Dr. Marco Deseriis, Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences and Research Fellow at Cosmos, has won the Best Paper Award at the Cedem17 Conference for e-Democracy & Open Government, which was held on May 17-19 at Danube University, Krems Au Donau, Austria.

Dr. Deseriis’ article is titled “Direct Parliamentarianism: An Analysis of the Political Values Embedded in Rousseau, the ‘Operating System’ of the Five Star Movement.”

Crossing empirical observation of the platform’s functionalities with quantitative data regarding it use and fieldwork data collected by the author during the 2016 National Meeting of the Five Star Movement, the paper argues that Rousseau supports an emerging “direct parliamentarianism,” which allows party members to entertain a direct relationship with their elected representatives, at the expense, however, of deliberative processes that may allow them to influence the party’s political line.

The article can be accessed through this link .