Federalist Tensions seeks to improve political communications to grow stronger democracies. Its platforms foster a non-partisan dialogue with academics, political practitioners and interested citizens about the role of social media in both traditional political organizations and external political entities. By contributing to the improvement of political communications using social media in the most efficient and effective manner, Federalist Tensions is a resource for all those motivated to enhance their own political social media strategies.
Social media has provided citizens with opportunities for expanding their participation in the political process, providing the means to communicate directly with people in power and with their fellow citizens. The emergence of social media onto the political scene presents dilemmas for political representatives and organizations which, by their very nature, prefer traditional broadcast media due to their preferences to control the conversation to further their aims.
But the issue isn’t that simple. Being part of a democracy involves more than the participation of its people – an authoritative, organizational structure is needed to provide the necessary leadership, services and protections required in a democracy. Navigating the explosion of possibilities for democratic participation in the Internet age bears a striking resemblance to the tensions inherent in establishing a democratic republic. In Federalist 10, James Madison addressed similar concerns when he suggested that the United States should operate as a republic rather than as a pure democracy. He made this argument in large part to prevent the dangers that factions, especially majority factions, present to governments. With the ascendance of the Internet, the facilitation with which factions can organize has greatly increased.
Perhaps more broadly and importantly, Madison throws down the gauntlet in Federalist 10 concerning citizen input in general, regardless of factions, in the political arena:
The instability, injustice, and confusion introduced into the public councils, have, in truth, been the mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished; as they continue to be the favorite and fruitful topics from which the adversaries to liberty derive their most specious declamations (Hamilton et al, 1961, p. 77).
All this is to say that over the past year, the question of “how much is too much communication/democracy” in the political realm has fueled my research projects in the Emerging Media program at Loyola University Maryland. Not surprisingly, I have observed a climate of caution and trepidation on social media by an organization I have been studying in the field of political communication. Political office holders and organizations want to have citizen participation to gain their support, but they do not necessarily want to deal with the consequences of the citizenry’s amplified, engaged voices or to lose too much control over the content of their messaging. The research projects I have completed so far have just begun to scratch the surface of the complexities and challenges these struggles pose for organizations. I have yet to explore the flip side of this coin – how citizens use social media to create platforms from which they can not only voice their opinions, but also organize outside of traditional institutions to exercise their political capital as a check on those institutions.
Enter this website: Federalist Tensions – the title being a fusion of an homage to Madison’s “Federalist 10” and the “tensions” that arise with both the incorporation of social media in the communication strategies of political entities and the political activism of Internet citizens on platforms both inside and outside of those traditional institutions. Here is a collaborative space for the exchange of ideas and the development of innovative approaches to address the tensions due to the emergence of social media between political powerbrokers and citizens in their efforts to communicate in a mutually beneficial manner.