Dansk Center for Forskningsanalyse

Key to the idea of a democratic public sphere has always been the ongoing conversations between citizens as well as between citizens and politicians (Koch, Mansbridge, Habermas etc.). The conversations between politicians and citizens in the Danish political system have traditionally taken place at political party meetings and at public meetings and hearings. However, the upcoming of new social media like Facebook provides new, interesting platforms for this conversation. And many opinion makers and scholars have high expectations for the democratic potential of these platforms. The paper examines what happens when traditional democratic conversations between citizens and politicians are moved away from the old face-to-face meetings and into Facebook. Through interviews with Danish Members of Parliament (MPs) the paper examines the advantages and disadvantages of online democratic conversations on Facebook as experienced by the MPs. The paper builds on a former quantitative mapping of the political conversation activities between Danish MPs and their followers on Facebook (Sørensen, 2015).