The Role of the Media in New Modes of Governance

Abstract

Unraveling the nation-state, processes of upwards, downwards and sideways de-nationalization have entailed an increasing participation of independent agencies, and civil society actors in policy-making. These trends towards ‘new’ modes of governance challenge the democratic accountability of public policies; the core instances of democratic participation and control are limited to state institutions and traditional ‘governmental’ styles of decision-making. But democratic accountability depends not only on institutional procedures by which voters can hold decision-makers accountable. Democratic accountability also depends on processes of communication that enable voters to connect policy performance to those who are actually responsible. In contemporary democracies, accountability of decision makers is construed not only via of electoral control, but also via communication processes of (mediated) public debate. This panel intends to develop a new perspective on the question of governance and democracy, by focusing on the role of the media in new forms of governance. Indeed, all actors involved in public policy making are potentially subject to media scrutiny. The media make policy actors publicly visible, point out their role in decision-making and hold them responsible for their achievements and mistakes, for policy success or failure. However, journalists can be expected to have an attention bias towards elected actors. It is unclear to what extent the advent of new forms of governance, involving shifts of policy-making authority to non-elected actors is parallelled by changes in political journalism. Given the rising importance of new forms of governance, it is crucial to analyse whether, how and why political journalism extends its focus beyond formal institutions and investigates entangled decision-making processes thereby identifying relevant decision-makers and their responsibilities in the policy-making process. This panel welcomes theoretical and/or empirical papers that contribute to this perspective by analysing the role of the media and the nature of political communication in new forms of governance.

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