EDITOR GLAVNI UREDNIK Slavko Splichal, University of Ljubljana EDITORIAL ASSISTANT POMOČNIK UREDNIKA Boris Mance, University of Ljubljana EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD: UREDNIŠKI SVET Muhammad Ayish, University of Sharjah Carlos Barrera, University of Navarra, Pamplona Kees Brants, University of Amsterdam Andrew Calabrese, University of Colorado at Boulder Nico Carpentier, Free University of Brussels Joseph Man Chan, Chinese University of Hong Kong Lincoln Dahlberg, University of Queensland Peter Dahlgren, University of Lund Terry Flew, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane Jostein Gripsrud, University of Bergen Tatsuro Hanada, Waseda University, Tokyo Robert L. Ivie, Indiana University Nicholas Jankowski, University of Nijmegen Risto Kunelius, University of Tampere Chin-Chuan Lee, City University of Hong Kong Ed McLuskie, Boise State University Paolo Mancini, University of Perugia Vincent Mosco, Queen's University, Kingston Barbara Pfetsch, Free University of Berlin Horst Poettker, University of Dortmund Philippe Joseph Salazar, University of Cape Town Hans-Jörg Trenz, University of Copenhagen Colin Sparks, Hong Kong Baptist University Andrej Škerlep, University of Ljubljana Daya Thussu, Westminster University, London Janet Wasko, University of Oregon at Eugene Yuezhi Zhao, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby Liesbet van Zoonen, Loughborough University Charis Xinaris, European University Cyprus Ksenija Vidmar Horvat, University of Ljubljana JOURNAL OF © THE EUROPEAN INSTITUTE FOR COMMUNICATION AND CULTURE © EVROPSKI INŠTITUT ZA KOMUNICIRANJE IN KULTURO PUBLISHED BY UNIVERSITY OF LJUBLJANA, FACULTY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES IZDAJA FAKULTETA ZA DRUŽBENE VEDE UNIVERZE V LJUBLJANI EURICOM om® * II) i is indexed ffi je indeksirana and abstracted in: ^^ in abstrahirana v: »□0 Communication Abstracts, Current Contents/Social & Behavioral Sciences, International Bibliography of Periodical Literature (IBZ), International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS), Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA), Peace Research Abstracts, Research Alert, Sage Public Administration Abstracts, ScienceDirect, Scopus (Elsevier), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Social SciSearch, Sociological Abstracts. Home page URL: http://www.euricom.si JUNE 2014 ARTICLES Frank Marcinkowski Mediatisation of Politics: Reflections on the State of the Concept Andrej Škerlep Public Discourse between Counterfactual Idealisations and Practical Realisation in Public Sphere ISSN 1318-3222 5 23 □0 (JF? ir ž Thomas Allmer (Dis)Like Facebook? Dialectical and Critical Perspectives on Social Media 39 Irena Fiket Espen D. H. Olsen Hans-Jörg Trenz Confronting European Diversity: Deliberation in a Transnational and Pluri-lingual Setting Eli Skogerbe Rune Karlsen Mediatisation and Regional Campaigning in a Party-Centred System: How and Why Parliamentary Candidates Seek Visibility Karen Donders Tom Evens Government Intervention in Marriages of Convenience between TV Broadcasters and Distributors POVZETKI ABSTRACTS IN SLOVENE 57 75 93 111 rN o o rN rN £ CO I- LU I- o u MEDIATISATION OF POLITICS REFLECTIONS ON THE STATE OF THE CONCEPT FRANK MARCINKOWSKI Abstract This paper reviews the current state of the literature on the mediatisation of politics. Five common assumptions are being identified, which in my view form the core of a basic understanding of the concept. I discuss for each of these assumptions a number of further deliberations. My analysis is based on a theory of functionally differentiated societies. More precisely, I draw on the vision of modern societies that German sociologist Niklas Luhmann has introduced. According to his view the functional specialisation of social sub-systems is accompanied by an increased consolidation of performance relations between them, because self-referential fixation on the own function inevitably causes deficits in most other capacities. Against this background mediatisation is reconstructed as a response to a serious deficit of political systems: the notorious lack of public attention given to democratic politics within modern societies. This framework has several implications for the reasoning on mediatisation, which are outlined in the article. Frank Marcinkowski is Professor of Communication Theory in the Department of Communication, University of Muenster; e-mail: f.marc@uni-muenster.de. rN rN m d cp rN o o rN rN 15 > A 3 a 0 z * 1 (I) 0 C (6 Ln Introduction "Mediatisation" is a neologism of communication studies that is guided by terms such as economisation, judicialisation and politicisation. Just as economis-ation denotes the encroachment of economic calculi onto non-economic areas of activity (e.g., family, health, public administration), so mediatisation refers to the increase in importance of medial calculi in many non-media areas of activity in contemporary society (e.g., science, law, sport). By medial calculi are meant here the general criteria of attention, selection and presentation used by professional news media. Research on mediatisation looks for explanations for the fact that media visibility is perceived today in wide areas of society as an effective tool for increasing performance, which is why enormous efforts are devoted to its production. Moreover, mediatisation research is interested in the question of what it means for society when deciding, acting and communicating that are compatible with the media become the norm in more and more areas of social and cultural life. The concept of mediatisation has rekindled long-standing debates within political communication about the relations of dependency and power between media and politics. What is innovate, then, is primarily the concept itself and the line of argumentation that it designates, rather than the state of affairs to which the concept responds. Mediatisation is also often understood as expressing a new supremacy of the media (Meyer and Hinchman 2002; Kepplinger 2002; 2008), which may explain why the concept has attracted significantly more attention within the European social sciences (Couldry 2008; Hjavard 2008; 2013; Lundby 2009a; Livingstone 2009) than in the US. Major impetus for its popularisation has come from Gianpietro Mazzoleni's study of media logic in the Italian election campaign of 1983 (Mazzoleni 1987) and Mazzoleni and Winfried Schulz's highly respected essay on the mutual dependencies of media and politics in contemporary democracies (Mazzoleni and Schulz 1999). Although since then the concept has developed greatly (Schulz 2004; Imhof 2006; Strömbäck 2008; 2011a; Hjavard 2008; Kunelius and Reunanen 2012a; Meyen et al. 2014), the mediatisation paradigm still looks more like an unfinished discourse than a theoretical approach that is used consistently. Nonetheless, we can make out several fixed points within the current debate forming a common basic understanding of mediatisation. This contribution reviews the state of the debate in its present form according to five basal assumptions.1 Drawing on a ^ systems theory approach to mediatisation, the foundations of which are laid out elsewhere (Marcinkowski and Steiner 2014), I will also formulate for each of these assumptions a number of further deliberations. The Concept of Mediatisation - Five Basic Assumptions Mediatisation Is a Reaction to the Logic of Media In the usual understanding of the concept, mediatisation of politics means the diffusion of a specific media rationality in the sphere of the political. In this case, it always refers to democratic politics and free media, since state-controlled media can obviously not develop an autonomy that can then reach out into other areas of society. Rather, they are themselves governmentalised in the sense that compliance with the ideological positions of the ruling political elite forms the sole basis for the creation of media publicity. The thesis of the mediatisation of politics therefore C > II UD needfully assumes that media and politics are, at root, autonomous areas of action in an open society - which, if you will, is a further (often unspoken) premise of this approach (Strömbäck and Van Aelst 2013, 342; Kunelius and Reunanen 2012a). Within communication studies, the inherent laws of media is called "media logic" (Mazzoleni 2008; Lundby 2009b). The concept is based on the idea that media develop certain rules and routines in the production of public communication, with these rules being determined by a number of constraints: for example, by the cultural symbol systems that are needed to construct and communicate meaning; by the specific technology that is used to create and disseminate news; by the organisational form of a medium that enables it to administer, finance and provide in the long term communication technology and labour power; by norms of appropriateness governing the profession; and, finally, by the self-understanding of media actors who shape the operational business of producing news. Within the interaction of these components emerges a particular "format" of media reality, which is assumed to give rise to an enormous shaping power for thinking, communicating and acting in society (Altheide and Snow 1979). Although the mediatisation thesis is in this respect based on a quite complex concept of media and a no less expansive concept of media logic, reference is usually made, particularly in the context of the mediatisation of politics, to the typical production rules of journalistic news media (Strömbäck 2011a; Esser 2013). These rules comprise at least three interconnected control systems: (1) regularities of selection in the sense of the conscious choice of events, issues and states of the world for public information; (2) regularities of narration in the sense of typical patterns governing how media texts are narrated, structured and sequenced; (3) regularities of interpretation in the sense of recurrent and cross-theme patterns in the assignment of meaning and framing. News media use such routines to select and present public affairs in such a way that they are attended to closely by the audience. Under such conditions, political communication by the media frequently has predictable properties, such as the focus on strong images, a preference for events rather than structures, the focus on people rather than on institutions or ideas, particular attention to conflicts and deviations from the norm, the interpretation of politics as a competition, etc. Mediatisation is a term used for the graded response to this media reality. It denotes on the one hand the extent to which politics is willing to engage in the media's reality - for example, granting political importance to the issues prominently dealt with by the media, adopting the interpretations selected by the media as premises of its own acts of communication, bestowing actual influence on the people "loved" by the media. Marcinkowski and Steiner (2014) have denoted such phenomena of media resonance in practical politics as "simple" (first-order) mediatisation of politics, with the term describing a development in which the media - rather than parties, parliament or government - increasingly determine what is of general interest in politics, what counts as the adequate fulfilment of function, and which facets of politics are deserving public attention. Politics is mediatised to the extent that it has accepted the description of itself provided by the media as a valid orientation. Marcinkowski and Steiner speak of "reflexive" (second-order) mediatisation when political actors become so used to absorbing into their own repertoire of behaviour the attention rules practised by the media that they operate them on their own: for example, they create pseudo-events, stage strong images, push people into the foreground and tailor everything to them, serve the human interest, provoke conflicts, etc. Reflexivity of mediatisation denotes the ability of politics to see itself through the eyes of others (the media) and to describe itself accordingly. In this respect, the concept defines the transition from a reactive to an active way of dealing with media logic. This can mean different things, from the habitual, almost unconscious adjustment by individual actors of their communication behaviour, to the creation by political institutions and organisations of structural measures to benefit conditions of media production. In the literature this is known as the adoption of media logic or the accommodation of politics to the media. Both terms do seem to suggest different degrees of voluntariness and compulsion. Since media use different techniques of dissemination and adopt different forms of organisation, and since their professional norms are subject to change, we should, strictly speaking, assume a plurality of media logics and think of these as being dynamic rather than static (see also Strömbäck and Esser 2014). However, if reference is made to media logic in the singular, then the perspective of those affected is being considered, since political actors (and their advisers) can obviously only orientate themselves towards what they consider to be the logic of the media. The media-related horizon by which politics orientates itself is therefore inevitably something that it creates itself; it is a self-creation which incorporates those elements of news logics which they consider to be important and which they have experienced themselves. Accommodation is therefore always preceded by the "adaptation" of media logic in the literary sense of reworking something for other purposes. In the course of this reworking for political use, components are joined to form a new whole, one which might well not occur at all in the reality of media. More important than the diversity of media logic(s), though, is the thesis that the news logic of traditional mass media, which is at the core of the mediatisation concept, faces a massive loss of importance and impact in the digital age, which is why the concept will become obsolete in the near future. This argument is uncon-y vincing for several reasons. First, a number of studies on media usage indicate that television, radio, and the press will remain the backbone of political communication in all Western democracies, including the United States, for the foreseeable future (Rosenstiel and Mitchell 2012; Lilleker and Vedel 2013; Saad 2013). As long as that is the case, the traditional news media and their logic will act as the central point of orientation for politics, something which is also indicated by current studies of the individual perception that politicians have of the media landscape. Second, several studies also show that online offshoots of the traditional news media accept responsibility for all wide-ranging components of political communication in the Net, something that has been termed the "mediatization of the Net" (Fortunati 2005). These bridgeheads carry the existing news logic of the journalistic mass media into the Net and, in this respect, enhance its relevance rather than its relevance being relativised or even suppressed by the Net. Besides, we can find definite evidence of a new formatting of political communication in the Internet, for which terms such as interactivity, virality, inclusivity and specific forms of connectivity (to C > name just a few) are certainly appropriate (van Dijck and Poell 2013, Klinger and Svensson 2014). This only shows, though, that in principle there might exist a logic of online-media communication about politics, a thought that opens up further II 00 opportunities for the mediatisation paradigm to be applied rather than making it dispensable (Schulz 2014). CT> Mediatisation Is a Process As can be seen from its morphology, mediatisation is a term denoting process. It identifies one aspect of social change - namely, the penetration of society by the logic of production of public attention practised by the media. Schulz (2004) points to four aspects of social change for which media play a role: the extension of human possibilities of communication in factual, temporal and social ways (extension), the substitution of societal activities by media-related activities (substitution), the linking of media and non-media activities (amalgamation), and the accommodation of social behaviour to principles of media communication (accommodation). Imhof (2006) deals with forms and consequences of social processes of differentiation that are shaped by the development of communications media, such as the emergence of new social inequalities (stratification) and the fragmentation of social groups and public domains (segmentation). Kunelius and Reunanen (2012a) as well as Marcin-kowski and Steiner (2014) refer to the functional differentiation of modern societies as a key to understanding the mediatisation process. Hjavard (2008), meanwhile, defines mediatisation as a process of societal modernisation, one which is driven by the organisational, technological and aesthetic ways that the media function. The consequence of thinking in terms of process is first of all that mediatisation effects only become visible in the long term and are not of a short-term nature. In terms of research strategy this means that empirical studies of mediatisation must be longitudinal or intertemporal. Second, consequences of mediatisation must be thought of as unintended effects, since social change is not determined consciously or in detail. And, third, it stands to reason to consider mediatisation always in conjunction with parallel processes of social change, processes with which it is interwoven. Of particular interest here is the interplay of mediatisation with similar processes by which system-specific calculi expand their sphere of influence. Marcinkowski and others (2013), for example, have been able to show with the example of the German higher education system that the mediatisation of universities is an immediate consequence of their economisation. Their analysis is based on a socio-theoretical perspective in which mediatisation appears as a result of the increasing functional specialisation of modern society. As a result of this specialisation, the mutual interdependences between the functional areas increase, so that performance relations between them thicken and have to be structurally anchored (Schimank 2006). Mediatisation denotes to a special type of performance relation, namely between the media system and other social systems, which try to gain access to the output of the media: publicity.2 Reflexive mediatisation would then be nothing other than the effort to ensure structurally that public visibility is available (Marcinkowski and Steiner 2014, see also Kunelius and Reunanen 2012a). Admittedly, we still need to explain why publicity should be regarded today as a response to a variety of functional problems of society, where previously money, law or trust could be relied upon. With regard to politics, some authors have described mediatisation as a historical process that can be reconstructed from the different stages of development in the relationship between politics and media in Western democracies (first Asp and Esaisson 1996). What these authors seek to make visible is how political logic has been gradually reshaped by the logic of (commercially operating) news media. Typical here is the work of Blumler and Kavanagh (1999), who argue that the "third age" of political communication is characterised by an all-encompassing professionalisation of the communication management of the political system, a constantly growing pressure of competition in the media system, an anti-elitist populism practised by the wide-ranging news media, a centrifugal diversification of what is offered by political communication, and a fundamental change in how people perceive politics. Similarly, Brants and van Praag (2006) have described a half-century of election campaigns in the Netherlands as a sequence of dominance in political communication of party logic, public logic and media logic, a sequence which corresponds to a shift from party democracy to audience democracy. This historicist understanding of the mediatisation of politics has also been given important impetus by Strömbäck (2008) and his four-phase model, although he has since come to understand the phases more in terms of four dimensions (Strömbäck and Esser 2014). For all their clarity, though, such models of historical process remain ultimately unsatisfactory, if only because they assume at least implicitly a telos of development for which vague structural concepts such as "telecracy" and "mediocracy" (Meyer 2001) then suggest themselves. In addition, mediatisation is assumed to have a degree of uniformity, periodisability and singleness of purpose which is not commensurate with its actual complexity and multiformity. Less effort has so far been spent on modelling mediatisation as a causal process - that is, on differentiating according to its causes, characteristics and consequences. On the contrary, current literature often uses the concept interchangeably to refer to all three of these elements. This ambiguity clearly prevents the development of the concept into a full-bodied analytical paradigm. Some authors have explicitly advised against modelling the mediatisation process in a causal-analytical way (Schulz 2004). At the same time, causal thinking is by no means excluded by the assumption often made that there may be interactions, such as between mediati-y sation of politics and politicisation of media. When it comes to the question of who or what triggers the process of mediatisation, the majority of authors provide an expectable answer: the media cause mediatisation. Unspecific reference to "changes" in media conditions, the "expansion" of the media system, the "proliferation" of media channels, or the somehow increased "importance" of the media at the end of the twentieth century is usually made here (Schulz 2004; Hjavard 2008; Meyen et al. 2014). If we see media development as a sufficient condition of mediatisation in society, then we can ask, for example, whether this development (particularly in the case of politics) is a result of the television age, or whether it had already begun with the rise of the mass press in the nineteenth century, and whether finally the Internet will trigger a new push of mediatisation. Contrary to such technological-deterministic speculations, the first premise of the approach points to the fact that mediatisation is bound neither to a particular technology of dissemination and nor to a specific organisational form of the media, but to the development and autonomisation of original media C > mechanisms for producing and bundling public attention with regard to events and issues in the world. The condition of possibility for mediatisation can therefore be seen on the most general level in the differentiation of a system of mass media il O which operates according to its own laws, as was already originally pointed out within systems theory some 20 years ago (Marcinkowski 1993; Luhmann 2000; see also Kunelius and Reunanen 2012a). With regard to the news media, which are of critical importance for the mediatisation of politics, the key lies generally in the development of a professional journalism up until the end of the nineteenth century and especially in the formation of an interventionist or interpretive news logic in the twentieth century (Strömbäck and Esser 2009; Salgado and Strömbäck 2011a; Cushion and Thomas 2013), a logic which no longer limits itself to reproducing the self-portrayals of politics. What I have sketched here, though, is no "history" of mediatisation, but the historical development of a condition of its possibility. For media autonomy and intrinsic logic are only a necessary condition of processes of mediatisation, but not a sufficient one. Otherwise, wherever comparable media conditions prevail, the same phenomena would have to appear at more or less the same time and with more or less the same intensity within societies and internationally, which obviously is not the case. How else could we explain that the mediatisation of universities represents a quite observable phenomenon, but not the mediatisation of primary schools? If mediatisation is ultimately about public attention, then it makes sense to look for the reasons of differential mediatisation not least in the specific publicity requirements that are quite unevenly pronounced both within and between the various areas of activity in modern society. Accordingly, pushes in the process of mediatisation are not triggered by the media (push model); it is caused by the contingent need for public attention of a given system combined with its inability to attract attention by system-specific means. There is much evidence of both in the case of politics. On the one hand, democratic politics needs public attention to keep its internal dynamic of gaining and losing power going. On the other hand, politics in the globalised world has become more complex than regular people can account for. Consequentially, increasing shares of the population turn away from politics and focus their attention on other points of interest within modern society. Mediatisation, in my view, is a reaction to this basal dilemma of functionally specialised politics. Such a push-and-pull model of mediatisation has at least two conceptual consequences. First, it should prevent us from representing political actors as victims of mediatisation that have the logic of the media imposed upon them as if by force. Politics is involved actively in the process of mediatisation in the sense that it is happy to make use of the services provided by the media. Second, it should reminds us of the fact that mediatisation is about enabling, not about destroying politics. It serves foremost to make politics possible under conditions of high political complexity, nearly complete inclusiveness of democratic politics and tightened competition for scarce public attention (see Marcinkowski and Steiner 2014). This in no way excludes the fact that the incorporation of media logic into the repertoire of actions belonging to politics does have unintended consequences. Mediatisation Is a Multidimensional Phenomenon The literature offers different answers to the question of what exactly is the object of mediatisation studies in the realm of politics. Most literature talks simply of a mediatisation "of politics" (Mazzoleni and Schulz 1999; Hajer 2009; Strömbäck 2011a). From time to time, though, the mediatisation of individual political actors (Elmelund-Praestekaer et al. 2011; Kunelius and Reunanen 2012b), a mediatisation of political organisations (Schillemans 2012; Strömbäck and van Aelst 2013; Donges and Jarren 2014), processes (Spörer-Wagner and Marcinkowski 2010) and institutions (Meyer 2009), or simply of the mediatisation of political communication (Blumler and Kavanagh 1999) is mentioned. And, indeed, mention has even been made of the mediatisation of media (Cushion and Thomas 2013, 342). This indeci-siveness can be traced back to the fact that no conceptual differentiation is made between the conditions, the characteristics and the consequences of mediatisation. If we assume that all three areas could be objects of investigation for mediatisation studies, then this means first of all that (to talk along disciplinary lines) research focusing on communicators, on content and on effects all have to make a contribution to these studies. This also makes clear that mediatisation is a multidimensional concept, since it is concerned with all dimensions of the communication process. Jesper Strömbäck (2008) has formulated this most clearly so far. He distinguishes four dimensions of the mediatisation of the political sphere: (1) the development of news media into the primary source of information about politics; (2) the dissolution of institutional, financial and personal links between media organisations and political institutions; (3) the development of an autonomous construction logic for political media reality; and (4) the development of media logic into the calculus used by political actors to guide their patterns of communication and action. Since the second and third dimensions are concerned ultimately with the same thing (the institutional autonomisation of media is, after all, a prerequisite for the formation of their operational independence), we can capture the analytical content of Ström-bäck's model by discussing just three dimensions.3 The Mediatisation of the Reception of Politics. This cannot mean that people today have in any quantifiable way less primary experience of politics than they did in the past. Such a claim would be difficult to prove empirically. On the one hand, there are and always have been a proportion of the population who abstain y from politics. On the other hand, those who are interested in politics now possibly have a different primary experience of politics than their predecessors. They are less £ often involved in political parties and prefer instead more unconventional forms of participation. But different does not necessarily mean less. What also cannot be meant is that people talk less often about politics because they use media more often. Empirical studies suggest the opposite is the case: those who often use political news in the media also discuss politics more often. Mediatisation of reception can therefore only mean that (quite irrespective of the extent of primary experience of politics) we are more often exposed to media reports on politics, and that conversations about politics are becoming more and more based on information that we receive from the media. Even if we can reconstruct a plausible understanding of the mediatisation of reception in this way, what still remains unclear is why the political public is considered to be an important element in Strömbäck's model at all. In the usual understanding of mediatisation, the accommodation of politics to media logic, the audience clearly does not occur. If Strömbäck nonetheless considers the dimension of reception to be important, then he probably does so because he assumes that the pressure on politics to adapt increases with the increase in use of the media for political information, since a wide-ranging presence of the media in C > II fM society points to the media's influence on public opinion (Strömbäck 2008, 236). A closer analysis of the argument shows that it works just as well if it is geared solely PO towards the perception that political actors have of the range and power of media rather than towards actual media use of the population. Mediatisation research can in this sense dispense with research into media use, and should concentrate instead on deciphering the implicit theories and perceptions that political actors have of people's behaviour regarding media use and of the media's power to affect. I shall return to this point when I consider "mental mediatisation." Mediatisation of Public Communication about Politics. With this dimension, we are concerned with showing that news media are more than mere organs of pronouncement or dissemination for political primary communicators. Rather, they have developed the autonomy that I have already mentioned with regard to theme selection, theme interpretation, opinion formation, timing, method of presentation, etc. Diachronic studies are clearly needed here, and they are now also being increasingly provided (Brants and Van Praag 2006; Zeh and Hoop-mann 2013; Seethaler and Melischek 2014). The most serious conceptual problem of cross-sectional studies, which still represent the bulk of research, is to provide a theoretically founded notion of the dominance of political logic in public communication about politics, a notion from which autonomously constructed media reality can be validly distinguished (Mazzoleni 1987). Either we define this state ex negativo, i.e., as the absence of typical features of media logic, or we resort to pure self-description, according to which politics is exclusively what politics says it is. Mediatisation of Politics. In my understanding, we find ourselves here in the dimension of effect. This leads to the question already raised above: what really are the relevant consequences of mediatisation for politics? Most authors refer here to all possible traces of an adjustment to the media, whereas, in line with my suggestion above, we should really distinguish between adoption of media reality of politics ("first-order mediatisation") and adoption of criteria of its production ("second-order mediatisation"). The latter includes not only approaches of an individual and informal kind, in terms of the dealings of political actors with journalists, for example (Davis 2009; Elmelund-Praestekaer et al. 2011; Kunelius and Reunanen 2012b). Second-order mediatisation also comprises institutional and organisational innovations, such as the adoption of formal regulations governing contact with media, decisions on whether committees are public or non-public, the timing of sessions, the content and frequency of press releases, the forming of specialised communication departments, the expansion of competencies and changes to the hierarchical position of organisational units of communication, the shift of resources for their benefit, etc. (Donges 2008; Schillemans 2012). What often remains ignored here, though, is the fact that adoption means the complete spectrum of the handling of the logic of media attention, including therefore measures to shield or make invisible certain areas of politics. But even if we consider both together, measures for producing and shielding against media resonance, we can ask whether doing so really captures all the relevant consequences of mediatisation. Such measures are certainly valid indicators for an adoption of media logic and therefore a good yardstick for the state of the process of adjustment. But if nothing more comes out of it for the core business of politics, if mediatisation affects "merely" the form but not the function of politics, then that would certainly still be of academic interest - but it would only have a limited social relevance. We should therefore add a fifth dimension to the research agenda, one that is concerned with the substantial political consequences of mediatisation. Relevant consequences of mediatisation would arise when the process of accommodation brings about consequences for the functional purpose of politics - namely, the production and enforcement of collectively binding decisions. Such typologies are useful to clarify what empirical research on mediatisation has to deal with. Instead of indiscriminately denoting all this as dimensions of mediatisation and thereby abetting the confusion described above concerning the semantic content of the mediatisation concept, we must state very precisely where we are in the process model of mediatisation. If it is about the autonomy and intrinsic logic of political communication by the media, then we are concerned not with a dimension of mediatisation, but with a condition of its possibility. Research into indicators for the accommodation of political actors, processes and institutions tell us something about the degree of mediatisation. Ultimately, we should distinguish this from the study of the consequences of mediatisation; and, as far as I am concerned, we should only talk about these consequences when it comes to proving that mediatised politics decides differently, and that in two senses: differently as far as the process of decision-making is concerned (politics) and/or differently in relation to the results of decision-making activity (policy). The following figure illustrates where the dimensions are to be located in a process model of mediatisation: Figure 1: A Process-Model of Mediatisation £ 3 a 0 £ * 1 * tf) 0 C Mediatisation Is a Gradual Phenomenon Mediatisation is not a disjunctive fact, but a gradual phenomenon. It can be differently far advanced in different dimensions. We won't find it in any venue of society, and we won't find it in each branch of politics. Instead, mediatisation will most prominently occur in venues where a lack of public visibility threatens the operational basis of a given process or institution. Nevertheless, the gradualisation in the middle part of the process model (Fig. 1) showing the competition between calculi and logics is of paramount importance. In LO the case of politics, very far-reaching versions of the understanding of mediatisation 1—1 have been formulated in this respect, ranging from a complete superimposing of political rationality by the logic of media, to a veritable "colonization" (Meyer and Hinchman 2002) of politics. Such exaggerations are generally based on a simplified notion of what is called "the" political logic. The notion of a uniform political logic is opposed in political science by the concept of governance, which expresses the idea that modern governing takes place in a variety of different and interwoven regulatory structures in which quite different mechanisms for coordinating action come into operation (Kooiman 1993; Pierre 2000; Benz and Papadopoulos 2006). The regulatory structure includes all forms of the intentional ordering of issues, formal and informal, governmental and quasi-governmental, self-regulation and external regulation. The coordinating mechanisms in operation here range from hierarchy, through market-shaped coordination, shared norms and routines, to agreement by compromise (Bevir 2013). The central insights of the governance perspective include the assumption of a constantly growing importance of non-hierarchical forms of regulation based on negotiation; the description of the factual complexity of horizontally and vertically networked systems of regulation with their sometimes contradictory combination of functional logics; the insight into the importance of informality in the political realm; and, finally, the extent of involvement of private actors in the production of collectively binding decisions. At the same time, regulating structures and mechanisms of coordination differ not only between different institutional spheres, but also between different sectoral policies. Given the complex networking of regulatory structures, rationality calculi and legalities, it is hardly plausible to speak of a displacement of the logics of politics by the logic of the media. Mediatisation is not synonymous with de-differentiation. In the words of systems theory, it does not play on the level of part-systemic guiding values ("codes"), but rather on the level of "programmes" (Luhmann 1995; see also Marcinkowski and Steiner 2014). It therefore means the incorporation of additional rationality calculi into regulatory systems that actually exist. What exists, though, is not replaced, but reorganised to a certain extent. The task of empirical research on mediatisation is to analyse where measures are taken to ensure public visibility in the existing political structures of regulation, and where not. There are three key questions of interest here: How do the rules and routines of media production behave as regards to the (in the narrow sense) political components of the governance structure of an institutional sphere or of a political field? What problems of compatibility and connectivity are there, such as between coordination through media logic and coordination through hierarchy or negotiation (Grande 2000; Marcinkowski 2005)? When there are "competing institutions" (Cerny 2000), what conditions cause political actors to give preference to media rules over alternative means of political coordination of action? Research that is devoted to these questions not only provides information regarding the