New Politics, Media and Decline in Participation: Will Citizens Love Politics Again?

Politics has changed, and so too our way of conceiving public life: on the one hand, a competitive, individualistically oriented politics has become prevailing; on the other, public space is now inconceivable outside media space. Politicians today seem nearer to people and more human than fifty years ago, but politics itself appears not very near to people’s real interests: political participation in western democracies is declining, and many people think politics is a bad affair. The concept of ‘public’ itself has become difficult for citizens to understand, because of the new, home-centred lifestyle which has affirmed itself with the widespread distribution of television: as Philip Howard argued, the way in which citizens today get political information increases their privacy and diminishes their capacity to understand the communitarian aspect of political problems. Citizens tend to behave like consumers, conceiving the political sphere as a market where decisions to engage or not are always egoistically motivated. Political scientists like Dahrendorf, Giddens and Beck argue that the way out of the many political problems, which affect western democracies nowadays, is a more engaged citizenship, animated by an active trustfulness, which doesn’t depend on institutional behaviour, but is built on strong ties of solidarity. In this perspective, only the associative ties which bind the members of civil society could give again a concrete meaning to the concept of public; they would also work as an antidote to the uncertainty typical of our age. In this chapter I argue that an engaged civil society is surely fundamental in order to restore meaning to public life, but that we can’t expect it to do all the work by itself. The role of the media is, in this sense, still crucial.