Questions and Answers
By Arvhie S. Santos
1. In what way the public opinion (from the public
sphere) can influence the state actions and decisions?
In concrete terms, Habermas explains that the informal
formation of public opinion produces “influence,” this
influence is then transformed into communicative power
through institutionalized mechanisms, for example, of
political elections; the communicative power is again
transformed into “administrative power” through the process
of legislation (Habermas 1994, p. 8).
2. How is publicity carried out in the matter of making
state actions publicized or available to the public?
Inherent in the practice of public discussion is the principle
of ‘publicity’, which makes known news and information about
events and the actions of state (Goodnight 2014, p. 244-245).
It is necessary that state actions be placed under publicity for
it allows the public to become aware of the decisions of the
state and subject such decisions to public reason (Goode
2005, p. 9). In this case, it should be noted that media
provides visibility to social problems that require public
attention. It makes discourses, viewpoints and images
available to the public. The “sphere of visibility” is provided
by media and made knowledge available for the common
(Gomes). Publicity creates an opportunity to criticize or
investigate national affairs by those whose interests are
affected by the activities of the state (Eriksen and Weigård
 and the political center,” and second, “an inclusive civil
2004, p. 180-181). Publicity must make state proceedings
accessible and open to the public (Habermas 1991, p. 207).
Thus, it gives citizens the ability to guarantee that the
programs and decisions set forth by the state are actually for
the benefit of everyone’s welfare and interests. State
authorities must engage with the public and justify their
decisions in relation to the welfare and interest of the public
so as to gain their support. Only the public debate in itself
has norm-giving power (Eriksen and Weigård
2004, p. 181).
The public sphere and public debate, thus, also serve as a
legitimizing mechanism to the power of the state (ibid).
3. Does the public sphere also has repressive
tendencies, not discounting the fact that it possesses
emancipatory potential? (Susen, 2011)
Habermas presents a somewhat idealistic picture of the public
sphere. Given his one-sided emphasis on the fact that the
bourgeois public sphere possesses a “rational-critical”
(Habermas 1962, p. 28, 176, 178, 179) character, he tends to
overestimate the significance of the emancipatory features of
modern public life and therefore underestimate the influence
of its repressive elements. As Habermas self-critically
acknowledges, it is
...tempting to idealize the bourgeois public sphere in a manner going way
beyond any methodologically legitimate idealization of the sort involved in
ideal-typical conceptualization (Habermas 1992, p. 442).
The public sphere is no less permeated by power relations than
society as a whole. The power-laden nature of publicity is
impregnated with the stratified constitution of society. The
ideological nature of public discourses is embedded in the
material organization of social resources. The symbolic
resources of critique are always dependent on the social
resources of power. The vertical structuration of society
manifests itself in the interest-laden structuration of ideology:
socially positioned subjects produce relationally contingent
discourses. The hegemonic discourses generated within the
bourgeois public sphere express the particular interests of the
most powerful social groups. The discourses of educated,
wealthy, mostly white, and predominantly male elites reflect
the specific interests of the privileged sectors of society (see
Thompson 1995: 72). To idealize the public sphere as a
communicative realm of rational-critical intersubjectivity
means to underestimate the substantive impact of interest-
laden hierarchies on the constitution of communicative
interactions in stratified societies.
4. How can deliberative democracy become an
empirical reality? (Benson, 2009)
Thus, in order for deliberative democracy to become an
empirical reality, two conditions must be met according to
Habermas’s (2006: 420) most recent synthesis of this model:
“first, a self-regulating media system must maintain its
independence vis-à-vis its environments while linking political
communication in the public sphere with both civil society
society must empower citizens to participate in and respond
to a public discourse that, in turn, must not degenerate into a
colonizing mode of communication.”
5. What is deliberative democracy? How is it different
to other models of democracy?
Deliberative democracy allows for the self-determination of
the citizens who view one another as free and equal members
of a particular society or association they have joined
according to their own volition (Habermas 1996, p. 110).
Habermas, in his Between Facts and Norms, views democracy as
a political system that constitutes sincere citizen engagement
and opinion formation as essential factors of the procedure
of civic discourse and political decision-making (Ranilo 2015,
p. 169). The objective of procedural principle of democracy
is to secure a normative procedure – that is, a process of
institutionalizing the rational formation of opinion and will,
by means of procedural character that ensures the formal and
equal participation of the citizens on the discursive formation
of opinion and will and it institutes with that a reasonable
procedure of normative process (Lubenow 2012, p. 61). In
this political organization, citizens acknowledge one another
as having deliberative capacities to partake in public exchange
of reason and to act upon the result of public reasoning
(Bohman and Rehg 1997, p. 73).
According to Kenneth Baynes, Habermas’s procedural
democracy attempts to incorporate the best features of both
models while avoiding the shortcomings of each. In
