From Sensation to Persuasion: Rethinking Media’s Role in Democratic Innovation

• In Event: Citizens' Assemblies, Media, and Civil Society

Abstract

Few would dispute that contemporary mass media no longer fulfills its traditional role as the “Fourth Estate” in modern mass democracies. Rather than responsible and truth-seeking news coverage, media is more often characterized by rampant sensationalism aimed at boosting readership. Media also receives criticism for its pro-establishment tendencies, operating more as the government’s mouthpiece than its watchdog. Explanations for this shift include market pressures, new technology, and political polarization.

While it is hard to deny that the current state of mass media falls short of the democratic ideal, there is a simpler, less “just-so story” available: the entire democratic system is malfunctioning, disincentivizing all political actors, including the media, from playing their expected roles. To break out of this suboptimal equilibrium, democratic innovation has focused on solving the incentive problem for politicians, with promising outcomes coming from various modes of citizen deliberative forums. Despite such progress, scholars of democratic innovation keep the media at arm’s length when it comes to scaling such initiatives, given their acute awareness of media’s pathologies. If, however, dysfunctional media is a symptom rather than cause of the democratic malaise, then not only is this approach a mistake, but counterproductive. Rather than offering piecemeal solutions, we need to zoom out and think of democratic innovation in more systemic terms that encompass a wide range of political institutions along with their interconnections.

In line with such considerations, I explore the following problem: how and under what conditions can the media contribute to scaling democratic innovations? Despite the important and timely nature of this problem, previous attempts to address it have been mired not only with strong preconceptions about the media, but also with the commonly held belief that citizen deliberative forums are lack “newsworthiness.”

I argue that when a representative cross-section of the society participates in an officially empowered forum to deliberate and make recommendations on a nationally controversial issue, not only does the forum gain newsworthiness, but it also induces the news media to adopt a more “deliberative” stance. This includes providing sufficient rationale in support of the positions taken, broadening the spectrum of coverage, and critically engaging out-partisan narratives. It is as if the media participates in public deliberation on its own accord, fully leveraging its unique capacity to provide public avenues for channeling, extending, and augmenting crowd-sourced thinking on major policy issues, thus solving the scaling problem.

I substantiate my argument by analyzing two recent cases of democratic innovation. The first is South Korea’s “Participatory Surveys,” during which 471 citizens gathered for a three-day consultation in 2017 on whether to continue the construction of two nuclear reactors. The second is Ireland’s “Irish Citizens’ Assembly,” where 99 citizens met over five weekends in 2016 to reconsider the abortion ban in its Constitution. Both forums were commissioned by their respective governments to prioritize citizen input in their policy-making cycles and, notably, received heavy media coverage throughout each cycle. As such, the two cases present us with an opportunity to investigate whether and how politically empowered deliberative forums can affect media dynamics.

The empirical section of this project begins with an observational study, where I collect on-topic news articles published in Korea and Ireland during the relevant time frames. Subsequently, I employ various text-as-data techniques and a synthetic control method for data operationalization and analysis. I expect statistically significant increases in indicators of media deliberativeness following pivotal moments of the citizen deliberative forum, such as announcement of the forum or the disclosure of deliberation results.

Afterwards, I conduct large-N surveys as well as qualitative interviews targeting journalists in Korea and Ireland to better understand the mechanism through which such forums trigger a shift in media dynamics. Here, I anticipate a story of political agency to emerge: in a counterfactual political environment where high-stakes policymaking extends beyond elected officials, journalists may expect higher payoffs from participating in public debates. Consequently, they endeavor to enhance both the breadth and depth of arguments in support of their own ideological positions, while also taking counterarguments from out-partisan news media more seriously. Thus unfolds a separate process of reason-giving in the media environment that runs parallel to the forum, with journalists functioning as catalysts for deliberation—perhaps inadvertently, but impactful nonetheless.

Author

• Euchan Jang, Ohio State University