Gergana Dimova's book is a study of media's role in the context of transformations of representative democracy and the multiplication of “forums,” that is, public, political, and judicial spaces used for debates about governments’ accountability. Based on a detailed and exhaustive review of democracy theories going from some fundamental authors (e.g., Jean-Jacques Rousseau) up to current democracy analysts and social theorists (e.g., Robert Putnam, Pierre Rosanvallon, Ulrich Beck), Dimova particularly asks what role media play in the public's capacities to check on their governments’ actions in this context. Her study focuses on three national cases, namely Germany, Bulgaria, and Russia. Based on these three examples, Dimova demonstrates the centrality and the complexity of governments’ accountability in current representative democracies. While these three examples vary regarding the level of control that the public has on their governments—higher control in Germany, relatively low control in Bulgaria, and very limited control in Russia—they also present similar features, which she discusses to illustrate her statements.
Central to Dimova's analysis is the notion of accountability and the hypothesis that since the end of the twentieth century, governments’ functioning and the public's political expectations have decentralized, ending up to the multiplication and diversification of “forums” aiming at checking on governments’ accountability. In this context, representatives must not only gain election but also demonstrate accountability when they are in place, in terms of their capacities to govern, their morality, and their ability to support the public in the complex, diverse, and unequal issues they experience. These changes transform our democracies, and particularly relations between governmental actors—mostly the parliament and the presidents or first ministers—and the public. Dimova focuses on three main dimensions of this new context. First, she underlines the proliferation of nongovernmental actors who contribute to governments’ decentralization trend. This results from structural transformations such as the raise of supranational political actors’ empowerment interacting in their own “forums” (e.g., the European Parliament) with which national governments must count; the fragmentation of traditional political parties that created “forums” accessible to a larger scope of political actors; and new ways to “do governmental politics,” particularly new public management trends that give nongovernmental actors the own “forums” (e.g., audit companies, think tanks, rating standard agencies) aimed at assessing governmental actors’ decisions. Dimova also underlines the role of prosecutors who can use judiciary forums to sanction governments regarding their accountability (and here, she points to the importance that these prosecutors are politically independent, as allegations provide more power to the public only when allegations can end up with sanctioning governments). In this context, accountability supply diversifies and includes not only elected representatives but a range of other governmental and nongovernmental actors, with their own spaces of debates and action.
Second, Dimova focues on not only accountability supply changes but also the public demand for governments’ accountability. Structural trends such as the globalization of capitalism, social and familial networks, and culture and values (cosmopolitanism (Beck 2012)) result in decentralizing and diversifying public's demand toward their political representatives. In this context, the public expects elected representative to address social, political, and economic issues that are more complex and include groups and social situations that used to be ignored (we can think of gender or race inequalities, for instance). While some authors see this as leading to the incapacity of current representative democracies to answer the public's needs—the “crisis of democracies”— Dimova rather sees here the transformations of representative democracies and their adaptation to the globalization of social and political issues and values.
In this context, media (i.e., traditional newspapers and new technologies of communication) play a crucial role and is the third major dimension of the study. In global and complex societies, they facilitate public, elected representatives and other extra-governmental actors’ capacity to interact, including regarding governments’ accountability issues. Dimova shows that these media often serve as a space where allegations towards governments’ actions are made public. This doesn't mean those who publish in the media (e.g., journalists) are themselves authors of these allegations; they rather provide other authors with a place to publicly formulate accusations. However—and Dimova presents this as a central tension for democracies at the Media Age—the role of the media is ambiguous. They can serve as platforms that governmental actors can use to their own purposes, to try to control political debates, including regarding governments’ accountability. (The case of Russia is an illustration of this trend in the book, with a president who tries to control the media and mostly uses them for his personal interest, to value himself and his government, and personally attack his opponents.) And so, in predominantly totalitarian—although democratic—regimes, elected representative can use media a tool for to manipulate the public. At the same time, governments can use medias to explain their actions and confront allegations—which the author shows to be typically the case in German government politics, where media serves to include the public into political debates.
In other words, media can also serve to make public the debates that take place in multiple “forums” and facilitate interactions between the public and politicians, typically in preelection contexts. According to the author, such debates can help the public not only express their ideas but also elaborate them. This conception of the role forums can play in democracy interestingly reflects Reference ArendtHannah Arendt's (1951) theories about democracy and totalitarianism—although Arendt is not mentioned in the book. Furthermore, because medias spread at the global level, these debates can made public across national borders (e.g., the author mentions debates that related to the EU elections, and we can also think of current conversations regarding governments’ abilities to address the COVID-19 pandemic).
Finally, Democracy Beyond Elections offers a detailed reflection about transformations of our democracies in the Media Age, based on a solid literature review, structured in three main sections: current knowledge and reflections about new supply and demands for governments’ accountability; a study of the German, Russian and Bulgarian cases; and a discussion on how these new trends threaten or transform democracies. In her conclusions, Dimova emphasizes the democratization of the access to political debate in the Media Age, and the globalization of democratic systems, but also their complexification and the risk that governments or other “forums” use the media for manipulation purposes. We might add to these considerations that while the media can serve to include a larger public into political debates and governments’ accountability controls, those who can access and have skills to use such media remain a selective part of the population (Roger 2016). As well, to be sure, globalization shapes people's culture around the world. But at the same time, cosmopolitanism remains an elected global culture and inequalities such as those of class, race, and gender still shape people's capacities to participate to social and political conversations and decisions, and certainly to governments’ accountability check.
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