Political Mediation Research Articles

Nowe oblicze polityki w mediach – tabloidyzacja, infotainment, politainment i kreowanie faktów

XXI wiek w znacznym stopniu zmienił oblicze mediów. Proces mediatyzacji i tabloidyzacji polityki, która stała się uzależniona w swych funkcjach od środków masowego przekazu i stale jest kształtowana przez interakcje z nimi, dał okazję politykom do zdobycia rozgłosu i znalezienia się w gronie tzw. celebrytów. Kandydaci podobnie jak gwiazdy zabiegają o popularność, biorąc udział w licznych programach telewizyjnych, nie tylko o charakterze publicystycznym, ale także rozrywkowym, gdzie rozpoznawalność i popularność nie wynika z osiągnięć, lecz głównie z aprobaty publiczności. Tradycyjne wiadomości telewizyjne oraz programy publicystyczne mają coraz mniejszy zasięg odbiorców, a tym samym mniejsze znaczenie dla publicznego dyskursu. Sytuacja ta wpłynęła na pojawienie się nowego zjawiska określanego mianem infotainmet, a w przypadku dyskursu politycznego – politainment, w którym debaty polityczne noszą znamiona spektaklu skierowanego do konsumentów zamiast obywateli.

Conciliating the incompatible: the chancery activity of the lords of Milan in the mirror of some charters (late fourteenth century)

Recent scholarship has highlighted myriad conflicts attending the legitimacy of power and authority at different levels of society in the Duchy of Milan. Against this backdrop I would like to explore how different political cultures could coexist. Indeed, day-to-day life was not made up only by conflicts, and all the players -from the prince downwards -sooner or later were interested in finding a middle road. Given that the relationships between the lords of Milan and the social and territorial bodies of the dominion were generally set out on the grounds of pacts, I assume that in the mirror of these documents it is possible to trace the role of the chancery as a political mediator. Indeed not only played the chancellors a significant role in dealing with the prince's counterparts (like communities or lords of castles), but they had also the responsibility of drawing charters which formalized the agreements. My ultimate goal is to show how, through an accurate selection of words, which each side could interpret in the light of its own policial culture, the chancery made the impossible become possible, and mutually incompatible principles and ideals could overlap, apparently without clashing. Hence some concluding remarks on political communication in the state-building process.

La storia come mezzo: l’Odisseo mediatore di Polibio

The text inquires into the meaning of Polybius’ references to Odysseus advancing the hypothesis of reconstructive mediation. The text’s two aims are first to delimit Polybius’ concept of mediation, then to use it to discuss possible meanings from the explicit association between Polybius himself and Odysseus in the Histories . §§ 2. and 3. analyze two sets of Polybius’ snippets through complementary approaches (M. Jay’s intellectual history, C. Romano’s hermeneutics, J. Thornton’s diplomatic perspective): the first one, on history’s mediative function, is discussed in the light of Polybius’ own theoretical statements in book XII; the second one, centered on his explicit mentions to Odysseus, advances the hypothesis of political mediation perceptible in Polybius’ mediative attitudes. The conclusions (§ 4.) argue the coherence between discoursive and political mediations in two ways: reconstructive (by investigating a Polibian meaning about writing history) and historiographical (by drawing a topical comparison with Thucydides).

BDS as a Mediator

The Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement is a global political campaign led by Palestinian civil society since 2005. Its official aim is to put pressure on Israel to radically change its policies towards Palestinians. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's political philosophy, this paper discusses the BDS movement by looking into its affective powers. In particular, it claims that, above all else, acting as a political mediator BDS weakens the predominance of the current assemblage of public discourses on Israel-Palestine.

The Mediation of Politics through Twitter: An Analysis of Messages posted during the Campaign for the German Federal Election 2013

Patterns found in digital trace data are increasingly used as evidence of social phenomena. Still, the role of digital services not as mirrors but instead as mediators of social reality has been neglected. We identify characteristics of this mediation process by analyzing Twitter messages referring to politics during the campaign for the German federal election 2013 and comparing the thus emerging image of political reality with established measurements of political reality. We focus on the relationship between temporal dynamics in politically relevant Twitter messages and crucial campaign events, comparing dominant topics in politically relevant tweets with topics prominent in surveys and in television news, and by comparing mention shares of political actors with their election results.

