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

Thu Jun 23 12:23:14 GMT 2011



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)



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