author: Mykola Spiridonov
Urgency of the research is connected primarily and mainly with the specificity of the influence of the information society on the formation of perceptions of democracy and the formation of the discourse of democracy: if inadequate, tendentious, demagogic, populist, etc. impressions are created about the phenomenon of democracy, then individual and collective impressions are channeled in false directions, which have nothing to do with real problems, and therefore cannot in principle serve to solve the real problems of democracy.
Target setting. The inadequacy of information support of democratic phenomenology is the key factor that generates and scales the problems in the research sphere regarding the praxeolo-gical collisions of democracy and their reflection at the level of theoretical and conceptual proposal.
Actual scientific researches and issues analysis. Hundreds of thorough works have been devoted to various aspects of democratic theory and the practical difficulties of its implementation. The most coherent with the subject matter of this study is the fundamental monograph by Oleksandr Skrypniuk, as well as numerous publications by Alain de Benoist, Jason Brennan, Ralph Darendorf, John Ecton, Kevin Eliot, Jacques Ellul, Kevin Calhoun, Helen Landmore, Giovanni Sartori, Tomislav Sutic, Richard Tuck, and Tsvetan Todorov.
The research objective. The solution of problematic challenges in the sphere of functioning and prospects of development of democracy requires systematisation of the shortcomings of democracy of the modern model and identification of mechanisms for overcoming them at the level of social practices.
The statement of basic material. In our time, what is called “democratic choice” is mostly an illusion, a fiction of full-fledged choice: it is “choice in the actual absence of choice” when one has to choose among pseudo-alternatives imposed by the information agenda. These quasi-alternatives may have nothing to do with the interests and needs of the people. Democracy of modern quality is more and more an instrument of information suggestion and propaganda manipulation. Последствия таких процедур безнадежно далеки от классических канонов демократии, от идеи демократии как народной власти, осуществляемой народом и в его интересах.
Conclusions. In order to bring the notion of democracy to a common criterion denominator of substantive cogency, it is necessary to develop, if not consensus, at least conventional clarity about certain fundamental identifications of democracy such as the democratic minimum - those substantive attributes that provide necessary and sufficient grounds for the substantive demarcation of phenomena of democratic etiology. Discourse about democracy, its opportunities, shortcomings, and prospects requires the removal of the information “filters” common nowadays in the form of tendentiousness, mythologising, stereotyping, etc.
Keywords: democracy, efficiency of functioning, civil society, information picture of the world, criterion features, and problematic challenges
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