particular, with the republican model, it rejects the vision of
the political process as primarily a process of competition and
aggregation of private preferences. However, more in keeping
with the liberal model, it regards the republican vision of a
citizenry united and actively motivated by a shared
conception of the good life as inappropriate in modern,
pluralist societies (Sunstein, 1998) Since political discourses
involve bargaining and negotiation as well as moral
argumentation, the republican or communitarian notion of a
shared ethical-political dialogue also seems to be too limited.
6. How is public sphere influenced by political, social,
and media power?
The public sphere is influenced by political power, which shapes
the legal regulations that constitute the diversity and
independence of the mass media. It is influenced by social
power (especially economic power), which must be exercised
in a relatively transparent manner; and it is influenced by
media power, which shapes the content and formatting of
public opinion according to its own professional code of
integrity (fairness and independence) (David Ingram 2014, p.
6).
7. What is the importance of public use of reason?
The opinion and will formation is the concrete manifestation
of public use of reason. We act autonomously when we obey
laws, which could be accepted by all concerned on the basis
of a public use of their reason (We derived our system of
rights from the procedural aspects of the public use of reason
which then undergoes legal institutionalization). As such, for
Habermas, laws are legitimate and acceptable only in the basis
of the opinion and will formation of the citizens, which are
then legally institutionalized by the administrative power. In
this regard, the public use of reason promotes the nonviolent
preservation of political stability (Habermas 1995, 109-131).
8. Does the public opinion have the capacity to decide
for state actions or does it just influence the state?
Public opinion can either serve to support or challenge the
ideals promoted or the decisions implemented by the state
(Habermas 1996, p. 2). However, regardless of what position
that public opinion may hold, it ultimately has an influence
over the decision-making process of the state. The public
whose function as a critical judge carries public opinion that
makes the public proceedings of the court, for instance,
meaningful.
9. What is the political function of mass media? What
is its role in terms of expanding democracy?
According to Habermas, communication within a large-scale
public requires specific channels of influence, circulation of
information, and facilitate arguments; as such, television,
newspapers, radio, and periodicals are the media of the public
sphere that fulfill these tasks (Habermas 1989, p. 231). Thus,
technologically augmented and organizationally mediated
forms of communication such as the printing press, the
electronic media free and expand communication from
confined spatio-temporal boundaries and to make it available
in different contexts; such mass media holds significant
position in the formation of multiple “public spheres,” with
both emancipatory and repressive potential (Habermas 1984,
p. 406). The media has the power to select, and shape how
messages are presented. Moreover, through its use of social
and political force to influence the subject matters, it can
stimulate public issues and discussions (Habermas 2006, p.
415).
10. Is it possible to create a commons-based social
media?
The antagonistic character of contemporary informational
capitalism of which the Internet or social media in particular
is a product of, is shown in technological manipulation,
commodification, inequality, hostility, domination, among
others. The challenge of the current century is to sublate
technology and society in order to overcome the antagonistic
characters of the economy, polity, culture, and nature and to
point towards a commons-based information society (digital
sphere) (Allmer 2015). We need a techno-social revolution
(Hofkirchner 2013, p. 246-247) for transformed productive
forces within transformed relations for production and for a
different technology in a different society oriented on social
needs and ethical dimensions far from bourgeois values. We
must transform new information and communication
technologies and begin to intervene in the design and
assessment of process of technology, instead of turning away
from technology. Technology and science would have to be
reconstructed in accordance with a new sensibility and new
ethical and aesthetical dimensions (Feenberg 2001), where the
real material and intellectual needs could be established.
11. What did Habermas say about Internet?
The Internet as that counterbalances the seeming deficits that
stem from the impersonal and asymmetrical character of
broadcasting by reintroducing deliberative elements in
electronic communication. The Internet has certainly
reactivated the grassroots of an egalitarian public of writers
and readers. However, computer-mediated communication in
the web can claim unequivocal democratic merits only for a
special context: It can undermine the censorship of
authoritarian regimes that try to control and repress public
opinion. In the context of liberal regimes, the rise of millions
of fragmented chat rooms across the world tend instead to
lead to the fragmentation of large but politically focused mass
audiences into a huge number of isolated issue publics.
Within established national public spheres, the online debates
of web users only promote political communication, when
news groups crystallize around the focal points of the quality
press, for example, national newspapers and political
magazines (Habermas 2006, p. 423).
12. Was rational/critical debate an ideal that Habermas
used for contrast with the present condition or was
 it a reality? Has rational/critical debate declined? If it disseminate information and facilitate arguments (Maia 2007,
did decline – why? p. 78).

