147
Political Communication, 22:147–162
Copyright  2005 Taylor & Francis Inc.
ISSN: 1058-4609 print / 1091-7675 online
DOI: 10.1080/10584600590933160
The Internet, Public Spheres, and Political
Communication: Dispersion and Deliberation
PETER DAHLGREN
The theme of the Internet and the public sphere now has a permanent place on
research agendas and in intellectual inquiry; it is entering the mainstream of political
communication studies. The first part of this presentation briefly pulls together
key elements in the public sphere perspective, underscoring three main analytic dimensions:
the structural, the representational, and the interactional. Then the discussion
addresses some central themes in the current difficulties facing democracy,
refracted through the lens of the public sphere perspective. In particular, the destabilization
of political communication systems is seen as a context for understanding
the role of the Internet: It enters into, as well as contributes to, this destabilization.
At the same time, the notion of destabilization can also embody a positive sense,
pointing to dispersions of older patterns that may have outlived their utility. Further,
the discussion takes up obvious positive consequences that follow from the
Internet, for example that it extends and pluralizes the public sphere in a number of
ways. Thereafter the focus moves on to the interactional dimension of the public
sphere, specifically in regard to recent research on how deliberation proceeds in the
online public sphere in the contemporary environment of political communication.
Finally, the analytic category of deliberative democracy is critically examined; while
useful, some of its rationalist biases, particularly in the context of extra-parliamentarian
politics, limit its utility. It is suggested that the concept of civic cultures offers
an alternative way to understand the significance of online political discussion.
Keywords deliberation, democracy, Internet, political communication, public sphere
For about a decade now, many researchers and other observers have been asking whether
the Internet will have—or is already having—an impact on the public sphere and, if so,
the attributes of this impact. Such discussions become unavoidably framed by the general
international consensus, emerging since the early 1990s, that democracy has hit
upon hard times; more specifically, the hope is often expressed that the Internet will
somehow have a positive impact on democracy and help to alleviate its ills.
Yet, given the variations in democratic systems and cultures around the world, and
given the pace of change—social, political, and technological—we should not expect to
soon arrive at some simple, definitive answer to these questions. Indeed, thus far the
evidence seems equivocal; moreover, the conclusions one might derive are inexorably
tied to the assumptions one has about the character of democracy. Rather than yielding
Peter Dahlgren is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Lund University, Sweden.
Address correspondence to Peter Dahlgren, Department of Sociology, Lund University, Box
114, 22100 Lund, Sweden. E-mail: peter.dahlgren@soc.lu.se
148 Peter Dahlgren
any fast answers, we should acknowledge that the theme of the Internet and the public
sphere has a permanent place on research agendas and in intellectual inquiry for the
foreseeable future. It is now entering the mainstream of concern for the study of political
communication and taking its place alongside the established research on the traditional
mass media. We may occasionally still ask if the traditional mass media enhance or
hamper democracy, but most research on that theme today focuses its questions on more
specific features within the overall complexity of the landscape. So too can we expect
the research on Internet to evolve—not least in highlighting the increasing technical
convergences between mass and interactive media.
In the first part of the presentation that follows, I briefly pull together key elements
in the public sphere perspective. I underscore three main analytic dimensions: the structural,
the representational, and the interactional. Then I address central themes in the
current difficulties facing democracy, refracted through the lens of the public sphere
perspective. In particular, the current destabilization of political communication systems
must be seen as a context for understanding the Internet: It enters into, as well as contributes
to, this destabilization. At the same time, the notion of destabilization can also
embody a positive sense, pointing to dispersions of older patterns that may have outlived
their utility and possibilities for reconfiguration. We can note, for example, the
obvious positive consequences that the Internet extends and pluralizes the public sphere
in a number of ways. It is this kind of tension that I would accentuate, rather than any
cheery optimism, dour pessimism, or cavalier dismissal.
Thereafter I focus my attention on the interactional dimension of the public sphere.
Specifically, I take up some of the recent research findings in how deliberation proceeds
in the online public sphere in the current destabilized environment of political communication.
I find the notion of deliberative democracy useful, though its rationalist biases,
particularly in the context of extra-parliamentarian politics, do limit its utility. I suggest
that what I call civic cultures offer an enhanced way to understand the significance of
online political discussion.
Democracy’s Communication Spaces: Three Dimensions
In schematic terms, a functioning public sphere is understood as a constellation of communicative
spaces in society that permit the circulation of information, ideas, debates—
ideally in an unfettered manner—and also the formation of political will (i.e., public
opinion). These spaces, in which the mass media and now, more recently, the newer
interactive media figure prominently, also serve to facilitate communicative links between
citizens and the power holders of society. The key text here is, of course, Habermas’s
(1989). There are problems and ambiguities in his book, as many have pointed out (see,
for example, the collection by Calhoun, 1992), yet, for many committed to a democratic
society, the concept itself remains compelling, both empirically and normatively. Habermas
himself has returned to the concept, revising and updating it (cf. Habermas, 1996). The
term “public sphere” is most often used in the singular form, but sociological realism
points to the plural. In large-scale, differentiated late modern societies, not least in the
context of nation states permeated by globalization, we have to understand the public
sphere as constituting many different spaces.
