Analysis and Examination of the Audience Democracy Theory in Modern Political Communication

The governance of the media, the media era, mediacracy, media democracy, impartial democracy, party democracy, long-distance democracy, and public relations democracy—despite the application of these terms—still reveal a shortage of specialized terminology for defining the position of the citizen and the audience in modern political communication. In other words, scholars of communication and media sciences must answer a fundamental question: despite the presence of the majority of citizens in the new media sphere, why is the level of influence and reception of their messages by politicians so low? Can today’s media democracy truly serve as the manifestation and expression of the real will of citizens, especially in instances of recourse to public opinion? In response to this question, the Franco-American scholar Bernard Manin proposed the theory of audience democracy in 1997. This article, employing a qualitative method and Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiotic approach, examines the theoretical foundations of this theory within the triangle of modern political communication and the discourse of neoliberalism. The preliminary contests of the 2016 U.S. elections and the emergence of the phenomenon known as “Donald Trump,” who, by directly engaging with citizens and his audience through the social network Twitter, won the election, can be cited as an empirical example of populism as the greatest challenge to audience democracy. Therefore, this article will also present certain viewpoints of the opponents of audience democracy and populism.