degree of the mediatisation of politics, but also allows for a more differentiated view of its consequences. Because, if we do not think in terms of the repression of political rationality calculi, but of different forms of their coupling with journalistic calculi, then the assumption of differential consequences of mediatisation presents itself. Political and journalistic calculi can relate to each other indifferently, complementarily or incompatibly. Depending on which, mediatisation can also result in an increase in performance as well as in blockage, or simply lead to nothing at all (Marcinkowski 2007). Mediatisation Is a Multi-level Phenomenon Research on mediatisation can begin on different analytical levels - microscopic, mesoscopic and macroscopic (Donges 2005; Strömbäck 2008). This is entirely understandable given the objects of study that such research considers, which range from individual media use through organisationally anchored media logic, to the transformation of areas of action in society. More interesting here is also the question of whether what we have identified as the core of the mediatisation process (namely, the anchoring of media logic governing the creation of public attention outside the media) can also be conceptualised on all three of these analytical levels. This question is relatively easy to answer for two of the three levels of analysis. On the macroscopic level of society, we can observe mediatisation as a structurally secure form of drawing on mass media services in non-media functional areas, with the consequence that criteria, norms and guidelines belonging to service delivery by media are implemented in the programme supply of other social systems (Kunelius and Reunanen 2012a; Marcinkowski and Steiner 2014). Even if the identity of an action area is not thereby put at risk, because mediatised politics is still politics, and mediatised sport is still sport (Vowe 2006; Meyen 2009), we can still talk in terms of changes which are observable and potent macroscopically. Of course, politics continues to be concerned with the production of collectively binding decisions and all action such as communicating is based on it. But if, with respect to media employability, no longer everything can be decided as politics might wish it to be, then we are dealing with a limitation of systemic autonomy in the operation of its guiding value. Uwe Schimank (2006, 76) has termed this a "hetero-referential framing of part-systemic self-referentiality." From a mesoscopic perspective, mediatisation acts as a collective term for all y references to mass media services in the structural and procedural organisation (as well as external communication) of corporate actors (Donges 2006; Schillemans 2012; Strömbäck and Van Aelst 2013). Also on this middle level of analysis there are studies that deal with changes to institutionalised routines of procedure under the influence of media logic, as they concern, for example, the metamorphoses of logic of political negotiation (Spörer-Wagner and Marcinkowski 2010). On the individual level, mediatisation has been associated with the altered perception of politics by citizens as a result of their dependence on news media (Strömbäck 2008), but also with the individual behaviour of politicians in their dealings with media (Elmelund-Praestekaer 2011; Kunelius and Reunanen 2012b). In both cases, there is a problem - or at least there is if we value the consistent use of scientific terms. Media influence on thought and action is in fact occupied within communication studies by the notion of media effects, a notion with which the concept of mediatisation is in this respect in competition. To avoid the charge of merely exchanging terms in order to be able to claim that what it is doing is new, C > microanalytical research on mediatisation should at least be able to make clear that it deals with a very specific type of media effect. To this end, the literature provides a number of valuable clues (especially Kepplinger 2007; 2008; Schulz 2009; Ström- II UD bäck 2011b), which could be condensed into a model of "mental mediatization." The key points of this model can best be conveyed when they are contrasted with a simple pattern of individual media effects as these are usually thought of in the 1—1 communication sciences (see Table 1). A first difference concerns the question of who is affected by mental mediatisation in contrast to political media effects. While research on media effects begins with effects on the recipient, it stands to reason that, in the case of mediatisation, we begin with effects on the person who is reported about: in the case of the news media, then, political actors. Politicians are also consumers of media content, but, in contrast to other recipients, they are informed by the media not only about events and states of affairs in the world, but especially about how they themselves are perceived externally. When they open the newspaper, they therefore look not through a pair of binoculars, but in the mirror. This fact distinguishes them from "normal" media users and establishes through the particular nature of this involvement a highly idiosyncratic reception situation. A first feature of this model of effect is therefore that it focuses on a relatively small group of users with a specific reception modality. Table 1: A Model of Mental Mediatisation Media Effects Mental Mediatisation Those affected Media Users Subjects of Reporting Triggers Media Contents Anticipation of Contents Consequences Attitudes/Behaviour towards Objects of Reporting Attitudes/Behaviour towards the Media A second difference to conventional thinking is already suggested here - namely, effect beyond content. Usually it is assumed that media effects are caused by media content: by a specific piece of information, a persuasive item of news, a specific framing, etc. In the case of mental mediatisation, though, we assume that it is the fact of being observed itself that causes changes in the thinking, communicating, and acting of the politicians concerned. According to this model, what triggers effects is the experience of the omnipresence of media, the expectation that the smallest utterance will always somehow reach the light of media publicity, combined with a hardened notion built through years of experience of what the media will make of it - in a word, the anticipation of media practices and products. It is not critical whether all this also then takes place. Occasional experiences of the relevant kind are more than sufficient to reinforce the expectations described (Davis 2009), which otherwise have an effect without having to be confirmed on a daily basis. In a modification of Altheide and Snow's well-known dictum (1988, 206), then, we could talk in terms of the primacy of anticipation over content, which adds another facet to the idea of the self-involvement of political actors in their mediatisation. The third difference is in the type of effect. Usually it is assumed that the media influence attitudes and behaviour of recipients in relation to the issues which they report on. In the case of mental mediatisation, though, we suspect that it is about the attitude towards the media themselves. Politicians experience at first hand what powers of influence the media can exercise. This experience, coupled with frequent contact with journalists, the persuasions of media advisers and their own extensive media consumption, leads to the development of ideas about how media function. Especially significant here is the power of media to influence public opinion that political actors typically assume (Davis 1983; Gunther and Storey 2003). This leads almost inevitably to the idea that it is important for politicians to control their dealings with the media in order to be successful. Using this line of reasoning, we can explain the adjustment of politics to the laws of the media at the micro level, too. Since the theoretical argument differs in three relevant respects from the standard model of media effects research, it is justified to bring the concept of mediatisation into play to describe this very specific form. The research available on the influence of presumed media influence can then be used (Tsfati and Cohen 2005; Cohen, Tsfati and Gunther 2008) to investigate the consequences of the mental mediatisation of political personnel for decision-making processes and policies. Conclusion The mediatisation of politics, as I have been trying to conceive of it here, is not a direct result of media development and also not a process by which politics is exclusively "affected." It is created, rather, in the deep structure of functionally differentiated society. In this social formation, specialised functional areas for politics, economics, law, science, etc. have formed which owe their ability to perform to the absolutisation of certain guiding values and which precisely for this reason have deficits in the consideration of competing spheres of value. Science is programmed to truth and does not necessarily think economically. The economic sphere is concerned with profits and not with the natural environment. The judiciary focuses on law and not on education. Politics specialises in the handling of power but is not primarily moral. This built-in ignorance of secondary concerns has become a relevant problem of modern society. This is why all functional areas of society are in many ways dependent on the performances of other functional areas that, precisely due to their specialisation, they themselves cannot provide (or at least y not in sufficient quantities). The mediatisation of politics is nothing else but the reaction to an essential deficiency within the political system: the typical deficit of attention given to politics in modern society, in which growing parts of the potential public turn away from politics and towards other attractions. Politics counters this threat to its own foundations of legitimation with affection towards that functional area which is, like no other area, able to bundle public attention: the media. The downside of this development is that politics has to reckon with an uncontrollable manner of its social visibilisation just as much as with excess attention to states of affair that it would prefer to deal with discreetly. Adaption and handling of media logic therefore always have two goals: steering media attention to specific issues, positions and messages, and deflecting it away from others. In other words, reflexive mediatisation aims at the ability to "manage" public attention. However, it is the positive side of the distinction (attracting attention), that drives the mediatisation process, because camouflage is easily manageable by system specific (especially bureaucratic) means. The systemic view makes it clear that the process that we call mediatisation is not, in truth, about the media and whatever kind of intrinsic logic(s) they have, but about the performance to which it grants access: namely, publicity. Media logic is 0 C ¥ I C > II oo not in itself important, even for politics; it is a means to an end. This end is called public attention, which, as all experience shows, is bound in contemporary society to media visibility. Accommodation does not really apply to media; it applies to the mechanisms that have proven to be particularly effective in the struggle for scarce attention. Each media logic is an operative formation of the guiding value of publicity. We may therefore wonder whether the process described here really can be called the mediatisation of politics, when it is actually about intended publicity, which, in turn, is used as a means to the end of managing assent, ensuring legitimacy, maintaining or gaining power - that is, for genuinely political ends. Ultimately, the process described here serves the maintenance of politics. That does not speak against the use of the term mediatisation, however. In the case of economisation, too, it is not decisive how the profit made possible by the use of economic calculi is put to use. Only within the economy is economic logic an end in itself; in the rest of society, the economic use of resources serves other ends, such as health (enabling a visit to the health spa), security (being able to take out another insurance), law (paying for the best lawyers) or truth (having more money for research). What is decisive is that this extension of possibilities is bought through the installation of a special external reference, which should be referred to with the appropriate concept formation. Notes: 1. I am orienting myself here to a so-called consensus list, which participants (including myself) put together at the end of several days of discussion as part of the "After Mediatization" workshop during the ECPR Joint Session in St. Gallen in 2011. For reasons of space, I have assigned some of the points that appeared on this longer list to my five primary assumptions. 2. According to my earlier writing I refer to publicity as the medium of the media (Marcinkowski 1993). The concept includes two different aspects: social visibility, e.g. being observeable independently of space and time (Thompson 2005), and the recognition of recognition (Luhmann 1970), e.g. knowing that others might know. In this text I use "publicity" and "public attention" synonymously. 3. 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European Journal of Communication 28, 3, 225-240. £ 3 a 0 £ * 1 * tf) 0 C (ju fN fN PUBLIC DISCOURSE BETWEEN COUNTERFACTUAL IDEALISATIONS AND PRACTICAL REALISATION IN PUBLIC SPHERE Abstract The article explores different approaches to the theoretical grounding of public use of reason developed by Habermas, Kant and Rawls. It is focused on Habermas's idea of communicative rationality and the public sphere, and then this approach is related to Kantian practical reason and Rawls's idea of public reason. The article highlights liberal and republican elements in Habermas's concept of public sphere, and emphasises that liberal concepts of democracy require public reason as a device of justification of constitutional norms, while the republican idea of popular sovereignty opens up the popular public sphere. The second part of the article describes the tension between the counterfactual nature of Habermas's discourse ethics and its practical realisation in deliberative politics in institutions of the state. ANDREJ SKERLEP Andrej Škerlep is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communication Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana; email: andrej.skerlep@fdv.uni-lj.si. CO m m rN d cp rN o o rN rN 15 > A 3 a 0 z * 1 (I) 0 C « m fN Introduction £ 3 a o £ C > In the article we explore Habermas's concept of public discourse as the public use of reason. Public discourse is argumentation on relevant issues of general interest in the political public sphere. We start the article with Habermas's early conception of the liberal public sphere. The liberal conception of democracy is not grounded on external authority; it is based on the idea of the constitution as a social contract founded on basic rights and liberties, so it has to rationally justify these rights and liberties as universal norms that are acceptable to all citizens. Since his early writings, Habermas has followed Kant's idea of practical discourse that linked the principles of freedom, autonomy and moral reasoning. In his mature philosophy, Habermas developed his own version of the so-called "discourse ethics" that is constructed to a large extent on the image of Kantian deontological ethics. Habermas's motive for developing discursive ethics is his insight that political reasoning in the public sphere refers primarily to legal and constitutional norms, because the political system operates in the "medium of law"; in other words, political decisions have a "legal form." In addition to parallels with Kant, we compare Habermas's ideas with the philosophy of John Rawls, one of the most influential political philosophers from the end of the 20th century, who calls his approach "Kantian constructivism." All three philosophers are developing the idea of public reason as a device capable of justifying universal norms that provide the normative core to a well-ordered political society. The article highlights the counterfactual nature of public reason, i.e., presupposed idealisations that have to be made by those who are engaged in public reasoning in order to secure its rationality and justice, but these idealisations are usually not empirically true. If prima facie counterfactuals seem to be implausible, more thorough investigation shows that they are absolutely necessary for a theoretical construction of public reason and that have real effects on empirical reality, although they might be just part of thought experiment, as in Rawls's case, or are empirically only partially realised, as in Habermas's case. We start the article with a short review of liberal and republican aspects of Habermas's early conception of the public sphere, then proceed with indicating basic principles of Kant's ethics; in the second part, the article offers a comparison between Rawls's and Habermas's ideas of public use of reason, and at the end it shows how Habermas connects his counterfactual idealisations with the empirical reality of political system. Early Version of Liberal Public Sphere Habermas in the Structural Transformation of Public Sphere (1989), his first book originally published in 1962, reconstructs the emergence of the public sphere in a complex historical process of economic, legal, political, social, cultural and philosophical developments that between 16th and 19th century transformed a feudal monarchy into a modern liberal democracy. He describes the formation of market economy in newly established nation states, enlightenment requests for the free and autonomous use of reason, and the constitution of modern republics, based on human rights and rule of law. He analyses how first democratic constitutions radically restructured the very idea about the relation between the state and the society and emphasises that between the state and the society public sphere emerged as an exclusive sphere of interaction, communication and mediation of interests. He calls the early modern conception of public sphere the liberal model of public sphere and defines it in the following passage: In the first modern constitutions the catalogues of fundamental rights were a perfect image of the liberal model of the public sphere: they guaranteed the society as a sphere of private autonomy and the restriction of public authority to a few functions. Between these two spheres, the constitutions further insured the existence of a realm of private individuals assembled into a public body who as citizens transmit the needs of bourgeois society to the state, in order, ideally, to transform political into 'rational' authority within the medium of this public sphere (Habermas 1974, 52-53).1 Habermas reconstructs the model of the liberal public sphere on the basis of the human rights written into preambles of early democratic constitutions. In this normative model we have on the one hand the democratic state, designated as a public authority because it has to operate in public interest of all citizens, and on the other hand a relatively autonomous civil society (Bürgerliche Gesellschaft) in the context of which private citizens, with constitutional guarantee of private autonomy, pursue their own private interests, and at the same time participate in the formation of public opinion and general will. Habermas's central claim is that the public sphere, in the context of which private citizens publicly discuss their interests in a rational manner, should be the sphere of mediation between citizens' interests and the state. Habermas uses Rousseau's idea of democracy, articulated in The Social Contract, as a political system in which decision-making in political institutions of the state has to enact the general will of the people. However, as Rousseau argued that the general will results from unity of hearts not arguments, Habermas complemented the idea of general will with Kant's appeal, made in his famous article, What is Enlightenment? (Kant 1999b), that people should make the "public use of reason," i.e., that people should reason publicly about matters of general interest. The crucial question is how the general will of people comes about. Habermas's central claim, which marks his social and political philosophy from his early writings to the present day, is that if public discussions about competing interests are made in a form of rational argumentation, the particularism of private interests can be transformed into a rationally articulated general interest of citizens. "Public debate was supposed to transform voluntas into a ratio that in the public competition of private arguments came into being as the consensus about what was practically necessary in the interest of all" (Habermas 1962/1989, 83). According to Habermas, public debates are supposed to lead to the consensus of opinion that is rational, and simultaneously represents the embodiment of the democratic will of private citizens acting publicly, in a sense of transforming the particularism of interests into the universal agreement of what is good and necessary for a society as a whole. Republican and Liberal Visions of Democracy Habermas's analysis in the Structural Transformations of Public Sphere shows in the kernel the collision of a republican and liberal vision of democracy, that he in his later work tries to integrate into his own version of discourse model of the public sphere. The republican idea of democracy is historically prior, as it is related to the ancient Athenian democracy, the Roman Republic and city states in the Italian Renaissance, and is associated with writings of Aristotle, Cicero, Machiavelli and Rousseau. As an idea of participatory democracy, it starts with the idea of citizens' active participation in governance, with the rule of the people, what is called the principle of "popular sovereignty." The principle of positive freedom is expressed in people's direct participation in political decision-making. Habermas calls it the principle of public autonomy (Habermas 1998, 67). A political order is legitimate if it is an embodiment of the general will of the people. For republicanism the people are above an individual. The conflict between particular interests is resolved because citizens participate in the enactment of a collective "vision of the good life," i.e., in a traditional system of values and beliefs on which community is based. In the Structural Transformations of Public Sphere Habermas detects this republican idea in various aspects of the public sphere, especially in the Rousseau's concept of the general will and in the public (das Publikum) as a "body of citizens," united as social macrosubject, as "the bearer of public opinion." In contrast, liberalism is a modern political philosophy of representative democracy, associated with Locke, Kant, Bentham and J.S. Mill. It is based on ideas of freedom, human rights, rule of law and constitution as a basic social contract that defines rights as basic constitutional norms. It is grounded in the concept of the individual and her freedom that should be granted to her to the largest possible degree, limited only with the equal freedom of other individuals. This is the concept of negative freedom, i.e. freedom from external coercion and interventions. Habermas associates it with the private autonomy of individuals (Habermas 1998, 72). The second key concept of liberalism is equality of all citizens before the law. The realisation of both principles is possible only if the constitution grants and protects basic human rights and liberties. In contrast with republicanism, which is grounded in substantial ethical values that emerge from particular traditions of the community, liberalism emphasises ethical neutrality of the legal and political y order. Visions of good life that impart substantial ethical norms and ways of life are the matter of private moral autonomy, specifically, of freedom of conscience. Political, administrative and judicial institutions are supposed to value neutrally in relation to private worldviews of its citizens. Legitimate are those decisions and actions of the institutions of the state that follow legally prescribed procedures. Citizens are free and equal before the law, so the operations of the institutions of the state have to treat them with impartiality, irrespective of their particular worldviews or specific ways of life. In the Structural Transformations of Public Sphere the liberal model of public sphere, based on rights and liberties, plays the central role in Habermas's definition. In contrast to the republican model of democracy, based on external authority of traditional forms of life and collective beliefs, liberalism has a problem how to justify particular rights and liberties that have to be neutral in relation to traditional beliefs. The question is what are the norms that represent "constitutional essentials," and other important laws and regulations and how are they justified. In order to solve C > this problem, thinkers associated with a liberal political tradition introduced the idea of the public use of reason. As we indicated above, Kant famously requested that people get rid of the tutelage by external authorities and find courage to use their reason autonomously. The central idea of the Structural Transformations of Public Sphere is that the public discourse is a discourse of argumentative public debate on important issues of general interest. Commenting on Rousseau's republican ^ and Kant's liberal vision of public sphere, Habermas concludes: "the principle of popular sovereignty could be realised only under the precondition of a public use of reason" (Habermas 1989, 107). Public argumentation as a mechanism for producing and testing norms that regulate a political order is the central topic not only of his idea of public sphere, both the early and later versions, but of his social and political theory in general. In the following we will present Habermas's idea of communicative rationality and then compare it with Kant's idea of practical reason and Rawls's idea of public reason. Public Reason as Counterfactual Idea of Communicative Rationality In order to solve the question of public debates as a social mechanism capable of producing rationally justified norms, Habermas developed in subsequent decades a series of complex theories that cover various aspects of public communication, opinion formation and political system. He developed the theory of communicative action (Habermas 1984), situated it in the context of social theory based on the distinction between system and lifeworld (Habermas 1987), then proceeded to construct the theory of discourse ethics as a theory of practical discourse (1990; 1994) and finally he constructed the model of discourse democracy as his take on political and legal theory (1996; 1998). One of his contemporary critics admits that his theory is "far more ambitious than any other present-day Western philosophy and might well merit Habermas the title of being the last system-builder in Western philosophy" (Steinhoff 2009, vii). The central element of Habermas's social and political theory is his concept of communicative action.2 It provides the model of discursive dialogue as a process of reaching understanding among participants. Let me briefly present the version of communicative action that Habermas calls "formal pragmatics." Namely, this version articulates his most important ideas of argumentative interaction oriented towards reaching rational consensus among the participants.3 It is a model of communication as pro et contra argumentation in a case that participants of interaction reject one or more statements as invalid. According to Habermas, in dialogue, each speaker with her speech acts poses to her interlocutors implicit claims to recognise the validity of her statements. Other participants can perceive her statements as unproblematic and as implicitly valid or, on the contrary, as invalid and reject one or more of them. If the statement is rejected, the process of argumentation can be set in motion that tests if the statement in question is grounded by sufficient reasons. In dialogic argumentation process, each participant offers warrants for her statements, and, in conditions of "ideal speech situation," the force of better argument prevails. In other words, if participants respect the force of better argument, they are motivated to rationally accept the best argument, so under ideal conditions the process ends with rational consensus and mutual recognition. Habermas interprets this interactive nature of communication as the "validity basis of speech," namely that the speech acts in dialogue are meaningful if and only if they are recognised as valid by interlocutors (Habermas 1979, 31-33). According to Habermas, the validity of statements can be tested in relation to truth, moral correctness and sincerity. Speakers can make three types of "validity claims": truth claims, when the statements relate to the facts (objective world); moral rightness claims, when the statement refers to relations with others and to socially valid norms that regulate social relations (social world); sincerity claim, when the statement is an expression of intentions, opinions or other mental states (subjective world). On the basis of three types of claims Habermas distinguishes between theoretical discourse (science), practical discourse (morality) and, in relation to the third claim, aesthetic criticism (authenticity) or therapeutic discourse (sincerity). If in argumentative dialogue the validity of statements is tested and recognised on the basis of better argument, communicative interaction embodies communicative rationality. The concept of communicative rationality carries with it connotations based ultimately on the central experience of the unconstrained, unifying consensus bringing force of argumentative speech, in which different participants overcome their merely subjective views and, owing to the mutuality of rationally motivated conviction, assure themselves of both the unity of the objective world and the intersubjectivity of their lifeworld (Habermas 1984, 10). But there is an important counterfactual provision: communicative rationality requires conditions of unconstrained argumentative speech based on the force of better argument. An "ideal speech situation" presupposes4 symmetry and impartiality among the participants of interaction, unlimited access to the debate, equal opportunity to make a contribution, unlimited amount of time to discuss the issues and that all participants are treated as equals, irrespective of their social status. Only under these conditions communicative rationality can be manifested. Habermas admits that the ideal speech situation is counterfactual, although he claims that the real speech situation can approximate the ideal conditions and that the participants have to presuppose the existence of sufficient conditions if they want to present the results of their debate as rationally grounded. This counterfactual status of communicative rationality will be one of the central topics of the rest of the article. In order to elucidate the problem, we will make a brief comparison with Kant's ethics and Rawls's idea of public reason. Kant's Practical Reason, Universal Norms and Moral Autonomy Immanuel Kant was the first who tried to solve the liberal dilemma of how to justify basic rights and liberties without reference to external authority or tradition. He linked the ideas of practical reason, self-legislation and modern moral autonomy. His deontological ethics is based on freedom of the autonomous subject, on equal and reciprocal relations between the subjects and on the idea of practical reason. The reciprocity of relations has been from the ancient times often defined by the Golden Rule, articulated in many variations, e.g. "do unto others as you would have them do unto you," or negatively, "do not do to others what you would not wish them to do to you" (Honderich 2005, 348).5 In Kant's view, individuals are free, but individual freedom is limited by equal freedom of other individuals. ^ Kant's concept of freedom is not voluntaristic in the sense of absolute free choice (Willkür) of the individual; Kant understands freedom as actions of individuals in accordance with her will (Wille) that is bound by judgments of practical reason. Practical reason is the capacity to recognise which actions are moral and just and which are not. So defined, practical reason enables free self-rule of autonomous subjects. Moral autonomy makes people in principle independent external authorities and traditional moral values. "At the core of moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant is the claim that morality centres on the law that human beings impose on themselves, necessarily providing themselves, in doing so, with a motive to obey. Kant speaks of agents who are morally self-governed in this way as autonomous" (Schneewind 1998, 483). Moral judgments' of practical reason are in Kant's ethics regulated by the categorical imperative.6 It requires that an individual acts always in accordance with norms that can be universalised. The categorical imperative is specified by the formula: "act only according to that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law" (Kant 2011, 71). Universality of norms implies reciprocity, because they are equally acceptable for everyone. Reciprocity is further defined by the second formula of the categorical imperative which states that "persons are to be treated always as ends and never merely as means" (Kant 2011, 85). Practical reasoning of each enables her to judge which norms are in each case universal, so she autonomously constructs moral norms that she is obliged to follow. The norms that pass the categorical imperative test, i.e. that are recognised as universal, are moral and embody justice. For Kant, Habermas and Rawls moral norms that passed the test of the categorical imperative have priority over the good, which means that universal norms have priority over values that emerge from cultural tradition.7 This is Kant's definition of a free and autonomous individual, liberated from any kind of external authority, especially traditional worldviews, and at the same time absolutely bound to moral norms provided by judgment of her own practical reason. In this context Kant develops his Universal Principle of Right that forms the basis of all his political and legal philosophy: "Any action is right if it can coexist with everyone's freedom in accordance with a universal law, or if on its maxim the freedom of choice of each can coexist with everyone's freedom in accordance with a universal law" (Kant 1999a, 387). Kant's categorical imperative is a procedure that enables us to judge validity and rational acceptability of moral norms. It is characteristic of proceduralism in ethics and political philosophy that it prescribes procedures of reasoning and judgment without offering substantial moral norms. Habermas and Rawls are proceduralists as well: each develops his model of the procedure for testing the validity of norms, which derives strongly from Kant prototype. But there is a difference. Kant's procedure is monological self-reflection of transcendental subject while Habermas and Rawls attempt to build their models on the idea of dialogue. On the ground of the principles of practical reason, Kant deduced that each one of us in her own moral judgment comes to the identical conclusion, so he saw no need for dialog.8 But Kant's ethics is part of his transcendental idealism that is very much part of his own time and culture of enlightened absolutism at the end of the 18th century. The culture of liberal democracies at the end of the 20th century, immersed in deep crisis of Western rationalism, requires a different approach. Habermas developed a strong version of dialogism associated with his idea of communicative action, Rawls a weak version embodied in his idea of original position and public reason. Both Habermas and Rawls have in common a strong "Kantian constructivism," based on individual liberty, moral autonomy, constitutional rights and a counterfactual mechanism for providing valid norms. First I will briefly present Rawls's model of original position and his take on public reason, then I will elaborate on Habermas's discursive ethics and discourse theory of democracy and public sphere. Rawls's Original Position and the Idea of Public Reason John Rawls developed his idea of "justice as fairness" in the context of his in 1971 first published A Theory of Justice (Rawls 1999). It has been designated as egalitarian liberalism (Nagel 2003, 62) with a strong social concern for the part of the society that is worst off. As a liberal political philosopher he advanced the idea of justice as fairness that grants "each person equal basic liberties" and "fair equality of opportunity," and, with the so-called "difference principle," diverges from strict equality and grants the "greatest benefit to the least-advantaged members of society" (Rawls 2001, 42). This is the so-called distributive justice as political philosophy of welfare state liberalism. Rawls situates his theory in the tradition of social contract theory that includes Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Kant (Hampton 1995): social contract theories start with the counterfactual hypothesis that people emerged from a pre-political natural state that, by composing a contract, introduced political order which transformed them into citizens. The introduction of social contract is conceived as an act of rational agreement on basic normative rules that constitute a just and well-ordered society (Kymlicka 2002, 60-61). From our perspective, the most interesting part of Rawls's theory of justice is how the members of society reach a reasonable agreement on principles of justice. He calls this counterfactual thought experiment the "original position." It is conceived as a counterfactual "device" that makes possible autonomous self-legislation in such a way as to enable people to reach a reasonable agreement on universal y norms that represent the best possible social contract. The key element of the device is the so-called "veil of ignorance": the citizens discussing in a rational and cooperative manner about basic norms for regulating social order, have, like the goddess of justice, their eyes covered in order to temporarily suspend their knowledge of their particular social position and real life circumstances (Rawls 1999, 102-170; Freeman 2007, 141-197). The veil of ignorance should ensure impartial and non-selfish judgment on norms that are truly universal; it is supposed to establish unbiased reasoning on the universal validity of norms. Rawls claims that the veil of ignorance is implicit in Kant's categorical imperative (Rawls 1999, 118, 122). The suspension of knowledge about social status, professional and other social roles, religion, ideology etc. should exclude egoistic self-interests and value-laden worl-dviews that cause disagreements. It is supposed to motivate the participants to be impartial, reasonable and to respect the principle of reciprocity. Rawls claims that in the original position rational participants would come to the conclusion that his principles of justice as fairness are exactly the best solution. Since the participants lack the knowledge about their position in life and cannot be sure on what kind of position they will find themselves, they grant every member of society the