Political participation, Democracy and Internet : Tunisian Revolution

Research Paper from the year 2011 in the subject Politics - Political Systems - General and Comparisons, grade: 1,3, Humboldt-University of Berlin, language: English, abstract: During the last century democracy expanded to all continents. Within Latin America,Africa, Asia and Europe many non-democratic regimes failed, and the world experienced the end of dualism between western democracy and communism. Behind each falling of authoritarian rule there has been political participation in one or another way: strikes, civil opposition, demonstrations, illegal parties or alternative press. Alan Ware once wrote that dictatorship never silenced and stopped completely the political participation of the civil dissidents. The difference with the last decades is that we can finally say democracy is the only way to the future, there are no other real alternatives . In fact, only Saudi Arabia, Vatican City, Burma and Brunei do not mention officially in their constitutions to be a democracy. Why? Because democracy is "the better political system that we know until now to make commons decisions" and more importantly, "participation and democracy are two inseparables values". The change of political participation brought along through Internet brings to the world maybe on new important way to political participate. The current incidents in North Africa and Muslims countries show a good sign of the power of Internet to mobilize and give voice to the society. It may give us a hint on how different ways of political participation of citizens bring along the opportunity to build a new democratic system. As it has happened before in the past: political participation brought democracy to the United States, England and France. Hence, my research question will be focused on the relation of the concepts of democracy and political participation. I will further explicitly discuss: What can we learn from recent uprising movements in Tunisia for the relation between democracy and political parti