As a starting point, I find it helpful to conceptualize the public sphere as consisting
of three constitutive dimensions: structures, representation, and interaction (I discussed
this in more detail in Dahlgren, 1995). The structural dimension has to do with the
formal institutional features. Most obviously, this includes media organizations, their
Internet, Public Spheres, and Political Communication 149
political economy, ownership, control, regulation, and issues of their financing, as well
as the legal frameworks defining the freedoms of—and constraints on—communication.
The structural dimension thus directs our attention to such classic democratic issues as
freedom of speech, access, and the dynamic of inclusion/exclusion. Beyond the organization
of the media themselves, the structural dimension also points to society’s political
institutions, which serve as a sort of “political ecology” for the media and set boundaries
for the nature of the information and forms of expression that circulate. A society
where democratic tendencies are weak is not going to give rise to healthy institutional
structures for the public sphere, which in turn means that the representational dimension
will be inadequate.
In regard to the Internet, the structural dimension directs our attention to the way in
which the communicative spaces relevant for democracy are broadly configured. This
has to do with such things as the manner in which cyber-geography is organized in
terms of legal, social, economic, cultural, technical, and even Web-architectural features.
Such factors have an impact on the ways in which the Net is accessible (or not) for civic
use.
The representational dimension refers to the output of the media, the mass media as
well as “minimedia” that target specific small groups via, for example, newsletters or
campaign promotion materials. And given the increasing “massification” of communication
on the Internet, representation becomes highly relevant for online contexts of the
public sphere as well. In this dimension, one can raise all of the familiar questions and
criteria about media output for political communication, including fairness, accuracy,
completeness, pluralism of views, agenda setting, ideological tendencies, modes of address,
and so forth.
In terms of the dimension of interaction, it may be useful to recall Habermas as
well as other writers, such as Dewey (1954), who argue that a “public” should be conceptualized
as something other than just a media audience. Publics, according to Habermas
and Dewey, exist as discursive interactional processes; atomized individuals, consuming
media in their homes, do not comprise a public. With the advent of the public opinion
industry (cf. Splichal, 1999; Lewis, 2001), the focus on aggregate statistics of individual
views became established. While such approaches do have their uses, it is imperative
not to lose sight of the classic idea that democracy resides, ultimately, with citizens who
engage in talk with each other. This is certainly the basic premise of those versions of
democratic theory that see deliberation as fundamental.
Interaction actually consists of two aspects. First, it has to do with the citizens’
encounters with the media—the communicative processes of making sense, interpreting,
and using the output. The second aspect of interaction is that between citizens themselves,
which can include anything from two-person conversations to large meetings. To
point to the interaction among citizens—whether or not it is formalized as deliberation—is
to take a step into the social contexts of everyday life. Interaction has its sites
and spaces, its discursive practices, it psychocultural aspects; in this sense, the public
sphere has a very fluid, sprawling quality, a view that correlates with what Alasuutari
(1999) and others call the third generation of reception research on the mass media,
where studies move beyond the actual sites of media reception and probe the circulation
of meaning in broader micro-contexts of everyday life.
With the advent of the Net, civic interaction takes a major historical step by going
online, and the sprawling character of the public sphere becomes all the more accentuated.
We should also recognize that, empirically, the categories of representation and
interaction on the Net often blur into each other. We tend to think in terms of either
150 Peter Dahlgren
“one to many” forms of communication, as typified by the mass media, or “one to one
communication” that is paradigmatic of interaction. This neat distinction unravels on the
Internet, where, for example, group communication can have attributes of both mass
communication and interaction.
These three dimensions—the structural, the representational, and the interactional—
provide an analytical starting point for examining the public sphere of any given society
or analyzing the contribution of any given communication technology.
Destabilized Political Communication
That contemporary democracies are facing difficult times has become an established
topic in both the public debate and the research literature, and the evidence translates
readily into issues in regard to the public sphere’s structures, representations, and modes
of interaction. The discussions about the poor health of democracy intensified during the
1990s, at about the same time that the Internet was rapidly leading a media revolution.
It did not take long for many observers to connect the two phenomena in an optimistic
way. That new information and communication technologies are affecting all spheres of
life in late modern society is of course not news, but there remains ambiguity as to the
extent to which they are enhancing democracy (cf. Anderson & Cornfield, 2003; Jenkins
& Thornburn, 2003). One’s understanding—and perhaps even appreciation—of this ambiguity
grows as one’s insight into the complexity of democracy’s difficulties deepens.
