Page 37 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 16

POLITICS IN THE AGE OF MEDIATION
the status of capital, earned in the marketplace rather than inherited.
Consequently, bourgeois philosophers such as Locke and Milton worked out a
critique of autocratic power, replacing it with a theory of representative democ-
racy and individual, or citizenship rights, which reflected in the ideological
sphere the realities of bourgeois economic and political power. Voting rights
were introduced, gradually extending to wider and wider sections of the
population, through such means as the British Reform Act of 1832. Constituent
assemblies – such as the British House of Commons – were erected, and
constitutional constraints on the abuse of political power put in place. The main
concern of liberal democratic theory was thus ‘to grant individuals civil liberties
against the incursion of the state’ (Bobbio, 1987, p. 10).
For the bourgeoisie, rejecting the principle of divine ordination, the
extension of citizenship rights was also a necessary stage in the legitimation
of its own political power, as the dominant class of a new type of social
formation. By ‘formally requesting the consent of all citizens’ (ibid.) elected
political leaders had the right to demand respect and loyalty even from those
who had not voted for them. Equally, citizens had the right to dissent from
the prevailing political wisdom, and to expect that they would be able to
express their views at the ballot box at agreed intervals.
The citizen’s right to choose presupposed the availability of alternatives
from which a meaningful selection could be made, and a rational, knowledge-
able electorate capable of exercising its rights. Democracy was real, in other
words, only when it involved the participation of an informed, rational
electorate. For Italian political sociologist Norberto Bobbio, liberal democ-
racy assumes that citizens, ‘once they are entrusted with the right to choose
who governs them’, are sufficiently well-informed ‘to vote for the wisest, the
most honest, the most enlightened of their fellow citizens’ (ibid., p. 19).
Drawing these strands together, we can identify the defining charac-
teristics of a democratic regime in the following terms: constitutionality,
participation and rational choice.

Constitutionality

First, there must be an agreed set of procedures and rules governing the
conduct of elections, the behaviour of those who win them and the legitimate
activities of dissenters. Such rules will typically take the form of a constitu-
tion (although some countries, like Britain, do not have a ‘written’ constitu-
tion) or a bill of rights.

Participation

Second, those who participate in the democratic process must comprise what
Bobbio terms a ‘substantial’ proportion of the people. In the early democratic
period, as we have noted, citizenship rights were restricted to a small minority

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