Negotiating a ‘Tangled Web of Pride and Shame’: A Crimean Case-Study

This article complements an identified ‘cultural turn’ in military history, which emphasizes the potency of perception and the extent to which successes, failures, opportunities and threats are culturally conditioned (Black 2004: 233-35). It will deal with issues surrounding ‘collective remembrance’, a concept which Joanna Bourke identifies as problematic. For Bourke, ‘collectivememory’ has been characterized by a ‘museal sensibility’ in which mass narratives ‘wallow’ in a nostalgic world of community, stability and certainty (Bourke 2004: 473). She argues that collective memory is an exclusive script, which imposes unity on individual experiences and overlooks conscious acts of cultural selection (Bourke 2004: 473). Whilst scholarship on the relationship of present with past rightly takes issue with collective, or public, memory, precluding individual, or private, memories, Bourke usefully draws attention to the mythical qualities of collective remembrance. Military history, integral as it is to national identity yet harbouring inherently difficult histories, is particularly susceptible to cultural, social and political mediation. This article traces nineteenth-century treatments of two Crimean failures and the legacy ofthese attitudes today in museums, which to a large extent echo some of the dominant myths and silences of Victorian Britain.

The Leadership of the "New" Italian Mayors Marco Cilento – Sapienza University of Rome

The years 2015 and 2016, in the Italian Government's agenda, should be remembered as the phase of the great constitutional reform: after several failed attempts – Joint Committees, reforms rejected by popular vote – Italian State institutions would be subjected to undergo a makeover in modernizing and efficiency way. So far, the only political-administrative institutions to be reformed effectively, during the 90’s of the last century, were the local ones, primarily the municipalities. The reforms of the 90’s are characterized by several trends: the centrality of the role of the Mayor; enhanced customization; greater accountability. The levels of political mediation were scaled down in favour of direttismo. The demo-elected Mayor is now primarily aimed at consolidation of the consensus. The paper, based on the evidence so far available, tries to test the hypothesis that the achievement of consensus on the part of the mayors can connect to the kind of leadership that they exercise and the socio-professional profile. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n6s2p707

Estados Unidos e Brasil: as primeiras tratativas entre Obama e Lula

United States and Brazil are historical allies, despite of certain disagreements from time to time. In the first months of Barack Obama’s government, Brazil tried to keep close ties by trying to be a political mediator in the continent and a valuable economic partner.

Junho de 2013 e os sinais de uma crise

Este trabalho busca compreender quais foram as dinâmicas que permearam o movimento Vem pra Rua em junho de 2013. Entende-se, então, que houve uma crise de mediação política no Brasil e que os partidos políticos já não se constituiriam em entidades com credibilidade perante a sociedade. Neste sentido, utiliza-se aqui do método dedutivo e da revisão bibliográfica acerca de quatro questões que se correlacionam ao longo do artigo: i) junho de 2013; ii) tragédia da política; iii) poder, Estado e legitimidade e; iv) crise política e vulnerabilidade dos partidos, a fim de compreender o sentido de governabilidade, governança, legitimidade e credibilidade no contexto do movimento de junho de 2013. Por fim, conclui-se que houve catarse, ou seja, um enfraquecimento do ímpeto para a ação sem ter-se concluído o ato, ou tendo-se concluído apenas um ato que não chega a alterar fatores significativos.

The Breakdown of Reflexivity: Recognition, Reification and the Fragmentation of Experience

In this essay I offer a qualified defence of Axel Honneth's recognition-theoretical critique of reification. This defence begins by engaging with a cross-section of the recent critical responses to Honneth's theory. In response to these criticisms I develop a reading of the recognition-theoretical critique of reification which illuminates both the intentional structure and pre-ethical nature of affective recognition whilst also reconstructing the existential contours of reification, understood as the “forgetfulness of recognition.” The paper concludes by taking the problem of “forgetfulness” in a novel direction by drawing on the theory of double reflection expounded by Kierkegaard's pseudonymous author Johannes Climacus in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. In this final discussion I argue that the recognition-theoretical application of the theory of double reflection provides a conceptual model which allows one to think through the social, cultural and political mediations which inhibit, or wholly dissolve, the individual's capacity to reflexively re-appropriate the cognition of social facts within the affectively charged substrate of intersubjectivity that, as Honneth argues, forms the bedrock of human social life.

Empowering Leaders Through Inquiry in Burundi and the DR Congo

Training programs can facilitate responsible leadership, when they are anchored in inquiry. Whether we talk about Burundi in 2005 or the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in 2006, a democratic process took place, which built upon strong local and international leaders’ empowerment. The efforts in these two countries to ask leaders to raise tough questions and to seek solutions themselves were multifold to ensure a transition as smooth and inclusive as possible; they bear worthwhile lessons for today. Our specific focus is on the work of two local organizations: the Burundi Leadership Training Program and the Initiative for Inclusive Leadership in the DRC. What can we learn from these initiatives that activated soft questioning to strengthen responsible leadership at troubled times and helped transform a fragile armed truce into a relative peace? Can the principles of inquiry that were mobilized a decade ago and thereafter serve again there or elsewhere? This article articulates six inquiry principles which contributed to a peaceful transition process: asking the local and international authorities to orient leadership programs; asking top leaders to designate participants to involve; asking them to identify a locally recognized third party; asking key leaders to address tough problems through facilitative mediation methods; questioning participating leaders to guide the sequence of national sectors to cover; and pushing the inquiry further for progressive reinforcement of impact. In brief, these leadership programs came as a complementary step to consolidate the political mediation (between top leaders and diplomats) and constituted a second-tier facilitative mediation campaign (between key leaders and professional facilitators) to ensure follow-up of official diplomacy. This leader-centered soft questioning approach can accompany political agreements and reduce the risks of return to violence.