max-PQ imum degree of freedom and equality as well as reasonable social conditions for 0 C ¥ I C > those that are the worst off. But the dialog in the original position is weak because the outcome of the debate is known in advance. In the nineties Rawls restated his theory of justice as political liberalism (Rawls 1996). He developed the "the idea of public reason" that is another formulation of the device that aims to provide at least minimal agreement on "constitutional essential and other matters of basic justice." Let me briefly present those elements of Rawls's idea of public debates that are significant for Habermas's theory of public reasoning. First, Rawls allows only "reasonable people" to participate in the debates, the ones that will be "ready to propose principles and standards as fair terms of cooperation and to abide by them willingly" (Rawls 1996, 49). This is another way of conveying what Habermas introduces with the "ideal speech situation," namely that a rational public debate does require a series of counterfactual presuppositions like respect for the force of better argument etc. Second, for Rawls the only appropriate topics of public reason are the so-called "constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice" which limits the topics of public discussions. In addition, Rawls introduces "nonpublic reasons" of civil society that belong to what he calls "background culture": in relation to nonpublic reasons, he mentions "churches, universities and many other associations of civil society" (Rawls 1996, 2013). This exclusion refers especially to the so-called "comprehensive doctrines": Rawls strictly excludes religious or metaphysical doctrines from public argumentation, because they are experienced as all-encompassing sets of beliefs and personal convictions that cannot be reasonable discussed: ...basic feature of democracy is the fact of reasonable pluralism—the fact that a plurality of conflicting reasonable comprehensive doctrines, religious, philosophical, and moral, is the normal result of its culture of free institutions. Citizens realise that they cannot reach agreement or even approach mutual understanding on the basis of their irreconcilable comprehensive doctrines. In view of this, they need to consider what kinds of reasons they may reasonably give one another when fundamental political questions are at stake (Rawls 1996, 573-74). Third, in order to mitigate these restrictions, Rawls introduces a weak version of rational agreement that he calls "overlapping consensus." It allows a public agreement to be reached on the basis of different reasons by different consenting parties. Since a reasonable agreement is so difficult to reach, it doesn't matter what kind of reasons motivate different parties to accept it. As we will see, Habermas take up a rational agreement about social norms is different in at least last two respects. First, Habermas allows "comprehensive doctrines" to enter into public discussions with the provision that "the right has priority over the good," or in Habermas's vocabulary we used above, universal moral norms have priority over ethical values that are part of particular cultural traditions. And secondly, Habermas rejects the idea of overlapping consensus with the argument that consensus over norms has to be made for the same reasons, otherwise public debates would lose their cognitive dimension. For Habermas, deontological ethics is "cognitive ethics" that can help us realise which norms and actions are universal, and can be generalised as laws in a legislative process. So he argues for a stronger version of rational agreement, based exclusively on better arguments.9 Discourse Ethics and Typology of Public Discourses The core idea of communicative action was further developed in the most consequential manner in discourse ethics. Its aim is to develop discourse theory of morality, politics and law. It is Habermas's extension of Kant's concept of practical reason. With his dialogic approach, Habermas translates Kant's practical reason into his concept of practical discourse. It is a "reconstruction of Immanuel Kant's idea of practical reason that turns on a reformulation of his categorical imperative: Rather than prescribing to others as valid norms that I can will to be universal laws, I must submit norms to others for purposes of discursively testing their putative universality" (McCarthy 2006, 91). He develops a series of principles that regulate various types of discourses in order to define discursive testing of validity of norms in public communication, primarily in legislative, administrative and legal processes. The basis of discourse ethics is the discourse principle (D): "Only those norms are valid to which all affected persons could agree as participants in rational discourses" (Habermas 1996, 107). Habermas positions the discourse principle as principle of impartial justification for various types of practical discourse that depends on the type of questions debated and on who are affected by those questions. According to Habermas, there are various types of discourse principles that can be applied to different types of discourse. Universal validity is present only in a very limited number of public discourses, primarily in moral and legal discourses. Habermas derives from the discourse dialogical principle of universalisation (U): "A norm is valid when the foreseeable consequences and side effects of its general observance for the interests and value-orientations of each individual could be jointly accepted by all concerned without coercion" (Habermas 1998, 42). This general rule of discourse ethics, which applies to all types of norms, does not necessarily possess the universal validity claim, e.g. "ethical values" are valid only for a particular community that observes them. Moral norms, and laws, have to fulfil the universal validity claim. Habermas defines public discourse as the process of rational "opinion- and will-formation." Namely, society is confronted with various social, economic and political problems that have to be solved by various social subsystems. Problems are often initiated and discussed in a wide-ranging public sphere of civil society, opinion is formed and social subsystems act if a particular problem falls within their field of relevance, competence and jurisdiction. In the following we will limit our analysis primarily on operations of a political subsystem. As Habermas emphasises, the political system acts in the "medium of law," i.e., political decisions have a "legal form" of laws, administrative decisions and the like. Habermas op-erationalises his concept of "practical discourse" in typology of public discourses 3 a public sphere there are, according to Habermas, the following types of discourse: pragmatic, ethical-political, moral and legal discourse; as a special case he adds bargaining as well (Habermas 1996, 157-168). Pragmatic discourse is the most common and widespread discourse, and it concerns pragmatic questions of effective collective actions. Habermas adopts Parson's idea of a political system aimed at making decisions that enable effective pursuit of collective goals. The questions PQ of pragmatic discourse concern the formation of collective will in solving practi- cal problems in pursuit of collective goals, especially the questions of means to achieve collective goals. For example, the ways and means in building efficient ro social transport infrastructure is a question of pragmatic discourse. Ethical-political ^ discourse refers to particular traditional worldviews and lifestyles that concern social groups in the form of religions, ideologies as well as professional, ethnic, racial and gender identities. These traditions are associated with special collective "forms of life" and substantial values. Ethical-political discourse overlaps with Rawls's "comprehensive doctrines." This type of discourse is manifested if the speaker appeals to the audience that consists of particular social groups in the first person plural, for example, with phrases like "we Christians," or "we scientists," or "we social democrats," or "we modern women," or "we Germans." Ethical-political discourse provides values that are part of a particular social identity and can help define collective goals. In contemporary multi-cultural societies there can be collision between different ethical-political discourses of different traditions and ways of life, for example the practice of female circumcision, that have to be resolved with reference to moral discourse. In case that public debate refers to the issue of human rights of a particular minority, then moral discourse has priority over other types of discourse. For example, reproductive rights of women and their choice concerning their progeny cannot be subordinated to ethical-political discourse or pragmatic discourse; it cannot be argued that female freedom of choice concerning progeny should be curtailed because it collides with values of a particular religion or because it would be economically more expedient to prohibit certain medical procedures. As Habermas puts it, the right has priority over the good, or as Rawls puts it, justice has priority over the good. Moral discourse represents the highest ranking device for testing the validity of norms. "For the justification of moral norms, the discourse principle takes the form of an universalisation principle. To this extent, the moral principle functions as a rule of argumentation" (Habermas1996, 109). Moral discourse is concerned with universal moral questions and with the highest constitutional norms that have to be just; other legislation can incorporate other, pragmatic or ethnic-political interests as well, but these interests cannot collide with constitutional norms or moral norms that have priority over all other interests. All legal norms as well as political and judicial decisions and procedures have to be consistent with the constitution and with the universal principles of justice. Legal discourse is discourse of courts of law and is the highest test of legality and legitimacy of all formally accepted laws and regulations. It is concerned with the questions of coherence of legal norms in general and especially with the consistency of all legal norms with constitutional norms. Higher courts supervise judgments and procedures of lower courts, and the highest constitutional court has the role of supervision that ensures coherence of all legal norms with the constitution. Legal discourse has to embody justice, so it has to be tested by moral discourse. Coherence of laws with the constitution requires universalisation. The problem we will address next is the problem of disagreement. In political procedures in institutions of the state rational consensus is attainable only in exceptional cases. In order to solve the problem of lack of agreement, Habermas adds to his description of democratic procedures two classical mechanisms of conflict resolution, bargaining and voting. He introduces a "procedurally regulated bargaining" as a mechanism of fair negotiation and achievement of compromise in conflicts of interests (Habermas 1996, 108). The mechanism of majority vote enables to resolve the lack of agreement in political institutions. With the help of these two mechanisms "communicative power" of unconstrained public debate is translated into "administrative power" and, correspondingly, practical discourse into legal discourse (Baxter 2011, 95). But the inclusion of these two mechanisms does not mean that political procedures can be reduced to bargaining and voting. It requires, prior to the decision-making, a wide-ranging debate in the public sphere and in institutions of the state. And the formal political decision does not close the issue forever, but represents only a temporary interruption of the debate on the issue: if the party that lost the vote strongly disagrees with the decision made, it can formally reopen the issue at the first opportunity. "Habermas's idea of democracy, then, involves much more than formal governmental institutions and periodic voting rituals. It requires broad, active, and ongoing participation by the citizenry" (Baxter 2011, 85). From Counterfactual Principles to Practical Realisation of Discourse in Public Sphere Habermas further defines political procedures aimed at solving social problems. Debates in institutions of the state have to come to a close in effective decision-making in a legislative, administrative or judicial process. In order to describe political processes, Habermas translates his discourse principle into the principle of democracy: "Only those statutes may claim legitimacy that can meet with the assent of all citizens in a discursive process of legislation that in turn has been legally constituted" (Habermas 1996, 110). Legitimacy is defined by rational assent of all those citizens that are affected by political decisions. But it is evident that rarely, if ever, all affected citizens assent to a particular legislation or decisions of the state. Even if citizens deny their rational assent to particular legal norms and regulations, those norms and regulations are still legally valid if they were made in a legally correct procedure. Norms can have contested legitimacy, but they are in this case still legally valid. In this case, however, the question can be what the use is of all these counterfactual principles for testing the validity of norms if there is no immediate practical effect in empirical reality. What does it mean to propose a whole series of counterfactual principles that are in contradiction with empirical reality? We strongly argue that these counterfactual principles can have an effect on empirical reality, but they require citizens that participate and actively argue in the public sphere. Counterfactual devices are heuristic methods that help us analyse existing normative structures and question them in a very practical manner, one piece of legislation after another, one political decision after another. If in a society under critical consideration, legal structures with questionable legitimacy have been detected that lack rational assent of citizens that violate human rights of citizens, they should be actively criticised by the citizens that participate in the public sphere. In his discourse theory of law and democracy, Habermas extensively reworked his early idea of public sphere (Habermas 1996, 329-388). He situated it in the concept of political system constructed on the difference of the centre and the periphery: in the centre there are central institutions of the state, i.e. the legislative, executive and judicial government, and on the periphery there is civil society conceived as the PQ source of popular sovereignty. In the intermediate zone there are various represen- C > tative institutions for mediating various interests, nongovernmental organisations like unions, professional and industrial associations as well as cultural institutions like mass media, universities, theatres, galleries etc. The political system is metaphorically defined as a system of sluices that channels public communication from unconstrained and wild discussions on the periphery to more focused debates on decision making in central institutions of the state. The communicative power of citizens, manifested in the strength and sharpness of their public arguments, can influence public opinion that have an effect on institutions of the states in the centre. The "process of discursive opinion- and will-formation" that is, metaphorically speaking, moving from the periphery to the centre and back again, is supposed to influence deliberations and decisions in central institutions of the state. Habermas distinguishes between the public sphere emerging from civil society, conceived as an open communicative network, and a narrow institutionalised political public sphere of state institutions (Habermas 1996, 307). A "weakpublic" (Schwaches Publikum) is wide and "wild" pluralistic public, emerging in the process of discursive opinion- and will-formation that freely evolves without being held back by formal procedures. It emanates from myriad episodic interactions in intersubjective networks of civil society, and from an "open and inclusive network of overlapping subcultural public spheres." Structures of wide public sphere emerge out of civil society spontaneously and self-referential-ly as "subjectless forms of communication," as communication flows, carrying information, comments and arguments on important social problems. Habermas designates the wide public sphere of civil society as the "context of discovery" of important issues that appear as problems in civil society; individuals and groups in civil society and representatives of intermediate institutions make these issues public with their debates triggering the process of opinion- and will-formation of the citizens. On the other hand, "institutional public spheres"(veranstalteten Öffentlichkeiten) are formed by public deliberations that inform formal procedures of decision-making in state institutions oriented towards the solution of social problems. Habermas calls institutional public spheres the "context of justification" because deliberations are geared towards decisions that have to be justified according to the constitutional and legal framework as well as to formal procedures regulating institutional decision-making. The process of discursive opinion- and will-formation has to be seen in the context of "two-track concept of democracy." In the wide public sphere of civil society, issues are debated and public opinion is formed, and in the institutional public sphere they are deliberated upon in the process of political decision-making: "...binding decisions, to be legitimate, must be steered by communication flows that start at the periphery and pass through the sluices of democratic and constitutional procedures situated at the entrance to the parliamentary complex or the courts (and, if necessary, at the exit of the implementing administration as well)" (Habermas 1996, 356). Conclusion Habermas himself often shows a bit of scepticism on his counterfactual presuppositions. "These argumentative presuppositions obviously contain such strong idealisations that they raise the suspicion of a rather tendentious description of argumentation. How should it be at all possible for participants in argumentation performatively to proceed from such obviously counterfactual assumptions?" (Habermas 2003, 107). If the counterfactual ideals about communicative rationality and legitimacy of the political order are taken seriously, many parts of the existing political systems become questionable. But, on the one hand, this should instigate citizens to actively participate in public debates and deliberative politics of the political system in order to reform the system for the better. On the other hand, Habermas emphasises that the order of liberal democracy, as he sees it, is worthy of "constitutional patriotism": he defines this concept by the political culture of citizens' identification with constitutional norms and the rule of law. He argues that liberal democracy is the system of self-legislation of citizens that is constitutionally arranged in such a way that citizens can exercise their private and public autonomy (Habermas 1998, 118). If citizens disagree with particular legal norms or regulations, and deny their rational assent, they should themselves engage into corrective political actions. In liberal democracy there is no one else but active citizens themselves that have to engage and lead the reforms of the social and political order in a desired way. In practical terms, institutions of liberal democracy allow citizens to engage in public debates in a wide-ranging public sphere of civil society as well as to participate in formal political processes by voting or active political actions in the public arena and formal political institutions. In his early concept of the public sphere, Habermas launched his famous thesis on "refeudalisation of modern public sphere." Several factors, most notably private lobbying of strong interest groups, interventions of the state into civil society and commercialisation of mass media, caused depolitisation of the public sphere in the middle of the 20th century. In his revisit and rearticulation of the public sphere theory in the nineties, he launched another thesis that seem especially relevant today, namely that a strong social crisis revives the structures of the public sphere and mobilises citizens to active participation. In a crisis citizens begin to question the status quo, inequalities, injustices, and develop a new vision of political society. As he wrote: "... in more or less power-ridden public spheres, the power relations shift as soon as the perception of relevant social problems evokes a crisis consciousness at the periphery. If actors from civil society then join together, formulate the relevant issue, and promote it in the public sphere, their efforts can be successful ..." (Habermas 1996, 382). In the decade after the financial crash of 2008, the crisis ft has become substantial especially for the citizens of Europe and the United States. Q Deindustrialisation of developed countries, caused by outsourcing and robotisation as well as by continuous attempts by the moneyed class to lower wages and working conditions of labour, resulted in a permanent crisis in the developed world, especially among the young generation. If the new social movements are to emerge, we argue that Habermas's theory of public reason is a good heuristic tool for critical analysis of society and for active political engagement in the public sphere. £ ^ of action aimed at coordinating individual actions into a collective action (Habermas 1979; Notes: 1. Quoted from Habermas 1974, because it is slightly better formulation and translation than nearly identical passage in Habermas 1989, 222. 2. In various publications Habermas developed three intertwined, but distinct versions of communicative interaction: first, communicative action is conceived as a sociological theory Habermas 1984, 273-337); second, universal pragmatics, later renamed formal pragmatics, uses the advanced philosophy of language in order to describe the process of validity testing of speech jv^ acts (ibid.); and third, discursive ethics uses the idea of dialogical argumentative testing as a p") mechanism for testing the validity of norms in "practical discourse" (Habermas 1990; 1994; 1996). The concept of communicative action as a sociological action theory is the most central and at the same time the weakest element of Habermas's theoretical edifice (Steinhoff 2009, 5-49; Ingram 2010, 83-95). We cannot go into critical analysis here, but let me put the problem of Habermas's action theory in a nutshell: first, every action is by definition goal-directed purposive behaviour, what Habermas somehow pejoratively designates instrumental/strategic action; secondly, there is no specific type of empirical actions (in a sense of observable regular pattern) that would be oriented exclusively towards reaching understanding, as Habermas defines communicative action. It follows that Habermas's idea of communicative action fails on conceptual and empirical levels as a sociological action theory. But we argue in this article that his idea of communicative action is plausible enough both as formal pragmatics and as discursive ethics. The difference between sociological action theory and the other two is that both formal pragmatics and discourse ethics can be plausibly interpreted on the counterfactual level. 3. Formal pragmatics (first called universal pragmatics) is Habermas's interpretation of Paul Grice and Michael Dummett philosophy of language and his appropriation of the theory of speech acts by John L. Austin and John Searle in order to articulate his vision of discursive interaction (Habermas 1979; 1984, 286-337). These topics have later become standard elements of philosophical and linguistic pragmatics. 4. Because of the importance of the concept, let me quote one of the first Habermas's formulations of the "ideal speech situation": "... my intention to reconstruct the general symmetry conditions that every competent speaker must presuppose are sufficiently satisfied ... Participants in argumentation have to presuppose in general that the structure of their communication ... excludes all force - whether it arises from within the process of reaching understanding itself or influences it from the outside - except the force of the better argument" (Habermas 1984, 25). 5. Kant's own ethical theory is prima facie close to the Golden Rule, so he notes (Kant 2011, 88n; Sullivan 1994, 77) that the Golden Rule is not specific enough, because it does not include relations to the self. 6. Besides categorical imperative there are also hypothetical imperatives, but they do not concern us here. This brief summary of some of the elements of Kant's ethics cannot be systematic; it serves as the stepping stone for understanding Habermas and Rawls. For a good overview of Kant's ethics see Sullivan 1989, Uleman 2010. 7. The "good life" or the "vision of good life" as defined in classical ethics of Aritstotle; his ethics and politics are closely connected, individual ethos is shaped by collective ethos, and vision of good life is understood as cultural tradition of the community that is the source of substantive moral values (Frede 2013). It corresponds to Hegel's idea of Sittlichkeit that refers to mores, i.e., to traditional ways of life of the community, to religion or to other collective worldviews that shape people's beliefs, habits, customs and social lifestyles (Rawls 2000, 349 f.). 8. Kant's transcendentalism is the object of Habermas's critique that attempts to detranscendentalise Kant's ethics, which in Habermas's interpretation starts with Hegel's critique of Kant's formalism and with Hegel's situating the problem of historical context. See Habermas, From Kant to Hegel and Back Again: The Move toward Detranscendentalisation, in Habermas 2003. 9. For discussion on similarities and differences between Habermas and Rawls, see Finlayson, Freyenhagen 2013. References: Baxter, Hugh. 2011. Habermas: Discourse Theory of Law & Democracy. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Frede, Dorothea. 2013. Political Character of Aristotle's Ethics. In M. Deslauriers and P. Destree (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle's Politics, 14-37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Freeman, Samuel. 2007. Rawls. London: Routledge. Finlayson, James Gordon and Fabian Freyenhagen, eds. 2013. Habermas and Rawls: Disputing the Political. London: Routledge. Goode, Luke. 2005. Habermas, Democracy and Public Sphere. London: Pluto. Habermas, Jürgen. 1974. The Public Sphere: An Encyclopaedia Article. New German Critique 3, 49-55. Habermas Jürgen. 1979. What Is Universal Pragmatics. In T. McCarthy (ed.), Communication and Evolution of Society. Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1984. Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1: Reason and Rationalization of Society. London: Heinemann. Habermas, Jürgen. 1987. Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2: Lifeworld and System. Cambridge: Polity. Habermas, Jürgen. 1989. Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1990. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Cambridge: Polity. Habermas, Jürgen. 1994. Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics. Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1998. Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory. Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press. Habermas, Jürgen and Eduardo Mendieta. 2002. Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity. Cambridge: Polity. Habermas, Jürgen. 2003. Truth and Justification. Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 2008. Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essay. Cambridge: Polity. Hampton, Jean. 1995. Contract and Consent. In R. Goodin and P. Pettit (ed.), A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, 379-393. Oxford: Blackwell. Ingram, David. 2010. Habermas: Introduction and Analysis. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1999a. Metaphysics of Morals. In M. Gregor (ed.), Practical Philosophy, 353-605. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1999b. An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? In M. Gregor (ed.), Practical Philosophy, 353-605. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 2011. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Moral: German-English Edition. Mary J. Gregor ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kymlicka, Will. 2002. Contemporary Political Philosophy, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McCarthy, Thomas. 1993. Ideals & Illusions: On Reconstruction and Deconstruction in Critical Theory. Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press. Nagel, Thomas. 2003. Rawls and Liberalism. In S. Freeman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, 62-85. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rawls, John. 1996. Political Liberalism - With New Introduction and the "Reply to Habermas." New York: Columbia University Press. Rawls, John. 1999. A Theory of Justice, 2nd ed. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press. Rawls, John. 2000. Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press. Rawls, John. 2001. Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press. Rehg, William. 1994. Insight and Solidarity: The Discourse Ethics of J. Habermas. Berkley: University of California Press. Schneewind, Jerome B. 1998. The Invention of Autonomy. A History of Modern Moral Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sullivan, Roger. 1989. Immanuel Kant's Moral Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steinhoff, Uwe. 2009. Philosophy of Jürgen Habermas - Introduction and Critique. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Uleman, Jennifer. 2010. Introduction to Kant's Moral Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. £ 0 £ i C (jü 00 m (DIS)LIKE FACEBOOK? DIALECTICAL AND CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON SOCIAL MEDIA Abstract Apart from a few exceptions, there are no studies combining critical theoretical and empirical research in the context of social media. The overall aim of my article is to study the constraints and emancipatory potentials of web 2.0 and to assess to what extent social media can contribute to strengthen the idea of the communication and network commons and a commons-based information society. I follow an emancipatory research interest being based on a critical theory and political economy approach in three sections: I provide some foundational concepts of a critical theory of media, technology and society in section one. The task of section two is to study the users' knowledge, attitudes, and practices towards the potentials and risks of social media. This section can be considered as a case study of the critical theory and dialectics of media, technology, and society. In section three, I raise the question if technological and/or social changes are required in order to bring about real social media. Section three furthermore discusses political implications and draws some conclusions. THOMAS ALLMER Thomas Allmer is a postdoctoral fellow at the Unified Theory of Information Research Group, Austria; e-mail thomas.allmer@uti.at. LO Cfi m d cp rN o o rN rN 15 > A 3 a 0 z * 1 (I) 0 C « Ch m Introduction We live in times of global capitalist crisis, widespread precarious labour, and rising inequality between the rich and the poor.1 The Occupy movement can be considered as part of response to such developments questioning capitalist logics (Harvey 2012, 159). The Occupy movement has claimed that large corporations and the global financial system control the world that benefits a minority and undermines democracy. The movement used social media including social networking sites such as Facebook for communicating their protest on a global scale (see: http://occupywallst.org). But Facebook is one of these large corporations and part of the global financial system. Facebook's revenue has increased by a factor of 18.7 from 272 million USD in 2008 to 5.1 billion USD in 2012 (Securities and Exchange Commission 2013). In addition, the co-founder and CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, is the 36th richest person of America with a net worth of 13.3 billion USD (Forbes 2013). Zuckerberg is part of the 1 percent in contrast to the 99 percent being criticised by the Occupy movement. The previous example indicates that the display of power and counter-power, domination and spaces of power struggles, and the commons and the commodifi-cation of the commons characterise modern society. The Internet and social media are fields of conflict in this power struggle. The media are power structures and sites of power struggles and are able to support both the expansion and the commod-ification of the commons. Social media are tools for exerting power, domination, and counter-power. Based on a critical and dialectical perspective it is possible to comprehend these contradictions occurring between emancipatory potentials of social media that imply a logic of the commons and processes of commodification and enclosure that tend to jeopardise the commons and incorporate them into the logic of capital. The overall aim of this paper is to study the objective and subjective aspects of social media and to deal with the limitations and prospects in terms of the expansion of the commons in the realm of social media. The main research questions thus are: How do the constraints and emancipatory potentials of social media look like and to what extent can social media strengthen the idea of the communication and network commons and a commons-based information society? In the positivist dispute of German sociology about the methodology of the social sciences and the philosophy of science in the 1960s, Habermas (1976, 131-162) drew the important epistemological insight that academic knowledge production is always embedded in social contexts and thus not able to be value-free, neutral, and apolitical. Empirical data are no objective observations of reality and both theoretical considerations and descriptive statements are related to normative attitudes 3 a research limits itself to empirical facts and to the analysis of the mere appearance and thereby celebrates society as it is and neglects complex and transcendental thoughts. The claim that academia should remain value-free frequently results in an affirmative and ideological agenda legitimating the status quo and undermines critical and dialectical thinking. The study at hand is based on these insights and follows a critical and emanci-^ patory research interest. I suggest a normative and partial approach giving voice to the voiceless and supporting the oppressed classes of society. Point of departure for such a critical approach is the work of Karl Marx. Marx's notion of critique derives from the humanist insight that "man is the highest being for man, that is, with the categorical imperative to overthrow all circumstances in which man is humiliated, enslaved, abandoned, and despised" (Marx 2000, 77). Marxist critique is opposed to all forms of human exploitation, domination, and oppression. Critical theory studies the dialectics of essence and appearance, considers social phenomena in the context of societal totality, is characterised by an interest in human emancipation, and conceives social reality as historical result of specific human practices and therefore as changeable (Marcuse 1988, 134-158; Horkheimer 2002, 188-243). Dialectical social criticism emphasises negations in society and supports a negation of negation for a "future society as a community of free men" (Horkheimer 2002, 217). Critical and dialectical analysis means to identify the contradictory, open, and dynamic tendencies of social phenomena that incorporate certain risks and potentials (Marcuse 1955, 312-322). Philosophy is the general scientific reflection about the human existence in the world. According to Hofkirchner (2013, 47-55), basically three fundamental questions constitute philosophy and philosophical thinking, namely the question of the ability to comprehend the world, the question of the composition of the world, and the question of the reasons to intervene in the world. The epistemological domain traditionally is concerned with the first, the ontological domain deals with the second, and the praxiological domain of philosophy considers the third question. Epistemology can be described as the philosophical theory of method, ontology as the philosophical theory of reality, and praxiology as the philosophical theory of praxis. The epistemological perspective includes knowledge and understanding, the ontological perspective comprises the being, and the praxiological perspective involves norms, values, ethics, and aesthetics. But the epistemological, ontolog-ical, and praxiological spheres are not independent and exclusive; rather, they are interconnected and mutually shape each other. Hence, there is an inclusive relationship between the epistemological, ontological, and praxiological level. Praxis builds upon reality and reality builds upon method; or speaking more generally, praxiology builds upon ontology and ontology builds upon epistemology (Hofkirchner 2013, 48). Critical and Marxian-inspired media and information studies therefore strives for the development of theoretical research methods (epistemology) in order to focus on the analysis of media, information, and communication in the context of domination, asymmetrical power relations, resource control, social struggles, exploitation, and alienation (ontology). Critical media and communication studies want to overcome social injustices and supports political processes and social transformations towards the commons and a commons-based information society (praxiology). The study at hand is thus structured according to this distinction. Section one strives for the development of theoretical foundations of the relationship between technology and society as well as privacy and surveillance (epistemology) in order to focus in section two on empirical results of social media in the context of advantages and disadvantages as well as emancipation and affirmation (ontology). Section three evaluates the prospects and limitations of the commons and com-modification of the commons in the realm of social media and argues for the need of a techno-social revolution in terms of achieving a commons-based information society (praxiology). Section one, two, and three of this study are interconnected and shape each other mutually. The recommendation to strengthen the idea of the communication and network commons and a real liberation of society is based on an empirical case study of social media in the context of emancipation and affirmation being grounded in the theoretical foundations of media, technology, and society. Section three builds upon section two and section two builds upon section one. Theoretical Foundations Feenberg (2002, 5) distinguishes between instrumental and substantive theories of technology and rejects both of them for several reasons. This section is inspired from these important findings and argues for the need of a third approach, a critical and dialectical theory of technology that understands the technological developments and dynamics as progressive and regressive and entails a moment of techno-social change (for example: Bloch 1986; Marcuse 1998). There is a mutual shaping of