Political communication: reflections on democracy and public administration

Abstract

The paper stems from the idea, illustrated in the first paragraph, that new forms of legal regulation of politics need to be developed in order to safeguard the functioning of democratic institutions as established by the Constitution. In this context, the paper specifically examines the issue of political communication, which is increasingly oriented towards manipulative and suggestive techniques, with prejudicial consequences on public debate, on the authenticity of democratic consensus, on the crisis of representation, and also on the very functioning of institutions and on the interaction between government bodies and management apparatus in public administration. The second paragraph and its subsections examine some recent European regulations designed to safeguard freedom of self-determination: of citizens with regard to political advertising; of users of large social media platforms with regard to manipulation; and of consumers with regard to greenwashing. This results in different models, one essentially focused on transparency obligations, based on the assumption of a certain capacity for self-determination on the part of citizens, and the other on the specific prohibition of certain content in forms of advertising communication. A focused analysis in the third paragraph on the topic of freedom of information and communication suggests caution with regard to hypothetical forms of direct limitation of possible political communication content. The fourth paragraph then hypothesizes some possible innovative mechanisms that could be gradually introduced by the legislator and tested to facilitate the contextualization of political communication and allow interested parties to request additional information from its authors. The desired effect would be to lead political debate and public opinion, at least when it concerns issues of administrative interest, towards greater professionalism, quality/verifiability of content, and adherence to reality, in order to limit the stress this causes for public administrations and the detrimental effects on their overall output.