In a recent overview, Blumler and Gurevitch (2000) summarized the ways that the
traditional systems of political communication in Western democracies are being destabilized
by changes in late modern society (see also the collection by Bennett & Entman,
2001, for an extensive overview of this landscape). They took up a number of by now
familiar themes:
• increased sociocultural heterogeneity and the impact that this has on the audiences/actors
within political communication.
• the massive growth in media outlets and channels, along with changes in the
formats of media output, the blurring and hybridization of genres, and the erosion
of the distinction between journalism and nonjournalism.
• today’s increased number of political advocates and “political mediators,” including
the massive growth in the professionalization of political communication, with
experts, consultants, spin doctors, and so forth sometimes playing a more decisive
role than journalists
• the changing geography of political communication as the significance of traditional
national borders becomes weakened
• the cacophony that emerges with this media abundance and so many political
actors and mediators
• the growing cynicism and disengagement among citizens
One can also add that deregulated, conglomerate media industries driven by market
forces push increasingly to the margins all normative considerations (e.g., journalistic
values) that do not enhance short-term profits (cf. Baker, 2002). The consequences of
these transformations run deep, and the coherence of the political communication system
comes into question. This destabilization encompasses several at times antithetical
tendencies. On the negative side, we can list chaos, inefficiency, unpredictability, and so
forth. Also, the centripetal forces of private capital are coalescing under the prevailing
Internet, Public Spheres, and Political Communication 151
neoliberal order, drawing power away from the formal political arena via a variety of
mechanisms and thereby constricting and weakening democracy. On the positive side,
we would certainly place such trends as the increase in political voices, new modes of
political engagement, and definitions of what constitutes politics. Further, cultural heterogeneity
may suggest dispersions and openings that can be developed for democratic
gains. Destabilization can thus extend political communication through horizontal civic
communication, as well as through vertical communication between citizens. Yet, again,
it must be acknowledged that from a systems perspective, too much dispersion and
polyvocality undercut political effectiveness and hamper governance.
To consider the role of the public sphere in general requires us to insert it into the
force fields of this historical setting. The public sphere is an expression of and a contribution
to these force fields, and this is all the more true as we consider its manifestations
on the Net. It is there that we find the real “vanguard” of the public sphere, the
domain where the most intense developments are taking place—what we might call the
cyber transformation of the public sphere. Though we cannot be fully unequivocal here,
we can still sketch some of the main vectors using the three dimensions I presented
above. From the standpoint of structures, the Internet’s political economy suggests that
its development is quickly veering toward the intensified commercialization that characterizes
the traditional media model (Patekis, 2000). The Internet has by now also become
an integrated element in the dynamics of global capitalism (Schiller, 1999). Market
logic, together with emerging legal frameworks and the impetus toward political restrictions,
serves to constrain the extent and forms of representation for civic purposes in
ways quite familiar from the mass media, diminishing its potential as a properly civic
communicative space (Lessig, 1999, 2001).
Moreover, the use of the Net for political purposes is clearly minor compared with
other purposes to which it is put. The kinds of interaction taking place can only to a
small degree be considered manifestations of the public sphere; democratic deliberation
is completely overshadowed by consumerism, entertainment, nonpolitical networking and
chat, and so forth. Further, the communicative character of the political discussion does
not always promote the civic ideal; much of it is isolated (and at times unpleasant), and
its contributions to democratic will formation cannot always be assumed (Wilhelm, 2000).
At the same time, we note that the present architecture of the Net does still offer
available space for many forms of civic initiatives. The criteria for access and use are
such that the “digital divide” in the Western democracies has been diminishing, even if
it would be unrealistic to assume that it will disappear (at the global level the prospects
are quite remote, as is well known). The Internet is becoming integrated with the established
system of political communication, yet it is also being used to challenge established
power structures. Even the efforts of some more overtly authoritarian regimes
around the world to curtail the democratic uses of the Net have not been fully successful,
though inventories of the mechanisms of control are sobering. The progressive and
subversive role of the Net should not be overestimated (Kalathil & Boas, 2003); “closed
systems” can short-circuit the potential gains to be had by online political conversation
(Fung, 2002). The sketchy evidence gives us some general impressions, but we obviously
need a good deal more research before we can make specific claims about the political
potential of the Net in different kinds of political contexts. At this stage, however, it
does seem to be the case that, for those who have access and the political motivation,
and who are living within open, democratic societies, the Internet offers very viable
possibilities for civic interaction but clearly cannot promise a quick fix for democracy, a
position that Blumler and Gurevitch (2001) affirmed in another recent article.
