Political blogs and representative democracy

Representative democracy faces profound problems. Electoral turnout has declined to such an extent that the legitimacy of the mandate to govern is drawn into question [19,p. 33]. This problem is exacerbated and reinforced by a feeling of disconnection and distrust between the governed and the governors and a perception that voting and other forms of participation do not influence electoral outcomes or policymaking. At the heart of this ‘crisis’, as it is sometimes referred to, is an increasingly disrupted and distorted process of political communication. Without effective communication flows, representation cannot be democratic. Responding to this situation calls for a normative account of what effective representative democracy entails [2]. One way of conceiving the desired paths for democratic political communication is in terms of cultural, spatial and temporal distance. The more political communication is characterised by the appearance and reality of such distances, the more likely it is to frustrate claims by political representatives to speak for the public – leaving citizens feeling like remote spectators upon the spectacle of political of representation. Conversely, there are normative and practical benefits to be derived from forms of political communication which engender various dimensions of closeness between representatives and represented. The perceived pre-eminence of mass-mediated forms of political communication, both ideally and practically, has led authors such as McNair [16, p. 5] to exclude direct communication between political organizations and citizens from diagrams of mediated political communication. The weakening of direct – and, specifically, interactive – communication, between citizens and elected representatives is an important aspect in the perceived crisis of political communication. As governments have come to believe that the public don’t know how to speak and the public has come to believe that governments don’t know how to listen [4], a wall of suspicion and incomprehension seems to separate the politically represented from their elected representatives. For many critics, the mass media are key accomplices in this process, seemingly ‘dumbing down’ political coverage by forgoing substance in favour of spin [6,9, 12,13,18]. As Jamie Oliver contended with school dinners, media content is cheap, popular and quick – but devoid of ‘goodness’; we need some substance to our media sustenance [8]. The need for a renewed relationship between citizens and politicians is addressed by the latest in vogue information and communication technology, the Weblog, or blog. Not since the dot com boom has the democratising potential of a technological tool been the focus of so much attention. A blog is a regularly updated webpage (often described as an online diary), with information (textual, photographic or video) presented in reverse chronological order. According to Ferguson and Griffiths [7, p. 366], in political blogs ‘the content focuses on issues, events and policy in a constituency, national, international or party political context.’ Political blogs can be individualised (for example personal blogs by MPs, citizens or journalists) or multiple author groups (for example Greenpeace). Blogs provide four principal avenues for enhancing political communication: