Palano Damiano eBooks
eBooks di Palano Damiano Struttura e processi politici
Democracy and DisintermediationA Dangerous Relationship. E-book. Formato PDF Damiano Palano - Educatt, 2022 -
What is disintermediation? In wider terms, it indicates the absence of a median entity between two subjects. As isknown, it was a term born in the economic-financial sector, which then spread to different areas of social life. Thisvariety of uses hasmade it ambiguous, an ambiguity that can develop on two levels. The first is almost inevitablebecause it is the consequence of its varied use. By disintermediation we can mean, for example, the absence ofmediators during an economic negotiation, the possibility of buying a plane ticket without travel agency costs, or thedynamic that is created between society and institutions with the use of Internet in the political arena. From thispoint of view, the word is ambiguous because it is overly generic. Thesecond level of ambiguity relates to therelationship between disintermediation and democracy because, on the one hand, it allows us to accept therequests of citizens who want a moredirectandtransparentrelationship with the political elites, and, on the other,it risks making some elements of representative government even more brittle, especially by undermining theirlegitimacy. As the title suggests, this book explores this second level of disintermediation ambiguity, offering a seriesofcontributions that, using different approaches, highlight also the moredangerousaspects that risk evenundermining some keystones of liberal-representative democracy.
State of EmergencyItalian democracy in times of pandemic. E-book. Formato PDF Palano Damiano - Educatt, 2022 -
It is probably still too early to take stock of the Covid-19 pandemic and establishwhether the solutions adopted by Italy have been more efficient than those adoptedelsewhere. Furthermore, it is still too early to formulate hypotheses on the ability ofdemocracies to respond to the pandemic, or on the causes that, in some areas, havefavored both a more rapid spread of the virus, as well as higher levels of mortality.The questions around the future of democracy and the impact of the pandemic on our political systems will remain at the center of scholarly attention in the comingyears and will require in-depth research.This volume, created by Polidemos (the Center for the study of democracy and political change), intends to contribute to the discussion, focusing in particular on the ‘Italian case’, or rather on the way in which Italian democracy has responded to the health emergency.The scholars who collaborated in this research focused on some crucial dimensions: in particular, the expansion of emergency powers, the relationship between the executive and the legislative, the role of local authorities and the state-regions relationship, changes in populist formations and technocratic tendencies, the response of the Italian elites, and the transformations in political communication. In an even simpler way, this book asks some brutal questions, which are worth enunciating: has the pandemic emergency aggravated the “crisis” of Italian democracy (assuming such a “crisis” really exists and is not merely the result of an optical illusion)? Has the “state of emergency” declared by the Italian government “suspended” individual freedoms and the power of Parliament? And has the pandemic emergency helped to erode the foundations on which Italian democracy rests, favoring the spread of anti-democratic parties and messages?
Towards a Bubble Democracy?Notes for a Theoretical Framework. E-book. Formato PDF Palano Damiano - Educatt, 2022 -
In the last few years, different hypotheses have been formulated to explain the success of populism, focused on socio-economic factors and on the ‘cultural’ components of the crisis of western liberalism. However, the discussion often turned to the unpredictable evolutions of “digital swarms”, to their indifference towards rational arguments, to their inability to distinguish between truth and falsehood. Damiano Palano’s book focuses precisely on the consequences that “digital swarms” can have on our democracies. The goal is, however, not to provide an explanation of the success of the ‘new’ populism, of fake news or of the so-called “post-truth”. More simply, the aim is to up- date the theoretical vocabulary with which to interpret the change we are experiencing. This book – which must be read as a piece of a re- flection in progress – focuses in fact on the implications that the new communication scenario has on contemporary democratic regimes. The thesis is that we are facing a new context, very different not only from the ‘old’ party democracy, but also from the audience democracy. In many ways, the spread of social media seems in fact to mark the decline of the “audience”, at least if it is understood as an audience made basically homogeneous by the existence of ‘generalist’ commu- nication channels. Rather than actually sanctioning mechanisms of dis- intermediation, the spread of new media triggers a fragmentation of the audience into a plurality of segments that tend to have no roots in a common sphere. And so, the public sphere is transformed into a myriad ‘bubbles’ that become largely self-referential and potentially polarized. Taking into account the transformations in the communica- tive scenario, as well as the implications on the relationship between citizens, information and parties, this book proposes the ideal-typical image of a new bubble democracy.