152 Peter Dahlgren
Multisector Online Public Spheres
If the vision of a singular, integrated public sphere has faded in the face of the social
realities of late modern society, so has much of the normative impetus that may have
previously seen this as an ideal. The goal of ushering all citizens into one unitary public
sphere, with one specific set of communicative and cultural traditions, is usually rejected
on the grounds of pluralism and difference. There must exist spaces in which citizens
belonging to different groups and cultures, or speaking in registers or even languages,
will find participation meaningful. Differences of all kinds, including political orientation
and interests, gender, ethnicity, cultural capital, and geography, can warrant specialized
communicative spaces. At some points, certain groups may require a separate space
where they can work out internal issues and/or cultivate a collective identity. Not least
we must take into account alternative or counter public spheres (cf. Fenton & Downey,
2003; Asen & Brouwer, 2001), where political currents oppositional to the dominant
mainstream can find support and expression. These were first formulated in terms of
class (“the proletarian public sphere”; see Negt & Kluge, 1993) as a direct response to
Habermas’s emphasis on the bourgeois public sphere. Later, Fraser (1992) further developed
the idea, not least with feminist horizons.
It is here where the Internet most obviously makes a contribution to the public
sphere. There are literally thousands of Web sites having to do with the political realm
at the local, national, and global levels; some are partisan, most are not. We can find
discussion groups, chat rooms, alternative journalism, civic organizations, NGOs, grass
roots issue-advocacy sites (cf. Berman & Mulligan, 2003; Bennett, 2003b), and voter
education sites (see Levine, 2003). One can see an expansion in terms of available
communicative spaces for politics, as well as ideological breadth, compared to the mass
media. Structurally, this pluralization not only extends but also disperses the relatively
clustered public sphere of the mass media.
If the Internet facilitates an impressive communicative heterogeneity, the negative
side of this development is of course fragmentation, with public spheres veering toward
disparate islands of political communication, as Galston (2003) had argued. Here opens
up yet another important research theme, one that must encompass an overarching systemic
perspective. That various groups may feel they must first coalesce internally before
they venture out into the larger public sphere is understandable; however, cyber
ghettos threaten to undercut a shared public culture and the integrative societal function
of the public sphere, and they may well even help foster intolerance where such communities
have little contact with—or understanding of—one another. Fragmentation also
derives simply from the mushrooming of advocacy groups and the array of issues available.
While traditional online party politics and forms of e-government may serve as
centripetal forces to such fragmentation, the trend is clearly in the direction of increasing
dispersion.
The question of multi-public spheres glides readily into the issue of the links between
the different spheres to the centers of decision making. The public sphere per se
is no guarantee for democracy: There can be all kinds of political information and debate
in circulation, but there must be structural connections—formalized institutional
procedures—between these communicative spaces and the processes of decision making,
as Sparks (2001) argued. There can obviously be no automatic, lock-step connection
here, not without degeneration into a chaotic populism. Yet, there must be some
semblance of impact, some indication that the political talk of citizens has consequences,
or else disengagement and cynicism can set in—as is precisely what many observers
Internet, Public Spheres, and Political Communication 153
claim has been a pattern for a decade or so in the mainstream, mass mediated systems
of political communication of the Western liberal democracies.
Today the most notable gap between communication in the public sphere and institutional
structures for binding decisions is found in the global arena. Transnational forums,
global networking, and opinion mobilization are very much evident on the Net,
yet the mechanisms for transforming opinion at the global level into decisions and policies
are highly limited, to say the least. There are simply few established mechanisms
for democratically based and binding transnational decision making. While we might
see the embryonic outlines of a global civil society (cf. Keane, 2003), its full realization
is not on the horizon, even if the idea is a powerful and progressive element of the
social imaginary.
In terms of the structural dimension, we can specify a number of different sectors
of Net-based public spheres, including:
1. Versions of e-government, usually with a top-down character, where government
representatives interact with citizens and where information about governmental
administration and services is made available. While interaction may be
relatively constricted, it can still at times serve as a sector of the public sphere.
This sector is sometimes distinguished from e-governance, which emphasizes
horizontal civic communication and input for government policy (Malina, 2003).
2. The advocacy/activist domain, where discussion is framed by organizations with
generally shared perceptions, values, and goals—and geared for forms of political
intervention. These include traditional parliamentarian politics, established
corporate and other organized interest group politics (e.g., unions), and the new
politics of social movements and other activists.
3. The vast array of diverse civic forums where views are exchanged among citizens
and deliberation can take place. This is generally understood as the paradigmatic
version of the public sphere on the Net, but it would be quite erroneous to
neglect the others.
4. The prepolitical or parapolitical domain, which airs social and cultural topics
having to do with common interests and/or collective identities. Here politics is
not explicit but always remains a potential. Clearly, there is no absolute way in
which the boundary between the nonpolitical and the parapolitical can be drawn,
since it is always in part discursively negotiated and changeable.
5. The journalism domain, which includes everything from major news organizations
that have gone online (e.g., newspapers and CNN) to Net-based news organizations
(usually without much or any original reporting) such as Yahoo!
News, alternative news organizations such as Indymedia and Mediachannel, as
well as one-person weblog sites (also known as “bloggers”). Interestingly, the
research literature has tended to focus mainly on deliberative interaction in terms
of online public spheres and/or mass media journalism. We should not forget
that the online journalism sector is a core element of the public sphere on the
Internet.
