Centre for Digital Citizenship

The Future of Citizenship: The Loudest Shout or the Best Argument?

The Centre for Digital Citizenship, Institute of Communications Studies, University of Leeds

At their best, democracies should be noisy, reverberating with pluralistic voices, competing explanations, diverse values, ever-broader sources of information and illumination, all competing to fill the public sphere with their calls to attention and urgent demands to make a difference.

But more than just noise. To be truly effective, democracy requires structure, so that speaking can lead to hearing; so that articulations of unexpected and unwanted views are not drowned out by the blindingly obvious; so that the nuance of qualification is not crushed by the blunt force of dogma; so that the voices of the marginalised, neglected and unconfident are allowed room to emerge and impress; so that the ratio between volume and meaning can favour the latter. In short, democracies should be noisy, but not cacophonous. Out of the incessant buzz of storytelling and debate, discernible outcomes must transpire.

Contemporary democracies are too often characterised by the frustrating vacuity of the angry headline, the over-dramatised incident, the denunciating mob and a prevailing mood of cynical resignation. From the US healthcare reform debate to the public furore surrounding EU deficit controls, the prospect of effective civic reflection has all too frequently been abandoned in favour of a carnival of unrestrained uproar or virulence. All of this has had troubling consequences for the practice of citizenship. Firstly, when politics is made to seem either fraudulent or futile, the most likely public response is to disengage. Secondly, even when citizens do feel motivated to engage with public affairs, there is a growing gap between the long-term character of socio-political problems and the short-term pressures that tend to dominate the political agenda. This leads too often to a public discourse framed by the pragmatic priorities of immediacy, with both politicians and journalists strategising in ways that ignore underlying problems and durable consequences. Thirdly, as the media have come to be characterised by intensified competition for public attention, their messages have tended to become increasingly consumed by sensationalism (in the case of mainstream, offline journalism) and extremism (in the case of online blogging and debate). None of this looks good for the prospects of a democratic public sphere, within which citizens ought to be free to engage in an informed, balanced, meaningful and consequential consideration of important public issues.

These common, recurrent and sometimes seemingly worsening phenomena stem from two underlying conditions, each incongruous for polities representing themselves as ‘democracies’. They need to be recognised, not merely deplored, and if properly recognised can in our view be effectively addressed.

First, there is the limited role assigned to citizens in the political process, laying them open to exploitation, i.e., serving the ends of more powerful others. Whereas the theory of liberal democracy treats the citizen as ultimately sovereign, in the practice of present-day competitive democracies citizens are mainly treated as targets, resources or pawns (in both politics and communication). Many people lack the conviction that through their utterances or actions they can make a difference to how politics runs — which for a democracy should be a sine qua non rather than an extraordinary event.

Second, there are the skewed platforms for opinion advocacy that dominate our political communication system. Political leaders occupy platforms both inside and outside parliaments, congresses and governments, through which they can voice their ideas, proposals and justifications. Journalists from the mainstream media have a platform from which they can regularly highlight, amplify and comment upon the events they deem interesting or important. But isn’t it a democratic anomaly – a glaring gap, even – that there isn’t an equivalent platform for citizen advocacy and discussion on its own terms?  While it is clearly the case that many people talk about current affairs from time to time with family members, friends and workmates (a practice that may have increased and broadened with the emergence of the Internet), much of this political talk is ad hoc, fleeting and lacking articulation to what politicians and journalists say and do. The views of citizens remain largely invisible. (Through the media we mainly see ordinary people reacting to what politicians in highly structured settings are up to, as in vox pops, or putting questions to politicians in phone-ins, but rarely as concerned citizens discussing issues with each other.)

A mature democracy would strive to build into our political culture and structures the missing ingredients outlined above. This calls for a sustainable, principled commitment to create a more deliberative democracy: one in which, in advance of decisions being made by governments and legislators, citizens’ discussions of and contributions to policy issues would be actively solicited, encouraged, fed with relevant information, seriously considered and registered in follow-up feedback. Not everybody would or should be expected to take part in every discussion nor in the same way, though opportunity of access should remain constant to each citizen. Nor would the locus of ultimate decision-taking – in elected representatives – need to change. The aim, rather, would be to build a more deliberative democracy, not wiping the slate clean with a view to eliminating existing political and journalistic platforms, but rather creating new, lasting platforms that are able to interact with and influence those existing institutions.

