ABSTRACT
Literature on social movements, mass media, and democracy has rarely interacted. Research on democracy has tended to focus on representative institutions, pragmatically using “minimalistic” operationalization of democracy as electoral accountability, and providing structural explanations of democratic developments. Research on the mass media has also tended to isolate them as a separate power, reflecting on the technological constraints and opportunities for communication. Social movement studies have mainly considered democratic characteristics as setting the structure of political opportunities that social movements have to address and – more rarely – looked at the constraints that mass media impose upon powerless actors. Structural, instrumental, and institutional biases, in various combination, have tended to characterize the three fields of studies.
