This book covers various aspects of political communication in dissonant public spheres and their impact on democratic processes. It expands research on campaigning beyond assumptions of well-functioning political systems, to better understand how the erosion of institutional legitimacy and trust affects communication processes. The volume approaches the concept of dissonant public spheres from four divergent perspectives: as instrumental threats to democracy, as communication performed by political actors, forms of engagement by citizens, and the nature of political conflicts. New perspectives are developed on how political candidates, organizations, and parties optimize their behaviour within dissonant political environments. These disrupted online communication environments reshape public spheres and change citizen engagement in ways that amplify political conflicts and crises. Chapters also examine the role of data-driven campaigning and address how limited access to platform data affects our understanding of dissonant public spheres. A significant new contribution to the field of political communication, this volume will be a key resource for scholars and researchers of communication studies, politics, media studies and sociology. The chapters in this book were originally published in Political Communication.

The successful Brexit referendum campaign; Donald Trump’s election; and the rise of right-wing nationalist-populist political parties and movements – all of these events have incited renewed interest in public communication and the internetised media, deliberative democracy and public spheres, challenged by an informational abundance that generates a communicative liquefaction of publicness and politics. This book celebrates the 25th anniversary of the journal Javnost – The Public, bringing together internationally renowned scholars from 20 countries to discuss topical issues in contemporary media and communication research. It focuses on challenging issues of the changing nature of publicness and the public sphere in the internet age, issues of democracy and the crisis of public communication and the tasks of media and communication research as a social practice. It critically reflects on the democratisation crisis and the demise of popular and scholarly optimism, which the emerging internet inspired in early 1990s, when Javnost – The Public was founded.

This collection is up-to-date and vital at the present moment which demands a special sense of responsibility regarding the tasks ahead for Europe, especially in the fields of media and communication. The volume adopts a wide range of approaches to the European public sphere, and provides much-needed insight into both Western and Eastern perceptions of events and processes in Europe. The contributions here analyse recent trends in media and communication (such as misinformation, fragmentation, and the core-periphery division) and search for possible ways to approach them. In doing so, they discuss a number of important current issues, such as populism, migration, and foreign involvement in European affairs. The volume also sheds light on the question of how the changes in communication environments affect the public spheres in Europe. Focusing on media in Europe, the contributors bring knowledge from different scientific fields (including geopolitics, sociology, political science, and philosophy) and represent different geographic regions, whilst at the same time presenting a European perspective on the issues they investigate.

From fake news to infringement of privacy in digital spheres, the changing landscapes of media and public communication have completely transformed contemporary democracies in recent decades. Disruptions of media functioning can be seen as evidence for a transition from democracy to post-democracy, but how plausible is this scenario? Using empirical evidence, the author asks how imminent the threat of the end of democracy is, and how it can be restored. Exploring the creative and destructive ways individuals and groups make use of new digital and social media in democratic societies across the world, the book presents a much-needed critical theory of the public sphere as we enter the new digital age.

To understand the profound changes in the modes of public political debate over the past decade, this volume develops a new conception of public spheres as spaces of resonance emerging from the power of language to affect and to ascribe and instill collective emotion. Political discourse is no longer confined to traditional media, but increasingly takes place in fragmented and digital public spheres. At the same time, the modes of political engagement have changed: discourse is said to increasingly rely on strategies of emotionalization and to be deeply affective at its core. This book meticulously shows how public spheres are rooted in the emotional, bodily, and affective dimensions of language, and how language – in its capacity to affect and to be affected – produces those dynamics of affective resonance that characterize contemporary forms of political debate. It brings together scholars from the humanities and social sciences and focuses on two fields of inquiry: publics, politics, and media in Part I, and language and artistic inquiry in Part II. The thirteen chapters provide a balanced composition of theoretical and methodological considerations, focusing on highly illustrative case studies and on different artistic practices. The volume is an indispensable source for researchers and postgraduate students in cultural studies, literary studies, sociology, and political science. It likewise appeals to practitioners seeking to develop an in-depth understanding of affect in contemporary political debate.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th Conference on Electronic Governance and Open Society: Challenges in Eurasia, EGOSE 2021, held in St. Petersburg, Russia, in November 2021. The 21 full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 69 submissions, additionally one invited paper has been included in this volume. The papers are organized in topical sections on ​digital technology and design; digital Society; digital government and economy.