democratic qualities usually considered under the formula of a 'democracy of the ancients'. These scholars emphasize the importance of a (free and committed) public. Prominent among them is Bernard Manin, who describes the contemporary evolution from a 'democracy of the parties' in which the public sphere is occupied mainly by the political parties, to a 'democracy of the public' in which the formation of public opinion is freed from ideological control of the parties (Manin, 1995: 295). This means also that the cleavages within public opinion no longer reflect electoral preferences, and instead develop from individual preferences formed outside the political parties.

At a more normative level, the concepts of participatory and deliberative democracy have been used, with mounting success, to stress the need to develop public spheres characterized by free and equal participation. Within participatory conceptions of democracy, the development of communicative space is given a fundamental value since citizen involvement requires a multiplicity of public spaces (Downing, 2001: 47–8). Also, in the radical version of participatory democracy:

[W]hile antagonism is a we/they relation in which the two sides are enemies who do not share any common ground, agonism is a we/them relation where the conflicting parties, although acknowledging that there is no rational solution to their conflict, nevertheless recognize the legitimacy of their opponents [...] This means that, while in conflict, they see themselves as belonging to the same political association, as sharing a common symbolic space within which the conflict takes place.

(Mouffe, 2005: 20)

With various degrees of emphasis, theorists of deliberative democracy also stress the importance of communication. This is because in deliberative democracy people are convinced by the force of the better argument (Habermas, 1996) or, at least, are willing to share this view while not abandoning their perspective, and to learn by listening to the other (Young, 1996).

In the debate on the transformations in democracy, social movements appear to play a potentially crucial role. Recognizing the democratic potential of mistrust in fact means pushing forward reflections on the democratic role played by non-institutional actors in the political system. Recent research on political participation shows that while some more conventional forms of participation (such as voting or party-linked activities) are declining, protest forms are increasing. Although fewer citizens may be voting, they are not less interested or less knowledgeable about politics. Also, although some traditional types of associations have become less popular, others (including social movement organizations) are growing in terms of their resources, legitimacy and membership.

In several accounts of broad democratic transformations, social movements are presented as performing an important democratic function. Although social movements are important actors in political and social communication, and communication is vital for social movements, the social science literatures on these two aspects rarely interact, as the introduction to this volume also points out. Social movement studies mainly consider the mass media as opportunities for social movements, and often stress their alignment with them. Mainstream communication studies, on the other hand, have maintained a long-standing focus on the stronger action and the mass media. Structural, instrumental and institutional biases, in various combinations, have tended to characterize these fields of study. The same applies to reflections on the democratic potential of democracy and communication.

More recently, in both fields of knowledge, certain opportunities for reciprocal learning and interactions have developed based on some exogenous, societal changes as well as disciplinary evolutions. In this review of the social science literature, I suggest that looking at the intersection of media and social movements might be particularly useful within a relational and constructivist vision that takes into account the normative positions of different actors. More broadly, this implies paying attention to the permeability of the borders between the two concepts as well as between the two fields they tend to separate.

To do this, I examine the debate on the recent transformations in democracy and the debate on the mass media and social movements, with particular attention to recent research on the potential of computer-mediated communication to improve democratic qualities by reducing power inequalities and improving access opportunities for weak actors. Finally, I discuss recent research on the communication strategies of social movements, stressing the importance of recognizing their agency, the links between their communicative practices and their conceptions of democracy.

Media studies, social movement studies and democracy: the missing links

The conditions and limits of the media's contribution to democracy have not occupied a central place in media studies. In addressing the important role of an active and autonomous public sphere, research on political communication has tended to stigmatize the commercialization and/or lack of political autonomy of the mass media as seriously challenging the performance of a 'power of oversight' over elected politicians. Recent tendencies in the mass media – including concentration, deregulation, digitalization, globalization and pluralization of the publics – tend to have ambivalent effects on democracy (Dahlgren, 2009). While various theorizations have mapped different types of public spheres (Gerhard and Neidhardt, 1990), and research on political communication traditionally has stressed the role of different filters between the media-as-senders and the citizens-as-receivers (e.g. Deutsch, 1964), research on political communication focuses mainly on the mass media as a separate power. This focus also explains the limited attention given to social movements' channels of communication, such as alternative journals, publishers, radio and the like.

The debate on democracy and the media mainly concerns the effects of institutional settings on media freedom and pluralism (e.g. Gunther and Mughan, 2000) although research on new media has focused some attention on democracy. Research on the Internet, for example, includes discussion of the potential improvements that digital communication could bring to the quality of democracy. Expectations about the relevance of effects of electronic communication have led to new concepts being proposed, such as e-participation (the possibility to express political opinion on line), e-governance (the possibility to access information and public services on line), e-voting (or e-referendum, and the possibility to vote online) and e-democracy – more broadly defined as the increased opportunity for participation online (Rose, 2005).

