The growth of hybrid political actors in the fourth age of political communication

The prospects of development of modern political theory in the context of filling the new semantic values of concepts of political discourse, political communication and public political representation are considered. The network of newly established democratic institutions, which required firm defenition, practicing public political debate and not distorted political communication defined. With the help of the comparative method, the common and different conceptual views of political debate in interpreting deliberative democracy and the public sphere of politics studied. The content of the concept of the public sphere of politics as a factor of coverage of the transition of democratic public institutions of transformational countries from the state of declarative to a state of sustainable democracy is discussed. Public sphere of politics as mainly unifying concept that determines the possibility of various aspects of joint interpretation of political realities and possibilities of the political participants’ appearance for any topic studied. The subject areas of the concepts of deliberative politics and the public sphere of politics regarding the ways of personal and institutional self-presentation are determined. The specifics of the reflection of political conflict and political decisions within the limits of the values of the public sphere of politics and deliberative democracy are revealed. The features of common approaches to the interpretation of political pluralism and political competition in the semantic structures of the public sphere of politics and deliberative democracy are explored. It emphasizes the flexibility of the concept of the public sphere of politics as a concept that encompasses a large number of events and phenomena of political communication. The possibility of a non-idealist approach to public political presentations on the Internet is substantiated. The political meaning dimensions of political deliberation and political manifestation which differ in explanations background of individual behavior, based on the ancient principle of political pragmatism and defending of selfish interests considered.The explanatory potential of a deliberative policy and the public sphere of politics is singled out. The peculiarities of crossing the subject areas of the public sphere of politics and deliberative democracy in the context of the functioning of modern civil society are established.

Modern German discourse about Poland in the political public sphere – some theoretical and empirical reflections In this article I will present some theoretical and empirical reflections regarding future habilitation thesis which will be on contemporary discourse on Poland in German political public sphere. It is an attempt to capture, analyze and present opinions about Poland and its society, which are transferred and propagated in contemporary German political public sphere. The discourse seems to be the proper method to present the issue. I define the concept of “discourse” in the context of political instrumentalization and purpose according to theory of Michael Foucault. Political public sphere is a commonly accepted category of sociopolitical research, which in works of Juergen Habermas has its reasonable substantiation, description and restrictions. Selected, representative and the most influential titles of contemporary German mainstream journalism will be analyzed, in which are discussed and presented sociopolitical opinions on Poland, its politics and social issues. Major part of German media discourse about Poland (in a text form) functions in that sphere. Analysis of the content of these materials will allow to emphasize its forms and functions, as well as to point out economic, political and social factors, which determine them. I assume that the discourse about Poland is led in an indirect (hidden), “inside” way, in other words — against a background of other significant debates, e.g. the EastWest discourse or the discourse on Eastern Europe, it is hardly ever led in a direct (opened), “outside” way, meaning — seldom directly referring to Poland. This problem gives rise to aquestion for relevance of the discourse on Poland within the discourse on Eastern Europe.

The article considers the relationship between the 2020 regional elections in Indonesia under the covid-19 pandemic, public space, and political activism in the social media. The covid-19 pandemic has changed the social, political and cultural fabric of the contemporary world. First, the covid-19 threatened the countrys healthcare system, then it affected other aspects of social life, including the political sphere. The pandemic has been exacerbated by the spread of misinformation about the covid-19, which is also known as the infodemic. Thus, the covid-19 pandemic influenced the choice of holding elections or delaying it until the situation is under control. The development of the social media encourages political activism in the political public sphere and makes it more diverse in the sphere of egalitarianism. The political public sphere becomes increasingly dynamic and critical to various policies. Indonesia did not postpone the 2020 regional elections under the covid-19 crisis. According to the health protocol, this decision had its pros and cons in the digital space. The authors show that political activists in the social media called for prioritizing health rather than the process of democratization through elections, while the government supporters insisted on having elections even in the covid-19 pandemic situation. Finally, the 2020 regional elections were held but were followed by various incidents. The question is whether the governments argument to hold elections under the covid-19 pandemic was reasonable or, on the contrary, contributed to the wider spread of the covid-19 in Indonesia. Deliberative democracy should consider civil participation as the main pillar of the political system, which is relevant for the new social reality as based on the new social media technologies.

