From Masterchef to the Arab spring via Wikileaks : social media and political change

This comparison between Bahrain and Australia shows how the main impact of social and mobile media has been in the form of facilitators of rapid political mobilization, as well as tools for everyday socializing and entertainment. Social media are both contributors to, and symptomatic of, a blurring of the boundaries between politics and entertainment, and public and private spheres, whether their users are in Australia or Bahrain, but they are not in themselves the makers of material sites of democracy or even agency.

Authoritarian deliberation : the deliberative turn in Chinese political development

Authoritarian rule in China is now permeated by a wide variety of deliberative practices. These practices combine authoritarian concentrations of power with deliberative influence, producing the apparent anomaly of authoritarian deliberation. Although deliberation is usually associated with democracy, they are distinct phenomena.Democracy involves the inclusion of individuals in matters that affect them through distributions of empowerments such as votes and rights. Deliberation is a mode of communication involving persuasion-based influence. Combinations of non-inclusive power and deliberative influence—authoritarian deliberation— are readily identifiable in China, probably reflecting failures of command authoritarianism under the conditions of complexity and pluralism produced by market-oriented development. The concept of authoritarian deliberation frames two possible trajectories of political development in China: the increasing use of deliberative practices stabilizes and strengthens authoritarian rule, or deliberative practices serve as a leading edge of democratization.