Abstract
Having established that our area of interest is the way the mass media has represented what it means to be an active member of a democracy, we consider what might constitute a democratic context. Beginning with an overview of the emergence of direct democracy in ancient Athens, we consider the growth of representational democratic systems in England and the UK. Starting with the signing of the Magna Carta we move on to the expansion of the electoral franchise from the early nineteenth century onwards. We then critically reflect on a range of better known models of democracy in order to establish some core characteristics of what democratic participation might mean.
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Notes
- 1.
Work by Feigenbaum et al. (2013), into the operation of democracy in protest camps also sheds some light on to contemporary ideas pertinent to direct democracy in practice.
- 2.
Boal claimed that as the population of the favelas around Rio was unknown, but that the total population of the Rio de Janeiro region could be as many as 14 million. His estimates for the city and the regional population seem to be exaggerations, though only slightly. In 2013 the IBGE (Insituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatistica) indicated the city’s population was around 6.45 million, the second largest city in Brazil, and regionally, they suggest, it could exceed 13.1 million people (IBGE, ND).
- 3.
We use the expression ‘two-way, symmetrical’ in the way it is commonly understood in public relations theory, in that all parties in a communicative process have an equally valid contribution to make to the communication and all parties are equally contributors and listeners.
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Lamond, I.R., Reid, C. (2017). Models of Democracy. In: The 2015 UK General Election and the 2016 EU Referendum. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54780-0_2
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