Digital Heuristics in the Deliberative System

Current social and technological transformations are reshaping political communication. On the one hand, the production of democratic authority and legitimacy hinges more and more on successful communicative performances of political actors in today’s modernized, individualized societies. On the other hand, the political communication environment has changed. According to Blumler and Kavanagh (1999: 225), we are living in a new age of communicative abundance paradoxically characterised by “both Machiavellian and discursive models of politics“. Digitalization has intensified and accelerated this change. The political communication environment is transforming towards a (new) hybrid media system (Chadwick 2013). Digital media and infrastructures provide political actors with new opportunities, incentives and constraints for internal and external communication (Schulz 2014). At the same time, however, the pluralization of media outlets and the growing fragmentation of audiences make the dynamic effects of political communication less and less predictable. This growing complexity undermines communicative control (McNair 2015). In light of these contradictory trends the question arises: How do political parties orient their communication strategies within these changing conditions? What communicative practices do they consequently employ and what does this mean for democracy? The paper brings together two perspectives: deliberative democratic theory and theories of heuristics for judgment and decision-making in political communication. The argument rests on the assumption that political actors have to develop new heuristics in order to orient their communication in the dynamic digital environment. Those heuristics can be systematically assessed in light of democratic theory. Thus, the paper progresses as follows: In the first step it provides a typology of heuristics for the digital communication environment that have been derived from interview material with party communication managers regarding their online campaign strategies. Heuristics are understood as informative short cuts for strategic decision-making that are based on experience and that are thus systematically linked to specific features of the digital environment. In this sense, heuristics make use of experiences for example with the algorithmic structure of social media platforms. In the second step, the paper addresses the theoretical implications of the systemic turn that deliberative democratic theory has recently taken in order to evaluate how it can accommodate newly arising digital communication practices. The systemic turn prompts a more integrated view of the diverse institutions and practices of democratic systems. Thus, the scholarly focus is shifting from the question of how deliberative a specific institution is to how it might contribute to the functioning of a deliberative system as a whole (Mansbridge et al. 2012). In the third step the paper brings together the types of digital heuristics and the deliberative systems perspective in order to answer the question: Can digital heuristics have a deliberative function? Do they give necessary orientation without which meaningful democratic decision-making cannot any longer be realized or are they prone to systematically distort democratic discourses?