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Workshop

Political Narratives, Social Media and Deliberative Democracy: Collective Memory Transformation as a Case Study

  • Marjan Horvat (IRRIS Institute)
E1 05 (Leibniz-Saal)

Abstract

Historically, narrative has always been an important element of political grammar and discourse. Specific interpretations of complex topics shape political and social spaces and connect different layers of society with coherent ideational frameworks. From the perspective of deliberative democracy's regulatory ideals, which emphasize reason and good argumentation in decision-making, the issue of narratives poses a particular challenge. On the one hand, theory acknowledges the importance and role of personal narratives such as storytelling and testimonies, as supplementary forms of argument justification. On the other hand, at the systemic level, the role of narratives is still under-explored, as deliberative democracy is designed as a form of progressive, reason-based Enlightenment intervention in existing decision- and policy-making patterns, effectively bypassing pre-existing embedded political and societal narratives.

In this paper, we argue that the scope and impact of this deliberative intervention are limited due to the underexplored impact of epistemic modalities on embedded patterns of decision-making. We support our thesis with a sociological critique of deliberative democracy, highlighting the importance of socio-political context in opinion formation and political decision-making, as well as the role of embedded values, cultural and historical factors, the specific configuration of the social contract and evolution of public deliberation on a macro scale. This perspective significantly alters the potential for enacting deliberative democracy standards in a given society. We posit that deciphering the embedded narrative patterns that constitute socio-political discourse of legitimation is a prerequisite for facilitating norms of deliberative democracy. Computational tools can assist in this task substantially.

From this standpoint, we explore the consequences of transforming and creating new narratives on social media, impacting the underlying structural solidarity of the public sphere in a given society. We particularly focus on cases of collective memory narratives, which can serve as integrative or polarizing factors in socio-political substratum. Finally, we present a theoretical framework for conceptualizing the impact of transformed collective memory narratives on the contemporary political and societal landscape through different theory- and narrative-based legitimacy models, with a specific focus on the transformation of existing political registers and narratives under the framework of deliberative decision-making.

Katharina Matschke

Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences Contact via Mail

Jürgen Jost

Max-Planck-Institut für Mathematik in den Naturwissenschaften

Eckehard Olbrich

Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences

Marjan Horvat

IRRIS Institute

Tom Willaert

Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Armin Pournaki

Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences