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Abstract
The "epidemic" of democracy that "infected" the world and the European countries, corroborated with the evolution of technology and science leaded to a great challenge, which can be summarized into several questions: how can we use the new communication techniques (such as Internet or social networks) for reinforcing and strengthening our contemporary democracy? How could technology engage a large segment of citizens in meaningful deliberation about regulatory policy issues? How real and efficient is such an attempt to modernize democracy? In this paper I will analyze the necessity of institutional stability, as a basic condition for an authentic reform in terms of re-inventing the civic participation in the policy making process, followed by the valorisation of internet and social networks, as an instrument for participatory democracy. At this point, I will analyze, as a case study, the Romanian Presidential elections from 2014, when the social network played a major role for the victorious candidate, with an attempt to discuss the general application over the Romanian and European society of these techniques. Despite the optimistic references about the future impact of social networks on democracy, we prefer to keep a more realistically perspective, by concluding that Internet and technology are not likely to transform or to revolutionize the rule-making process from local, national or European level, but merely to create a broader connection between citizens and institutions, to mobilize resources in order to acquire a civic culture and to reinforce the institutional stability.
Keywords: participatory democracy, social networks, Internet, legitimacy, information.
Introduction into the field of study
Our democracy should be a "market place of ideas and opinions" (Ravaz, 2006: 29), where the citizens and public institutions freely discuss and analyze the social problems, in order to find and implement the best solutions and public policies. At this point, the good governance (as an autonomous concept from European regulations) is bound by three cornerstones: citizens (as a source of power into a democratic state), the public institutions (as executors of the citizen's will) and the channel of communication between citizens and institutions. Our study will be focused on this channel of communication which became essentially into a healthy democracy: it facilitates the transfer of power from citizens to political representations (from local, national or...