society and technology: Society constructs and shapes technology (design) on the one hand and technology impacts and transforms society (assessment) on the other (see Figure 1). Figure 1: Mutual Shaping of Society and Technology The mutual relationship of society and technology is a dynamic process with shaping effects onto each other (Feenberg 2002, 48; Fuchs 2008, 2-3). Humans are able to design and to control the employment of technology and technology reacts up on society. Technology is the expression and form of social relations, corresponds to a certain historical period, is not neutral, and biased (Feenberg 2002, 63). Marx indicated that capitalist forms of machinery and technology incorporate elements of domination: "By machinery ... domination of former over living labour preserves not only social - expressed in the relation between capitalist and worker - but so to say technological realization" (Marx 1982, 2059, my translation).2 Social purposes and values of capital shape technology in its design and development (Feenberg 2002, 15, 48). The technological design must be rooted in capitalist interests and social forces. Technology is not designed in a vacuum isolated from the social context. Rather, the social context forms the technological product and the corresponding labour. The dynamics of technological development are embedded into social relations and are thus no neutral dynamics. Capitalist technology is in its foundational form also ^ a technology of power and domination. The repressive elements of technology in C > capitalist societies are not solely to its applications, but technology is inherently a mean of power and domination (Marcuse 1972, 129-131). Capitalist interests do ro not only shape the employment and purpose but the design of technology. Not just the ends, but also the means of production must be transformed (Feenberg 2001, 140). Technology is a form of organisation and maintenance of social relations and a means of control and domination. The objectives of capitalist technology; that is value creation, had been defined before the actual conception and construction of technology took place. Technological control is internal to their very structure (Feenberg 2002, 51). At the same time, technology cannot be isolated from its application. For instance, employing automation in the capitalist mode of production reinforces competitive relationships between humans and machinery, the redundancy of human labour force, unemployment, poverty, alienation, exploitation, and the intensification of labour. Instead, employing technology in the automated process of production in a commons-based society could primarily help to intervene to reduce necessary labour time to a minimum in order to have time for the full development of the individual, to increase the wealth of society, and could contribute to a real liberation of humans. Modern technology has provided possible the satisfaction of needs and the reduction of toil (Marcuse 1969, 12). The technological development incorporates alternative potentials and possibilities and we do not have to "reinvent the wheel" in order to establish a real liberation of society being based on technological innovations. If we take a look at new information and communication technologies including the Internet and the corresponding struggles between competition and co-operation and the commons and the commodification of the commons, one can see the capitalist process of production has driven the productive forces forward to an extent also showing possibilities of transforming society. Technology incorporates potentials. The dynamic interaction between technological essence and appearance are the source of tensions that move the technological development in one direction or another and could bring technological potentials out. Real technological potentials could be brought to fruition having "not yet" been realised (Bloch 1986). In the appearance of capitalist technology (being-for-itself) are also technological potentials (being-in-itself) and it would be important to uncover and reveal those hidden and suppressed potentials for a real liberation of humans. A dialectical view sees the development of technology as progressive and regressive, liberating and repressive, as potential and risk. It indicates different possibilities of technological dynamics between resignation and utopia (Feenberg 2002, 13, 15). This view is neither techno-deterministic, nor socio-constructivist, neither techno-optimistic, nor techno-pessimistic, and takes into consideration the design and assessment of technology. The Internet is a techno-social system (Fuchs 2008, 121-123). It is a network of networks and consists of a technological infrastructure (technological subsystem; network of computer networks) and human actors (social subsystem; network of social networks). The technical structure enables and constrains human activities and is itself produced and reproduced by human agents. The technical structure is medium and outcome of human agency. The technological infrastructure is a materialised outcome of social action and social actions (cognition, communication, and cooperation) are based on this infrastructure. There is a mutual shaping of technology on the one and society on the other hand, in which technologies and humans are connected in a complex way, produce and reproduce each other, and have relative autonomy. Many authors have recently argued that the Internet has been transformed from a system being mainly oriented towards informational elements into a system being more oriented on enabling communication and co-operation (O'Reilly 2005; Beer and Burrows 2007; boyd and Ellison 2007). The notions of "web 2.0," "social software," "social media," "participative web," and "social network(ing) sites" (SNS) have emerged in this context. Most approaches see the active involvement of users in the production of content as the main characteristic of web 2.0. There has been an intensification and extension of informational commodities being based on knowledge, ideas, communication, relationships, emotional artefacts, and cultural content in the last decades of capitalist production (Fuchs and Sevignani 2013, 257). The emergence of corporate social software can be seen in the context of the need to find new strategies of capital accumulation under post-Fordist conditions after the dot.com crisis around the turn of the millennium. The fact that one can find social media platforms such as Facebook (rank 2), YouTube (rank 3), Twitter (rank 12), and LinkedIn (rank 13) among the most frequently accessed websites worldwide, indicates the enormous popularity of these sites (Alexa Internet 2013). When it comes to the risks of new information and communication technologies, we must look at the other side of the coin as well. There has been an extension and intensification of privacy threats and surveillance risks in economic, political, and cultural contexts in recent years being also based on the employment of various surveillance technologies. The Internet and social media are one of these technologies. Before moving on to the empirical analysis, the work at hand must thus be theoretically situated in the context of the state of art in the fields of privacy and surveillance. It is often claimed that a critique of political economy, which is rooted in economic theory, focuses more on commodity critique and a critical theory, which is y rooted in social theory and philosophy, more on ideology critique. In this context, Murdock and Golding (1997, 3-4, emphasis added) make the important point that "the obvious starting point for a critical political economy of mass communication is the recognition that the mass media are first and foremost industrial and commercial organizations which produce and distribute commodities." Murdock and Golding (1997, 4-5, emphasis added) also include the ideological level in their analysis by saying that "it is this second ideological dimension of mass media production which gives it its importance and centrality and which requires an approach in terms not only of economics but also of politics." Due to that ideology and commodification are interconnected core elements of capitalist society, a Marx-inspired contribution to media, technology, information, and communication should focus on the role of media in the context of commodity and ideology; or speaking more generally, in the context of base and superstructure. Ideology and commodity are interrelated aspects of capitalism. Ideologies are a reflection of real life processes and are based on material foundations. Hence, C > commodities form ideologies. Values, an ideology refers to, including liberalism, freedom, and privacy enable the development and progress of modern capitalist ^ societies and processes of commodity production and capital accumulation. Ideol- ogies therefore form commodities in return. Ideological deceptions and processes of commodification shape each other mutually. I will argue in the following that privacy is a modern concept of liberal democracy and is used in order to justify liberty from public intervention and that the debate of privacy advances the idea of possessive and self-protective individualism. The notion of privacy is an ideology of modern society. I will also demonstrate that surveillance is an important aspect for guaranteeing the production of surplus value and for accumulating profit in the spheres of production, circulation, and consumption. Surveillance actions are crucial in the process of commodity production in capitalism. Hence, privacy critique can be considered as ideology critique and surveillance critique as commodity critique. Many authors have advanced critique of the concept of privacy in general (Gouldner 1976, 103; Lyon 1994, 179-198; Ogura 2006, 277-280). Privacy is a modern concept of liberal democracy and is used in order to justify liberty from public intervention (Lyon 1994, 185). In the liberal understanding of privacy, the sovereign individual should have freedom to seek his/her own interests without interference and those interests are primarily interpreted as property interests and private ownership rights (Lyon 1994, 186-188). Therefore, the concept of privacy fits neatly into the concept of private property (Ogura 2006, 278). The debate of privacy advances the idea of possessive and self-protective individualism (Lyon 2001, 21). The existing (Internet) privacy concepts advance the idea of possessive individualism in order to define the private individual embedded in a system of a competitive market society (Gouldner 1976, 1976). In a market society, the com-modification of privacy is important in order to enable targeted advertising being used for accumulating profit. Hence, economic actors undertake surveillance in order to threaten privacy. Privacy as ideological value enables surveillance actions and commodity production. There is a contradiction between privacy on the one hand and surveillance on the other hand in modern society. The privacy ideal thus comes into conflict with surveillance actions. The privacy concepts claim privacy as a crucial value within a society not being able to fulfil this value. One can imagine a commons-based society, where no substantial surveillance actions take place. In such a society, privacy as important value would not be necessary any more in this traditional way. It thus can be said that surveillance actions as commodity production enable privacy as ideological value. Only because of surveillance, privacy is needed in modern society. The existing approaches of privacy seem to be not fruitful for studying privacy. Therefore, the following treatment wants to contribute to a critical theory of (online) privacy (for a more detailed discussion see Allmer 2011): A critical theory of privacy (on the Net) strives for the development of theoretical and empirical research methods in order to focus on privacy in the context of domination, asymmetrical power relations and social struggles. It asks who can obtain privacy and who benefits from the contradiction between privacy and surveillance in modern society. It critically analyses (a) the threats of privacy as important aspects for guaranteeing the production of surplus value and for accumulating profit on the one hand and (b) privacy protection of income inequality, property interests, as well as power and ownership structures on the other hand. A critical theory of (Internet) privacy wants to overcome (a) privacy threats as well as (b) entrepreneurial privacy protection and privacy protection for other powerful actors in society in order to establish political processes and social transformations towards a participatory society. Since Foucault published his book Surveiller et Punir in French in 1975 and in English in 1977, the amount of literature on surveillance has increased enormously and represents a diffuse and complex field of research. Foucault (1995) analyses surveillance in the context of the emergence of modern disciplinary societies. He understands disciplines as forms of operational power relations and technologies of domination in order to discipline, control, and normalise people. For Foucault, the Panopticon is an ideal symbol of modern surveillance societies. Foucault's understanding of surveillance and the Panopticon allows to distinguish panoptic (affirmation of Foucault's notion) and non-panoptic (rejection of Foucault's notion) approaches of defining (Internet) surveillance that can be used for constructing a typology of existing surveillance literature and for discussing commonalties and differences of definitions of surveillance. Non-panoptic notions use a neutral and general notion of surveillance (in cyberspace); they are represented by scholars such as Baudrillard (2007). In contrast, panoptic notions consider surveillance to be negative and being connected to coercion, repression, discipline, power, and domination; they are represented by scholars such as Deleuze (1992). Non-panoptic notions understand (Internet) surveillance in a non-hierarchical and decentralised way, where everyone has the opportunity for surveillance. This argument overlooks the fact that corporations and state institutions are the most powerful actors in society and are able to undertake mass-surveillance, what private actors are not able to do. Neutral surveillance concepts tend to overlook power asymmetries of contemporary society and therefore tend to convey the image that private actors are equally powerful as corporations and state institutions. Although panoptic notions recognise the importance of the economy, they tend to focus only on one or two spheres as important aspects of contemporary surveillance societies. Furthermore, panoptic notions claim that there are particular forms of economic surveillance without a theoretical criterion for a certain typology. In contrast, a typology of (Internet) surveillance in the modern economy, which is based on Marx' theory of the political economy, allows to systemise economic J surveillance on the Internet and to distinguish online surveillance into the spheres of production, circulation, and consumption. A critical contribution to surveillance studies strives for the development of theoretical and empirical research methods in order to focus on surveillance in the context of resource control and exploitation. It critically analyses surveillance as important aspect for guaranteeing the production of surplus value and for accumulating profit. Based on the dialectically mediated spheres of the capitalistic economy (Marx 1986, 26-37), a critical perspective studies ^ surveillance in the spheres of production (surveillance of employees), circulation (surveillance of applicants), and consumption (surveillance of consumers) (for a more detailed discussion see Allmer 2012). Section one can be considered as epistemological approach, because it provides the theoretical research methods for this study. The economic and political logic shaping the strategies of profit-oriented social media platforms produces an antagonism between communicative opportunities, privacy, and surveillance threats. ^ This points out the antagonistic structure of communication technologies in capi- 0 £ i C (6 talism. The overall aim of the subsequent section is to study the users' knowledge, attitudes, and practices towards this antagonistic character and the potentials and risks of social media. Section two can be considered as a case study of the critical theory and dialectics of technology and society. Empirical Case Study The analysis of existing research literature shows that empirical studies of privacy on web 2.0 mostly focus on privacy-related issues on commercial social networking sites (Acquisti and Gross 2006). These studies pay attention to issues of users on social networking sites, namely individual knowledge and information about privacy, individual privacy-related attitudes, and individual behaviour towards privacy. Some authors have advanced critiques of this kind of studying privacy and have contributed filling the identified gap with critical arguments (Beer 2008). Also some authors have conducted critical empirical case studies of economic surveillance and targeted advertising and have thereby helped advancing a critique of the political economy of online/web 2.0 surveillance (Sandoval 2012). Some other theoretical studies have tried to situate the logic of web 2.0 surveillance in light of the social factory and free labour, alienation and exploitation, exception and dispossession (Terranova 2004). There is an on-going debate in academia about studying social and new media critically. Dallas Smythe's concept of "audience work" has recently gained importance in discussions about value creation and labour on the Internet. Research at different levels has been carried out touching the digital labour concept and (un)paid Internet labour that is also related to the context of surveillance (Fuchs and Sandoval 2014). Most empirical studies of privacy on social networking sites pay attention to individual user aspects. The issue of surveillance is more a macro-topic requiring that usage behaviour is framed by societal context variables such as state surveillance, economic surveillance, and modernity. The analysis of surveillance and SNS therefore is in need of a research approach taking into account political contexts (Beer 2008). Surveillance has thus far, with single exceptions, been rather ignored as a topic in SNS studies. The absence of critical empirical studies of social media characterises the academic landscape. The existing empirical studies show that there is much more focus on the privacy topic than on surveillance. Advertising mechanisms and the connection between surveillance and privacy attitudes on the one hand and SNS advertising settings on the other hand have thus far hardly been studied. This is a task for the survey that is still missing in the state of the art. Given the fact that the majority of the most popular web 2.0 platforms are privately owned and commercially organised and that the business model of most web 2.0 platforms is based on personalised advertising, I find it more appropriate to study web 2.0 in the context of economic surveillance and targeted advertising. What is missing within the current research on privacy is a critique of the political economy and a critical theory of privacy and surveillance taking into account the larger societal context of class, ideology, commodity, and exploitation. Apart from a few exceptions, there are no studies combining critical theoretical and empirical research in the context of social media. This was the task for the study in which we wanted to find out if (1) maintaining existing relationships over spatio-temporal distances and creating new social relationships is considered the main advantage of SNS, and (2) the surveillance threat is considered the major disadvantage of SNS. We conducted an online survey (Batinic, Reips, and Bosnjak 2002) that was focusing on Austrian students. We identified how important students consider the topic of surveillance in relation to SNS by analysing their answers to our questions. The survey was conducted in German, but the questionnaire was translated for the analysis into English. The questionnaire was implemented as an electronic survey with the help of the online survey tool SurveyMonkey (Babbie 2010, 286). The research was carried out from June 20 to November 23, 2011. We conducted the survey as part of the project "Social Networking Sites in the Surveillance Society" (see: http://sns3.uti.at). There were 63.8 percent female and 36.2 percent male respondents. The mean age of our respondents was 24.3 years and the mean number of studied semesters was 6.6 (including summer term 2011). In order to test if maintaining existing relationships over spatio-temporal distances and creating new social relationships are considered as the main advantages of SNS, we asked the students what in their opinion the greatest advantages of social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace are (open question)? For analysing whether the surveillance threat is considered the major disadvantage of SNS, we asked what the greatest concerns of social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace are (open question)? We received 3,531 textual replies to the question that addressed advantages and 3,534 replies to the question that addressed disadvantages. I identified 17 categories for the advantages and 14 categories for the concerns and analysed the answers to the questions by content analysis (Krippendorff 2004). On the one hand, the categories were adopted from theoretical and empirical studies about social networking sites and were revised and expanded regarding the provided answers by summarising, paraphrasing, abstracting, and generalising groups of answer texts to categories on the other hand; that is, a combination of inductive and deductive methods (Babbie 2010, 339). The respondents tended to list y more than one major advantage. Many answers are therefore mapped with more than one category. Table 1 presents the major advantages of social networking sites that our respondents mentioned. Table 1 shows that maintaining existing relationships and communication over distances are considered as the greatest advantage of social networking sites. More than 40 percent of our respondents stress the maintenance of existing contacts, friendships, and family relations as major opportunity of SNS. One third of respondents (33.8 percent) say that social relationships over spatial distances are very important. Almost a quarter (23.4 percent) see social networking platforms as a medium of information and news and 22.5 percent mention finding and renewing old contacts as major benefit. 7.5 percent of the participants state that an important aspect of a social networking site is that it enables free communication saving money. In addition, 7.4 percent mention sharing photos and other media with friends and accessing such media as major opportunity and 6.6 percent of the students say establishing new contacts is very important. 4.2 percent list communication C > and contacts in general with no further specification as greatest advantage. Also interesting is only 0.04 percent of our respondents mention flirting, sex, and love ^ as important aspects of social media, which could be caused by social desirability. Table 1: Greatest Perceived Advantages of Social Networking Platforms ("What are the greatest advantages of social networking platforms such as Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, etc. for you?" N=3531) Ch No. Category Percentage 1 Maintaining existing contacts, friendships, family relations, etc. 42.3 2 Communication and contacts over spatial distances (national and international) 33.8 3 Medium of information and news 23.4 4 Finding and renewing old contacts 22.5 5 Free communication that saves money 7.5 6 Sharing and accessing photos, music, videos 7.4 7 Establishing new contacts with unknown people or with people whom one hardly knows and can easier contact online 6.6 8 Communication and contacts in general (no further specification) 4.2 9 Communication in political groups and interest groups 2.5 10 Mobility, access from anywhere 2.1 11 Entertainment, fun, pastime, amusement 2.1 12 Overview and reminder of birthdays 1.3 13 Self-presentation to others (for non-business reasons) 0.6 14 I see no advantages 0.5 15 Business communication, finding jobs, self-presentation for potential employers 0.2 16 Browsing other profiles, "spying" on others 0.1 17 Flirting, sex, love 0.07 As a result, the hypothesis that maintaining existing relationships (category one) and communication over spatio-temporal distances (category two) is considered as the main advantage of SNS can be verified, but creating new social relationships (category seven) is not indicated as greatest opportunity. Table 2 presents the major concerns of social networking sites that our respondents mentioned. Table 2 shows that surveillance is considered as the greatest concern of social networking sites. Almost 60 percent of our respondents stress that economic, political, or cultural surveillance as a result of data abuse, data forwarding, or a lack of data protection is the main threat of SNS. One third (33.8 percent) say that it is problematic that personal affairs that should better be kept private and should not be known to others tend to become public. 7.7 percent state that it is a danger that also current and potential employers can access profiles, which could result in job-related disadvantages. In addition, 3.2 percent mention Internet addiction, and 3.0 percent of the participants stress data and identity theft as greatest risks of social media. 2.6 percent express concerns about advertising or spam. Also interesting is that 2.6 percent of the students do not see disadvantages in the usage of commercial social networking platforms. As a result, the hypothesis that the surveillance threat (category one) is considered as the major disadvantage of SNS can be verified. Table 2: Greatest Perceived Concerns of Social Networking Platforms ("What are the greatest concerns of social networking platforms such as Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, etc. for you?" N=3534) No. Category Percentage 1 Data abuse, data forwarding or lack of data protection that lead to surveillance by companies, state, or individuals 57.0 2 Private affairs become public and result in a lack of privacy and privacy control 33.8 3 Personal profile data (images, etc.) are accessed by employers or potential employers and result in job-related disadvantages (such as losing a job or not getting hired) 7.7 4 Internet addiction 3.2 5 Data and identity theft 3.0 6 Receiving advertising or spam 2.6 7 I see no disadvantages 2.6 8 Stalking, harassment, becoming a victim of crime 2.4 9 Commercial selling of personal data 2.3 10 Lack or loss of personal contacts, superficial communication and contacts, impoverishment of social relations 2.1 11 Virus, hacking and defacing of profiles, data integrity 2.0 12 It is a waste of time 1.3 13 Unrealistic, exaggerated self-presentation, competition for best self-presentation 0.5 14 Disadvantages at university because professors can access profiles 0.1 Section two can be considered as ontological approach, because it focuses on the analysis of social media and the concrete usage of social media. Based on some foundational concepts of a critical theory of technology and society of section one, the next section contains a theoretical interpretation of the empirical results. Section three can be considered as praxiological approach, because it discusses political implications and argues for the need of political interventions. Techno-Social Revolution I have argued in the first section that asymmetrical social relationships of power and domination are already embedded into the conception, construction, maintenance, as well as modification of technics and the technological design must be rooted in capitalist interests and social forces. Dominating the architecture of the Internet and social media platforms, the client-server computer network can be seen as an empirical evidence for this theoretical consideration. ture of a powerful server with data and files in the centre and relatively powerless clients at the edge. The client-server architecture structures the contemporary online world basically consisting of web servers operated by powerful political and economic actors such as Google and Facebook and clients used by individuals including social media users. The physical architecture of the Internet and the corresponding software entail hierarchical and structural forms of controls, which U^ enable centralised processing and storage of user data and log files. The dominant client-server technology fits well into the business model of corporate social media platforms being based on selling personal data (Moglen 2010). The client-server computer network model is a hierarchical organised technology, which includes the idea of the existence of proprietors of such data centres and incorporates the potential of centralised control. The client-server architecture dominating the Internet is designed and constructed as control and surveillance technology, which is embedded in the capitalist relations of production. This technology may increase the risks that people do not know where their data are stored and what is happening with them. It may strengthen non-transparency and uncontrollability of personal data and files (Moglen 2010). This is reflected in the perceived fears and risks of the survey participants when it comes to the greatest disadvantages of social networking sites. The vast majority of our respondents stress that economic, political, or cultural surveillance as a result of data abuse, data forwarding, or a lack of data protection is the main threat of social media. Following Marx one can argue that the current physical architecture of the Internet indicates that by technology domination preserves not only social but so to say technological realisation (Marx 1982, 2059). This example shows that capitalist technology may in its foundational form be also a technology of power and domination. The repressive elements of technology in capitalist societies are not solely to its applications, but technology may inherently be a mean of power and domination. Technology is a form of organisation and maintenance of social relations and a means of control and domination. Technological control is internal to their very structure (Feenberg 2002, 51) and therefore a transformation and redesign of technology is necessary in order to strengthen the idea of the commons and a real liberation of society. In contrast, the peer-to-peer system is a computer network where each computer can act as a client or server for other computers sharing access to various digital contents such as audio, video, and data files. Peers are equally privileged participants and are both suppliers and consumers of resources. Every switch is an independent and free-standing entity, which makes digital data available to other network participants without the need for a central server or host. In order to provide a mobile version of the peer-to-peer system, Moglen (2010) argues for personal webservers that everyone can put into his or her pocket. A mobile webserver could be plugged in at any place, synced up to any router, could be connected to the Internet, could keep your log files, and could store all your personal online data. Everyone would be the owner of his or her server and could control what to share online. Such technologies are hard to control and capital's and communities' interests collide resulting in social struggles and conflicts. I have also claimed in the first section that technological effects depend on how technologies are used and technology cannot be isolated from its application. I will show exemplarily in the following that the effects of the Internet and social media depend on how they are used in society. Social movements such as the Occupy movement and Anonymous and alternative media including Democracy Now! and Indymedia have potentials to establish a "counterpublic sphere" (Negt and Kluge 1993) and question capitalist logics. Or speaking in terms of autonomist Marxism, the multitude is able to undermine capitalist hegemony in order to strengthen the idea of a commons-based society. The rise of the Internet has brought new opportunities for social movements and alternative media that often suffer from a lack of resources. Social movements are able to publish and spread alternative views and raise critical awareness cost-effectively on a global level. The Internet can support digital grassroots democracy and can give the powerless a say. Real technological potentials of cyberspace could be brought to fruition having "not yet" (Bloch 1986) been realised. The appearance of the World Wide Web and social media also contains potentials and it is important to uncover and reveal those hidden and suppressed potentials for a real liberation of humans. However, the multitude is confronted with problems of gaining visibility, attracting publicity, and getting attention on the web, which is characterised by capitalist logics, marketing strategies, information overflows, and a lost in cyberspace. Powerful political and economic actors are very successful in raising visibility and attracting publicity in cyberspace. Due to capitalist structures of the Internet and asymmetrical distributions of material resources between the multitude and the empire on the one hand as well as the logic of one-dimensional thoughts (Marcuse), instrumental rationality (Horkheimer), manipulative culture industry (Adorno and Horkheimer), and global false consciousness of society (Marx) on the other hand, critical social movements and critical (social) media are confronted with marginalisation and disappearing attention (on the Internet). The survey result that only 2.5 percent of the students list communication in political and interest groups as important aspect and beneficial characteristic of social media shows that such platforms are not a priori political and critical places. Although social networking is shaped by individualised communication and corporate interests, it also poses possibilities for group formation and cooperation might being channelled into collective political projects as the Occupy movement, the Indignados movement in Spain, or the Arab Spring showed last. Corporate social media are ideological platforms, because they provide the illusionary impression that everyone now has the opportunity to present oneself to y the public and to receive attention, while most people on web 2.0 are marginalised and invisible and cannot influence political decisions and define cultural values compared to powerful political and economic actors (Dean 2009, 31). The material resources of participation are asymmetrical and show the limitations of freedom of speech on social media. Structural inequalities and power relations stratify public visibility and participation online (Sandoval and Fuchs 2010, 144). New technologies such as social software are an ideology and an expression of "repressive tolerance" (Marcuse 1965) in capitalist society. This is not caused through technics by itself or by design, but rather results from the application of technology in society. Social media may be applied differently to another society. In reference to the limitations and emancipatory prospects of social media that are addressed in the main research questions, Figure 2 can be outlined. In summary, social media incorporate both technological as well as social constraints and potentials. Power and domination are embedded into the design of the Internet and social media and at the same time the effects of the Internet and social media depend on how such technologies are used. In reference to the dialectics of technological design and assessment it has U^ become clear that both technological and social changes are needed in terms of C > Fi gure 2: Technological and Social Constraints and Potentials of Social Media m lo achieving commons-based social media. The challenge of the current century is to sublate (aufheben) technology and society in order to overcome the antagonistic characters of social media in particular and society in general and to point toward a commons-based information society. We need a techno-social revolution (Hofkirchner 2013, 246-247) for a different technology in a different society oriented on social needs and ethical dimensions far from bourgeois values. We must transform new information and communication technologies and begin to intervene in the design and assessment process of technology, instead of turning away from technology as technophobic groups, neo-Luddites, and some reactionary environmentalists suggest (Feenberg 1999, xiv). We must redesign technology and adapt it to the needs of a real liberation of humans. Speaking in terms of dialectical philosophy, a qualitative change and a dialectical sublation (Aufhebung) of capitalist technology in general as well as ICT and social media in particular are necessary. That is to say, elimination of regressive elements (destructive productive forces), preservation of progressive elements (constructive productive forces), and elevation of new technological qualities on a higher level. This new emergent qualities are the negation of the negation, cannot be found on the lower level, and are a dynamic process of development. In advanced industrial societies, we do have "the change of turning quantitative technical progress into qualitatively different ways of life" (Marcuse 1969, 19). The technological transformation does not follow an automatic process and is not predetermined, but requires in praxis the human subject and points towards the need of class struggles and revolution. Notes: 1. This article summarises the main arguments of my PhD dissertation that I defended at the University of Salzburg, Austria, on December 19, 2013. I will publish parts of my doctoral research as book, entitled "Critical Theory and Social Media: Between Emancipation and Commodification," with Routledge in 2015. 2. "Mit der Maschine ... erhält die Herrschaft der vergangenen Arbeit über die lebendige nicht nur soziale - in der Beziehung von Kapitalist und Arbeiter ausgedrückte - sondern sozusagen technologische Wahrheit." References: Acquisti, Alessandro and Ralph Gross. 2006. 