In relation to representative democracy, use of the Internet is seen as improving communication between citizens and their elected politicians through increasing access to information, opportunities for providing feedback and greater transparency. E-governance is supposed to reduce the discretionality of public administrators, by improving public access. The Internet has been credited with having a positive impact on democratic participation: as a horizontal, bidirectional and interactive technology, it is expected to favour the multiplication of information producers (Bentivegna, 1999; Warkentin, 2001) and of the information available for consumption (Ayers, 1999; Myers, 2001). In fact, '[t]he open and accessible character of the net means that traditional centers of power have less informational and ideational control over their environment than previously' (Dahlgren, 2009: 190). As for the deliberative quality of democracy, the Internet is said to increase the quality of communication by improving not only the number of sources of information, but also their pluralism (Wilhelm, 2000). In general:

[T]he powerful have been spying on their subjects since the beginning of history, but the subjects can now watch the powerful, at least to a greater extent than in the past. We have all become potential citizen journalists who, if equipped with a mobile phone, can record and instantly upload to the global networks any wrongdoing by anyone, anywhere.

(Castells, 2009: 413)

In multiplying the spaces for the exchange of ideas, the Internet also improves mutual understanding by allowing the development of multiple, critical public spheres.

Similar to other technologies, opinions on the advantages and disadvantages of the Internet are divided (for a review, see della Porta and Mosca, 2005). Research on its use in representative politics has expressed concerns about especially the unidirectional (top–down) use of new technologies by politicians and administrators alike (Zittel, 2003: 3). The potential egalitarian effects are denied by those scholars who stress the presence of a digital divide at both the individual and country level, that increases rather than reduces inequalities through lack of access to the Web tendentially cumulated with lack of access to other resources (Margolis and Resnick, 2000; Rose, 2005; Norris, 2001). With regard to the deliberative quality of the Internet, there are concerns over the plurality and the quality of the information and communication on line (Schosberg et al., 2005). E-public spheres have been defined as 'partial', elitarian and fragmented (Sunstein, 2001).

Also, increasing attention notwithstanding, discussion on the improvement of democratic politics on the Web tends to be highly normative or rather technical, with even some nuances of technological determinism. The debate on the Internet, in fact, is perceived as belonging to the domain of techno-maniacs and utopian dreamers (Zittel, 2003: 2).

These gaps in the reflections on communication and democracy have not been fully closed by social movement studies. Paradoxically, notwithstanding its obvious relevance to democracy (and vice versa), social movement research rarely focuses on the democratic functions. Democracies tend to be considered as the context to social movements, and some of the characteristics of representative institutions (especially territorial and functional divisions of power) are seen as particularly important for promoting 'healthy' (intense but moderate) protest (della Porta and Diani, 2006: Ch. 8).

A less well-known area, research on social movements and the media, has traditionally addressed especially the limited capacity of social movements to influence the mass media that are characterized by selection but also descriptive biases in their coverage of protests (Gamson and Modigliani, 1989; Gamson, 2004).

The media certainly are important for social movements. As Gamson (2004: 243) observes, 'the mass media arena is the major site of context over meaning because all of the players in the policy process assume its pervasive influence – either it is justified or not'. Control of the media, and of symbolic production therefore, becomes both an essential premise for any attempt at political mobilization and an autonomous source of conflict. Although the extent to which protest events are first of all 'newspaper demonstrations', that is, oriented mainly towards media coverage, is debatable (Neveu, 1999: 28 ff.), the media are the most obvious shapers of public sensitivity (Jasper, 1997: 286). The success of protest action is influenced by the amount of media attention it receives, and the media attention in turn affects the character of social movement organizations (Gitlin, 1980).

Focused mainly on the interaction between mass media and social movements, research repeatedly singles out the media bias towards social movements endowed with little social capital – in terms of relations and reputation as reliable sources – to influence journalists.

Social movements have been described as 'weak' players in the mass-mediatic sphere, and the relationships between activists and journalists are seen as competitive (Neveu, 1999). General tendencies (e.g. journalistic preference for the visible and dramatic, or reliance on authoritative sources of information) and specific characteristics of the media system (a greater or lesser degree of neutrality on the part of journalists, the amount of competition among the different media) both have an influence on social movements (see, e.g. Kielbowicz and Scherer, 1986). Recent evolutions towards the depoliticization of the journalistic profession or increasing commercialization (Neveu, 1999), further reduce activists' access. The use of newspapers as a main source of information on protest events has promoted systematic analyses on the selection bias of the quality press. A comparison between the coverage in national newspapers and regional papers or police records reveals the over-representation of large and violent demonstrations, and novel forms of protest and protests that coincide with contingent issue cycles (della Porta, 2009a).