[ecrea] CFP 'Issue-Congruence and Political Communication in Representative Democracies'

Call for Papers for the Workshop

*"Issue-Congruence and Political Communication in Representative 
Democracies" *

Jena/Dornburg, October 28-29, 2011

There is widespread agreement within public and academic discussion that 
opinions and attitudes of representative elites, i.e. members of 
parliament, in democracies must /in some sense /reflect the opinions and 
attitudes of the population. This assumption provides the starting point 
for the comparison of representative elites and citizens in terms of 
issue-congruence. However, this discussion still exhibits blind spots 
and open questions.

For instance, when it comes to clarify whether and under which 
circumstances issue-congruence provides an appropriate indicator for the 
quality of democracy the opinions begin to differ. Additionally, 
issue-congruence can be analyzed for a variety of issues and for 
different relations, e.g. between the entity of representative elites 
and the population within the same country, between individual 
parliamentarians and their constituencies or between party-elites and 
their followers. While all these perspectives provide important insights 
into the core of representative democracy, a comprehensive approach 
integrating these perspectives is still lacking.

Further, only a few empirical studies analyze, if issue-congruence 
results out of /responsive /or out of /leading /political elites. Spoken 
more generally, the mechanisms underlying issue-(in)congruence need more 
attention. At this point the link to communication studies becomes 
obvious, because those mechanisms are necessarily based on communication 
between representative elites and citizens. Integrating these two 
perspectives may help deepen the understanding of both approaches. For 
instance, if we analyze the communication patterns of representative 
elites and citizens, could we actually identify strategies that are 
suited to achieve issue-congruence? Can the strategies of representative 
elites be subsumed in the dichotomy of leadership and responsiveness? 
Does the degree of issue-congruence differ dependent on the channel and 
type as well as on the sender and recipient of the communication?

Especially the discussion about E-democracy depicts citizens as 
increasingly using the technical possibilities of Web 2.0 in order to 
bring "their" political elites (successfully) in congruence with "the" 
population. For representative elites the direct way of communication 
via Web 2.0 towards the voters provides them the possibility of 
individualized political communication, which may serve as tool to 
achieve issue-congruence for individual MPs by simultaneously distancing 
themselves from their party.

In front of the sketched questions and desiderata in both fields of 
research the workshop aims to bring together scholars of 
issue-congruence with scholars from communication studies, not only to 
examine the empirical evidence for the mentioned questions and 
assumptions, but also to proceed to a general discussion on the relation 
between issue-congruence and communication. The workshop welcomes 
theoretical, empirical and methodological papers.

The workshop will be hosted by the Collaborative Research Centre 580 at 
the Universities of Jena and Halle, Research Project A3 "Representative 
Elites after the Regime Change".

Please submit your abstracts via email to (_lars.vogel /at/ uni-jena.de) _until 
*1st of August, 2011*.

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*Venue*: Altes Schloss Dornburg, 07778 Dornburg 
(_http://www.dornburg-saale.eu/01_altesschloss.php_)

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*Contact*: Lars Vogel M.A. Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena 
Collaborative Research Centre 580 / Project A3 Bachstraße 18k 07743 Jena 
Tel.: +49 (0)3641/945054

_lars.vogel@uni-jena.de_

Julien Navarro

Faculté Libre de Droit

Université Catholique de Lille

60 boulevard Vauban - BP 109

59016 Lille Cedex

Tél. +33 (0)3 20 13 40 76

         +33 (0)6 29 20 26 04

(julien.navarro /at/ icl-lille.fr)