This paper draws upon public sphere theories and the “mediatization of politics” debate to develop a mapping of the Australian political public sphere, with particular reference to television. It discusses the concept of a “political public sphere,” and the contribution of both non-traditional news media genres, such as satirical television and infotainment formats, to an expanded conception of the political public sphere. It considers these questions in the context of two case studies: the Q&A program on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), and its uses of social media and interactive formats to engage citizens, and the comedy program Gruen Nation , also on the ABC, which analyzed the use of political advertising to persuade citizens during the 2013 Australian Federal election.

The article discusses questions concerning the cultural public sphere in relation to empirical material from a media ethnography of young menąs use of extremely violent action and horror films on video, and how the young men’s cultural practices, including media reception and film swapping, relates to their cultural production in the form of fanzines and amateur video films. The aim is to analyse this practice of film swapping, fanzine writing and amateur video making, in terms of cultural publicness, in order to shed light on those micro processes of communication that result in the formation of public spheres of various kinds. In the first part of the article some theoretical implications of the concepts cultural and political public spheres are discussed. Then follows a discussion on the internal communicative patterns within this alternative cultural public sphere, organised informally around fanzines and amateur video festivals. The dynamic relation between this alternative public sphere and other public formations, alternative as well as dominating or bourgeois, is then dealt with, and the different approaches among the various individuals is discussed. This is then followed by a discussion on the alternative cultural public’s relation to the market and state systems. Lastly, some general conclusions are drawn, covering the need to analytically separate cultural and political public spheres in order not to forget the task of the cultural public in mediating between market system and lifeworld, and thus not to dismiss the political implications of the cultural.

This paper aims to elucidate the negative understanding of politics (depoliticization) that results from the classic work of Jürgen Habermas about communicative action. The political potential of communicative action that results from political public sphere and the institutionalization of practical and political discourse constitute the leitmotiv of Habermas’s political philosophy. However, the understanding of politics that results from the communicative action presents the problem of limited capacity of realization of a discursive social practice in institutional contexts. The social-integrative power (social integration) of communicative action and the communicative power (power of influence) do not refer directly to the democratic procedures into political-institutional level. The political public sphere, as it defends the lifeworld in relation to systemic imperatives of power and money, it is not directly linked to institutional complexes and, therefore, it can only “besiege them”. This deficit of institutionalization undermines the political public sphere model (the potential political discourse in a communicative public sphere) that results from the theoretical framework of Theorie. Consequently, the “defensive” vision of politics undermines Habermas’ emancipatory project, because it does not expand the areas submitted to social and communicative rationality and does not open communicative channels for inflows in the political-administrative system. From the perspective of the theory addressed to emancipation (as is Habermas’ theory) these defensive movements, although they are important, are not sufficient, because defending it only does not expand the social areas in which the communicative understanding predominates. This is the reason for critical discourses and posterior need of reformulations.

ABSTRACTThe political public sphere is at one and the same time both public, and private and religion operates in both the public and the private spheres in the modern way of life. This article approaches the dynamics between the cultural and the political public sphere from the point of view of religion; how the cultural intelligentsia developed its worldview fuelled with attitudes towards religion in times of political turmoil. The case study, based on the empirical analysis of cultural periodicals and societies around them, concerns the Finnish liberal intelligentsia in the early twentieth century. The first decade of the 1900s was a particularly important period of formation for the Finnish public sphere; the societal turmoil highlighted the importance of cultural periodicals in defining what was important for the national public sphere. The case of religion is an illustrative example of it, particularly from the point of view of the liberal intelligentsia of the era.

This article proposes an understanding of politicization as the field of contestation about the political. Applied to the contested field of EU governance, the argument is that EU politicization cannot be understood without analysis of its synergy with EU depoliticized governance. We will start with a discussion of some of the dimensions and modalities of (de)politicization and follow with analysis of EU (de)politicization in relation to the political field and public sphere. To understand the ‘politics of politicization’, we demarcate the field of political struggle and locate the wider public and societal resonances of such a struggle over the political. The research programme for the analysis of the ‘politics of EU-politicization’ then refers to the wider processes of how political conflicts are selectively amplified to create public visibility, how attention among relevant publics is unequally distributed, how opinions of these publics are formed and, ultimately as well, how legitimacy (or de-legitimation) is generated. After delineating possible research directions, we finish with some comments on EU (de)politicization as a rupture from national politics and the competitive and multi-level merging of political fields and public spheres through the transnational encounter of agents and publics. This chaotic process has unpredictable outcomes for EU-legitimacy, but nevertheless opens a European field where political contestation meets with societal resonance with possibilities of reflexivity and democratic learning for both institutional agents and publics involved. This working paper thus contributes with insights into the conditions for EU democratization, which is a core concern for EU3D (in particular in Work package 4, which focuses on public opinions, debates and reforms).