This list can of course be made more elaborate; for example, one could divide civic
forums into those which originate from journalistic initiatives and those with other origins.
The point is simply to highlight a bit more specifically the sprawling character of
the multisector online public sphere.
154 Peter Dahlgren
Two Perspectives
Two contending perspectives are emerging in regard to the role of the Internet in the
public sphere. One view posits that while there have been some interesting changes in
the way democracy works, on the whole, the import of the Internet is modest; the Net is
not deemed yet to be a factor of transformation. Margolis and Resnick (2000, p. 14)
concluded that “there is an extensive political life on the Net, but it is mostly an extension
of political life off the Net.” So while the major political actors may engage in
online campaigning, lobbying, policy advocacy, organizing, and so forth, this perspective
underscores that there does not seem to be any major political change in sight. The
argument is that the Internet has not made much of a difference in the ideological political
landscape, it has not helped mobilize more citizens to participate, nor has it altered
the ways that politics gets done. Even the consequences of modest experiments to formally
incorporate the Internet into the political system with “e-democracy” have not
been overwhelming (cf. Clift, 2003). E-government efforts to incorporate citizens into
discussions and policy formulations usually have a decisive top-down character (see
Malina, 2003, for a discussion of the UK circumstances), with discursive constraints
deriving from the elite control of the contexts.
This evidence cannot be lightly dismissed, but what should be emphasized is that
this perspective is anchored in sets of assumptions that largely do not see beyond the
formal political system and the traditional role of the media in that system. Indeed,
much of the evidence is based on electoral politics in the U.S. (cf. the collections by
Jenkins & Thornburn, 2003, and Anderson & Cornfield, 2003). While the problems of
democracy are acknowledged, the view is that the solutions lie in revitalizing the traditional
models of political participation and patterns of political communication.
Other scholars alternatively take as their point of departure the understanding that
we are moving into a new, transitional era in which the certitudes of the past in regard
to how democracy works have become problematic. Democracy is seen to be, precariously,
at a new historical juncture. Few observers would dismiss the central importance
of electoral politics: A more robust democracy will not emerge by blithely sidestepping
traditional, formal structures and procedures. However, certitudes of the traditionalist
view of a “return to normalcy” are challenged, not least by some of the kinds of developments
that Blumler and Gurevitch (2000) mentioned (see above), such as increased
sociocultural heterogeneity and the changing position of the nation state. In terms of the
Internet, however, the argument is that they become particularly salient precisely in the
domain of informal, extra-parliamentarian politics. There has been massive growth in
what we can call advocacy or issue politics, often in the form of ongoing campaigns.
Some of the advocates are large and powerful interest groups; others take the form of
social movements or have a more grass roots character. Many represent versions of
“new” politics (called “life politics” by Giddens, 1991, and “sub-politics” by Beck, 1997;
Bennett, 2003b, spoke of “lifestyle” politics); such politics can materialize all over the
social terrain in many different contexts.
This “infinite” view of politics is increasingly in confrontation with the more traditional
“bounded” notion, to use the terms of Blumler and Gurevitch (2000). Common
for most is that electoral politics is often sidestepped, signaling a growing bifurcation
between traditional parties and single-issue advocacy groups. There is not that much
research available yet on these new forms of engagement, but initial findings suggest a
variety of different organizational forms, usually very loose and horizontal in character,
with fluid memberships (cf. Bennett, 2003a; Cammaerts & van Audenhove, 2003). This
Internet, Public Spheres, and Political Communication 155
suggests a very different kind of organizational structure, as well as view of membership,
relative to traditional parties.
It is often commented that the ostensible political apathy and disaffiliation from the
established political system for many citizens may not necessarily signal a disinterest in
politics per se. Rather, many citizens have refocused their political attention outside the
parliamentary system, or they are in the process of redefining just what constitutes the
political, often within the context of social movements. Among such groups, the boundaries
between politics, cultural values, identity processes, and local self-reliance measures
become fluid (Beck, 1997). Politics becomes not only an instrumental activity for
achieving specific goals, but also an expressive activity, a way of asserting, within the
public sphere, group values, ideals, and belonging. The evidence for such views makes
good qualitative sense; however, it is almost impossible to get a quantitative grip on
these developments. The fluid—and virtual—character of the organizations involved,
the ease of joining and withdrawing, prevent us from getting a sense of the numbers
involved. We can’t know how many people any given Web site actually represents.
In the arena of new politics, the Internet becomes not only relevant but central: It is
especially the capacity for the “horizontal communication” of civic interaction that is
paramount. Both technologically and economically, access to the Net (and other new
technologies, such as mobile phones) has helped facilitate the growth of large digital
networks of activists. At present, it is in the tension-filled crevices deriving from the
changes in the media industries, in sociocultural patterns, and in modes of political engagement
that we can begin to glimpse new public sphere trends where the Internet
clearly makes a difference. In their recent survey of the available research from political
science, Graber et. al. (2002, pp. 3–4) noted:
The literature on interest networks and global activism seems particularly
rich in examples of how various uses of the Internet and the Web have
transformed activism, political pressure, and public communication strategies.
