Abstract
The aim of this paper is to create a deep radiography of the evolution of deliberative democracy in the digital era. The increased number of on-line media, social dynamics and economic variables could be seen as several structural challenges for the quality of the deliberative democracy. Starting from these premises the study has several research objectives as: i. to analyse the impact of deliberative democracy in EU countries; ii. to estimate the magnitude of the statistical association between deliberative component of the democracy and on-line media; iii. the impact of economic development on the evolution of deliberative democracy and on-line communication. The main research questions are: “how could on line media determine the decreasing level of deliberative democracy?” and “is political polarization the effect of the on-line media fractionalization?” Empirical findings present the image of the EU political systems in terms of “flawed democracy” with the mean of Democracy Index= 7.34. At the inferential level we have determined several linear and non-linear equations of regression as: deliberative democracy and on-line media fractionalization, a negative relation with R2= 0.673, p=0.01.Also, the main predictor of the quality of the democracy in conditions of the increased number of on-line media is represented by the social and political polarization. Economic determinants are statistically significant for the dynamics of the deliberative democracy (R2=0.465, p<0.001).
Highlights
Contemporary society is characterized by the accelerated development of cyberspace, and by the rise of social networks, two processes with an important and complex influence upon the manner in which large categories of public interact
Statistical Results This section presents the main empirical findings related to the impact of the on-line media fractionalization on the dynamics of the deliberative democracy
In figure no.4 we present the vector space between deliberative democracy, on-line media fractionalization and social and political polarization
Summary
Contemporary society is characterized by the accelerated development of cyberspace, and by the rise of social networks, two processes with an important and complex influence upon the manner in which large categories of public interact. People are able to cluster one another in this cyberspace around specific topics They form virtual communities articulated around a common set of values and beliefs we could call thematic communities. The collision among such clusters favors the polarization of the public, a phenomenon that makes, on its turn, the process of attaining constructive compromises at the social level more and more difficult. In cyberspace the geographical relief of the world is replaced by a new kind of relief, one we could call thematic relief In this thematic relief, users are clustered around common subjects of interest, around common sets of principles and common groups of values. The communicative interactions among them are more violent, giving the fact that in digital communication the feed-back is a mediated one
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