Public lecture of Stephen Coleman, Professor of Political Communication at the University of Leeds (UK)

We invite you to the public lecture of Stephen Coleman, Professor of Political Communication at the University of Leeds (UK) "The Terms of Political Trust". 

When: 29 May 2018, 17:00

Where: Higher School of Economics, 123 Naberezhnaya Kanala Griboedova, St. Petersburg, room 410 (4^th floor)

Registration for guests out of HSE: https://www.hse.ru/expresspolls/poll/219114375.html

Language: English 

Stephen Coleman, Professor of Political Communication at the University of Leeds (the UK) is an author and editor of ten books and more than one hundred articles devoted to the problems of political communication.

His recent book Can the Internet Strengthen Democracy?(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017) will soon be published in Russian by the Aletheia Publishing in Russian.

Professor Coleman is one of the leading scholars in the areas of e-democracy, political communication and the new media. He is also Honorary Professor in Political Science at the University of Copenhagen and Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. In 2002 he became the first Cisco Systems Professor of E-Democracy, studying the problem of adaptation of representative democracy and public participation in the digital era. Before he had been Director of E-Democracy Program at Hansard Society for Parliamentary Government, cooperating with governments and business in the UK and Europe to develop new methods of political representation online. He was also one of the initiators of the first online public discussions in the British Parliament.

Abstract: Democratic trust depends upon a normative commitment to care about truthfulness. Default assumptions that politicians are all professional liars, journalists and editors make up stories, experts can easily be bought and everyone else is out for themselves are worrying, but even more deeply disturbing is the normative assumption that this is the way of the world and distrust is a mark of discernment. Trust atrophies when its terms cease to matter. When, for example, politics is regarded as a Machiavellian game in which the shrewdest players adapt truth claims to strategic ends, the vigilance of reasonable scrutiny gives way to a licentious veneration of slick chicanery. When the quality of journalism is judged on the basis of its capacity to fob off an ideologically dodgy narrative, the terms of trust become opaque. For these reasons, banal though it might sound, the most fundamental normative prerequisite of democratic trust is that people – citizens, politicians, journalists – care about truthfulness.