. . . Research on civic organizations and political mobilization is characterized
by findings showing potentially large effects of new media and for the breadth
of directly applicable theory.
Set in relation to the population as a whole, the numbers involved here may not seem
overwhelming, but the embryonic patterns taking shape in the public sphere now may,
with historical hindsight in the future, prove to have been quite significant.
Interaction: Limits of Deliberative Democracy
In the discussions about democracy and the public sphere in recent years, the theme of
deliberative democracy is often aired. In the final sections of this presentation, I wish to
address this topic by looking at some findings from recent research on online forums, as
well as considering the concept itself. In particular, I see limitations in the notion of
deliberative democracy as an analytic horizon for understanding the democratic impact
of political discussion in online public spheres. While useful, my view is that this notion
only takes us part of the way in analyzing and understanding political discussion on the
Internet, especially if we focus on new, extra-parliamentarian politics. The rational biases
of the deliberative democracy perspective need to be complemented with what I
call civic cultures.
Theories of democracy have generally posited that the communicative interaction
156 Peter Dahlgren
among citizens is of prime importance. Civic discussion is seen as constitutive of publics,
which are both morally and functionally vital for democracy. The specific notion of
deliberative democracy integrates elements of political theory with perspectives on communication
(I developed these points in more detail in Dahlgren, 2002). Habermas and
those working within his theoretical tradition have had a major impact in shaping the
idea of deliberative democracy. The idea of deliberation points to the procedures of
open discussion aimed at achieving rationally motivated consensus. Certainly dialogue is
preferable to violence, and good dialogue is preferable to poor dialogue, but with the
referent of the Habermasian ideal speech situation, demanding criteria are placed on the
nature of political discussion. High standards are useful and necessary to define directions,
even if we realize that reality often falls short of the ideals. There is a growing
literature, largely normative and theoretic, addressing the concept of deliberative democracy
(see, for example, Chambers & Costain, 2000; Elster, 1998; Sanders, 1997; Benhabib,
S, 1996; Bohman, 1996; Fishkin, 1991; Dryzek, 1990).
Not surprisingly, recent research has shown that online discussions do not always
follow the high ideals set for deliberative democracy. Speech is not always so rational,
tolerance toward those who hold opposing views is at times wanting, and the forms of
interaction are not always so civil (Wilhelm, 2000). Hagemann (2002) found in his
analysis of political party discussion lists in the Netherlands that, the communicative
rationality of the contributions was not impressive, in that they were often typified by
the assertion of opinion without supporting arguments. Fung (2002) noticed that in the
Hong Kong situation, journalists might sometimes debate under the false guise of ordinary
citizens. Certainly political life offline can often be like that, so there is no particular
reason to expect an ontological transformation merely because discussion shifts to
cyberspace. Yet, it is important that current research is showing the particular character
of some of these communicative shortcomings on the Net.
There are also sociological shortcomings in regard to deliberative democracy, the
most basic being the familiar low level of participation, awareness of which in turn
seems to further reduce the motivation to engage via the Net (Schultz, 2000; Heikkilä &
Lehtonen, 2003). (It might be useful, however, to reflect more on the theoretic issue that
Schultz (2000) raises: While we might bemoan low participation on the Internet, given
that attention is a scarce resource and with increasing participation, there is less time for
participants to listen to each other, what would be the consequences of very high participation
be? The issue of “optimal” levels of participation in specific contexts, based on
discursive feasibility, is in need of investigation.) In any case, there is also good news
from this research. Tsaliki (2002) found a very satisfactory level of public deliberation
in her comparative study of online forums in Greece, the Netherlands, and Britain. Also,
the Internet seems to offer opportunities to participate for many people who otherwise
find that there are too many taboos and too much discomfiture in talking about politics
in their own face-to-face environments (Stromer-Galley, 2002).
In regard to such aspects as these, the vision of deliberative democracy provides a
useful compass for envisioning what enhanced online public spheres could be. Yet, there
are two basic conceptual difficulties in the discursive rationalism in Habermas’s (1989)
original position regarding the public sphere, and this is amplified by his later work on
pragmatics and the ideal speech situation (Habermas, 1984, 1987). The first is by now
familiar, and I will just mention it without further development: The rationalist bias
tends to discount a wide array of communicative modes that can be of importance for
democracy, including the affective, the poetic, the humorous, the ironic, and so forth.
