Interfaces of Political Participation: Challenging the Analysis of Communicative Spaces

Opening politics to direct citizen participation seems a double-edged operation that aligns communicative infrastructures with the governmental executive political sphere of participatory citizenship. While citizens’ initiative platforms wave civic participation as a democratic opportunity, their relative distance from the executive core conditions their political effectiveness. This paper considers the participatory platforms as communicative spaces and analyses them following the four-mode model that considers communicative spaces under four facets: representations, structures, connections, and textures. This paper reports on the initial results of a study of the effectiveness of three participatory portals available to Russian citizens to test the analytical tool, and to adapt, expand, and challenge it. This brief paper is first at exploring the possibilities of the four-mode model of analysis of communicative spaces, applied to participatory portals.