ABSTRACT
The literature on the public sphere provides scholars with a rich resource of empirically sophisticated and normatively-committed concepts that aid the scholar in evaluating such cultural dimensions of democracy. There are several reasons why this literature is particularly useful for addressing the blind spots of formal, institutionally-focused modes of democracy measurement. The study of the public sphere is grounded in the understanding that the development of the modern liberal form of democracy took place primarily in the realm of civil society and was only later codified into liberal institutional forms. Ever since Habermas argues that one-to-many forms of mass communication in the twentieth century had transformed the public sphere of western societies in a deleterious manner, public sphere theory has been used by scholars to criticize supposedly mature democratic societies on the basis that the emancipatory potential of democracy is all too frequently subverted in spite of the persistence of the characteristic institutional forms of liberal democracy.
