Democracy in disguise: the use of social media in reviewing the Icelandic Constitution

Abstract

The aim of this article is to scrutinise the participative processes enabled by social media services in the collaborative rewriting of the Icelandic Constitution. The Constitutional Council creating and presenting the bill made use of Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and its own stjornlagarad.is site to encourage and ensure engagement and participation by the general public in the rewriting process. This article presents the participating citizens as a weak networked public, the Constitutional Council as an intermediate public, and the members of Icelandic Parliament as a strong public. Despite open structures and the facilitation of information, statements, and in some cases deliberation, the communicative efforts of the general public remain in the form of weak publics belonging to the cultural public spheres since decision-making still takes place in the ‘upper’ structures of political public spheres.

Extraordinary partisanship in the European Union: Constituent power and the problem of political agency

“…To that end, Wolkenstein envisages constitutional crowdsourcing as it was practiced in the course of Iceland's (ultimately unsuccessful) process of constitution‐making in the early 2010s. The reference to Island suggests that the work of intergovernmental conferences should be prepared by mini‐publics and encompass several stages in order to allow executives negotiating at the EU level to gather citizen feedback on draft articles through online platforms (see Landemore, 2015; Valtysson, 2014). While this falls short of an (electoral) mechanism of public approval, it might be a way to extend deliberation beyond the confines of transnational partisan networks.…”

The Double Conditioning of Political Participation

“…Instead these media are entangled in complex sets of socio-economic, political, cultural and technological relations" (2014, p. 191). In the context of political participation, we argue that Valtysson (2014aValtysson ( , 2014b in particular has provided valuable (empirical) insights into how social network sites do not simply constitute neutral spaces for democratic deliberation but are actively shaping and conditioning the discursive possibilities aff orded to users. Valtysson's (2014a) fi ndings underline that the platform-specifi c structures of a given medium must be kept in mind when studying emergent forms of mediated participation.…”

“…In the context of political participation, we argue that Valtysson (2014aValtysson ( , 2014b in particular has provided valuable (empirical) insights into how social network sites do not simply constitute neutral spaces for democratic deliberation but are actively shaping and conditioning the discursive possibilities aff orded to users. Valtysson's (2014a) fi ndings underline that the platform-specifi c structures of a given medium must be kept in mind when studying emergent forms of mediated participation. Langlois et al (2009) have also argued that the level of code and politics are becoming increasingly intertwined within contemporary forms of networked participation.…”

Conditioned participation: Technology, context and user-manoeuvrability

“…People's interactions on social media were thereby communicatively conditioned by the technology in question, be that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or Flickr, and the hierarchical design of the process of rewriting the Constitution. This is clear in the communication that took place, which fell mainly into four categories: 'practical information', 'exclamations', 'dissemination', and the axis of 'deliberation and statements' (Valtysson 2014).…”

“…The first case focuses on social media's role in the rewriting processes of the Icelandic Constitution, while the second involves the Mayor of Reykjavik's communication practices on Facebook. I have been interested, on one hand, in how different social media generated different kinds of participative patterns in the discussions concerning the rewriting process of the Constitution (Valtysson 2014), and on the other hand on how Facebook limits the performative dimensions of the Mayor's communication on his Facebook 'Diary' (Valtysson forthcoming).…”