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NetworkCulture:PoliticsfortheInformation Age. London: Pluto Press. a 0 £ * 1 * tf) O C (jü KD LO CONFRONTING EUROPEAN DIVERSITY: DELIBERATION IN A TRANSNATIONAL AND PLURI-LINGUAL SETTING Abstract In this article, we confront some commonly held assumptions and objections with regard to the feasibility of deliberation in a transnational and pluri-lingual setting. To illustrate our argument, we rely on an analysis of group discussions from EuroPolis, a transnational deliberative experiment that took place one week ahead of the 2009 European Parliamentary elections. The European deliberative poll is an ideal case for testing the viability of deliberative democracy across political cultures because it introduces variation in terms of constituency and group plurality under the controlled conditions of quasi-experimental scientific setting. For measuring group dynamics and interactions we apply a modified version of the Discourse Quality Index (DQI) that is combined with a qualitative content analysis of selected sequences of discussions. Findings show that participants of transnational deliberative polling 1) generally recognise the EU polity as a reference point for exercising communicative power and impact on decision-making, and 2) are in fact able to interact and debate across languages and cultures, developing a self-awareness of citizens of a shared polity and thereby turning a heterogeneous group of randomly selected citizens into a constituency of democracy. IRENA FIKET ESPEN D. H. OLSEN HANS-JÖRG TRENZ Irena Fiket is Post-Doc Fellow at the Center for the Study of Political Change, University of Siena; e-mail: fiket@unisi.it. Espen D. H. Olsen is Senior Researcher at Arena -Centre for European Studies, University of Oslo; e-mail: e.d.h.olsen@arena.uio.no. Hans-Jörg Trenz is Deputy Director of the Centre for Modern European Studies (CEMES), University of Copenhagen and Research Professor at ARENA - Centre for European Studies, University of Oslo; e-mail: trenz@hum.ku.dk. IV IV m d cp rN o o rN rN 15 > A 3 a 0 z * 1 (I) 0 C « IV Ln Introduction The debate on the democratic deficit of the EU has increasingly involved calls for a more profound engagement of "ordinary" citizens in European politics. The low level of political participation in EU politics has become all the more acute in recent years as the so-called "permissive consensus" has been cast aside by growing discontent among citizens with the integration project (Hooghe and Marks 2009); most clearly visible in a string of popular rejections of the Constitutional and Lisbon Treaties. Moreover, the new diversity of the enlarged Europe is potentially a further obstacle to mutual understanding among the peoples of Europe and the activation of European citizenship. European Parliamentary elections thus far rather amplified the problem addressing the citizens mainly as uninformed voters, displaying decreasing turnouts and increasing support for populist parties and Eurosceptic opposition. After the "period of reflection" that followed the 2005 rejection of the EU Constitutional Treaty, EU institutions took a deliberative turn manifested in the implementation of numerous deliberative experiences based on the involvement of lay citizens in public debate across Europe. Even though the institutional and procedural design of the expanding participatory regime of EU governance has been widely analysed, only few empirical studies have thus far analysed the conditions and capacities for citizen deliberation within the EU (Abels 2009; Hüller 2010; Friedrich 2011). EU analysts have however repeatedly emphasised that the generation of democratic legitimacy in a setting of enhanced socio-economic, political and cultural diversity is constrained by the lack of a common public sphere that guarantees a certain degree of uniformity of public opinion and will formation (Grimm 1995; Schlesinger and Fossum 2007). In this article we analyse whether enhanced diversity of a group of deliberating citizens and the fuzziness of the polity to which they respond impacts the constitution of a mini-public of democratic self-government. We argue that the potential of citizens' deliberation to generate democratic legitimacy is dependent on participants' disposition to recognise, first, the polity as a legitimate entity to exercise political authority, and second, to identify as a constituency, i.e. as members of a political community that is (self)empowered to authorise and control government. The EU poses a challenge to both the polity and the constituency dimension. In formal terms, the EU exercises political authority, but is it recognised by the citizens as a legitimate entity for delegating collectively binding decision-making (the polity dimension)? Secondly, the EU has established a complex citizenship regime, but do citizens identify as a constituency of rights holders and democratic agents of public authorisation and control (the constituency dimension)? 3 a these two constitutive dimensions of democratic legitimacy which are commonly treated as independent variables in deliberative experiments within national political settings. Our argument is that both dimensions, the recognition of political authority and the identification of the citizenry, are not simply to be considered as constitutive elements of democracy. Both dimensions are rather to be seen as possible outcomes of the process of building democratic legitimacy through reflexive y^ reason-giving (see Eriksen 2005). In the following we therefore explore the possibility of a positive correlation between participation in deliberative polling and the formation of a democratic constituency. The guiding hypotheses are that, as an effect of deliberation with ^ other European citizens, participants of deliberative polling start to a) recognise the EU as a legitimate authority for collective problem solving (polity hypothesis), and b) identify as a constituency of democratic politics (constituency hypothesis). Deliberation can thus trigger reflexive processes conducive to the establishment of both legitimate government and the democratic agents of authorisation and control. In the context of citizen deliberation, this polity and constituency generating power of deliberation (see Cooke 2000) is overlapping and mutually dependent. We conceptualise the reflexivity of the deliberative setting in procedural terms through the generation of knowledge and shared normative perspectives among the participants that help to qualify (or validate) the substantial policy issues at stake and to establish mutual understanding and agreement (Eriksen 2005, 17). In the Deweyan sense, then, we observe whether and how individuals identify as democratic agents (as a public) through critical practices, which authorise political power and, at the same time and through the same practices, constitute the community of citizens that is in charge of the control of this power (Dewey 1927). Confronting European Diversity: The Polity and the Constituency Contested Deliberative polling has thus far been applied mainly within national and monolingual settings: Respondents were chosen from one legally demarcated, and socially and culturally recognised constituency. In addition they respond mainly to one (either local, regional or national) level of government. Deliberative theorists, including the designers of deliberative polling, have however emphasised that diversity of opinions needs to be considered as a necessary procedural condition for deliberation to facilitate opinion change and learning (Fishkin and Luskin 2005; Sunstein 2009; Thompson 2008). This is based on the argument that deliberating citizens from diverse socio-cultural backgrounds can learn to acknowledge and respect the plurality of values and views that exist within a polity and contribute to the construction of the public good (Benhabib 1994; Gutmann and Thompson 1996). We argue that experimenting with citizen deliberation in the transnational setting of Europolis creates two additional challenges. Firstly, the applicability of the experiment is put into question by the fact that the group of randomly selected participants is situated within a "non-finished" polity. Political authority of the EU is neither legally consolidated nor socially accepted. The EU polity as the reference point for the sample is not the familiar environment of national or regional government but a complex multi-level governance arrangement. This introduces uncertainty with regard to the question of which type of administration, legislative procedures and formal government deliberation should exert influence on. Is communicative power expressed through transnational deliberative bodies renationalised in the sense that participants target mainly domestic institutions and decision-making processes or do such "mini-publics" also pay tribute to the complexity of multi-level governance in the sense of empowering European institutions and supranational authority? Secondly, the constituency from which the representative sample is chosen for deliberative polling lacks concrete political recognition in the EU setting. Participants of Europolis were not members of a pre-established demos or a fully recognised political community. Participants rather represented lay citizens from 27 member states and spoke 23 different languages. The constituency of democratic politics in the EU is arguably neither fully legally recognised nor does it recognise itself as a politically bounded and culturally distinct community. EU constituents are unbounded, multi-dimensional and contested (Abromeit and Schmidt 1998; Fos-sum and Trenz 2006). Statistical indicators for drawing a representative sample of European citizens can therefore not rely solely on the background assumption of a relatively homogeneous and monolingual population but must take into account the existence of pluri-ethnic and pluri-lingual fragmented groups as well as shifting minorities and majorities. In confronting these two challenges, the feasibility of deliberative democracy in the EU has been discussed widely. From the one side meaningful and equal deliberation in a complex and culturally pluralistic EU is seen as an impossible project. The democratic deficit of the EU is seen here as structurally rooted in the absence of a European demos. The people(s) of Europe do not simply have a common identity as citizens of the same polity. They also lack the socio-cultural prerequisites to become united, e.g. through a common language, a shared cultural background or through participation in an encompassing public and media sphere (see e.g. Grimm 1995; Offe and Preuss 2007; Kraus 2008). In this line of reasoning, deliberation works best, if political culture is contextualised, pluralism of opinions is contained, participants speak the same language, share a common ethical understanding and pay each other respect as co-citizens (Habermas 1998, Wessler 2008). The upshot of this is, then, that democratisation in terms of engaging citizens and fostering a vibrant public sphere on the transnational level is an impossible task. If cultures demarcate different discursive universes, discourses between cultures must be seen as principally problematic (Leigh 2004). From the other side, different solutions have been discussed for reconciling political equality with deep diversity in multicultural societies (Fossum 2003, Fray ser and Honneth 2004). There is a tendency in homogeneous deliberative settings that familiarity and closeness leads to unjustified extremism (see Sunstein 2009, 3). Like-minded people tend to amplify their pre-existing views and reduce their internal diversity (ibid., 8). High degrees of solidarity and pre-existing affective ties even increase these effects of group polarisation (ibid.: 42-44). Deliberative polling contributes to avoiding such polarising traits of groups by creating a setting where people do not start out with strong convictions. Participants are confronted instead with plural views and new information that breaks familiar settings. In this line of reasoning, we would expect that group heterogeneity is a favourable condition in transnational settings. Group polarisation effects should be unlikely and deliberation should be on average more balanced and less "extreme" than in national settings. The upshot is: deliberation works better if it includes diverse people: "Cognitive diversity is crucial to the success of deliberative democracy" (ibid., 142-43). Another manifestation of deep diversity in the EU setting is its pluri-lingual C > traits (Kraus 2008). The question of whether and how groups can interact and seek understanding across languages is therefore highly relevant. Findings from social ^ movement research show that pluri-linguism at the European level does not nec- essarily impair the inclusivity and epistemic quality of deliberative settings such as the European Social Forum as compared to the exchange among movement activists at the national level (Doerr 2008, 2009). Translations can potentially help out in exceptional circumstances, for instance, in the case of professional groups or among experts. But can the epistemic condition of democracy be met in a pluri-lin-gual random sample of citizens? The critical issue in confronting European diversity is how transformative the deliberative poll can potentially be in a transnational setting. The transformative power of deliberation can alter individual preferences towards the identification of a common good (Mansbridge 2010). But deliberation can be also transformative in the sense of social learning and group identification. In Europolis the participants were at the same time empowered as potential voters in European Parliament elections. Against their diverse socio-cultural backgrounds they were confronted with problems of common relevance and through their communicative exchanges around these issues, they learned to articulate their shared concerns, (e.g. in the question rounds with experts and political representatives), fleshed them out with reasons and justifications and critically reflected on their experiences. Deliberation is in this sense embedded in social learning processes (Trenz and Eder 2004). It spurs not only reflection over the policy issues at stake but also over the process itself as a collective experience. This community generating potential of deliberation is at the core of our empirical analysis. The critical yardstick for concluding on the community generating effects of deliberation in Europolis is, then, the extent to which a randomly selected group of individuals from diverse national and linguistic backgrounds turned into a critical public, which recognised EU authority and developed a notion of identity. Method and Data Taking place one week ahead of the 2009 European Parliamentary election, Eu-roPolis was set up to conduct a transnational deliberative experiment that engaged 348 citizens from all EU Member States. The Europolis research design followed standard Deliberative Poll design.1 The event specifically addressed climate change and immigration control, two high-profile issues of recent political debates in Europe. The participants were assigned into 25 small groups consisting of two or three languages. Discussions were led by moderators who had the task to raise certain pre-determined issues for debate as well as to manage the workings of the group, but still with a minimalistic approach to moderation. In addition, there was a host of translators involved with each group due to their pluri-lingual character, thus allowing verbal exchange in the participants' mother tongue. Europolis produced two sets of data. The first were collected using questionnaires and those allow us to measure both, pre- and post-deliberation opinions and knowledge level and the perceptions of the participants at the end of experiment. The second were audio recordings of the debates in all small group discussions of the event. The small group debates have been coded by using a modified version of the Discourse Quality Index (DQI). The DQI is a measurement instrument2 that relies on qualitative coding of debates based on a carefully constructed coding scheme3 and represents a quantitative measure of deliberation based on Habermas' concept of discourse ethics. The main goal of the DQI is to tap a continuum that ranges from the complete violation of Habermas' discourse ethics to the ideal speech act. The initial DQI was constructed to analyse elite deliberation in parliamentary assemblies (Steiner et al. 2004). Europolis was, however, about citizen deliberation. The DQI was subsequently modified to include a new set of categories.4 We coded and analysed small group discussions on immigration control in 4 groups of the following language composition: the first was composed of Italian and English speakers; the second of English speakers and Bulgarians; the third of English, French and Portuguese; and a fourth group of Italians, Spaniards, and Swedes. Beyond Attitudinal Data: Opening the Black Box of Deliberation Deliberative polling has, thus far, relied principally on attitudinal data to measure the transformative effects of deliberation. In our study we take attitudinal changes of participants of Europolis, in both the "polity" and the "constituency" dimension, as a starting point of our discussion. With regard to the first dimension, the questionnaire measures participants' attitudes on decision-making levels before they started the discussions but after they read the briefing materials and after deliberation with regard to the two debated issues (immigration and climate change) and two "control" issues (unemployment and crime).5 The results show that participants of the groups that were analysed became more favourable of shifting decision-making powers to the supranational level on the "control" issues6 (unemployment and crime) but less favourable on immigration and climate change. With regard to the second dimension, the Europolis questionnaire results indicate that deliberation in a transnational setting shows a clear potential to spur identity change among the participants.7 More concretely, the share of participants that perceived themselves as national citizens only decreased significantly after participation in the deliberative poll. Participants turned from identifying in exclusive nationalist terms to becoming "inclusive nationalists," i.e. they also identified as members of a community of Europeans. In order to understand better why deliberation led participants to become more nationalist in their polity preferences while at the same time socialising in a transnational group setting it is necessary to analyse micro processes of debate and group formation in deliberative polling. Relying principally on aggregated questionnaire data, deliberative polls have so far not systematically covered "real-life" experiences of deliberating citizens. Our in-depth analysis of deliberative group discussions is an attempt to enter the black box of deliberation. For that purpose, we rely on behavioural data from audio recordings of the debates in 4 out of 25 small groups that discussed the issue of immigration. Qualitative content analysis of the transcribed discussions was applied to select speech acts, in which the polity and constituency dimensions were raised by the participants. Relevant text was tagged during the coding process to expose arguments and story lines used by participants. We do not claim that the quotes are "representative" of overall discussions, but rather use the quotes to firstly illustrate and elaborate on findings from the quantitative data regarding the polity dimension, and secondly to highlight specific sequences of critical reflexivity among citizens regarding the constituency dimension. This approach made it possible to ^ tease out substantive issues raised by participants in actual deliberative moments. C > The selection of quotes was as such done in a sequential manner. Based on initial descriptive analysis we then went back to the substantive debates to recover quotes ro that underlined the results. Our qualitative analysis further needs to be considered as exploratory in the sense that we cannot rely on any comparative baseline as well as no comparable data from other deliberative polls or mini-publics. Indeed, the experimental character of deliberative polling raises the question of its relevance to political analysis. We argue that the counterfactual nature of deliberative polls in itself can be used as a starting point for answering the questions of polity recognition and constituency formation in an EU setting. In this sense, Europolis as an orchestrated multicultural and pluri-lingual event is meant to put key notions of deliberative theory to test. Against this background of a counterfactual setting (the deliberative poll as the opinions of citizens if given opportunity to deliberate) and the uniformity of deliberative theory (a modicum of linguistic and cultural understanding needed for deliberation) we can explore the potential of citizen deliberation in a transnational setting. To investigate the transformative potential of deliberation in relation to this set of data, we can operationalise our guiding polity and constituency hypotheses as follows: Polity Dimension. As an indicator of recognition of the EU polity, we expect that participants justify their arguments less in terms of particular group interests or references to their country of origin but by referring to the benefits of EU/Europe, or to common good principles. We further expect that European or common good-oriented justifications increase as an effect of group discussion while particularistic (nationalist) justifications decrease over time. The DQI has a variable called "content of justification." This variable allows for the measurement of justification of arguments. Originally, this was set up to capture whether arguments were made in terms of narrow group interests, in terms of the common good, or in terms of both (Steiner et al. 2004, 58). To capture the specifica of citizens' deliberation8 in Europolis on European issues, we added the category Europe justified speech acts. Through content analysis of the transcribed group discussions we expect to find specific instances of "polity contestation" that involve participants spontaneously in debates about the delegation of political authority and the preferred institutional/ constitutional design of the EU. Constituency Dimension. As an indicator of the formation of a political community, we expect that participants participate equally in group discussions and that no linguistic group dominates over others.9 Furthermore, we look at the role of the facilitator, in order to determine to what degree equal participation has been encouraged and if that was the case, which participants needed encouragement.10 We further measure degrees of interactivity between participants across languages and whether these interactions include positive, neutral or negative reference to other participants' arguments.11 Through content analysis of the transcribed group discussions we expect to find specific instances of "constituency contestation" that involve participants spontaneously in debates about the confinement of the political community and degrees of common identification in Europe. Analysis: Deliberative Citizens in Action The Polity Dimension £ 3 a 0 £ * 1 * tf) 0 C (ju KD Coding the group discussions by the use of DQI helps us to understand how participants in a transnational deliberative setting exchange arguments in political debates on the EU and how they justify the appropriateness of collective choices and levels of decision-making. The underlying assumption is that citizens by expressing preferences with regard to specific policy solutions (that were measured trough use of questionnaires) also raise validity claims relating to the common good of the issue under debate: Within what particular institutional arrangements are arguments held to be valid and who should be the main beneficiary of a given policy solution and to whom shall collective decisions apply? In a given setting, should the collective choice respond to the needs of the participants' own country, the EU, or global community? To analyse whether European or global-oriented justifications increase as an effect of group discussions we adopted a sequencing approach. Different sequences were separated following the agenda of the group discussion. The first phase of discussion evolved mainly around the identification of the problems at stake. The second phase was more strongly influenced by the moderators, who coordinated the more formalised task to formulate questions for the plenary session. These questions were based on a selection of previously justified contributions to the debate, which made a further engagement of the participants in justificatory discourse during this phase redundant. The third phase was again more open and allowed participants to synthesise debates on the issue, express their opinions on the plenaries with experts and reflect their experiences. Deliberation in this last phase was found to be frequently less issue focused and more geared towards reflection of the common understanding of the citizens and their attitudes towards the EU. Leaving aside the more formalised setting of the second phase, we would expect to observe that European common good orientation among the participants increase from the first to the third phase. Table 1 largely confirms this hypothesis. As an effect of knowledge increase, learning and socialisation during the experiment participants became more "European" in their justifications and recognised the EU polity as a legitimate entity of problem-solving. At the end of the experiment one third of the justifications delivered contained a European common good reference, while references to national interest clearly diminished. Table 1: Justification All groups (7, 8, 11, 12) Discussion Formulation of questions Discussion after plenary N speech acts (excluded moderator) 202 74 73 N of speech acts justified among which: 109 40 25 group interests, own country 25.9% 25.5% 12.5% Europe 31.5% 19.3% 45.8% global or common good references 42.5% 55.2% 41.7% Overall, Table 1 indicates that European and common good orientations with regard to the issue of immigration control prevail over national interests. Citizens demonstrate a clear tendency to look beyond the national context to validate their claims and to raise competing polity preferences. Citizens do in fact also engage with the issue of the EU polity and express strong opinions on European integration in relation to alternative local, national or global polity settings. Selected speech acts identified through content analysis confirm that citizens exhibited preferences for a more powerful EU that develops capacities of immigration control. The lack of coordinated action in this area is seen as a problem and responsibilities should be shared instead of blaming single member states: But what I understood today at the plenary meeting was that everybody blames individual member states. Italy is sending back immigrants. Spain does not want to do anything. Greece the same. Still, Italy, Spain and Greece are receiving these people, trying to select them in the best possible way. I would ask the 'lords' of the European Union what they are doing for these countries (Italian male, SG [small group] 12). In addressing and recognising the EU as a polity, where borders and the insider/ outsider logic matters, these debates also suggest that "polity recognition" correlates with an evolving sense of community. As we will see from the following example, polity and constituency dimensions frequently overlap: The only thing I want to say is that we can't really allow to sit on the fence. If we truly want to build a true Europe, we should talk about external borders only, and the EU member states should relinquish some of their sovereignty. I think that there's no other way to go about it (French male, SG 11). So, I think we should also strengthen the borders of Europe, because if we make all these people legal, we will have a massive arrival of migrants, and we do not have the capacity to welcome all these people. And it will only be to the detriment of the migrants themselves (Luxembourg/Portuguese male, SG 11). The Constituency Dimension Any viable polity depends on a modicum of identification from its citizens. As frequently highlighted, the EU lacks the typical identity signifiers that are held to be constitutive of nation-states (Giesen 2003; Delanty 2005; Castiglione 2009). Since a strong political identity that would replace the existing identities of the nation state seems unattainable and for many also undesirable, the question is whether the European setting is based on a zero-sum relationship between existing national identities or conducive to a positive sum relationship of nested identities (Góra et al. 2011). From the first perspective, participants in transnational mini-publics would be expected to defend primarily national views and interests. The group discussions would lead to a nationalist clash among the participants who would become more introverted in defending the integrity of the national community and mapping their attitudes onto a cultural cleavage towards their follow participants from other member states. From the second perspective, participation in group discussions would stimulate citizens to engage with others' views and interests. This would lead, in turn, not only to attitude change but also trigger off micro processes of identity change and socialisation of participants as citizens of Europe. Europolis provided an ample "laboratory" for gauging the degree to which group heterogeneity and language differences affected the deliberative mini-public as a democratic constituency. Did participants in the multinational and pluri-lingual setting of Europolis have equal opportunity to participate in the debate and to contribute to deliberative exchange and opinion formation? In the following analysis, we analyse possible effects of ethno-cultural heterogeneity and language pluralism with special emphasis on socialisation, group reflexivity and identity formation. Group Solidarity. Qualitative data from transcripts give numerous examples of the development of what we call reflexivity of participants which turned group deliberations into critical voice of the citizens. Critical reflexivity was partly encouraged by the specific task the group had to perform in formulating expert questions and addressing policy makers. The confrontation with experts and other groups in the plenaries created shared expectations that were exchanged among the participants especially in the last round of the debate. The development of critical and reflexive attitudes as part of group deliberation can be considered as an important identity marker. We can distinguish between different layers of deliberations which can encompass a critical reflection on the role of participants as citizens, on the purpose of the scientific experiment and their role therein, and finally, a meta-discourse on Europe and its complex identity questions. For obvious reasons, critical reflexivity as part of the group discussions is unequally developed; in some instances, it is given only sporadic expression and restricted to single statements, in other instances, it unfolds in longer sequences through dialogue among the participants. First, group solidarity is enhanced by the processes of becoming reflexive as citizens of Europe and expressing critique towards the experts and politicians. In the following statement, an Italian participant confronts the unitary visions of the citizens (the participants of the panel) with the still divided positions of the political representatives (the experts of the plenary). We (the citizens) can make proposals and provide solutions for problems, which we feel are ours. We can, in principle, convert from nationals to Europeans. But they (the politicians) are not able to give y substance to a European identity. They do not know how to use the opportunities (like a citizen forum) for us but only for them. They do not take up our ideas but only follow their opportunistic interests: [we should] ... make a question to our political representatives of Europe: Wheth-^ er (and when) Europe will give substance to a European identity. (...) We could give the proposals and solutions to our problems (but) we must feel them as our problems, we should feel as Europeans... the fact that we still (mainly) have a national identity is limiting strongly our ability and participation. In fact, the participation in European elections' was shameful. The sense of belonging (to Europe) is lacking (Italian male, SG 7). More specifically, the experts and politicians are criticised for their unwillingness to provide concrete answers or their incapacity to make themselves understandable to the citizens. This lack of responsiveness is then generalised as a European ^ experience that marks the citizen-elite divide of the EU and justifies the democratic response of indignant citizens against the elites in Brussels: ^^ What I experienced as a person, I felt that these young women (experts and pol- (^q iticians who participate at the plenary sessions) ... even if they wanted to give 0 £ tf) 0 KD us the answers, those were not the answers in my opinion. ... And I am sorry for this but if I could decide who should occupy those places at the European l^v Union I would suggest placing us there. Why so many people are moved from their homes (to work for the EU) if they can't give us concrete answers? (Italian female, SG 12). This indignation about the incomprehensible experts and elites is also shared by other participants. In the following statement, the upcoming elections are seen as an opportunity to mark a difference. Again, a "we"-feeling is created by distinguishing participants of the experiment as the forerunners of a European citizenry who should guarantee that only the "really qualified" are elected. ... now we have the European elections, and we should all do the 'advertising' in order to select the qualified people. So they will not come there only to be 'chair warmer' (Italian male, SG 12). Secondly, group solidarity is enhanced by the processes of becoming "reflexive" as being part of a European experiment. Reflections on the purpose of the experiment are a recurrent topic of group discussions. Participants see themselves confronted with the expectation that they should develop a common understanding and we-feeling as Europeans. In general, this possibility is not rejected but taken up as an opportunity for further reflection: ... the purpose of this research is to understand how the discussions may change our views ... and I think that the possibility to communicate with each other could help us to understand each other better and could lead us to feel more European ... because we get to know other people and we discuss with them ... so the time we spent here is good for us (UK female, SG 07). Another Italian participant reflects about the privileged experience to participate in the scientific experience, which for him is also a "human experience." He is however fully aware of the isolated character of the experience and deplores the lost opportunity for the EU to not making a more systematic use of the ideas and proposals that are produced by the citizens: I wonder why this opportunity is not used by the EU. It could have been an opportunity for the EU and for the people to bring up new ideas. In fact, it could have given the space for (our) new ideas that could have become active and not only passive proposals (like now). Instead, it's only good for us as an experience, but in the end it only remains a 'discourse' that we carry with us, but this benefit does not sufficiently justify that the EU is losing this opportunity (Italian male, SG 07). Participants thus combine their critical reflection about the experiment with the expression of critique of the EU and the state of European democracy. As a case of second-order reflexivity, this transformation of becoming a European citizen can again become an element of reflexive group deliberation. It is then recognised that the experiment was not helpful in an instrumental sense to arrive at better policies and solutions but rather in a symbolic sense to make participants aware of the dimensions of European citizenship: ... this meeting, at least in my opinion, did not help us to solve or to clarify the problems of immigration. But, it increased the awareness of European citizen- ship. Not because they made me feel more European, but because they made me be more careful towards the people we are selecting to represent us in Europe (Italian female, SG 12). While acknowledging the potential for transnational identity formation, another participant also underlined its possible pitfalls and limits. A contrast to this is found in the interplay between different modes of identity that might change over time: For me, Europe and the world are a village (...) A Frenchman for example, coming from the south of France to the north of France, is like in a foreign country. And with the years, he will become used to the people of Northern France and the people of Northern France will become used to him. (...). And I think that those who welcome the migrants should create situations where people can better integrate themselves. I think if you do that, you're not going to lose your identity, you're not going to lose your origins (...) (Luxembourg/Portuguese male, SG 11). These findings on critical reflexivity of group discussions strongly back an understanding of reflexive public deliberation as an effective means to overcome cultural incommensurability (Bohman 2003). Socialisation factors of taking part in an assembly like a deliberative poll matter to explain the transformative force of deliberation in intercultural settings. The challenges of cultural pluralism are thus minimised by the effects of group reflexivity. Participants from diverse eth-no-political groups are committed to shared practices for providing evidence and discussing solutions to common problems. What is more, participants from diverse socio-cultural background are critically engaged in contesting political authority and defining their role as European citizens. These findings on group reflexivity and socialisation as a counter-effect to cultural fragmentation are also strongly backed by the post-deliberation questionnaire poll.12 The views and perceptions of participants on the behaviour of other participants, provides answers to the degree of cohesion and "group-ness" in the transnational mini-public of Europolis. Overall, the participants evaluated their experience of participating in the deliberative event as highly positive. Only 28 percent of participants felt that their group fellows mainly cared about their own country and not about European Union. 88 percent agreed that participation J was equal in small group discussions. The experience of meeting and talking with other people from all across the continent and with different cultural background also had an impact: 81percent of the participants thought that they had learnt a lot about people different from themselves, "about who they are and how they live." 84 percent felt that their fellow participants respected what they had to say, even if they did not necessarily agree. On average, the participants thought the event extremely balanced and considered the quality of the group discussions they took part in to be high. Most importantly, participants from other member states were not seen as hostile players who defended diverging interests but as equals who expressed strong views and provided accessible justifications. On this score, then, we can conclude that, overall, the results of analyses of EuroPolis groups show that contrary to the communitarian assumptions, ethno-cul- 0 £ i _________„.....,______________________,...