Urban Spaces, Socialising Networks and Outdoor Media Shows: The Complex Engines of Political Participation

The issues approached in this paper concern the combined role of urban spaces, socializing networks and social media technologies could play in reshaping essential aspects of political participation, and influencing the dynamics of political stability in the new democratic societies of Eastern Europe. Our research paper approach concerns three main dimensions of study: (a) Urban spaces change dynamics, and their impact on the characteristics and intensity of political protests in Eastern and Central European countries (2010-2018); (b) Socializing networks as vectors of massive, fast mobilization, the new media show technologies (laser shows, outdoors shows, media shows on the buildings facades, etc.) and their impact on political symbol and identity construction in the CEE countries related to the anti-corruption protests; (c) Political protests, movements and conflicts, emergence of new political parties and alliances, emergence of ideology-based cleavages in the Eastern European societies. The present approach has conceptual roots and almost a decade-long research history and experimental background in the interdisciplinary area at the border between political science and agent-based modelling and simulation systems. The project is aimed to further develop the previous conceptual and experimental research approaches on corruption, political attitudes towards governance (Voinea, 2013a), and political regime change from autocratic to democratic rule (Voinea 2013b, 2013c, 2015, 2017). The conceptual modelling approaches the modelling of state, governance, and political attitude formation and change by revisiting classic theories of social and political process modelling (Coleman, 1990; Tilly, 2000; McAdams, Tilly, 2006; Klingemann et al., 2006; Klingemann and Fuchs, 2016; Fuchs, 2015). Preliminary results provide substantial support to the research hypotheses H1, H2, H3. The empirical and simulation models provide good backgrounds for enhancing the study of the dynamics and complexity of the political instability phenomena in the CEE countries where human empowerment aspects as well as anti-corruption, anti-governmental and/or anti-political leadership movements have provided for: (i) value change phenomena and enhanced the emergence of new political identities (new ideologies, new political parties and movements), (ii) emergence of social and political cleavages as a consequence of different expression, degree of intensity, and quality of support to democracy; (iii) agent-based simulation models for the identification of the institutional and societal weaknesses / strength of the societies in the several CEE case studies.