The transformations of public debates in European post-truth politics: disruptions of polarization and fragmentation

How and whether liberal democracies should respond to the challenge of post-truth politics is an open theoretical and political question for EU states. Democracy presupposes an epistemic, evaluative and political pluralism that places the debate at the centre of its institutional organisation. They are founded upon the acceptance of the plurality of ways of life and establishing a government that does not claim the monopoly of the truth (Keane 2018). However, post-truth politics increases tensions in liberal democracies by making pluralism and tolerance more costly (Arias Maldonado 2020: 75). This paper argues that significant differences in values and conceptions of the public debate persist among EU political systems. This paper builds upon and beyond debates about the fragmentation and polarisation of European public spheres to analyse the broader transformations and disruptions of the systemic connections between public debates and institutions. The conceptual link between public debates and decision making is transformed by distrust in institutions but also by institutional strategies to (re)create opportunities for deliberation and improve the quality of public decisions by strengthening scientific evidence in the policy process. Furthermore, the disruption of the public spheres implies that the existing knowledge about different forms of organisation of the relations between institutions, media and policy processes are being transformed by new actors and processes of public debate– among others, public attempts to foster deliberation – but also by phenomena that transform polarisation and fragmentation such as platform concentration, privatised segmentation of political debates.