___________________________,..................... tural plurality has no significant impact on deliberative quality and the possibility for citizens from different member states to debate and find agreement on issues ^ of common concern. CT» KD Discussion Formulation of questions Discussion-after plenary SG 7 (n participants 11) Language of moderator - Italian Total speech acts (excluded moderator) 46 21 21 Moderator intervene to engage individual participants 15.2 % 4.5 % 5.0 % Moderator intervene to engage linguistic group (engl) 0.0 % 0.0 % 10.0 % Neutral or positive reference to other arguments 50.0 % 90.9 % 85.0 % UK and IRL 56.9 % 50 % 68.1 % Italian n. of speech acts 43.1 % 50 % 31.9 % Total 100% 100% 100% SG 8 (n participants 10) Language of moderator -English Total speech acts (excluded moderator) 64 35 20 Moderator intervene to engage individual participants 11.00% 8.6% 30.00% Moderator intervene to engage linguistic group 0.0 % 0.0 % 0.0 % Neutral or positive reference to other arguments 39.1% 34.3% 50.0 % UK 67.2% 44.2% 50 % Bulgarian n. of speech acts 32.8 % 55.8% 50 % Total 100% 100% 100% SG 11 (n participants 13) Language of moderator -English Total speech acts (excluded moderator) 46 9 16 Moderator intervene to engage individual participants 20.7% 22.2 9.1 Moderator intervene to engage linguistic group 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% Neutral or positive reference to other arguments 50.0% 42.2% 66.7 FR LUX % of speech acts 30.8% 15.6% 25.8% UK IRL % of speech acts 69.2% 84.4% 74.2% Total 100% 100% 100% SG 12 (n. participants 15) Language of moderator -Italian Total speech acts (excluded moderator) 76 9 16 Moderator intervene to engage individual participants 2.6 % 0.0 % 0.0 % Moderator intervene to engage linguistic group (sw) 3.9 % 0.0 % 0.0 % Neutral or positive reference to other arguments 35.5 % 11.1 % 43.8 % Swedish n. of speech acts 23.3 % 23.5 % 37.5 % Italian n. of speech acts 65.1 % 70.6 % 62.5 % Spanish n. of speech acts 11.6 % 5.9% 0.0 % Total 100 % 100 % 100% *The percentages of each linguistic group speech acts are calculated by weight of each language within the composition of small group. Impact of Language Pluralism. For the purpose of this analysis, language is used as the second analytically distinct though not independent variable in constituting a critical public. In the post-deliberation questionnaire poll language was seen by only 12 percent of the participants as a barrier to follow the debate and "understand" their fellow European citizens. When analysing language group participation and interactions in different sequences of deliberation in the four groups analysed the results are more mixed (Table 2). Table 2: Equality, Language Groups and the Role of Moderators* In our analysis of group discussions we approached the criterion of equal participation by weighting each linguistic group's share in deliberation. Table 2 indicates that all linguistic groups participated in group discussions. Furthermore, moderators rarely intervened to engage specific linguistic groups in discussion but barely encouraged individual participants to get on board in the debates. There are, however, some patterns of language dominance in two groups (11 and 12) that correlate with the language spoken by the moderator while in the other two groups (8 and 7) moderating effects on language dominance did not become salient. Our data set is too small to further enquire this question of language dominance. Possible intervening variables that explain the variation on the share of group participation are the design of the group setting, delays in waiting for translations and individual styles of moderation. Another possible explanation for the minimisation of language as an impact on deliberative quality is that pluri-lingual settings are in fact especially conducive towards certain "habits of listening" (Doerr 2008; 2009). Transnational groups might turn out to be more attentive listeners and overcome habits of hearing in familiar national settings. In a discussion among co-nationals we know intuitively whom to listen to and whom to ignore. In a transnational setting, this familiarity is not given. In EuroPolis this was amplified by the technical equipment (simultaneous translations, headphones and microphones) which helped focus the attention of the participants. Participants were routinely asked to speak slowly and keep their speech intelligible in order to facilitate translation and thus mutual understanding. The higher listening requirements of the pluri-lingual setting might thus have worked positively for the deliberative quality. In all, then, our results with regard to the equality of participation and status of language groups confirm the overall trend of the Europolis experiment that plurality is not a principled barrier to deliberation. Participants did not isolate themselves but engaged in debate with citizens from other language groups. Conclusion In this article, we have explored whether deliberation is feasible if participants respond to a polity of dispersed authority and interact in a transnational and pluri-lingual setting. The analysis of group discussions from Europolis has J furnished two main findings. Firstly, the EU polity is recognised and taken as a reference point by citizens for exercising communicative power and impact on decision-making. In this sense, Europolis generated a counterfactual and microcosmic European "public," where citizens from highly diverse backgrounds and despite language pluralism have debated and contested each other on issues of principle and policy related to European integration. Problems of understanding related to the use of several languages in heterogeneous group settings can thus be partly ^ overcome, though there remain restrictions in how the principle of political equality can be approached and how the overall representativity of the experiment can be defended (Olsen and Trenz 2013). Secondly, the constituency created in Europolis was mainly one of critical reflexiv-ity toward experts and political elites. As such, our qualitative data highlights deliberation's community-generating and transformative role against the communitarian view that certain pre-political requisites must always be in place for deliberative democracy to function effectively. The participants did not all become wholehearted 0 £ i C (6 o Europeans or came to share a specific political identity. We show, however, that they in certain sequences of the deliberation developed a critical and collective problem-solving capacity on issues of shared relevance (Dewey 1927; Dryzek 2009). In other words, Europolis instilled in its participants a deliberative reflexivity which went beyond mere preference exchange: we have provided examples of how some of them developed what Dryzek (2009) has highlighted as a capacity to identify systemic shortcomings after confrontation with experts and politicians. Our analysis shows, then, that the EU polity received "recognition through criticism." By giving citizens the opportunity to discuss and voice opinion, deliberative polling raises awareness of the complexities of political decision-making and democratic legitimacy. We therefore conclude that communicative barriers as deriving from dispersed authority and group heterogeneity in the post-national constellation are for the most part practical and not substantial. They can be overcome by careful design of the deliberative setting which facilitates encounters among the participants and generates habits of respect, listening and learning. Notes: 1. For an overview of how deliberative polls are organised, see Fung 2003. See also Fishkin 2009. 2. The unit of analysis of the DQI is a speech act delivered by a participant. The entire discussion is broken down into smaller speech units and each speech act is coded separately. Every speech act is coded for all the variables included in the coding scheme. 3. See Steiner et al. (2004) for the coding scheme. 4. New categories of interest for this study will be listed and explained later in the text. 5. The question used to measure those attitudes read: And on a scale from 0 to 10, where "0" means "entirely at the EU level," "10" means "entirely by the individual Member States," and "5" is "exactly in the middle," at what level do you think decisions should be made in each of the following areas? Immigration; Climate Change; Fighting unemployment; Fighting crime. 6. "Control" issues are those that were not discussed during Europolis, namely: unemployment and crime. 7. The questions that allowed the measurement of identity change read as follows: On a scale from 0 to 10, where "0" is "not at all," "10" is "completely," and "5" is "exactly in the middle," how much would you say you think of yourself as being European?; And on the same 0 to 10 scale, how much would you say you think of yourself as just being from your [country]? Only country=10; And if you had to choose just one of the following alternatives, what would you say you see yourself as...? 1-nationality only/ 4-European. 8. The DQI category "content of justification" allows to assess whether justification of the statements or speech acts have been backed referring to benefits and costs of all. The DQI distinguishes three types of justification: Explicit statement concerning constituency or group interests (own country); Explicit statement in terms of a conception of Europe in utilitarian or collective terms; Explicit statement in terms of the common good or difference principle (solidarity, quality of life, justice, etc.). 9. We counted the number of speech acts delivered by participant/linguistic group. 10. The DQI category that captures the nature of moderator intervention is also a new category for the purposes of Europolis. In our study we specifically probe whether moderators of selected groups intervene to engage specific language groups in the debate. 11. The DQI categories that allows the measurement of degrees of interactivity is coded "Respect toward other arguments" and distinguishes between: No reference to other participants' arguments; Negative reference to other participants' arguments; Neutral reference to other participants' arguments: and Positive reference to other participants' arguments. 12. The questionnaire data are available on http://cdd.stanford.edu/polls/eu/ under the heading "Results." References: Abels, Gabriele. 2009. Citizens' Deliberation and the EU Democratic Deficit: Is There a Model for Participatory Democracy? Tübinger Arbeitspapiere zur Intergrationsforschung 1. Abromeit, Heidrun and Thomas Schmidt. 1998. Grenzprobleme der Demokratie: konzeptionelle Überlegungen. In B. Kohler-Koch (ed.), Regieren in entgrentzen Räumen, 293-310. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Benhabib, Seyla. 1994. Deliberative Rationality and Models of Democratic Legitimacy. Constellations 1, 1, 26-52. Bohman, James. 2003. 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Towards a Theory of Democratic Functionalism. European Journal of Social Theory 7, 1, 5-25. Thompson, Dennis F. 2008. Deliberative Democratic Theory and Empirical Political Science. Annual Review of Political Science 11, 497-520. Wessler, Hartmut. 2008. Investigating Deliberativeness Comparatively. Political Communication 25, 1, 1-22. a 0 £ fr 1 fr tf) 0 C (jü MEDIATISATION AND REGIONAL CAMPAIGNING IN A PARTY CENTRED-SYSTEM HOW AND WHY PARLIAMENTARY CANDIDATES SEEK VISIBILITY Abstract Election campaigns are central to political life as well as to the study of political communication and provides much empirical knowledge about the processes of mediatisation and mediation of politics. Most often studies focus on the campaigns featuring the national top politicians. However, most elections campaigns in Western democracies are run by party branches and candidates who rarely make the top headlines in the nationwide media, yet they are also dependent on media attention and agenda-setting to be visible and reach their voters. Relying on several data sets from studies of the Norwegian 2009 parliamentary election campaign, this study asks, first, how regional, mainly "non-celebrity politicians," obtain visibility. We seek to unravel how the media logic works on the regional and local level. Second, we ask why it is important for candidates in a party-centred proportional (PR) system to be visible. Our findings suggest that we should recognise the mediatised and multileveled character of election campaigns in order to understand how media logics work below the nationwide setting. ELI SKOGERB0 RUNE KARLSEN Eli Skogerb0 is Professor in Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo; e-mail: eli.skogerbo@media.uio.no. Rune Karlsen is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Research, Oslo; e-mail: rune.karlsen@socialresearch.no. rN Cfi LO IV d CP rN o o rN rN 15 > Z 3 a 0 z * 1 (I) 0 C (6 LT) Introduction Prior to parliamentary elections, parties and politicians seek and attract attention from nationwide media. Celebrity politicians fill the newspapers and are frequent guests in newscasts and talk shows on television (Van Zoonen 2000; 2005). There is an abundance of studies focusing on how politics is adapted to the media logic, and particularly on the mechanisms of mediatisation in election campaigns (see e.g. Strömbäck and Dimitrova 2006; Davis 2007; Davis 2010; Norris, LeDuc and Niemi 2010; Allern 2011; Young 2011; Aelst, Thorbj0rnsrud and Aalberg 2012; Landerer 2013), however, less knowledge about parliamentary candidates who run local and regional election campaigns and rarely make the headlines of the nationwide media. Their campaigns are carried out in public spaces, mainly but not exclusively made up of news media as well as online and social media, and as such, we would expect these candidates to adapt their campaigns to the media logic, too. Mediation and Mediatisation "Mediatisation" refers to the complex and interdependent relationship between the media and other social institutions. The origins of the notion is often credited to Altheide and Snow's (1979) work on "media logics" where the authors argued that the news media "formatted" the way events and messages were shaped and mediated. However, these phenomena have been discussed for decades within different disciplines. Lippmann (1922) observed the difference between mediated and personal communication of news, Adorno and Horkheimer (1997) were absorbed by the power of the mass media during the Nazi period in Germany, and Stein Rokkan (1966) pointed to the media as a channel of influence beside the numerical and corporate (Elmelund-Prastek^r, Hopmann and N0rgaard 2011). There is no full consensus on the use of these concepts (Couldry and Hepp 2013). Recently, Altheide (2013, 226) emphasised that "mediation" "joins information technology and communication (media) formats with the time and place of activities." Often, however "mediation" refers to the simple fact that messages are conveyed through some kind of media (Strömbäck 2008; Hjarvard 2013). Mediatisation may be studied as processes that have been ongoing through human history (Finnemann 2011) £ whereas other see them as recent developments tied to the expansion of modern news media and, more recently, interactive and digital media (Hepp, Hjarvard and Lundby 2010; Hjarvard 2013). In order to study processes of mediatisation empirically, we have delimited and operationalised the concept. First, we look at mediatisation of politics, that is, how media logic affects political processes and political outcomes. In Scandinavia, Hernes (1978) introduced the notion of the "media-twisted society" as a description of how adapting political actions and messages to the formats and timetables of the news media were effective ways for political activists to obtain political influence. Asp (1986) used "medialisation" for techniques used by interest groups to attract attention and set the agenda for in the media as well as for political decision-makers. These early contributions incorporated theories on media power and agenda setting and nourished the strand of thought conceiving "mediatisation" as shifting political power from democratic bodies to the media and non-elected activist group. In this view, mediatisation is inherently negative and detrimental to democracy (Mazzoleni and Schulz 1999). C > II UD IV In line with others, we do not adhere to this normative view on mediatisation (Strömbäck 2008; Elmelund-Prastek^r, Hopmann and N0rgaard 2011; Hjarvard 2013). We regard Western democracies and politics as mediated and mediatised, and mediatisation of politics as an empirically observable process of change describing the increasing interdependency between political institutions and actors, such as parties and candidates, and media institutions. By increasing interdepen-dency, we refer to the fact that parties and politicians rely on the media in order to communicate their politics, whereas the media need the parties and politicians as sources, contributors of news and entertainment. There are many and different ways of exemplifying mediatisation. Elmelund-Prastek^r et al. (2011) point to five structural indicators conducive to increasing mediatisation: weak political parties/ decline of class parties; dominance of commercial media; intense competition for media audiences; professional management of parties; and journalistic focus on horse races and not policies. All these are observable in the Norwegian setting, but they may not fully illustrate that mediatisation incorporates an institutional and constructivist approach to politics. Politics is played out inside and outside the media, and political events, such as elections and party conventions, are followed, framed, interpreted and commented on by journalists. Some politicians obtain celebrity status by position or by building up "media capital" by continuous and reproduced media appearances that may be converted into political power (Davis 2010, chs. 5-6). Most citizens experience politics mainly as mediated and mediatised events, and meet top politicians and the political parties only though television, newspapers, blogs or Facebook. Political parties and their candidates strive accordingly to be visible in and gain attention from the media, if not continuously so as an important part of their everyday political life and indeed when campaigning. Division of Labour Our second focus is on the mediatisation of election campaigns. Election campaigns in mediatised democracies can be conceived of as ways of managing and optimising visibility for political parties, their issues and candidates prior to Election Day and are as such particularly spectacular examples of mediatised politics. We argue that mediation and mediatisation take place not only on top-level politics but on the regional and local level, too. Political practices and institutions have increasingly been adapted to the practices of journalism and media institutions. During election campaigns, such practices are observable in the professionalisation of the party organisations, media training of politicians and their advisors, increasing media competence and appearances of politicians and political candidates, and increased use of digital and social media for political purposes. They are constant ingredients of political activity, yet intensified during campaigning periods. In party-centred systems, there is a division of labour between the central party organisation and the party leadership and the local and regional party branches and the local and regional candidates (Karlsen and Skogerb0 2013). Time and Space Third, we look at campaigning locally and regionally. The party leaders naturally attract most attention from the nationwide media. These media stage the contest for power of the government, and there is little space for the regional candidates. Regional candidates have to seek alternative communicative spaces for attracting attention to their candidacies and their parties' politics. We expect that traditional and online local and regional newspapers, radio and television, as well as social media, blogs and websites make up the communicative spaces for these candidates. Both individual and structural factors may influence whether individual candidates succeed or fail in their attempts to attract attention to their campaigns. Individual factors may include candidates' personal communication skills, strategies, and their position on the party list. Structural factors may refer to the parties' historical position in the constituency, the geographical and demographical characteristics of the constituency as well as the local and regional media structure. As a rule, regional candidates cannot draw on a nationwide celebrity status as they are less well known, less exposed on national television, do not hold high positions in the party and accordingly draw less attention to their candidacies. However, they may have accumulated local "media capital" (Davis 2010). Parliamentary candidates are likely to be well versed in mediatised politics, as they often are experienced politicians from local and regional government and parties. They know the local media structure and may take advantage of the competition between the different news media for breaking news, and use online and social media as alternative routes onto the agenda of the news media. Local media structures may be monopolistic or pluralistic depending on the amount of media and communication channels available in the constituency. A pluralistic structure allows for more competition between the media and provides more space for the individual candidates. As the media structure varies between the constituencies in terms of number, popularity, readership and reach of newspapers, broadcasters and online media, it may affect how and to what extent candidates achieve attention. Local and regional media operate within spatial and temporal frames and have editorial priorities that influence the way they follow and report politics. The main characteristic of local journalism is the localisation of news and stories (Franklin 2006; Mathisen 2010). In the same vein, elections, constituencies, voters, and political candidacies are defined by time and space. Electoral constituencies are rarely identical with the areas covered by either traditional regional and local news media or online media and constituencies do not have identical media landscapes. For political candidates, this means that they may have to localise their messages, too, but still operate within the boundaries of a central campaign. Parties and candidates are likely to adapt, transform and communicate their messages to conform to the journalistic priorities and agendas of local and regional media. Local party branches £ and candidates may front local issues or conflicts that highlight differences and views in the campaign. In the following, we seek to untangle how parliamentary ^ candidates run their campaigns in a media landscape dominated by local journalism. The Norwegian Setting - Politics and the Media Q The study is carried out in Norway and includes candidates who ran for the 2009 national election. Politically, Norway is a stable democracy with a parliamentary government, a multiparty system and well-organised membership parties. 3 a c > Although the political parties over time have been weakened by declining membership and reduced party identification, the organisations have remained strong (Heidar and Saglie 2003). The parliamentary constituencies are made up by the il 00 19 counties, large administrative and geographical units consisting of many different rural and urban municipalities. All major parties put up lists and campaign for representation in each constituency. Political sociologist Stein Rokkan (1967) ^ described the Norwegian political landscape as one of cross-cutting cleavages, and explained the formation of several parties as outcomes of their placement in the conflict structure. Over time, the cleavage structures have been weakened as has the support for the smaller parties. The Left - Right cleavage has remained significant and was in 2009 one of the major conflicts (Aardal 2011a). The party system can be described in terms of how the parties are placed on this continuum (see Table 1). Table 1: The Norwegian Party System: The Seven Parties Represented in Parliament 2005-2013 Socialist Left Labour Party Centre Party Christian Liberal Party Conservative Progress Party (SV) (Ap) (Sp) People's (V) Party Party Party (H) (Frp) (Krf) The electoral system consists of direct elections and proportional representation in multi-seat constituencies. The party system is, as is common in Europe, party-centred, as opposed to candidate-centred systems (e.g. USA). The central party organisations draw up campaign strategies that are guiding for the local and regional campaigns run by the party branches. The political parties dominate the nomination of candidates for parliament. The nomination processes are decentralised and the nomination of candidates in ranked order on party lists are made by representative conventions organised by the constituency branches of the parties (Narud, Pedersen and Valen 2002). Once the parties have put together the lists, the voters have formal but in practice no possibility of influencing the ranking order (Aardal 2011b). Consequently, campaigning is directed at mobilising voters for the party, not primarily for candidates. However, in situations where parties compete for mandates, the focus on candidates is likely to increase. Norwegian elections over the past decades have seen increasing shares of volatile, non-voters and undecided voters, meaning that a substantial share may be mobilised to vote or swing their vote until the last days and minutes of the campaign. Within each constituency, the candidates compete for a fixed set of seats. As most constituencies are geographically rather large and have more or less clear sub-regions, some parties, typically the large ones may divide the counties into several local campaigning grounds. As candidates normally live in localities within the constituencies, they also belong to different coverage areas of the local media. For the candidates, the existence of local newspapers and radio stations that cover their place of residence may be of particular importance for their ability to attract journalistic interest and use the local media as communicative platforms for promoting their candidacies. The four selected constituencies provide somewhat different structural communicative conditions for the election campaigns. Hallin and Mancini (2004, 11) regarded the Norwegian media system as a typical example of the Democratic-Cor-poratist Model as the state is active in designing public media policy including public service broadcasting and press subsidies and simultaneously there are strong legal and institutional barriers against interference in the editorial freedom. There is a historical coexistence of commercial media and political parallelism, meaning that many media, typically newspapers, have a past as being party press or tied to civic organisations. Over the past decades, the media dealigned themselves from the political parties, yet there are remnants of the system. Norway, as other countries, also has several distinct characteristics indicating that the Democratic Corporatist Model is weakened or perhaps never fitted that well (Herkman 2009; Humphreys 2012; 0stbye and Aalberg 2008). Important for understanding the roles of the media in regional campaigns are two structural traits: first, the ubiquity of media all over the country, traditional and online. Approximately 225 newspapers, mostly local, many only issued on print a few days a week, cover the entire country. Two popular tabloid newspapers have nationwide coverage and a few regional newspapers cover larger geographical areas (H0st 2013). The number of local newspapers has increased over the past decades, and local journalism occupies more space in the regional newspapers. Newspaper readership is high, although declining on print. Broadcasting and newspapers are significant and important information sources for voters (Karlsen 2011). The public broadcaster, NRK, offer national and regional radio and television as well as online services in all counties. The largest private TV channel, TV2, provides online services and nationwide broadcasts on several channels, too. Broadband services and social media are widely used, although the share of users varies largely between different services such as e.g. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Research Questions The core question running through our analyses focuses these issues: How do regional, mainly "non-celebrity politicians," obtain visibility? They have to compete both with other candidates from their own constituency, with other sources and with the news agenda in general. Second, we ask why it is important for candidates in a party-centred proportional y (PR) system to be visible. A party-centred PR system where the ranking order on the party lists is fixed, is conducive to a party-centred campaign-style with a rather limited role for candidate-centred campaigning (Karlsen and Narud 2013). Candidates who cannot use the campaign to change the ranking order of the party list and thereby improve their own chances to be elected, logically would not need to be visible and mobilise voters to support their own candidacies. Such reasoning unfortunately removes the fact that politics and election campaigns are mediatised processes, they take place on mediated arenas and follows the media logic. Increased personalisation is one of the aspects of this. With increasing personalisation, voters recognise parties not only by ideology and issues but also by candidates. Parties personalise their images by fronting their party leaders and top candidates and the voters recognise and relate to celebrity politicians in the party leaderships as well as to individual politicians running in their home constituencies (Van Zoonen and Holte-Bacha 2000). Voters experience, learn about and make choices about politics from many sources, however, their experiences with and conceptions of parties and politicians will more often originate in images and representations in the media than in personal meetings. We do not argue that there is a simplistic in-QQ fluence from media experiences to voting, we simply point to the fact that citizens, 0 C ¥ I C > as individuals and members of social collectives, usually experience, discuss, assess and act politically by way of their experience with politics as mediated events. Election campaigns cannot be imagined without mediation, they are designed to be carried out in public spaces and on all kinds of media platforms. Although not all campaign activities happen through or in the media, mediation is essential to reach large groups of voters. This is why we hypothesise that visibility for individual candidates is essential in campaigning in mediatised democracies. Data and Research Methods We analyse three unique sets of data, one quantitative and two qualitative, collected in the aftermath of the Norwegian 2009 parliamentary campaign. The first is the 2009 Norwegian Candidate Survey that was sent to all candidates running for election for the seven major parties. The original sample was 1972. The response rate was 52 percent, which left 1015 candidates. All parties and top and lower placed candidates were about equally represented. The survey data were analysed by means of computerised statistical measures, including descriptive as well as analytical statistics. We have run analyses controlling for socio-demographic background variables as well as variables concerning campaigning and mediati-sation. The survey complemented, contrasted and triangulated our findings from the qualitative data. By triangulating, we seek to increase the relevance, validity and reliability of the empirical findings, as well as strengthening the hypotheses that are generated from the study. The second data set consisted of qualitative interviews with 29 top candidates from the seven parties. This included candidates placed as no. 1 or no. 2 on the party lists in four constituencies; Buskerud (pop. 269,000) in east Norway; Ro-galand (pop. 452,000) on the south-west coast; Sogn and Fjordane (pop. 108,000), situated in the west; and Troms (pop. 160,000) in north Norway. The four case constituencies belong to regions where the traditional cleavage structure was widely different, meaning that the parties had different historical starting points. Third, we included interviews with nine editors in local and regional media in the same four constituencies. These focused on the editorial and journalistic priorities of the local and regional media in covering the general election in 2009. The two sets can be classified as "elite interviews" and were analysed systematically with the intention of adding information and meaning (Kvale and Brinkmann 2009). Taken together, the three data sets produce unique, statistical, reliable and to some extent generalisable findings as well as exemplary and illustrative insights into the campaigning efforts and media strategies of regional candidates. Although the data were collected in Norway and vary in generalisability, our findings provide insights into and generate hypotheses about the priorities and strategies of rank-and-file politicians and local journalism that have relevance in other national settings, too. Findings In the candidate survey, we investigated the communicative platforms of the candidates by asking the following question: On a scale from 1 to 5 where 1 indicates unimportant and 5 indicates very important, how important were the following media for you in your campaign effort? Table 2 reports the results. Table 2: The Importance of Media for Candidate Campaign Communication 2009 ("On a scale from 1 to 5, where 1 indicates unimportant and 5 indicate very important, how important were the following media for you in your campaign effort?"; in percent and arithmetic mean; source: Candidate Survey 2009, N=1015) Not important Very important 1 2 3 4 5 Mean N Local newspapers 6 4 12 26 53 4.16 973 Regional newspapers 16 8 16 27 34 3.56 963 Local radio 23 13 21 22 21 3.06 965 Regional television 32 11 18 21 19 2.84 965 National newspapers 42 13 14 15 17 2.54 966 Social Internet media 36 13 22 18 11 2.54 947 Nation-wide television 46 10 11 12 21 2.53 965 Nation-wide radio 41 13 17 15 14 2.46 958 Personal website 47 14 19 12 7 2.17 932 Table 2 shows that there was a distinct hierarchy in the candidates' media preferences. Local newspapers were the most important communication channels. Regional newspapers and local radio followed next. Nationwide television was ranked as third from the bottom of the nine communication channels. 