No abstract

In recent years, the scientific debate on populism has experienced a new momentum: on the one hand, the emergence of new populisms even in Western democracies and on the other hand, disagreement among scholars on the definition of populism. In this context, new trends have emerged-such as those concerning the link between populism and technology-along with the need to revise the traditional study paradigms, which are often difficult to operationalise. The transformation of the political sphere appears to be strongly interconnected with the digital media landscape. If the new forms of communication are the cause or the effect of processes, such as the personalisation of leadership, the verticalisation of political organisations, the presidentialisation of political parties, or the social delegitimisation of the old "intermediate bodies", these forms should be the subject of ongoing research. At the same time, a very simplistic storyline tries to overlap the rise of neo-populist parties with their use of communication technologies. A quality that is common to the many different populisms is an appeal to the use of direct democracy as a tool to empower citizens. Populism itself is sometimes portrayed as almost synonymous with direct democracy. At the same time, direct democracy is used by populists as a critique of the lack of participation in representative democracy and the need to make it more participatory. In this perspective, technology becomes a tool (and a storyline) to facilitate the use of direct democracy and the rise of a new form of "hyper-representation". At the same time, concepts such as efficiency, privatisation, short-termism, newism, and meritocracy are keywords successfully used by populist leaders, technocracy élites and neo-liberal political leaders. In other words, we can highlight a strange meeting between technological storytelling about direct democracy and technocracy myths. Even among the new populist parties, the technopopulists appear to represent an important category, whose peculiarities can easily be put into evidence using some empirical tools (such as content analysis). The aim of this article is to investigate the relationships between technocracy, direct democracy's storytelling and hyper-representation as a distinctive characteristic of neo-populisms.

The recent decades more than anything else have revealed the ambivalence not only of the articulated expectations about the digital public sphere but also of the ‘real’ development itself. This thematic issue of <em>Media and Communication</em> highlights some of the criticalities and specificities of the evolution of the public sphere during this period where digital communication ecosystems are becoming increasingly central. The different articles offer a polyphonic perspective and thus contribute significantly to the debate on the transformations of the public sphere, which—in the time of the Covid-19 pandemic—dramatically affect the very essence of our democracy.

Abstract. This article proposes an analysis of the relationships amongst the crisis of political parties, the insurgence of phenomena such as the cognitive mobilization and the role of participatory and deliberative democracy as frame for new forms of civic engagement. The authors also focus over the transformation of the public sphere and the need for scholars and politicians to go beyond a normative conception of the mediatised public space. The rising of new forms of political parties (cartel party, “presidentialized” party, franchise party) is strongly connected with the partisan dealignment, the crisis of the liberal representative democracy and the deep transformation of the public sphere; in the same time, new forms of active citizenship and civic engagement can replace and/or support the political parties. The participatory and deliberative democracy challenges the old politics and can represent both a tool and a frame for strengthening the new forms of political participation