The second problem has received less attention. Basically, the argument is that adherence
Internet, Public Spheres, and Political Communication 157
to the perspective of deliberative democracy risks downplaying relations of power that
are built into communicative situations. Kohn (2000, p. 409) approaches this issue by
saying that “reasonableness is itself a social construction which usually benefits those
already in power. . . . Democratic theory must consider how critical perspectives capable
of challenging the dominant definition of rationality are generated, contested, and
institutionalized.” While she underscores the important role that deliberative democracy
has, she makes the point that it tends to privilege the modes of communication among
the elites. She argues that, historically, the expansion of the democratic character of
society has been prompted by mobilization, the generation of collective identities, and
concerted action, not by the attainment of deliberative consensus.
Arguing in a parallel, if a bit more abstract manner, Mouffe (1999) makes the case
that the political is an irreducible dimension of all social relations and that conflict—she
uses the term antagonism—is always present in the ever-shifting relations between various
interests, between changing groupings of “us” and “them” in plural societies. The
task is not to strive for consensus, which is ultimately temporary, or to eradicate power
from democratic politics, but rather to formulate forms of power that are in keeping
with democratic values and a democratic system. Instead of trying to remove passions
from politics, replacing them with rational consensus, the aim should be to “mobilize
those passions towards the promotion of democratic designs” (Mouffe, 1999, p. 756).
While she does not have so much to say about the specifics of political discussion, she
too sees the vision of Habermasian deliberative democracy suppressing the reality of
power relations.
These critical reflections can be linked to the point noted above that the Internet has
a more compelling role to play in the advocacy/activist sector of the online public sphere,
in the context of new extra-parliamentarian politics. Political discussion within these
organizations strives for internal consensus (or at least compromise), often to some degree
of collective identity, and for political mobilization. Externally, however, the thrust
of their political address toward power holders in the political or economic realm is not
to attain consensus, but rather to affect on policy. Toward political society at large, they
seek to stimulate public opinion. Those working in the alter-globalization movement, as
well as those in, for instance, environmental, human rights, feminist, and peace organizations,
are striving to make a political difference in settings that are characterized by
highly unequal relations of power. While rational consensus may at times be a suitable
strategy, deliberation is not always the best overall frame for describing or analyzing the
political interaction that takes place.
Civic Cultures and Political Discussion
As a complementary way to analyze and understand political interaction in online public
spheres, I propose that we treat political discussion not just in terms of its rational
communicative qualities, but also as a form of practice integrated within more encompassing
civic cultures. I have been developing the notion of civic culture (Dahlgren,
2000a, 2000b, 2003) as a way to conceptualize the factors that can enhance or impede
political participation—the enactment of citizenship understood as forms of social agency.
Space only permits a brief overview of this notion here, and then I will return to the
question of political discussion, framing it as part of civic cultures.
The idea of civic culture takes as its starting point the notion of citizens as social
agents, and it asks what the cultural factors are behind such agency (or its absence).
Civic cultures point to both the conditions and the manifestations of such participation;
158 Peter Dahlgren
they are anchored in the mind-sets and symbolic milieu of everyday life. Civic cultures
are potentially both strong and vulnerable: They help to promote the functioning of
democracy, they can serve to empower or disempower citizens, yet like all domains of
culture, they can easily be affected by political and economic power. A key assumption
here is that a viable democracy must have an anchoring at the level of citizens’ lived
experiences, personal resources, and subjective dispositions. The notion of civic cultures
grafts some fruitful elements from cultural theory onto some more familiar themes from
political communication. This highlights that such dimensions as meaning, identity, and
subjectivity are important elements of political communication.
We can point to public spheres, to their representations and possible forms of interaction,
yet questions remain about why people participate in them or not. The framework
of civic cultures seeks to address these questions and provide empirical starting points for
analysis. Given that the foundation of the civic culture frame is the citizen-agent, this frame
is thus interested in the processes of becoming—how people develop into citizens, how
they come to see themselves as members of and potential participants in societal development.
Civic culture is an analytic construct that seeks to identify the possibilities of
people acting in the role of citizens. This is a role which can have non- or pre-political
aspects, but which may develop toward politics and indeed evolve into formalized politics.
The key here is to underscore the processual and contextual dimension: The political and
politics are not simply given, but are constructed via word and deed.
The civic culture concept does not presuppose homogeneity among its citizens; it in
fact assumes that there are many ways in which citizenship and democracy can be enacted.
It does, however, suggest the need for minimal shared commitments to the vision
and procedures of democracy, which in turn entails a capacity to see beyond the immediate
interests of one’s own group. Needless to say, this is a challenging balance to
maintain. However, different social and cultural groups can express civic culture in different
ways, theoretically enhancing democracy’s possibilities. To facilitate the use of
this materialist and constructionist concept, I treat it as comprising a number of dynamically
interrelated parameters: values, affinity, knowledge, identities, and practices.
Values: It should be underscored that values must have their anchoring in everyday
life; a political system will never achieve a democratic character if the world of the
everyday reflects antidemocratic normative dispositions.