46 percent regarded nationwide television unimportant for their campaigning whereas 47 percent considered personal websites of no value. We found few differences between the candidates concerning their background, such as age, gender, and party affiliation. Age was relevant for the assessment of social media, and the candidates representing parties to the right on the political spectrum valued television somewhat more than other media but overall similarities were more striking than differences. Concerning regional differences, nationwide TV and radio were very important only for the top candidates campaigning in the capital, Oslo. Several of the top candidates in the capital were party leaders, so this finding illustrate that the party elites and the regional candidates operate on different media arenas. Further, the candidates regarded online and social media as less important for their campaigning than traditional media. Only 11 percent of the candidates who answered the question regarded online media as very important. The survey data also showed that position on the party lists influenced the assessment of the media: the top candidates assessed traditional media as more important than candidates placed lower on the lists. The qualitative interviews with individual candidates supported the findings in table 2. The interviewees unanimously listed local media, in particular the local and regional newspapers, as fundamental to their campaigns. They also provided reasons why they put the local media on top of the hierarchy. One candidate, a high-profiled and well-known MP who was not part of the party leadership, remarked, "There are limitations on the number of Labour MPs who have access to the nationwide media" (Candidate interview 7\12\2009), while another detailed the importance of local media: £ 3 a 0 £ * 1 * tf) 0 C (ju fN 00 The regional and local media are extremely important, and increasingly so in every election campaign. For us who are not in the party leadership they are the CO most essential communication channels. It is there we present our candidacies and the party programme (Candidate interview 01\12\09). Knowing that the focus in the nationwide media was on the party leadership, the candidates considered the regional and local media as their main arenas for displaying their views and face to the voters. Contrary to the many premonitions of the demise of the local media (Franklin 2006), some candidates argued that the local and regional media were becoming more important for the candidates over the years: "The local and regional media have improved, are more critical, and follow us in ways they formerly did not" (Candidate interview 1\12\09). Further, candidates confirmed the division of labour and the different conditions for access inside and outside campaign periods: During election campaign, the main media focus is on the party leader and the party elite. In this period, I concentrated on the local media, although I did try to get through to the national media once or twice. Between elections, it is "both please," - it is easier to get access in the national media. As a representative for the party, I must have a strategy to show my face in the newspapers and on TV (Candidate interview 22\9\09). Visibility Having a "strategy to show my face" was the essence of the campaign efforts in the local constituencies, if we are to believe the candidates: The election campaign is very much about visibility. People may agree or disagree with your message but being visible has a value in itself. Accordingly, the [local and regional] newspapers and radio programmes are very important (Candidate interview 02\11\09). The candidates emphasised that their main objective in the local campaigns was to be visible. For these candidates the local and regional newspapers provided the largest, most attractive and most efficient arena for reaching the voters. The local newspapers were "read by everybody" as one candidate claimed. Another argued that it was most "effective" to be in the local media. Others pointed out that getting coverage in local and regional newspapers was more valuable than being quoted in a major quality newspaper, while some measured the success of the campaign in front pages: The regional media are important for the home market and for issues that are regional and local. The goal in the election campaign was to get as many articles and front pages as possible in the leading regional newspaper. If we got three or four front pages, it was a successful election campaign (Candidate interview 12\11\09). These viewpoints were common for the candidates, regardless of party, position in the party and place on the lists. The editors of local and regional media confirmed that their media were important stages: Election campaigns are about getting known, make people know who you are. ... The local newspaper is a very important arena in this (Interview, editor-in-chief, 08\12\09). Put simply, the main differences between the national and local campaigns seem to be the stages on which the politicians strove to be visible. For the candidates, the ability and need to obtain visibility varied not only with their personal capacity for attracting journalistic attention, but also with their position on the lists and the "security" of their mandates (table 1). Table 3: Proportion of Candidates who were Regularly Interviewed in Local and National Media during the Parliamentary Election Campaign by Perception of Winning Chances 2009 (in percent; source: Candidate Survey 2009; N=1015) Local newspapers National newspapers Local TV National TV (N) Could not win 60 8 27 6 656 Could hardly win 85 17 62 16 99 It was an open race 93 44 78 36 58 I could hardly lose 88 30 66 29 54 I could not lose 93 70 89 59 38 Regularly interviewed = used more than 1 hour every week on interviews. Position and Party Table 2 shows differences between candidates with different perception of their chances to win a mandate and their access to the media. Two findings are very clear: the local newspapers were important media arenas for all candidates. Even the group with no winning chances were regularly interviewed locally whereas they had insignificant access to national media. Further, the candidates in the best positions, those who could not lose their seat, together with those who had to fight hard to win a mandate, won the attention of the media. This is hardly surprising, given the media logic: the secure positions on the lists were likely to be occupied by local "celebrity politicians" who can count on newsworthiness by their sheer presence, or following Davis (2010), by their accumulated "media capital." The interviews shed further light on these findings. Several of the candidates with secure positions on the party lists, did not, according to themselves and the editors, need ^ to do very much to get attention. One editor confirmed this: Q We have one of the Labour Party veterans here. He is not very visible. Still, he is the classic politician, the one who is always present at party meetings and always works for local projects and gets credit for it, too. He is probably the politician that ordinary people vote for although he does not appear in the news very much. However, he has his footing in the working class, if anything like that still exists. They are his people. When he comes up with something, we put him on because we know he is good and he knows what is important (Interview, 0 _____________________________ editor-in-chief 04\12\2009). The editor here describes a "local working-class hero," a politician whose views and stories will interest the local readers, thereby fitting the demands of local journalism. Equally expected is that the political struggles for power and positions OQ between candidates fighting for insecure seats attract more media attention than candidates who do not stand a chance. The editor pointed to the difference between the candidate who held a secure top position for the Labour Party and the top candidate from the Centre Party that had not taken a mandate in the constituency for decades. "He knew that he would win whereas the Centre Party candidate had to do something exceptional to get a seat in Parliament" (Interview, editor-in-chief 04\12\09). By pointing to the differences in their positions, the holder of a safe seat versus the candidate running in an open race, the editor also drew attention to the substantial differences between campaigning for a large and a small party. Driving a successful campaign from the underdog's position required quite another effort for entering the news. When asked why one particular candidate from a small party attracted so much attention, the editor pointed to her media capital: She was extremely energetic and contacted us on SMS, telephone and everything else. She succeeded in breaking the barriers. Moreover, she was trained in getting what she wanted. She continuously announced newsworthy issues and events that we simply had to report. She was always present and often together with someone from the top party leadership or the Government, promising to solve or support a local issue. She arranged meetings with local party leaders and if we could not send a photographer, she even fixed pictures. She was very keen on winning a seat in Parliament and she succeeded, too (Interview, editor-in-chief 04\12\2009). The editor described a candidate well versed in mediatised politics. When interviewed, she confirmed that the campaigning efforts were part of a systematic communication strategy aimed at attracting local media attention and mobilising local support: We systematically worked the media and we worked closely with our local party representatives, too. When I travelled around the constituency, I did so together with the local representatives from the places I visited, e.g. the mayor, a group leader, the leader of the local party branch. They were always involved in the campaign and the issues that we fronted (Candidate interview 10\11\09). Localising the Campaign The interviews illustrated the mechanisms of mediatised politics in practice: candidates played not only the media logic but also the local media structure. Focusing local issues, cooperating with the local party representatives, showing that also the "big issues" had a local angle, were among the techniques employed to attract attention from local and regional media. In areas with a multitude of different local media, they adapted their messages to ultra-local, local and regional media, as well as observing differences between online and traditional publishing. As expected, differences in the media structure opened for different and individualised media strategies. The candidates in one constituency praised the ubiquity of local media and described a competitive media situation that benefitted the candidates. They expressed more control and autonomy over their communication strategies than candidates in constituencies where the media structure was centralised or nearly monopolised. In a situation with local news competition, the candidates experienced that their value as sources was higher than in a near-monopolised situation where the dominant medium could choose from an abundance of sources. This finding supports the argument that media concentration lead to less diversity and more difficult access for views and individuals (Baker 2007), and, equally important, that diversity of media channels may also mean diversity of voices (Karppinen 2012). There were some differences between the candidates concerning how they localised issues. As may be expected in a party-centred system, candidates from the small parties with few secure seats focused on specific local issues, sometimes promising financial support for local projects. Candidates from the large parties seemed to adhere to their parties' central campaign strategies arguing that their main issues, e.g. securing kindergartens or good schools everywhere, did not need specific localisation as they were important and relevant for their local voters, too (Karlsen and Skogerb0 2013). The editors supported that localising issues and messages were in line with their editorial philosophies. In order to be journalistically attractive, the candidates had to be relevant for the local audiences: For us it was important to cover the election campaign by focusing the local issues. The local campaigns are often overshadowed by the national election campaign. ... Many candidates were not prepared for anchoring their messages locally. ... We had a criterion for coverage of e.g. a Minister's visit to the constituency that he or she had to contribute to a local issue (Interview, editor-in-chief 14\10\2009). The attempts of local party branches and candidates at enhancing the visibility of their campaigns by inviting national celebrity politicians illustrate the dynamics between the national and the local campaigns and between the media logics of the nationwide and local media. Hosting a visit from the top party leadership shows local citizens that local candidates and votes are important to the central party. It may attract attention from the nationwide media to local issues and the region. Yet, if we believe the editors, it may not enhance the candidates' local news value, as they step out of the local media logic and into the national media arena. Commu-y nicating politics thus not only demands that candidates have considerable insight into processes of mediatisation, the local candidates need substantial skills for translating big politics into issues that reflect on voters' everyday life in different geographical and medial settings, too. Still, the local and regional media were not the only platforms. Several candidates across party lines emphasised personal contact with voters through home visits and other forms of face-to-face communication as important and believed that such activities would increase in coming elections. In contrast, political meetings and debates tended to be deemed as unimportant for reaching new voters. Among the arenas that a number of the candidates used, were social and online media. Online and Social Media Were Add-ons Q Online media and social media were indeed gaining importance for the candidates. Social media, e.g. Facebook, were considered more important than the more static personal websites. In 2009, quite a few candidates did not employ social media in their campaigning effort. Those who used them regarded social media highly and for the youngest candidates they were the second most important channels. QQ Both the survey and the interviews indicated that online and social media com- C > plemented and did not replace other media exposure (Figure 2). Candidates who assessed social media as important valued all other media, too. The underlying explanation may be that the already "media savvy" candidates benefitted most ^ from online media. Figure 1: Social Media are Add-ons: The Importance of Different Media for Campaign Communication for Candidates Who Say that Social Media Are Important, and Candidates Who Indicate that Social Media Are not Important Social media important: 4 and 5 on the scale from 1-5. N: Important=268 Not important=667-676. All parties encouraged their candidates to be present online. The Labour Party, for instance, sought to lower the threshold for online participation in order "to be present everywhere," to quote one Labour candidate. None of the interviewees was unaware of online and social media. Everyone had a personal website provided for them by the party and all used electronic media for information and communication. Not all candidates had a personal online profile, but all were aware that many voters, in particular the young, expected them to. Some were active on several platforms, many preferred Facebook, and others did not prioritise social media at all. The following quotation is typical of the latter group: I am not very active on Twitter. I started but fell out again. I wanted to be there myself and not have other people write for me. ... However, I did not manage (Candidate interview 29\01\10). This candidate was a party leader, member of the Cabinet and enjoyed the corresponding celebrity, media capital and access to all media while running for election in her home constituency. Still, she saw it as a problem that she failed to be personally active on social media. Her example illustrates the strong claim for authenticity that prevailed among the candidates. With few exceptions, they all regarded personal authorship on the web as essential, thereby also emphasising that social media presence was part of personal image-building (Enli and Skogerb0 2013). The candidates also distinguished clearly between different online media, using blogs, Facebook and Twitter for different purposes: My goal is to blog a couple of times a week. I want to get my political message out on the web so that those surfing the net can pick it up and discuss it. I want to create two-way communication with the voters concerning concrete political issues. I use Twitter primarily to draw attention to my blog, and Facebook, too, but Facebook lies in the intersection between my private and public roles (Candidate interview 01\12\09). Only one of the interviewed candidates had the Internet as her main platform, and she used online presence as a substitute for lacking access to other media. As a candidate without winning chances, she had few opportunities for attracting attention from the traditional news media. Importance of the Nationwide and the Local Campaigns As much as the candidates emphasised the importance of local and regional media in the regional campaigns, a different pattern emerged when they assessed the salience of different media in the national election campaign (Figure 3). Figure 2: Important Media in the Election Campaign: Percentage of the Candidates Who Placed the Medium as Most Important, Second Most Important and Third Most Important (Source: Candidate Survey 2009; N=1015) 00 00 Whereas only candidates campaigning in the capital identified nationwide television and newspapers as important for their own campaigns, eight out of ten candidates identified nationwide television channels as the most influential in the national campaign. Over 70 percent regarded the public broadcaster NRK most significant. These figures point to the perceived importance of the media in securing visibility for the party elites, highlighting the parties' core issues, and setting CT> the agenda of the nationwide election campaign. The interviews confirmed that the candidates regarded nationwide TV and newspapers as essential for setting the agenda of the national campaign. Some even questioned whether the local campaigns made a difference but the most common assessment was that local campaigns might have a limited local effect on the outcome, but not change the general trends of the campaign: Those who say that the local election campaigns are decisive are simply wrong. They may be important in order to draw one or two percent of the voters, but the 12, 14, 15 percent, the so-called core voters are recruited nationally. It can clearly be seen from the fact that the Conservative Party had 10 percent on the opinion polls when the election campaign started and ended up with 17 percent of the votes cast. It was not the good job done in the counties that caused that, it was caused by the formidable job done by the party leader on TV (Candidate interview 12\11\2009). The editors shared their views, as the following, typical, quotation illustrates: The campaign is dominated by the nationwide agenda and we have marginal influence. We introduce and make known the local candidates to the local voters but we do not have much influence on the nationwide agenda or the outcome of the election on the national level (Interview editor-in-chief 6\11\2009). Discussion Our study opened by asking how candidates running for election in their home constituencies obtain visibility, taking as a starting hypothesis that election campaigning in the regional and local constituencies are mediated and mediatised processes, just as the national campaigns. Our findings show, clearly and unequivocally, that this is the case. The media channels are different; the centrality of mediatised politics is not. Our findings confirmed, first, the interdependency between local media and local parties and candidates. Elections were important news that "had to be covered." Making candidates and political alternatives known to the voters is prioritised by local journalism. The journalistic newsworthiness of candidates, parties and issues were measured by the relevance for local audiences and their adaptability to local news criteria. Campaign strategies, media capital, and the party organisation were resources drawn upon by the candidates. Their journalistic attractiveness varied with media competence, status, position on the party lists and chances of winning a seat. Local editors published what they saw relevant for their local audiences and the local media logics were well known by the candidates. In a media economy where fragmentation of attention and diversification of media products are strong trends, increased localisation of parliamentary campaigns seem to be an emerging hypothesis. Some candidates indicated that they tailored their media performances to different local media. Such strategies might mean that they also fragmented and tailored their political arguments; however, our findings also indicate that central campaign strategies prevailed, preventing a clear conclusion. Our interviews suggested that the candidates perceived a dilemma between being responsive to local demands during the campaign and accountability as representatives for a large party that was likely to be in government after the election. There were differences shaped by the media landscapes. Within local media, the candidates had ample room for driving their own campaign. Interestingly, whereas the candidates in the survey described their communicative spaces as hierarchical and ranked, the interviews pointed to benefits of campaigning in constituencies where the media landscape was diverse and different media covered different parts of the constituencies. For these candidates the media diversity worked as a network of media spaces that offered many outlets. Small ultra-local newspapers, online and print editions, party web sites and social network sites like Facebook and Twitter were described as complementary if not of equal importance to the nationwide media. This description challenges the media hierarchy that emerged when candidates ranked channels according to perceived importance, and may point towards a shift in the power play between the media and politicians. The more media accessible to them, the more spaces in principle will be open for meetings between politicians and their voters. This observation does not necessarily rock the fundamentals of the mediatisation framework but it needs to be re-described in a situation of "communicative abundance" (Karppinen 2012). Our interviews as well as other studies of how politicians use social media and other channels to avoid the gatekeepers and market their views and images suggest that this is a likely interpretation (Enli 2007; Skovsgaard and Van Dalen 2013). Our second main question was why visibility is essential for candidates in party-centred systems. Neither local candidates nor local media claimed to influence the agenda of the nationwide election campaign, suggesting a contradiction between the importance that the candidates attributed to being visible and their assessment of their own campaign efforts to have little bearing on the nationwide campaign. Instead, they pointed to the party leaders' performances on television to explain success or failure of the party on Election Day. So, why did the candidates put so much effort into their regional campaigns if they actually believed that most of their efforts did not make a difference? We suggest that the explanation is that they conceive of campaign communication as multi-layered and hierarchical communication processes, following the same organisation and division of labour as the ^ political system and the media structure. Local campaigns matter locally but do not outweigh the nationwide campaigns. Yet, were they not to campaign locally, the candidates risk disappearing from the voters' eyes and thereby lose their votes. If we regard their assessment of the different levels of campaigning from this angle, the contradiction disappears. ^ Conclusion Our findings provide new insights into the complexity of mediatised politics. First, even in party-centred systems parliamentary election campaigns are multi-level, mediatised political communication processes. Candidates obtain visibility through a network of mediated spaces, locally or nationwide. Second, personal visibility is important also in settings where the candidates cannot change their own winning chances. Large numbers of voters decide if and what party to vote for shortly before Election Day, and they know parties mainly through the media 0 £ > (6 o ^ appearances of their candidates. Visibility for candidates means visibility for parties. 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Göteborg: Nordicom. fM Ch GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION IN MARRIAGES OF CONVENIENCE BETWEEN TV BROADCASTERS AND DISTRIBUTORS Abstract Albeit largely neglected in communication sciences research, industrial convergence has put the relation between legacy content media like TV broadcasters and distributors (cable, satellite) firmly on the policy agenda. There seems to be an increasing awareness of the gatekeeping characteristics of mainstream as well as online video distribution, and the power distributors can exert vis-à-vis television broadcasters in terms of the bundling of services and pricing. The relation between TV broadcasters and distributors is increasingly characterised by conflicts. Because of public disputes between broadcasters and distributors, and threats of blackout, several governments across Europe are indeed discussing the necessity of regulatory intervention in order to decrease tension and promote cooperation in their media sectors. The article therefore questions how broadcasters have problematised their relation with distributors and put it on the policy agenda, whether it is up to governments to intervene in the relationship between broadcasters and distributors, and whether the proposed policy actions are likely to remedy the tensions in the marketplace. KAREN DONDERS TOM EVENS Karen Donders is Professor of Policy Analysis and European Media Markets at the Communication Sciences Department of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel; e-mail: kdonders@vub.ac.be. Tom Evens is Senior Researcher at the Research Group for Media & ICT (iMinds-MICT) at Ghent University; e-mail: Tom.Evens@UGent.be. m Cfi d cp rN o o rN rN 15 > A 3 a 0 z * 1 (I) 0 C « m Ch Introduction Distribution has always been a key factor in content industries. Essentially, distribution is the part of the media supply chain determining access to the audience. Since distributors (cable, satellite, etc.) have control of the television channels that reach both the aggregate audience and individual viewers, they act as gatekeepers and therefore have considerable market power. This means that their relevance is not only of an economic nature, but extends to the social and cultural, affecting content diversity and cultural citizenship. As the value of content depends crucially on its distribution and the value of distribution depends on the programming it carries, content and infrastructure are highly interconnected (see Croteau and Hoynes 2006; Doyle 2013b). Nevertheless, infrastructure and in particular the distribution of television content has been largely neglected in communication sciences research (Michalis 2014). In particular communications policy research has had a rather "narrow focus on mass media with a concurrent neglect of telecommunications" (Just and Puppis 2012, 14). Given the technicality of distribution, it has more often been the playground of research in fields like informatics. Although one might argue that the Internet has opened up a massive array of new means of distribution and, hence, that traditional modes of distribution like cable and satellite have lost power and/or will lose out in the future (for more information on the declining control over content distribution, see Braet 2013; Davenport and Beck 2001), power asymmetries between broadcasters and distributors are likely to persist in Europe as most viewers still use the main(stream) distribution networks to watch television programming (Hesmondalgh 2007). Among Europe's 249 million television households, satellite is the most popular platform, accounting for 85 million homes at the end of 2012. Digital terrestrial television (DTT) is the second most popular way of receiving signals, accounting for 78 million homes. Thanks to the analogue switch-off, cable is on the rise with 68 million homes whereas IPTV, Europe's fastest growing television distribution market, rose to 18 million homes. Power asymmetries between broadcasters and distributors may give rise to conflicts, especially if revenues are disproportionally divided between those firms that invest in content production and those firms that make money by reselling that content. Moreover, also between broadcasters and over-the-top (OTT) platforms (i.e. television content providers operating over the Internet without a traditional distributor being involved) such as Netflix and YouTube relations seem to become increasingly tense. UK broadcasters ITV and Channel 4 have protested against services like TV-Catchup, streaming over 50 UK television channels online without prior consent of the broadcasters and without any remuneration.1 ITV said it would pursue these and other sites it believed "to 3 a be infringing our copyright or using our content in an unlicensed, illegal capacity" 0 (Halliday 2013, sp). In a converged media environment, in which boundaries between actors and industries are blurring, the relation between legacy content media like television broadcasters and distribution companies has become a "hot topic" in public and policy debates. There seems to be an increasing awareness of the gatekeeping characteristics of mainstream as well as OTT distribution, and the power distribu-^ tion companies can exert vis-à-vis television broadcasters in terms of the bundling of services and pricing. Free-to-air broadcasters in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, etc. have argued that distribution LH companies benefit enormously from broadcasters' programming without adequate compensation (Donders and Evens 2011). Observing significant concentration in the market for television distribution (compared to the multitude of broadcasters - even though concentration is also a feature of some broadcasting markets2) and given the intrinsic dependency of free-to-air television stations from distributors to reach the audience (Oliver and Ohlbaum 2011, 8-9), they claim to be in a weaker bargaining position. Moreover, public broadcasters like BBC (UK), ARD, ZDF (Germany) and VRT (Flanders, i.e. the northern part of Belgium) have protested against (commercial communication) overlays on their programming, which - so they argue - go against their editorial autonomy and responsibility (see, for example, Vlaams Parlement 2013a). Whereas the Court of Justice of the EU (2013) has explicitly confirmed that services like TV-Catchup operate illegally, failing to respect basic principles of copyright law, other issues related to, what we would dub, "economic fairness" and "content integrity" are less easily captured by existing policies and laws applying to media and electronic communications. Broadcasting-distribution relations are influenced by five factors: i.e. the structure of the industry, the structure of the involved companies, the type of services concerned in the relation, personalities, and policy (see Table 1 below). For research on the first three aspects we refer to previous work (Evens and Donders 2013). While expert interviews with industry representatives (see Donders and Evens 2011) show that rather "personal" and even emotional issues play a considerable role in broadcasting-distribution relations, this aspect is difficult to study in an empirically valid way. The policy factor deserves more attention, however. Because of public disputes between broadcasters and distributors, and threats of blackout, Table 1: Factors Influencing Broadcast-Distribution Relations MACRO - Media-specific regulation - - Telecommunications policy INSTITUTIONS - Antitrust regulation - Copyright law MESO - Industry consolidation - - Amount of buyers/sellers MARKET - Entry barriers - Technological change MICRO - Relative size - - Conglomerateness COMPANY - Vertical integration - Financial resilience MICRO - Product differentiation - - Exclusivity PRODUCT - Bundling/subsidisation - Switching costs INDIVIDU - Negotiation strategy - - Relative familiarity PERSONAL - Reputation for fairness - History of conflicts several governments across Europe are indeed discussing the necessity of regulatory intervention in order to decrease tension and promote cooperation in their media sectors. An analysis of these policy initiatives is in place at this stage as government action at the European and/or national level might have significant effects on the media value chain and, consequently, be of importance to citizens across Europe. Indeed, whereas media business literature sometimes underestimates the policy factor, reducing it to some sort of exogenous factor, it is in fact a shaping force in emerging and/or changing media markets (Croteau and Hoynes 2006, 65; for an illustration of the impact of media policy on specific media systems see, for example, Doyle 2013a; Kuhn 2013; Donders and Van den Bulck 2013). The article therefore questions how broadcasters have problematised their relation with distribution companies and put in on the policy agenda, whether it is up to governments to intervene in the relationship between broadcasters and distributors, and whether the proposed policy actions are likely to remedy the tensions in the marketplace. Structure and Methodology The article consists of four parts. Firstly, we elaborate on the role of distribution in media industries. A brief theoretical background for the discussion on broadcaster-distributor relationships is provided, drawing mainly from insights from political economy of communication scholars. We, secondly, on the basis of a qualitative analysis of press releases, popular press articles, statements in Parliament, etc. carry out an argument mapping exercise (see Dunn 2012), which focuses on how broadcasters problematise their relation with distributors. Such an analysis is necessary as problems are by no means "natural phenomenons," waiting "out there" to be found, but rather constructs that are interdependent, instable and dynamic in nature. Problems are constructed through human interaction and pushed onto or, as emphasised by Freedman (2008), of the policy agenda. Inexperienced analysts suppose that problems are purely objective conditions that are determined by the 'facts'. This methodologically innocent J view fails to recognize that the same facts - for example, statistics that show that global warming is on the upswing - are interpreted in varied ways by policy stakeholders. For this reason, the same policy-relevant information frequently results in conflicting definitions of a 'problem'. These definitions are shaped by personal and institutional interests, assumptions £ about human nature, ideas about the proper role of government, and beliefs about the nature of knowledge itself (Dunn 2012, 66). We also take into account whether and how distributors, governments and scholars provisionally take stance on this topic. Who defines the problems? How are commercial problems turned into wider public interest concerns? Whose interests are served best by the problems defined? Answering these questions, we draw from literature review and desk research, covering experiences in the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, etc. 3 a c > Specifically, an argument mapping exercise centers on the following elements: claim (what do stakeholders want policy makers to do?), information (what data do they provide to sustain their claim?), motivation (why should policy makers II UD Ch follow-up on the claim made?), qualifier (is this likely to help?), and backing (why is the motivation valid?). Objections (i.e. counter-arguments from other stakeholders) are most often also mapped as to allow for a more complete and even-handed analysis. The aim of an argument mapping is to arrange all elements of a certain discourse in a coherent way and to find for inconsistencies or missing information. Thirdly, we look at the emerging policy answers at the European level and in two countries (the Netherlands and Belgium - more specifically the Flemish Community or "Flanders" that is the autonomous level of government in the area of media policy making), which have taken legislative action in this respect and were selected for our analysis for that reason. This part is largely based on a qualitative document analysis in context of policy and legal documents, complemented with insights from company reports and popular press coverage. Documents are treated both as sources of factual information on the policy outcome (i.e. which rules have been adopted?) as well as reflections of the policy process (i.e. why were these rules adopted?)(Karppinen and Moe 2012). The Netherlands and Flanders were selected as two particularly interesting case studies as they are the only two countries that have adopted laws to deal with the issue of content integrity. Focus of the case studies (for methodological elaboration, see Vennesson 2008) is on the newly adopted laws on content/signal integrity in these two countries. Other rules, e.g., must carry obligations distribution companies have to abide by are not part of the research. Fourthly, we evaluate whether the emerging policy initiatives are likely to affect broadcasting-distribution relations, in what way, and whether such change is desirable at all. Will, for example and too often neglected, citizens benefit from the adopted legislation? Such an analysis is important as policy makers are often guided by partial information provided by broadcasters and distribution companies. Of course, their information can be instructive, but remains largely anecdotal. Finally, some conclusions and recommendations for further research and policy are outlined. The Role of Distribution in Media Industries Much of the literature regarding the role of distribution in media industries is rooted in the political economy of communication. This rather critical approach aims at unravelling power relationships in media markets and analysing structural processes of control over the production, distribution and consumption of media (Mosco 2009). Already in 1987 Nicholas Garnham claimed that "it is cultural distribution, not cultural production, that is the locus of power and profit" (31). Garnham contends that, because the business of cultural goods is much about "creating audiences" as it is about "producing cultural artefacts," distribution is characterised by the highest level of capital intensity, ownership concentration and multi-nationalisation. In a similar vein, Hesmondhalgh (2007) points to the hourglass structure of the media industries (many producers, few distributors) and argues that power resides with those firms that control distribution of cultural production. Miège (2011) observes a particular rise in the position of hardware manufacturers, web players and telecom firms, exerting control of all information that is distributed over their networks. Cunningham and Silver (2013) pose that the power and profitability in screen industries have always resided in distribution, and born digital, globally focused players like YouTube, Apple and Netflix will become the King Kongs of the media industries. Undeniably, the rise of multichannel TV (cable and satellite), the transition to digital and the popularity of the Internet (streaming and downloading) as a new distribution platform affect the power structures and relationships in the audiovisual media landscape. Following a more technology-optimistic perspective, Todreas (1999) and Benkler (2006) claim that new technology is likely to erode the monopolistic control over distribution and contends that the economic power conferred by control over distribution networks is being reconfigured around alternative sources of economic rents, such as copyright regimes. In addition, Christophers (2008) insists that power in the media landscape has shifted in favour of content producers and television broadcasters. Profits will move upstream as content has the opportunity to create branded, high-quality products. A third perspective (e.g. Doyle 2013b, Evens 2013a) stresses the mutual power between television producers and distributors, and points to the interdependency between audiovisual production and distribution. Broadcasters need distribution to generate advertising revenues whereas distributors need programming. Furthermore, they emphasise the importance of the political and economic context of production and distribution to assess power relationships. Whereas in some markets distributors are the leading party, broadcasters may be powerful in other markets. Focus of the next section is on uncovering which of the abovementioned theoretical approaches is reflected most in broadcasters' "structuring" of their problematic relation with television distribution companies and whether that approach is also visible in emerging policy initiatives. Perceived Problems and Diverging Interpretations: In Search of Empirical Data This article zooms in on the definition of a policy problem (i.e. the problematic relation between broadcasters and distributors), emerging policy solutions dealing with this problem, and the aptness of these emerging policies. Looking first at the "problem structuring" issue, this section analyses the numerous issues that are raised by broadcasters in relation to broadcasting-distribution relations and subsequently "problematised" by broadcasters. The latter's claims and arguments are discussed and summarised through an argument mapping exercise (see meth-Q odological section, cf. supra), including, but not focussing on, counterarguments made by distributors (i.e. objections). Aside from other possible conflicts that might be dealt with (e.g., must-carry of linear and non-linear services), the focus of the article is on two problems, constructed by broadcasters (Figure 1). First, alleged unfair economic practices with distributors failing to adequately remunerate broadcasters for their content. Second, distributors' interventions with broadcasters' editorial autonomy and responsibility. The authors are at this point not implying that these problems are "real." Rather, the aim of the analysis is to "de-construct" ^ the construction of a policy problem by several free-to-air broadcasters. (B 00 Ch £ 3 tf) 0 Figure 1: Argument Mapping of Broadcast-Distribution Relations Stakeholder = Broadcaster Ch Ch "Unfair" Economic Practices and Investment in Local Content Discussions between free-to-air broadcasters and distributors are captured by the tension between maximising own revenues on the one hand while not jeopardising a long-lasting contractual relation. Broadcasters argue that relations with distributors are (no longer) economically "fair." To sustain this argument, they point at two issues. First, there are conflicts about so-called "retransmission payments" and "distribution costs." The former are paid by distributors to broadcasters and can be regarded as a remuneration for the exploitation of broadcasters' signal; the latter flow from broadcasters to distributors in exchange for carriage (Evens 2013a). The variety in contracts between broadcasters and distributors is enormous, and needs to be investigated in the local political and economic context. In the UK, free-to-air broadcasters, including the BBC, have paid substantial amounts for carriage to BSkyB without a retransmission sum being paid to them (Mediatique 2012). However, free-to-air broadcasters in Denmark, the Netherlands and Flanders receive substantial retransmission payments. However, even in these cases most broadcasters hold that the sum they receive is too low in comparison with the contribution made to distributors' offer to consumers. Broadcasters claim that they carry the bulk of investments in quality content whereas distributors take a disproprtional share of the pie, without significantly contributing to the financing and production of that content. According to UK media regulator Ofcom (2012), in 2010, UK public service broadcasters spent 27 percent of their revenues on domestic first-run originations (£1.868 billion) compared to only 2 percent for pay-TV operators (£215 million). In this regard, a senior UK television executive, quoted by The Guardian journalist Mark Sweney (2011, sp) said "We all pay a fair amount of money to Sky and provide them with free channels, but no money flows to us. Yet, where would their platform be without PSB channels? How many