Mediated political masculinities: the commander-in-chief vs. the new man

ABSTRACTThe media play a very influential role in our perceptions of our political leaders, irrespective of where in the world they appear. Since the latter part of the twentieth century, our leaders’ personalities came to play an increasing role in their appeal, in particularly their gendered performances. As Barack Obama's presidency draws to the end of its second term, this paper will examine the representation of his persona in the context of the election in 2008 when he became the first Black US president. Much has been written of him being the first Black president of the USA, however, if we explore his campaign through a gendered lens, we can see that he is equally revolutionary. This contrasts with the gendered construction of male political leaders in other parts of the world, particularly that of Vladimir Putin in Russia. Building on work carried out in relation to the mediatisation and personalisation of politics in the last 50 years, this article shows how gendered performances can be seen to mirror changes in society.

A Curatorial Turn in Policy Development? Managing the Changing Nature of Policymaking Subject to Mediatisation

A Curatorial Turn in Policy Development? Managing the Changing Nature of Policymaking Subject to Mediatisation

From Dialectics to Theo-Logic: The Ethics of War from Paul Ramsey to Oliver O’Donovan

This article studies the fundamental shift between Paul Ramsey’s and Oliver O’Donovan’s ethics of war and so reintroduces Hegel into the debate on political ethics. The topic is approached through the notion of divine-human and political mediation, whereby Hegel’s early movement from Christology to dialectics provides the analytical framework. The article first studies the theo-logic of Paul Ramsey’s early agapist notions of war up to his transformist period. It then traces how O’Donovan fundamentally transforms Ramsey’s dialectical framework within that of narrated Christology. O’Donovan’s focus culminates in the unified reign of Christ and the overcoming of Hegel’s dialectics. But it is argued that the transition to Hegel’s and Ramsey’s perspectives is constantly required in order to prevent Christian ethics from becoming ossified. The article thus hopes to initiate a comprehensive, because logical-systematic discussion of contemporary wars and war machines, especially in critical conversation with philosophers and military practitioners.

Mediating migration in Ceuta, Melilla and Barcelona: border thinking and transnationalism from below in independent documentary

This article analyses Spanish-independent documentaries that deal with issues of immigration in Ceuta, Melilla and Barcelona from 2005 to 2012. Departing from Walter Mignolo’s ‘border thinking’ and Hamid Naficy’s systematizations of the ‘interstitial mode of production’ and ‘the independent transnational film genre’, we situate these audiovisual practices as political and cultural interventions from below in recent debates about borders and immigration cinema. We understand these projects as technological, social and political mediations between the experiences of migrants and spectators. Taking into account the diversity of these videos, we explore how they materialize the tensions and violence implicit in the spatial encounters between migrants, local citizens and the film-makers themselves. Thus, we claim that these works challenge extended assumptions about migratory victimization and agency and that they are a significant contribution to debates about human trafficking and its representation in the digital age. Last but not least, we call for more open and flexible histories of national cinemas and international conflicts, which may include independent documentary productions as examples of non-official diplomacy. All in all, the examples discussed in this article directly confront the issue of migration and serve as problematic examples of migration and as problematic examples of thinking from and across borders.

Immediate Mediacy, Iberian Globalization and Commodity Fetishism

In this article, I discuss Carlo Galli's view of globalization as a new epoch by appealing to recent scholarship on the early modern Iberian empire. The article begins with an examination of Galli's notion of globalization as an unprecedented explosion of the command of the economic over the political sphere. Galli criticizes Marxism and dialectics for being economicist and, therefore, incapable of explaining the complex interrelations between the political and the economic. In order to avoid what he considers an inherent failure of Marxism to grasp the novelty of globalization, Galli mobilizes the notion of ‘immediate mediacy’. While modernity is characterized by a political mediation of the economy and technology, globalization is characterized by the immediate economic and technological command of deterritorialized networks over all aspects of life. However, in Hegelian dialectics, ‘external reflection’ takes the ‘immediate’ as a given point of departure, while ‘reflexive determination’ considers every immediate presupposition as posited, thus redoubling the contradictions of mediation into the immediate itself. Galli's immediate technological and economic medium is deemed to be given and external. Alternatively, Marx's critique of commodity fetishism transcends ‘immediate mediacy’ because it makes explicit the mutual co-implication of the economic and the political. Marx mobilizes Hegelian reflexive determination to show how neither political power nor the commodity's value is the property of an inner substance but the effect of illusory and fetishistic metaphysical mediations. Recent scholarship on early modern Iberian empire and economics shows that, from its very inception, the political power of the Spanish monarchy depended on the mediation of a global network of credit and circulation of money. Finally, I mobilize Marx's critique of money fetishism to analyze the work of the sixteenth-century Jesuit Jose Acosta titled Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590). In this work, Acosta conceives of precious metals as means of exchange that paradoxically enjoy a commanding power of their own. I conclude that the metaphysics of credit implicit in Marx's general theory of fetishism and exemplified in the early modern apologists of the empire is better suited than Galli's schmittology to understanding the theological and metaphysical dimension of the sixteenth-century imperial globalization.