The article addresses the extent to which current developments in the political public sphere in contemporary Russia might be seen as manifestations and maybe condensations of developments in representative democracies in a more general sense. These developments concern the ways that elections and other practices of voting achieve a hegemonic significance as processes of symbolization in the political public sphere. The first section outlines the role of voting practices for the legitimation and stability of Russia’s current super-presidentialism. The second section connects these findings to a theoretical framework that capitalizes on the symbolic effects of elections and polling practices in democratic political and societal orders. Here critics of representative democracy and of majority rule, which highlight the contradictory role of majority decisions in democratic institutional and imaginary orders, will be discussed and related to the mass protests against election fraud in 2011 and 2012. The third section reconceptualizes the current problematics of the political public sphere in contemporary Russia. The overall aim is thus not to measure political-public developments in Russia against the normative yardstick of allegedly uncontested democratic development in western societies, but rather to situate Russia on a conceptual map of a generic crisis of majority rule.

The paper explores competitive securitizations of the Russian Federation vs. the European Union in the Georgian political public sphere through deconstruction of the pro-Western and pro-Russian public political narratives. The dis-information incursion and propaganda of the Russian Federation in the societal landscape of Georgia have become the primary tools of the Kremlin to undermine the soft-power policy the EU and the pro-Western agenda. The study reflects on the rotating political discourses on Russia vs. EU through narrative analysis and deconstructs those metanarratives, that securitize the pro-Western and pro-Russian foreign policy discourses and contribute to fragmentation of the political public sphere. The paper reflects on three interrelated clusters – politics, media and civil society – influenced by the pro-Russian strategic narratives tailored across ‘communities of grievances’ to counteract the Western liberal and normative-based agenda. Alternatively, the pro-Western narrative evolves around liberal conceptions, that tries to transform the post-Soviet Georgian society through ‘mental revolution.’ The political discourse analysis – understanding and interpreting meanings – refers to the public speeches of elites and policy documents for deconstruction of narrative structures, as their causal explanations provide insights into the ambiguous and contradictory representations of Russia and the West/EU in the securitized political public sphere in Georgia.

“Nothing but Fiction”Modern Chivalry, Fictionality, and the Political Public Sphere in the Early Republic Thomas Koenigs (bio) Over the past decade, fictionality has been at the center of new work in novel studies and novel theory. Exemplified by Catherine Gallagher’s “The Rise of Fictionality,” recent scholarship on the history of fictionality in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France and England has provided a means of reframing and rethinking the conventional narratives of the rise of the novel and the development of realist fiction.1 Yet the history of fictionality in early America has largely been ignored or casually dismissed. For example, Gallagher, noting the prevalence of “Founded in Fact” narratives in the early Republic, has declared that “[f]ictionality seems to have been but faintly understood in the infant United States” (345). Gallagher’s characterization of the early Republic, however, overlooks the significant body of early American fiction that emerged in dialectical relation to the early Republic’s famous antifictional discourse. Those American novelists who broke the taboo against fictionality did so with a sense that the mode provided distinct advantages for their novelistic projects. Responding to fiction’s critics in their texts and paratexts, these writers advanced sophisticated metafictional arguments for the value of fictionality within republican culture. This essay takes up one such fiction, Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry (1792–1815), which posits fiction as an ideal mode for carrying on political debate. Many early Americans, dedicated to the ideals of classical republicanism, saw the popularity of fiction as a sign of modern degeneration: for these critics, the rise of fiction in the United States reflected the young Republic’s distance from the virtuous republics of antiquity and served as a harbinger of its failure.2 Brackenridge, however, saw in fiction not a sign of modern corruption, but a genre uniquely suited to address the challenges of modern republicanism.3 In Modern Chivalry, he [End Page 301] argues that the suppositional reference of fiction and especially the suppositional personhood of fictional characters—what Gallagher refers to as their “nobodiness”—allow fiction to achieve a greater impersonality than other forms of discourse, giving it the potential to serve as a uniquely virtuous mode within republican print culture. Confronted with the rise of the partisan press and the intensifying of conflicts between competing regional and political groups, Modern Chivalry approaches the factious political discourse of the young Republic as a problem of genre. For Brackenridge, the genres most closely associated with classical republicanism were insufficient for the challenges of the modern republic. In his landmark reading of Modern Chivalry, Christopher Looby shows how Brackenridge lampoons the pretenses of the Ciceronian oratory that was closely identified with classical republicanism, presenting classical republicanism as an anachronistic and even quixotic political framework for the modern United States (Voicing, 203–65, esp. 236). Faced with the inadequacy of these older forms, Brackenridge posits fiction as an alternative to both antiquated modes of political oratory and the scurrilous, partisan attacks of contemporary periodical writing. Modern Chivalry presents the suppositional reference of fiction as a better way of creating truly impersonal discourse than the norms of anonymity that governed the political public sphere in early America, which Brackenridge regards as providing a screen for interested political action. Modern Chivalry complicates our current narratives of fiction’s development. Tracing the emergence of novelistic fictionality across the long eighteenth century, Gallagher has linked fictionality’s “rise” to its depoliticization, showing how suppositional reference came to serve as a sign of privacy, politeness, and distance from political scandal (Nobody 88–115). Responsive to the exigencies of republican culture, Brackenridge sought to reverse this very depoliticization, arguing for fiction’s value within the very realm of public, political struggle to which it was generally regarded as opposed. Modern Chivalry reveals that by the end of the eighteenth century, fictionality’s “rise” extended far beyond the limited cultural arena in which the mode had first emerged. But more than just pointing to a neglected chapter in the history of fiction, Brackenridge’s metageneric argument exposes the limits of the theoretical framework through which scholars have approached the early American public sphere. For the past twenty years, public sphere...