people would subscribe?" A second problem put forward by broadcasters relates to the new television functionalities offered by distributors to consumers: the digital video recorder (DVR), the electronic program guide (EPG), ad-skipping, "flex view" with various degrees of recording facilities, etc. These services are a thorn in the flesh of many broadcasters. While traditional advertising remains overwhelmingly important in free-to-air broadcasters' revenues (about 30 percent of the television industry's turnover), the revenue model is undeniably under pressure and this, seemingly, to the benefit of more customised services offered by distributors and OTT players that allow ad-avoiding behaviour (Picard 2013; Knapp 2013). In particular in Flanders, television broadcasters oppose distributors' practices in this regard. The argument is that distributors build business models (ab)using broadcasters' content without appropriate financial compensation. The analogy with companies like Google and Facebook, using content from legacy media to the benefit of their business model holds. Television executive Christian Van Thillo (Medialaan) said distributors give away content for free in order to lock in consumers in triple play bundles (television, Internet and telephony). Arguing he did not oppose flex view and other types of services, he did say broadcasters should receive a fair compensation for this additional use of their signal. Otherwise, so Van Thillo claimed, broadcasters will become unable to uphold investments in domestic content. In other words: distributors can "play around" with broadcasters' signal provided they have the latter's prior consent, which will in most cases depend upon a contractually arranged remuneration flowing from distributor to broadcaster. There is disagreement [between broadcasters and distributors] on several issues, but essentially it comes down to the television signal. The question is whether a TV channel, which represents a brand, a program schedule, presenters and channel values, is owner of the signal. Of course, it is the owner of that signal. Otherwise, we might better quit the business. A newspaper company, for example, also owns its product until it is in the ft shop (NN 2013, own translation). Both inadequate retransmission payments and lack of compensation for new services would, according to several broadcasters, result in declining investments in original domestic content which are an important instigator of economic growth in the audioviual production sector but the most expensive programming genre £ has made it difficult to raise advertising income and therefore produce profitable domestic series, so it is argued. Flemish private broadcaster VMMa (now "Medialaan") has, for example, provided figures that illustrate the pervasive nature of delayed viewing (with approximately 80 percent of ad-skipping), in particular when drama series (the most costly content) are concerned. Table 2 shows a substantial and continuous increase in delayed viewing could be observed for its most popular programs. Delayed viewing figures for drama series like Danni Lowinski went from O O 27.3 in 2012 to 36.5 percent in 2013 (with no further broadcasts of the series in 2014 and also no broadcasts of telenovellas anymore) and even "live" entertainment is captured by the phenomenon of delayed viewing.3 Preliminary figures indeed suggest that investments by broadcasters in domestic, independent productions have fallen since 2007. In recent years, investments in domestic production have dropped with 30 percent, whereas output in terms of hours of domestic content has fallen with 15 percent (Loisen 2011; Vlaams Parlement 2013c). Table 2: Delayed Viewing in 2012 for Flemish Television (by programme; source: CIM) Programme title Content genre Channel Percentage of delayed viewing Met man en macht Fiction VIER (commercial) 41.9 Code 37 Fiction VTM (commercial) 40.4 Danni Lowinski Fiction VTM (commercial) 36.5 Zone Stad Fiction VTM (commercial) 35.3 Salamander Fiction Één (public) 26.1 The Voice (van Vlaanderen) Entertainment VTM (commercial) 24.0 Het Journaal Information Één (public) 4.6 Het Nieuws Information VTM (commercial) 5.2 Manneke Paul Talk show VTM (commercial) 9.4 Café Corsari Talk show Één (public) 4.0 Editorial Autonomy, Independence and Responsibility Discussions between broadcasters and distributors do not solely revolve around financial issues; they also relate to broadcasters' editorial autonomy and responsibility. The former refers to broadcasters' independence in scheduling and producing programs. It is related to the fundamental right of freedom of expression and as such recognised by all EU Member States' constitutions. The latter refers to the fact that broadcasters are obliged by law to comply with rules on the protection of minors, commercial communication, hate speech, European content quotas, etc. They are "editorially responsible" for the content that is being broadcast, even if distributed by a cable, satellite or OTT provider of television services. Indeed, it is presumed by the Audiovisual Media Services Directive that broadcasters hold "effective control both over the selection of programmes and over their organisation" (Article 1(c) of the AVMSD). Their editorial autonomy and responsibility is, according to broadcasters, being breached by distributors when these, for example, put overlays on broadcasters' programming. Overlays can refer to social media, might advertise programs of a similar genre consumers are watching, or can concern commercial communication messages that are not administered by broadcasters but by distributors. In Germany, the UK and Flanders there have been heated debates on the legality of overlays. In Germany, public broadcaster ZDF noticed Panasonic was putting overlays on news bulletins. These overlays concerned commercial communication, advertising for among others MySpace. In the UK streaming service TV Catchup immersed BBC programming with commercial communication. Some users protested in forums, saying such a practice was against UK regulation. TV Catchup counter-argued, saying it was legally entitled to run advertising before BBC programs (ignoring the banners surrounding programs) and even inquiring after users' motivation to protest against its practices. In fact, the company was supported by some viewers, saying BBC itself also behaved in very commercial ways and, hence, not noticing so much of a difference between BBC's and TV Catchup's behaviour.4 In Flanders telecommunications incumbent Belgacom and also cable provider Telenet put overlays on public service children's programming, in so doing not only ignoring public broadcaster's VRT editorial autonomy, but also going against the provisions of the Flemish media decree that hold that children's programming on public service television should be free from commercial communication. The distributors are not held by these provisions, as are the broadcasters that are editorially responsible. The abovementioned practices puzzle regulators. They might raise questions on what levels of protection consumers expect in an inter-connected media environment. More importantly, overlays and similar practices challenge basic notions of editorial autonomy and responsibility. Author rights law, including the internationally agreed rules of the Berner Convention, might at first sight seem clear on this: people or companies that want to adapt legally protected works need permission of the author to do so. The question is whether adding something (e.g. an overlay) without actually changing the underlying content is an adaptation indeed. An overarching problem identified by broadcasters relates to the concentration of market power in distribution markets, producing relative bargaining power vis-à-vis broadcasters. In fact, it is argued that the oligopolistic market structure of distribution in several EU Member States explains for the weak bargaining position of broadcasters in supposedly "normal" buyer-supplier negotiations and justifies regulatory intervention. The standard economic case in favour of government intervention in media industries is that market failure occurs and needs to be cory rected (Doyle 2013b). Regulatory intervention may thus be required to deal with the problem of externalities and to restrict the exercise of oligopoly power. In a BBC commissioned report Oliver and Ohlbaum (2011, 2) indeed argue that regulatory intervention is necessary "to help set the terms of retransmission" and rebalance power asymmetries between broadcasters and distributors. Such intervention, so the report continues, merely recognises that "negotiations between leading networks and third party platforms are unlikely to lead to an optimal outcome." In short, broadcasters argue regulatory intervention is needed to correct, what they deem, asymmetric buyer-supplier relations. In so doing, they identify two problems. First, they argue that lack of adequate financial compensation exemplifies unfair economic behaviour from distributors and will eventually result in declining investments in domestic content. Given the topical nature of the discussion, few empirical evidence (leaving aside the anecdotal information provided by broadcasters themselves, see above) backs this claim. Secondly, they - and in particular public broadcasters - point at their editorial responsibility and the protection of C > consumers, which is foreseen by both European and national media regulation. In spite of some research on broadcast-distribution relations (see, for example, Evens and Donders 2013), there are few, independent and comprehensive studies fM O of the issue. Policy makers are often guided by partial information provided by broadcasters, which can be instructive, but remains largely anecdotal. As the following shorter section illustrates the objections made to the claims made by broadcasters are equally vague and are not sustained by empirical evidence either. Objections From their side, distributors (see Vlaams Parlement 2013b) have consistenly argued that the above type of reasoning is the reason for broadcasters' threatened position. It is claimed that broadcasters are too conservative, fear innovation and under-estimate the capacity of the viewer to tape programs and skip ads even when distributors do not enable this (given the availability of low-cost recording alternatives like TiVo or AutoHop). Furthermore, broadcasters would over-estimate the uptake of DVR functionalities and the popularity of ad-skipping (Deloitte 2011). In addition, it is said that broadcasters deny distributors' contribution to their business model by providing access to audiences and ignore the investments cable, satellite and other distribution companies make in order to ensure performant infrastructure networks. Belgian network incumbent and IPTV provider Belgacom claims it invested over €500 million in the deployment of VDSL2 infrastructure to ensure high-bandwidth services such as HDTV. With its "Digital Wave 2015" program, cable TV operator Telenet announced an extra €30 million per year to upgrade its network to DOCSIS 3.0. Hence, they claim it is not irreasonable to charge broadcasters that seek access to the distribution network. As said by a Sky spokesperson: "We ask for a financial contribution that reflects the performance of channels on the Sky platform, with those who benefit the most paying accordingly" (Sweney 2011). Finally, distributors often contend that they pay free-to-air broadcasters much higher retransmission fees compared to other markets, most notably the US. Since they do not provide actual data, these claims are hard to verify though. Possible Solutions: The Protection of the Integrity of Broadcasters' Content In the UK the Minister of Culture Ed Vaizey said: "We're not going to rush into a regulatory solution because I believe there's no reason the market shouldn't be able to work out a fair and equitable solution as things stand" (yet, hinting at regulation when industry fails to come to a consensus)(Sweney 2013, sp). However, in Flanders and the Netherlands, governments have decided to take action, adopting amended media laws; and also at the European level there is a definite interest in following up on this issue. European Union: Towards Establishing Content Integrity In January 2013, the Committee on Culture and Education of the European Parliament published a draft report on Connected TV. Referring to cultural diversity, fundamental rights like freedom of expression, and the importance of public service broadcasting, the Committee called for a resolution of the European Parliament on issues related to hybrid and connected TV. In its draft report, the Committee urges the European Commission to revise the Audiovisual Media Services Directive. It should lay down provisions that will control "the availability of, and access to, CO o audiovisual media services and other communications services or their representation on hybrid receiving devices, so as to prevent producers of such receiving devices or suppliers of the services in question from exploiting their gatekeeper position which discriminates against content providers" (Committee on Culture and Education 2013, 5). Whereas the Committee explicitly refers to the importance of "findability" of public service content on new platforms, it also calls for a flexibele approach towards advertising rules in the Audiovisual Media Services Directive as to allow the exploitation of new opportunities (Idem, 6). Besides these more generic principles, which emphasise the importance of a level-playing field for both platform owners and content providers, the Committee also introduces the principle of "integrity of services," providing: Calls on the Commission to safeguard by law the integrity of linear and non-linear services on hybrid platforms and in particular to prohibit the overlay or scaling of these services with third-party content, unless the latter have been authorised by the content provider and explicitly initiated by the user; points out that unauthorised use or dissemination by third parties of the content or broadcast signals of a provider must likewise be prevented (Committee on Culture and Education 2013, 6-7). Interestingly, the report does not make any reference to copyright in this regard. It positions "integrity" of services or content as a new concept. It does not define the concept, however. Indeed, the Committee gives the example of overlays and asks for a prohibition of these "unless the latter have been authorised by the content provider and explicitly initiated by the user" (see above). Integrity is, hence, linked to some sort of ownership by the content provider as the latter should authorise a modification (like, for example, an overlay). Integrity is, moreover, related to the rights of consumers. It remains to be seen whether and how the concept will appear in an eventual resolution of the European Parliament. Similarly, the European Commission still y needs to pick it up in its revision of the Audiovisual Media Services Directive - a revision that has not started off yet and is not likely to be completed soon. However, it is very likely that Member States might pro-actively engage with the issue, triggering prejudicial interpretations of the Court of Justice of the European Union. The Netherlands: Editorial Autonomy and Content Integrity In the Netherlands an amendment of the media law has been proposed by members of Parliament in spring 2013 and subsequently adopted in summer. Specifically, the new rule allows for "ministerial regulations," which provide that the signal of some designated services (e.g., subtitling, "red button" services) should be considered an integral part of program channels and that more specific rules can be 0 C specified for the transmission of these services (Tweede Kamer der Staten Generaal 2013).5 In other words: the Dutch government can apply "must carry" status not only to the linear broadcast channel, but also to certain add-on services, and this in a flexible way. Indeed, a "ministerial regulation" can be adopted quite easily and does not require lengthy, burdensome (yet, democratic!) parliamentary processes. Concretely, the change of the Dutch media law could (in case a ministerial regulation follows) make it possible for broadcasters to make sure that particular il O services are transmitted together with their programs as these services are considered an integral part of the broadcasting signal. Subtitling is explicitly referred to, but in the elucidation of the legislative proposal reference is also made in a 2 rather broad, all-encompassing manner, to "interactive" services (Tweede Kamer der Staten Generaal 2013, 1-2). There is no mentioning of the prior authorisation or prohibition of particular services like ad-skipping and delayed viewing, however. Flanders: Signal Integrity Flanders has probably taken the most pro-active approach in tackling tensions between broadcasters and distributors. Since 2010, when the CEOs of the three main broadcasting companies in Flanders (public broadcaster VRT and commercial broadcasters VMMa and SBS) wrote a joint letter to cable operator Telenet complaining about services like delayed viewing, tensions between broadcasters and distributors have been on the rise in Flanders. The argument on falling investments in Flemish content has found fertile ground in Flemish politics. After all, there has been a long-lasting commitment to ensure the production and broadcasting of local content in Flanders, which is a region that is very much aware of its cultural heritage in a "difficult" country like Belgium with three language communities (i.e. the Dutch, French and German language communities). In spite of very contentious and conflictuous debates in Flemish Parliament, the Commission Media of the Flemish Parliament reached a consensus on a legislative proposal acknowledging that broadcasters are the owners of the broadcast signal on 11 June 2013. The legislative proposal was unanimously adopted in the Commission Media of the Flemish Parliament on June, 25; and subsequently voted unanimously across opposition and government in Flemish Parliament on July, 10. The decree provides quite revolutionary that service providers (whether cable, xDSL, satellite, OTT ...) have to transmit the television broadcast signal without interruptions or alterations. All functionalities that go against this require the prior consent of the concerned television broadcasters (and possible additional payment). In the absence of prior consent a conciliation procedure of three months, facilitated by the Flemish Regulator for the Media, can be initiated. Functionalities that go against the editorial independence, autonomy and responsibility of broadcasters can be refused by broadcasters and no conciliation procedure is required in this regard. In case broadcasters receive additional remuneration for allowing specific functionalities, these revenues have to be invested in the production of Flemish content (Vlaams Parlement 2013a). Article 180 (§1-2) of the Flemish media decree6 thus recognises or at least implicitly refers to principles of economic fairness and editorial responsibility. It emphasises the necessity of negotiation, with the important requirement for distribution companies to have the prior consent of broadcasters in case they want to add functionalities to the latter's signal. In the elucidation of the proposal of decree, emphasis is put mainly on the cultural motivations (i.e. protection of Flemish content, the Dutch language, etc.) underlying the new legislation. Problem Solved? The Multi-faceted Nature of Problems and the Necessary Multi-faceted Nature of Policies Few observers will deny the tensions in broadcasting-distribution markets. Media markets are in turmoil and power relations are in some instances asymmetric (but not necessarily always in favour of distributors). EU distributors are often more powerful than free-to-air broadcasters due to oligopoly control over distribution facilities, and can exert substantial bargaining power during carriage negotiations. In contrast to the US, domestic broadcasters in the EU are less integrated with powerful production studios and have less leverage vis-à-vis prominent distribution powerhouses including Sky, Liberty Global and Vodafone (Evens 2013b). This asymmetry is not problematic per se. The exercise of power in buyer-supplier relations does not always generate negative consequences for the party that is less powerful. Powerful parties like distribution companies, that very often hold gatekeeper positions, might undertake actions that improve coordination and result in benefits for both parties (dubbed "pie-expansion"). In that case, the weaker party has to be able to rely on the dominant party to engage also in "pie-sharing." Indeed, imbalanced relationships can be characterised by mutual trust, but only in case the powerful party treats the weaker party fairly. And this is where the shoe often pinches. Albeit being questioned by distributors, the emerging policy initiatives in the EU have merit. The draft report of the Committee on Culture and Education of the European Parliament minimum minimorum puts an important issue on the policy agenda. Far too often content and infrastructure have been treated separately by policy makers at the national, European and international level. In its discussion of hybrid and connected television, the Parliament adopts a more integrated approach, which is recommendable and might trigger further discussion in the future. One should hope this will be the case as a European solution for this problem seems most desirable. The Dutch approach seems quite prudent. It assigns ownership of y the broadcast signal to broadcasters, covering also services added to the program. However, its notion of content integrity is less wide-ranging in comparison with the Flemish media decree. The latter goes much further and is more disruptive, requiring prior authorisation of broadcasters for all new functionalities added to the broadcast signal by distributors. It remains to be seen which approach, the Dutch or Flemish, will stand the test of time, and which will solve the problems identified by policy makers. Indeed, whereas the Dutch text is more prudent and might, hence, be acceptable from a European internal market point of view, the Flemish text might be more effective (in terms of changing broadcast-distribution relations) while being more vulnerable to European criticism for being disproportionally affecting distributors' delivery of services. Moreover, there are not only the tests of the European Commission C > (with DG Internal Market investigating whether the Flemish signal integrity decree is in line with the E-commerce and Transparency directives and the Electronic Communication Package) and the Court of Justice of the European Union (should a prejudicial question be raised), but there is also the test of technology. Indeed, how likely is it that consumers can and will circumvent restrictive measures im posed by policy makers? il y£> o To some extent, taking the merit of these actions and also the related uncertainties into account, the Dutch and Flemish initiatives concern alterations of media law. Whereas this might be a step in the good direction, the problems identified in 2 the second section of this article are multi-faceted. They touch upon content and infrastructure, different legislative frameworks, companies across the media value chain, changing technologies, business models under pressure, etc. This means these problems, if and when substantiated better by empirical evidence, require a multi-faceted policy as well. Although current initiatives might result in some short-term changes, they "alone" will not do the trick as broadcast-distribution relations are affected by four types of policies: media policy, copyright law, competition law and electronic communications law. Conclusion Answering the first question raised in this article, i.e. how broadcasters constructed their relation with distributors as a policy problem, it is clear that free-to-air broadcasters rely very much on a blended cultural and economic argumentation, pointing at the cultural importance of freely accessible domestic programming for audiences on the one hand and the economic interest of governments to protect/ shield a sustainable and local development of broadcasting markets. They adhere to a conflictual "distribution-takes-all" approach, which is (to some extent) accepted in emerging policy initiatives in the Netherlands and Flanders. Indeed, we illustrated that governments are in some cases intervening, albeit in different ways. The approach in the Netherlands and Flanders is, for example, similar at first sight, but very different when taking a closer look. This will most likely raise issues within a European internal market. Thirdly, it remains to be seen whether the adopted legislation will solve the problems broadcasters identify. Both the legal and technological "sell-by-date" of the rules is debatable. In addition, the adopted rules set out from the assumption that broadcasters have to be protected from distribution companies, an assumption that is based on another assumption that distributors can exert a linear, top-down influence on broadcasters. Such an assumption is flawed and neglects recent scholarly work, which provides evidence of a more circular power relationship between television broadcasters and distributors. The media sector, including broadcasting and distribution, will continue to change. Technological change, internationalisation and consolidation of the media sector will make policies increasingly difficult to enforce. National legal initiatives are also likely to be challenged at the European level, even though initiatives like the European Media Futures Forum (2012), emphasising the importance of European content industries, seem to indicate a more balanced approach towards infrastructure and content issues might emerge at the European level, correcting the previous predominant focus on infrastructure. Policies of course also have difficulties keeping pace with fast technological evolutions. That does not mean, however, that policy makers should not explore the possible means to protect local content, quality programming, pluralism and diversity. In so doing, they should however not opt for easy symbolic solutions, but go for a complementary policy approach. This requires, first and foremost, an adequate structuring of problems. With regard to this issue it is not altogether clear what exactly is the basic policy problem: too low retransmission payments, a lack of economic rewards for new, interactive services, or competitive imbalances in media markets with some companies occupying gatekeeping positions. Moreover, more scientific research on these markets and in particular the interplay between content and infrastructure markets is necessary to have some empirical data policy makers can rely on when developing policies. On a final note, policy makers should avoid the trap of overt protectionism. This does not mean that there is no public value in the economic protection of local companies. However, one should be aware of mere instrumentalisation to serve short term needs of industry on both infrastructure and content sides. Notes: 1. http://www.tvcatchup.com/ 2. The multitude of broadcasters does, however, not guarantee diversity and pluralism in the market. 3. CIM is the Centre for Information on Media in Flanders. It records all figures regarding television viewing in Flanders (http://www.cim.be/). 4. See, for example, http://forums.tvcatchup.com/showthread.php?11456-Having-adverts-on-any-bbc-channel-is-against-regulation 5. Translation from Dutch: "Bij ministeriele regeling kunnen diensten worden aangewezen waarvan het signaal als integraal onderdeel van de programmakanalen moet worden doorgegeven en kunnen nadere regels worden gesteld voor de doorgifte van deze diensten." 6. Article 180: "§1. Dienstenverdelers geven de lineaire televisieomroepprogramma's die deel uitmaken van hun aanbod van televisiediensten in de Vlaamse Gemeenschap, onverkort, ongewijzigd en in hun geheel, door op het ogenblik dat ze worden uitgezonden. Dat geldt ook voor de bijbehorende diensten, vermeld in artikel 185, §1, tweede lid, laatste zin. §2. Elke functionaliteit die een dienstenverdeler aan de eindgebruikers aanbiedt en die het mogelijk maakt om de in het eerste lid bedoelde lineaire televisieomroepprogramma's op een uitgestelde, verkorte ofgewijzigde wijze te bekijken, is onderworpen aan de voorafgaande toestemming van de betrokken televisieomroeporganisatie. De voorafgaande toestemming is vereist van iedere televisieomroeporganisatie die onder het toepassingsgebied van artikel 154, eerste en tweede lid, valt. De betrokken televisieomroeporganisatie en dienstenverdeler onderhandelen te goeder trouw en dienen hun toestemmingswijze op een redelijke en proportionele wijze uit te oefenen. ÜWanneer een akkoord hierover leidt tot financiele vergoedingen van de dienstenverdelers aan de televisieomroeporganisaties, dan dienen die te worden aangewend voor Nederlandstalige Europese producties, overeenkomstig artikel 154." A References: Benkler, Yochai. 2006. 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Unauthorised TV Live Streaming Breaches Copyright, Rules European Court. The Guardian, 7 March. Hesmondalgh, David. 2007. The Cultural Industries. London: Sage Publications. Just, Natasha and Manuel Puppis. 2012. Communication Policy Research: Looking Back, Moving Forward. In N. Just and M. Puppis (eds.), Trends in Communication Policy Research: New Theories, Methods and Subjects, 9-30. Bristol: Intellect. Karppinen, Kari and Hallvard Moe. 2012. What We Talk about When We Talk about Document Analysis. In N. Just and M. Puppis (eds.), Trends in Communication Policy Research: New Theories, Methods and Subjects, 177-195. Bristol: Intellect. Knapp, Daniel. 2013. New Revenues for Private TV: Audiences, Algorithms & the Janus-faced Nature of OTT. Presentation at the conference "Private Television in Europe: Connecting to the Future," 19 April, Brussels. Kuhn, Raymond. 2013. Private Television in France: A Story of Political Intervention. In K. Donders, C. Pauwels and J. Loisen (eds.), Private Television in Western Europe: Content, Markets and Policies, 56-69. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Loisen, Jan. 2011. Economische basisgegevens over de Vlaamse audiovisuele sector. Antwerpen: Steunpunt Buitenlands Beleid. Lonsdale, Chris. 2004. Player Power: Capturing Value in the English Football Supply Network. Supply Chain Management: An International Journal 9, 5, 383-391. Mediatique. 2012. Carriage of TV Channels in the UK: Policy Options and Implications. Media Futures Forum. 2012. Fast-forward Europe: 8 Solutions to Thrive the Digital World. Brussels: European Commission. Michalis, Maria. 2014. Infrastructure as a Public Service Media Content Issue. International Journal of Digital Television 5, 1, 75-90. Miège, Bernard. 2011. Principal Ongoing Mutations of Cultural and Informational Industries. In D. Winseck and D. Y. Jin (eds.), The Political Economies of Media. The Transformation of the Global Media Industries, 51-65. London: Bloomsbury. 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Case Studies and Process Tracing: Theories and Practices. In D. Della Porta and M. Keating (eds.), Approaches and Methodologies in the Social Sciences: A Pluralist Perspective, 223-239. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vlaams Parlement. 2013a. Voorstel van decreet houdende wijziging van het decreet van 27 maart 2009 betreffende radio-omroep en televisie - Tekst aangenomen door de plenaire vergadering. Stuk 1703(2011-2012) - Nr. 9. Vlaams Parlement. 2013b. Verslag hoorzitting. Stuk 1703(2011-2012) - Nr.4. Vlaams Parlement. 2013c. Verslag hoorzitting. Stuk 1703(2011-2012) - Nr.5. Webster, Frederick. 1992. The Changing Role of Marketing in the Corporation. Journal of Marketing 56, 4, 1-17. S 3 a o £ * 0 C (6 n FRANK MARCINKOWSKI MEDIJATIZACIJA POLITIKE: RAZMISLEKI O STANJU POJMA Članek vsebuje pregled trenutnega stanja literature o medijatizaciji politike. Identificiranih je pet skupnih predpostavk, ki po mnenju avtorja tvorijo jedro osnovnega razumevanja pojma. Vsako od predpostavk avtor ponuja v nadaljnjo razpravo. Analiza temelji na teoriji funkcionalne diferenciacije družb. Natančneje, avtor izhaja iz vizije sodobne družbe, ki jo je predstavil nemški sociolog Niklas Luhmann. Po njegovem mnenju funkcionalno specializacijo družbenih podsistemov spremlja utrjevanje učinkovitih odnosov med njimi, saj samo-referencialno zanašanje na lastno funkcijo neizogibno povzroči primanjkljaje v večini drugih zmogljivosti. Glede na to ozadje je medijatizacija rekonstruirana kot odgovor na resen manko političnih sistemov - obče znano pomanjkanje javne pozornosti demokratični politiki v sodobnih družbah. Ta okvir ima številne implikacije za razmišljanje o medijatizaciji, ki so predstavljene v članku. COBISS 1.02 ANDREJ SKERLEP JAVNI DISKURZ MED KONTRAFAKTIČNIMI IDEALIZACIJAMI IN PRAKTIČNO REALIZACIJO V JAVNI SFERI Članek raziskuje različne pristope k teoretskemu utemeljevanju javne rabe uma, ki so jih ponudili Habermas, Kant in Rawls. Usmerja se na Habermasovo idejo javnosti in komunikativne racionalnosti, potem pa njegov pristop primerja s Kantovim praktičnim umom in Rawlsovo idejo javnega uma. Članek izpostavlja liberalne in republikanske elemente Haber-masovega pojma javnosti ter pri tem pokaže, da liberalno pojmovanje demokracije zahteva javni um kot mehanizem upravičenja ustavnih norm, medtem kot republikanska ideja ljudske S/1 suverenosti odpira široko javnost ljudstva. V drugem delu članek opiše napetost med kontra-faktično naravo Habermasove diskurzivne etike in njeno praktično realizacijo v deliberativni politiki državnih institucij. COBISS 1.02 I- LU N > O Q_ THOMAS ALLMER (NE) VŠEČKAŠ FACEBOOK? V V V DIALEKTIČNI IN KRITIČNI POGLEDI NA DRUŽABNE MEDIJE Razen nekaj izjem ni študij, ki bi združevale kritičnoteoretične in empirične raziskave družbenih medijev. Splošni cilj članka je proučiti omejitve in emancipacijske potenciale družbenih medijev in oceniti, v kolikšni meri lahko prispevajo h krepitvi ideje o komunikacijskem in omrežnem 'skupnem' in na njem temelječi informacijski družbi. Avtor sledi eman-cipacijskemu raziskovalnemu interesu, ki temelji na kritični teoriji in politično ekonomskem pristopu, v treh korakih. V prvem delu predstavi nekaj temeljnih pojmov kritične teorije medijev, tehnologije in družbe. Namen drugega dela je proučiti znanje uporabnikov, njihova stališča in prakse do potencialov in tveganj družbenih medijev. Ta del lahko razumemo kot študijo primera kritične teorije in dialektike medijev, tehnologije in družbe. V tretjem delu avtor postavlja vprašanje, ali so tehnološke in / ali družbene spremembe nujne, da bi dosegli prave družbene medije. Tretji del nadalje obravnava politične posledice ter oblikuje določene sklepe. COBISS 1.01 IRENA FIKET ESPEN D. H. OLSEN HANS-JÖRG TRENZ SOOČENJE Z EVROPSKO RAZNOLIKOSTJO: POSVETOVANJA V TRANSNACIONALNIH IN VEČJEZIČNIH PRIZORIŠČIH Članek obravnava nekatere pogoste predpostavke in pomisleke o izvedljivosti posvetovanja v nadnacionalnih in večjezičnih okoljih. Za ponazoritev naše argumentacije uporabljamo analizo skupinskih diskusij v Europolisu, nadnacionalnem posvetovalnem eksperimentu, ki je potekal teden dni pred volitvami v Evropski parlament leta 2009. Evropska posvetovalna Q anketa je idealen primer za preskus življenjskosti posvetovalne demokracije političnih kultur, £ saj uvaja spremembe na področju volilne enote in skupinske pluralnosti pod nadzorovanimi pogoji kvazi-eksperimentalne znanstvene postavitve. Za merjenje dinamike in interakcije v skupini smo uporabili spremenjeno različico indeksa kakovosti diskurza (DQI), v kombinaciji s kvalitativno analizo vsebine izbranih zaporedij razprav. Ugotovitve kažejo, da udeleženci nadnacionalnih posvetovalnih anket (1) na splošno priznavajo politično telo EU kot referenčno točko za uveljavljanje komunikativne moči in vpliva na sprejemanje odločitev, in (2) so v resnici sposobni sodelovati in razpravljati v vseh jezikih in kulturah, razvijati državljansko samozavest skupnega političnega telesa in s tem spremeni heterogeno skupino naključno izbranih državljanov v konstituanto demokracije. £ 3 a i * in 0 c 1 ■i fM ELI SKOGERB0 RUNE KARLSEN MEDIJATIZACIJA IN POKRAJINSKE KAMPANJE V PARTITOCENTRIČNEM SISTEMU: KAKO IN ZAKAJ POSLANSKI KANDIDATI IŠČEJO VIDNOST? Volilne kampanje so tako v središču političnega življenja kot tudi v raziskovanju političnega komuniciranja in prinašajo veliko empiričnega znanja o procesih medijatizacije in mediacije politike. Najpogosteje se študije osredinjajo na kampanje, ki se ukvarjajo z glavnimi nacionalnimi politiki. Kljub temu večino volilnih kampanj v zahodnih demokracijah vodijo strankarske podružnice in kandidati, ki le redko nastopajo v glavnih naslovih nacionalnih medijev, a vendar so, da bi bili vidni in tako dosegli svoje volivce, odvisni tudi od medijske pozornosti in določanja medijskega dnevnega reda. Izhajajoč iz več podatkovnih baz študij volilne kampanje ob norveških parlamentarnih volitvah 2009 članek raziskuje, kako regionalni, večinoma »ne-slavni politiki«, pridobijo vidnost. Avtorji si prizadevajo razvozlati, kako medijska logika deluje na regionalni in lokalni ravni. Sprašujejo se tudi, zakaj je za kandidata v partitocen-tričnem proporcionalnem (PR) sistemu pomembno, da je viden. Ugotovitve kažejo, da je za razumevanje delovanja medijske logike na nižjih ravneh od nacionalnega okvira treba upoštevati medijatiziran in večnivojski značaj volilnih kampanj. COBISS 1.01 KAREN DONDERS TOM EVENS VLADNI POSEG V ZAKONE IZ PRERAČUNLJIVOSTI MED TELEVIZIJSKIMI HIŠAMI IN DISTRIBUTERJI Čeprav je v komunikološkem raziskovanju v veliki meri zanemarjena, je industrijska konvergenca odločno postavila na politični dnevni red odnos med ustvarjalci vsebin, kot so televizijske hiše, in (kabelskimi, satelitskimi) distributerji. Videti je, da narašča zavedanje o odbirateljskih značilnostih »mainstreamovske« kot tudi spletne video distribucije ter o moči, ki jo distributerji lahko izvajajo v odnosu do televizijskih hiš z združevanjem storitev in določanjem cen. Za odnose med televizijskimi hišami in distributerji je vedno bolj značilen konflikt. Zaradi javnih sporov med izdajatelji televizijskih programov in distributerji ter groženj z zatemnitvijo številne vlade po Evropi razpravljajo o nujnosti regulativnega posega, da bi zmanjšale napetosti in spodbujale sodelovanje v svojih medijskih sektorjih. Članek se zato sprašuje, kako so televizijske hiše problematizirale svoj odnos z distributerji in ga postavile na politični dnevni red, ali je na vladi, da poseže v razmerje med televizijskimi hišami in distributerji, in ali predlagani politični ukrepi lahko odpravijo napetosti na trgu. £ 3 a 0 £ * 1 * (I) 0 C I üDq© 01 0 C > (6 Javnost—The Public Print & Online Subscription Individuals: one year €45.00 two years €80.00 three years €110.00 Institutions: one year €120.00 two years €220.00 three years €320.00 Send subscriptions to: EURICOM, Kardeljeva pl. 5, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenija, fax: +386 1 5805 106, or use the subscription form at our web site http://www.euricom.si ÌjODCSS fi Q Please enter our/my subscription for the following year: g Javnost—The Public ORDER FORM 2014 2015 2016 Ì Name/Institution_ Address_ City_ State_ Zip/Postcode Signature: NAVODILA ZA AVTORJE Priprava rokopisov Rokopise pošljite na naslov uredništva po elektronski pošti v formatu Microsoft Word/Windows. 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