In the refeudalization of the public sphere, giant corporations
have taken over the public sphere and transformed it from a
sphere of free exchange of opinions and rational-critical
debate into a sphere of consumerism, manipulation and
passivity (Habermas 1991, p. 245). Moreover, political issues
are no longer decided based on a free and open deliberation,
rather, it was decided in closed conventions and by means of
organized bargaining (Eriksen and Weigård 2003, p. 183). The
public sphere now is no longer known for its principle-based
and rational-oriented debates, but by the competitions
between propagandistic press and political parties, which are
supported by spectacle-oriented and profit-driven media
(ibid).
13. Do you agree with Habermas that the mass media
has fashioned a world in which the public sphere
was merely an appearance? (p. 171).
The changes in the usage and role of media has also become a
factor in the collapse of the public sphere as media is
portrayed as an apparatus that holds a capacity to manipulate
the flow of discourse within the public sphere (Habermas
1991, p. 162). This is partly because of the fact that several
forms of mass media function across the realm of commerce
and politics. The media now becomes inadequate in fulfilling
its role of providing a platform form for people to become
informed about important concerns of the society and to
communicate their public opinion to the state (ibid). The
objectives of media corporations have changed and has
turned into a pursuit of profit that has resulted to the
commodification of news, turning public discourse into a
product to be sold back to consumers rather than to be
communicated freely to members of the public (ibid). The
commercial power of big media corporations enables them to
gain control and influence over the public debate and the
public sphere (ibid).
15. How can public sphere remain a site of
enlightenment and emancipation in an age of mass
media and communications?
Intermediary between civil society and the political system is
the mass- mediated sphere of communication, which is charged with
condensing, refining, weighing, and selecting public opinions
emanating from civil advocacy groups, special interest
lobbyists, and politicians. When properly instituted, with
appropriate government regulation ensuring independent,
fully representative, and roughly equal access, this arena of
the public sphere can counteract shortfalls in discursive
rationality that dominate in civil society and government by
disseminating opinions more widely and by subjecting already
filtered arguments to a second level of public reflection
(Ingram and Bar-Tura 2014, p. 4).
16. What are the deficits of mediated communication
according to Habermas?
[T]wo deficits in particular immediately stand out: the lack of
straightforward, face- to-face interactions, between really (or
virtually) present participants, in a shared practice of
collective decision-making; and the lack of reciprocity
between the roles of speakers and addressees in an egalitarian
exchange of opinions and claims (Habermas 2009, p. 154).
What mediated communication potentially possesses – and
what face-to-face conversation lacks – is a critical distance
from the immediate spoken utterance that, in Habermas’s
own words, enables a kind of delayed, secondary reflection
on what is said by other third parties (Ingram and Bar-Tura
2014, p. 7).

14. What are the key differences between the bourgeois

public sphere and the transformed public sphere that
followed? (exs. social structure, political function and
ideology)

Habermas contrives a classification of different forms of

public sphere, identified according to the substance of
communication, range or scope, and organization complexity
(Habermas 1996, p. 374) in an attempt to make the concept
of the public sphere correspond to the urban conditions and
complex realities of contemporary society. Habermas is able
to conceive a theoretical framework versatile enough to
accommodate the various modes of expression of
argumentative exchanges through the use of such typology of
public sphere. These argumentative engagements may happen
in informal settings, apparent in multitude realms of everyday
communication between individuals or groups, or in more
complex interchanges of ideas, acted upon by civil society
associations and organizations of different natures and
schemes, or, definitively, through the ability of mass media to