Contested Elections in Increasingly Commercialized Media. A Diachronic Analysis of Executive and Parliamentary Election News Coverage in Switzerland

AbstractIn view of the sinking level of consensus and the allegedly growing ‘presidentialization’ of politics in Switzerland, this paper asks whether this process can be explained by the ‘mediatization of politics’, enforced by the commercialization of the media. Taking a comparative approach in analyzing news coverage about executive and parliamentary elections from 1960 to 2011 in three different media types, it shows an increasing focus on executive elections, triggered not only by increasing political conflict but also by commercialized ‘media logic’. Attention to the executive is highest in the commercialized tabloid paper and lowest in the less commercialized quality paper, which only much later starts to focus on these elections. Contested executive elections have become attractive for commercialized media to focus on prominent figures and dramatize conflicts. This news reporting about politics arguably gives incentives for political actors to contest executive elections, thus intensifying the transformation of the political system.

Stuff and money in the time of the French Revolution

Rebecca L. Spang, who revolutionized our understanding of the restaurant, has written a new history of money. It uses one of the most infamous examples of monetary innovation, the assignats a currency initially defined by French revolutionaries as circulating land to demonstrate that money is as much a social and political mediator as it is an economic instrument. Following the assignats from creation to abandonment, Spang shows them to be subject to the same slippages between policies and practice, intentions and outcomes, as other human inventions.But Spang s book is also a new history of the French Revolution, one in which radicalization was driven by an ever-widening gap between political ideals and the realities of daily life. Money played a critical role in creating this gulf. Wed to the idea that liberty required economic deregulation as well as political freedom, revolutionary legislators extended the notion of free trade to include freedom of money. The consequences were disastrous. Backed neither by the weight of tradition nor by the state that issued them, the assignats could not be a functioning currency. Ever reluctant to interfere in the workings of the market, lawmakers thought changes to the material form of the assignats should suffice to enhance their credibility. Their hopes were disappointed, and the spiraled out of control.Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution restores economics, in the broadest sense, to its rightful place at the heart of the and hence to that of modern politics.

Mediatization of politics: The case of the former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt

Mediatization is one of the modern buzzwords in communication science. Despite this, empirical research faces enormous problems, both intellectual and methodological. As mediatization is a process, it has to be analysed from a historical perspective. The case of the former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt gives us the opportunity to research nearly the whole history of the Federal Republic of Germany from its beginnings in the late 1940s until today, following Strömbäck’s four phases of mediatization. After World War II, Schmidt, chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1974 to 1982, started to write newspaper articles. Since 1983, he is copublisher of the weekly newspaper Die Zeit. The analysis of one special politician over six decades offers new insights into the interactions between media and politics on the micro-level. Under certain historical circumstances, media-conscious politicians initiate the mediatization of politics, without submitting politics to the logic of the mass media.

The "Arab Spring": New Mechanisms of Change of Authoritarian Political Regimes

The article explores the use of mechanisms in bringing down authoritarian political regimes in the Middle East and North Africa with the "Arab spring" in focus. The technique of "non-violent" methods of fight suggested by "godfather" of the "Arab spring" Gene Sharp is analyzed. It is noted that the distinctive features of his system were planned, determined and dynamic actions of protest forces. A special place in the article is devoted to the study of the role of non-governmental organizations in selecting and training protest leaders and activists and in creating a network of supporters of prodemocratic movements. The article examines the role of the Internet and cyber technologies used by the opposition during protest rallies. Non-violence as means of bringing down the existing power turned out to be an alternative to armed resistance. The key role of non-violent actions consisted in changing the point of view of anti-government forces, demonstrating that the public solidarity could make the regime overthrow possible. It is noted that the latest information means gave the process of political changes due activity and focus which was followed by the information actions designed to discredit the government in place and form the corresponding public opinion. Mediatization of politics promoted the creation of a dense information veil retouching a real picture. The overall system of methods used during the "the Arab spring" indicates that the mechanism of overthrowing authoritarian regimes and its technologies came from Western culture and were borrowed by Arab activists.