Introductory note

Resumo

Participative democracy is, more than ever, a constant work-in-progress and an ever challenging dilemma both for citizens and the civil community and also for political elites and democratic governments. One of the core questions to address is on which side to be: on ‘their’ side, the side of the power elites, cooperating with them, or on the ‘other’ side, the side of the people and of civil society, growingly critical and suspicious about the status quo system and its elites. This special issue and the contributions therein is focus on three main interrelated areas of inquiry: political web communication, civil society and citizenship. Briefly, we seek, on the one hand, to get closer to the inner process of political interactivity in the web space, particularly by questioning how citizenship has been performed. On the other, we engage in a broader discussion about civil society and the different forms of citizenship. In other words, in political terms, citizenship should be one of the most urgent concepts to be discussed because interfering in public debate means to choose and interact with the development of participative democracy.