Page 34 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

POLITICS, DEMOCRACY AND THE MEDIA

of absolute power, an end to the ideology of divine right, and
recognition of 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 democracy 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, knowledgeable 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 democracy 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
characteristics of a democratic regime in the following terms:
constitutionality, participation and rational choice.

Constitutionality
Firstly, 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

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