The European Neighbourhood Council (ENC) released its new analysis entitled “Will Deliberation Save Our Democracies? A domestic and foreign policy analysis”
The ENC Analysis of November 2020 is written by Samuel Doveri Vesterbye, ENC Managing Director and expert in Turkey and the Middle East and Pepijn Kennis, ENC External Advisor and Member of the Parliament of the Brussels-Capital Region.
The 21st century democracies have witnessed lower voter turnouts in elections, declining trust in public institutions and widening polarisation, both politically and socially. Samuel Doveri Vesterbye and Kennis Pepijn provide an analysis of the ineffectiveness of our current electoral governance systems with regards to polarisation, information consumption and new technologies, including disinformation. The authors draw on literature and academia to explain how information is being consumed and how societies are increasingly divided. They explain how online algorithms and digital echo chambers are increasingly polarising voters while enhancing levels of disinformation, which pose both a problem in domestic and foreign policy. The analysis paper examines how deliberative democratic governance based on sortition can help curtail these issues. It is recommended that new and effective citizens-based democratic models should be used more and institutionalised within the EU domestic and foreign policy context, particularly through local-to-local (municipal; civil society) cooperation and democracy instruments in EU foreign policy to fight disinformation.
The full analysis is available in the PDF version below.
Will Deliberation Save Our Democracies? A domestic and foreign policy analysis