Network Society and Democracy: How ICT Mediated Communication and Virtual Socialization Affects Political Participation

The article deals with the issue of political participation in the network society. It examines how new forms of public communication enabled by ICT mediated communication (especially new media), as well as virtual socialization and the resulting new social structures (especially social networks), affect political participation, particularly citizens’ influence on the government and the political decision-making processes. An analysis of these relationships shows that the changes brought by ICT, in both the social structure and the area of public communication equally, and the expansion of space of political freedom and political communication, do not increase political participation by themselves. It is determined primarily by technological requirements, and then by sociostructural and sociocultural factors, as endogenous properties of certain societies that substantially determine their overall social and political dynamics. In that sense, the level of development of the virtual sphere, the numbers and diversity of social networks and new media, cannot by themselves be considered to be independent variables, nor can they be considered outside of the specific social context. This is particularly noticeable in transitional societies in which specific (undeveloped) sociostructural and sociocultural factors are the key obstacle to the development of political participation, and hence democracy.