Page 38 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

POLITICS, DEMOCRACY AND THE MEDIA

overthrow of autocracy and its monopolisation of political power.
For capitalism to develop freely there had to be freedom of thought
and action for those with entrepreneurial skills and the wealth to
use them. There had, therefore, to be freedom from the arbitrariness
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 indi-
vidual, 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.

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