“Ideology and simultaneously more than mere ideology”: On Habermas’ reflections and hypotheses on a further structural transformation of the political public sphere

This study explores recent attempts by the hip hop community to be recognized in the mainstream political sphere and to have its concerns acknowledged and addressed. This project examines how the scholarship of hip hop (musicology), rhetoric (counterpublic spheres), politics and social movement theory intertwine, and to demonstrate how hip hop’s community can emerge as a counterpublic sphere that could become a social movement capable of altering the current cultural and political landscape in the United States. Although hip hop as a culture consists of four major elements: breakdancing, graffiti art, deejaying, and rapping, this study focuses on rappers and the use of rap music in the political sphere. It suggests that hip hop is a counterpublic sphere that has the power to affect culture and politics and examines attempts by both liberal and conservative politicians and organizations to garner the hip hop community’s vote. It then discusses political opportunity theory and suggests that it may help the hip hop community emerge as a social movement capable of seizing its political opportunities. It relies upon the rhetorical work of the counterpublic sphere theory as a result of the hip hop community seeking a voice and recognition in the political public sphere. This serves as one of the basis for creating a counterpublic sphere.

Gender research faces inspiring and interrelated challenges in globalisation. As globalisation and modernisation are deeply connected processes, we can say that the resulting rapid transformation of gender relations is one basic challenge. In short, this transformation can be seen as selective incorporation into and exclusion from the public spheres of work, politics and civil society along the lines of gender, class and ethnicity. Gender relations are changing because now some women as well as most men are integrated into the public spheres of work, politics and civil society (while most women are still assigned to carry out unpaid care work in the home) (cf. i.a. Lenz et al. 2007). Thus, the situation is different from the former hegemonial exclusion of most women from these public spheres. These processes of selective incorporation and exclusion create new chances as well as new deep tensions and contradictions with which gender research is confronted today.

This article draws upon Ubuntu philosophy to reframe and construct a pentecostal constructive theology of hatred. It critiques contemporary manifestations of public hatred within Pentecostalism in Zambia, particularly in relation to the Christian nation clause in the constitution. The article argues that constitutionalizing Christianity perpetuates pentecostal normativity in political public spheres, institutionalizing religious-based political hatred. The exclusive reliance on pentecostal literal exegesis of scriptures fosters hierarchical dynamics, enforces norms, and obstructs dissenting voices and religious pluralistic character of the nation. The article contends Ubuntu constructive spirituality of hatred is essential for developing functional, moral, prophetic leadership and a just democratic nation. It proposes a theology of mutually transformative constructive hatred of evil as a means of countering prevailing destructive hatred in public discourse.