Affinity: This points to a minimal sense of commonality among citizens in heterogeneous
late modern societies, a sense that they belong to the same social and political
entities, despite all other differences. They have to deal with each other to make their
common entities work, whether at the level of neighborhood, nation state, or the global
arena. This commonality is grounded in a realization among all groups of the mutual
need to maintain democracy and adhere to its rules. Without this affinity, there can be
no progress in communicating with adversaries, or even cooperation and networking
among like-minded.
Knowledge: Referential cognizance of the world is indispensable for the life of democracy.
A subset of knowledge is competencies and, in particular, communicative skills,
which points to some degree of literacy and the relevance of education for democracy.
Modes of knowledge are evolving, however, especially among the young, in keeping with
cultural changes and new media technologies that can promote new modalities of thought
and expression, new ways of knowing and forms of communicative competencies.
Identities: Citizenship is a formal status, with rights and obligations. However, it
also has a subjective side: People must be able to see themselves as members and potential
participants with efficacy in social and political entities; this must be a part of people’s
Internet, Public Spheres, and Political Communication 159
multidimensional identities. Citizenship is central to the issues of social belonging and
social participation. Identities of membership are not just subjectively produced by individuals,
but evolve in relation to social milieus and institutional mechanisms.
Practices: Democracy must be enacted in concrete, recurring practices—individual,
group, and collective—relevant for diverse situations. Such practices help generate personal
and social meaning to the ideals of democracy. They must have some element of
the routine, of the taken for granted about them (e.g., elections), if they are to be a part
of a civic culture, yet the potential for spontaneous interventions, one-off, novel forms
of practice, needs to be kept alive. Civic cultures require many other practices, pertinent
to many other circumstances in everyday life. Across time, practices become traditions,
and experience becomes collective memory. Today’s democracy needs to be able to
refer to a past without being locked in it. New practices and traditions can and must
evolve to ensure that democracy does not stagnate.
The most fundamental and most ubiquitous practice is precisely civic interaction,
and discussion. Interaction is one of the dimensions of the public sphere, and as I noted,
one can empirically investigate civic discussion by examining, for instance, its various
discursive modes, its spatial and contextual sites and settings, and its social circumstances,
both on- and offline.
From this vantage point, discussion in the context of the extra-parliamentarian new
politics within the advocacy/activist domain of online public spheres can be seen in a
different light. In the context of destabilized political communication systems, the discussions
generated in these settings by these actors hold out the modest potential for
making a contribution to the renewal, growth, and strengthening of civic cultures among
many citizens who feel distanced from the arenas of formal party politics. This view
must of course be nuanced. For example, there are a wide variety of political colors in
this sector, and not all of them may be considered democratic and progressive. Also, we
are no doubt talking about relatively small numbers of seriously engaged citizens. The
general situation here can be compared with the protest movements of the 1960s and
1970s, where rather small but determined groups could have a significant impact on
political agendas. One of the differences is that today the groups are generally much
more sophisticated and effective, not least thanks to their access to the new media and
their skills with them.
Discussion here may or may not always take the form of Habermasian deliberation,
but what is more important is the reciprocal dynamics that it can generate, reinforcing
the parameters of civic culture and the impact this may have on the larger political
situation. The values and commitments espoused by these groups are largely very democratic,
and can be seen as a counter to some of the very undemocratic values associated
with the prevailing neo-liberal order. They are able to diffuse their knowledge through
the Net to each other, and on occasion their efforts are picked up by journalists on the
Net or in the traditional mass media and become disseminated further to wider publics
(Bennett, 2003a). The affinities demonstrated by many of these groups foster a spirit of
cooperation between various organizations and their loosely defined memberships, contributing
to the formation of a broader counter political culture (see the Cammaerts and
van Audenhove article, in this issue). Via the identities that are developed by participation,
people are exploring new ways of being citizens and doing politics. Among the
other notable practices are the sharing of information and experience, often transnationally,
maintaining permanent campaigns to try to influence on public opinion on particular
issues, and in some cases organizing political anti-consumption (i.e., boycotts),
which can serve to concretely link the politically abstract with people’s everyday lives.
160 Peter Dahlgren
While it is important to keep a clear perspective and not exaggerate the extent of
the activities or their impact, it would also be foolish to underestimate what seems to be
a major development in the contemporary history of Western democracy. The Internet is
at the forefront of the evolving public sphere, and if the dispersion of public spheres
generally is contributing to the already destabilized political communication system, specific
counter public spheres on the Internet are also allowing engaged citizens to play a role
in the development of new democratic politics. Discussion here may take the form of
deliberation, with various degrees of success, but what is more important in this context
is that talk among citizens is the catalyst for the civic cultures that are fuelling this
engagement. The jury is still out on what the verdict will be regarding the impact of
these developments on the larger democratic systems—and I suspect that it will be out
for quite some time—but in the meantime important developments in political communication
are in motion.
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