The Internet is a potential space for the creation of a more deliberative democracy. Unlike broadcasting the Internet is unquestionably a medium of predominantly active users; its discursive role diverges from that of older media insofar as it is possible to involve large numbers of users themselves in a more full expression and exchange of experiences and opinions on a given topic; it is a medium which allows individuals to find and follow what concerns them personally; it lowers the cost of obtaining information, thereby reducing the influence of social status on political involvement; it allows people to discuss ideas, experiences and strategies with one another over a period of hours, days, weeks or months in an  asynchronous fashion, thereby affording time for reflective debate and space to develop evidence and  argumentation; it facilitates forms of discussion that often start out by being narrowly focused on a local issue and subsequently develop into a broader network, involving both online and offline connections between a range of people who would not have otherwise met and discovered what they shared; and it opens up space for citizens to encounter new ideas and sources of information and new ways of thinking about issues.

Thus far, however, there is a broad consensus that the Internet’s civic potential has been greater than its use:

●     Experimentation has been fragmented, small-scale, transient and of disparate value.

●     Much online discourse is characterised by a tilt away from informed argument and extended rationalism.

●     Much of what passes as political discussion online reflects a failure to appreciate that policy problems almost always involve trade-offs. The Internet is good for letting people say what they would like to see happen and what they do not like, but has thus far developed few constructive mechanisms for helping people to determine effective solutions in the face of scarce resources.

●     Representative government needs to hear from not only a large number of citizens, but a range that reflects the broadest possible spectrum of social actors. The evidence so far has been that higher-status citizens are the most likely to participate in online debates, thereby reinforcing communicative inequalities, access barriers, knowledge gaps and patterns of political exclusion.

●     Thus far, online communication has tended to be most energetic, productive and satisfying across horizontal lines of interaction. As a space of citizen-to-citizen, many-to-many networking, the Internet has certainly opened up new opportunities for collective sociability and discussion. However, vertical interactivity, between citizens and governments, parliaments, local councils or global bodies tends to be under-developed, blighted by institutional blockages or one-way streets. Where political institutions do interact with citizens online, such initiatives are usually top-down, with elites setting the rules, framing agendas, designing spaces that reflect their own terms of engagement and, above all, feeling free to ignore inconvenient public input.

If the Internet is to play any serious role in the reinvigoration of democratic citizenship, those who engage in forms of online discussion need to be able to feel that there is a visibly consequential relationship between public inputs and political outcomes.

To be taken seriously, public deliberation needs to take place within a space that, over time, can become trusted by citizens as an effective channel to elected representatives, governments at various local, national and supranational levels, and each other. This space must be characterised by principles of political inclusion and equality among all and any groups desiring participation; an openness to democratic agenda-setting by citizens, rather than them being cast in the role of respondents to government-run consultations; an acknowledgement of conflicting interests and values and the need for trade-offs between them; and a genuine commitment by elected representatives and government institutions to engage actively with and respond meaningfully to public deliberation.

A commitment to establishing this kind of online deliberative space would be a major step towards the reinvigoration of our currently enfeebled political system. By establishing an online commons dedicated to multivocal, civilised and consequential public debate, a balance between the amplification of talk and the arrival at common understanding might stand a chance. Such a commons must cross disciplines and agendas to include an array of ideas for accessible, sustainable platforms of deliberation.

Our view as researchers, citizens and democrats is that online deliberation could and should play a key role in revitalizing political democracy; indeed, that to fail to take advantage of new technologies and techniques of public debate would be to abandon our political communication system to a set of ineluctably failing and frustrating relationships. Having researched many piecemeal, experimental attempts to promote online deliberation over the past couple of decades, we have accumulated a significant body of knowledge about the limitations of certain methods; the scope for utilising technologies to structure, visualise and analyze public discussions; and the hard, systematic work that is involved in creating sustainable spaces for democratic deliberation. We hereby offer our active support to any democratically-inclined government that is prepared to take the next step. Believing that the role of researchers is not merely to think clever ideas or criticise the failure of bad ones, we express our determination to play our part in an attempt to develop a space for online deliberation that can contribute to what Anthony Giddens has called ‘the democratisation of democracy’.