Importance of TV Media for Democratic Deliberation and Civic Engagement - A Case of Georgia

Post-Soviet Georgia after its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 embarked on a path towards greater democratization and integration into Euro-Atlantic organizations. The first peaceful transfer of power from the United National Movement to the six-party Georgian Dream coalition took place in October 2012. The present research is about a causal link between TV media, democratic deliberation and civic engagement in Georgia. I have chosen this topic because the problem I am observing in the country is multifaceted and directly linked to the lack of deliberation between regular people, reluctance of Georgians to be civically engaged in political processes and the media that remains to be less pro-active therefore only talks about the problems of social, political and economic nature. Georgia’s social, economic and political problems are prevailing, however, the major public remains silent and the political elite is blaming the previous government in all wrongdoings thus take no responsibility for the country’s dire conditions. The polarization of public opinion seems to have a negative effect on holding the government accountable in which the current media landscape playing a major role. The leading political party lost contact with regular citizens therefore the gap and mistrust between the public and the government are growing. My research is about deliberation as a means for transforming individual preferences which can help people develop opinions that are more informed, reflective, and considered. I would like to emphasize on the importance of deliberation’s social aspects that give a strong basis for people to solve their main problems and community concerns together. I aim to observe how TV media in one of the regional television stations in Georgia could help people enhance their deliberation on certain social and community issues and help them activate their civic engagement and strengthen their civic role in political or non-political decision-making (on the regional level), through partaking in public discussions, forums, street protests, and demonstrations if needed. Because morally or civically responsible individuals living in a democratic country and be able to recognize himself or herself as a member of a larger social group should consider social problems to be at least partly his or her own. To guide my investigation, I am going to use the mixed methods research that enables a researcher to combine elements of qualitative and quantitative research approaches. The exploratory nature of my study can be described as follows: “it is a two-phase approach, in which one phase (qualitative) results can help develop or inform the second phase (qualitative). For this reason, I plan to stage (together with the regional TV producer) a series of TV programs (mainly about social and community problems and concerns in the researching region), use a set of experiments of mini-publics that would follow each TV program every week and for data collection, I would use Q methodology. One on one (structured) interviews will be used as a quantitative data collection method for more general information from the regional population in the first phase of the empirical research.