logo

Cosmos

The Centre on Social Movement Studies

logo

Marco Deseriis – “Direct Parliamentarianism: An Analysis of the Political Values Embedded in Rousseau, the ‘Operating System’ of the Five Star Movement”

On May 11th 2017, at 2 p.m., Marco Deseriis (Scuola Normale Superiore/Northeastern University) will present a paper entitled “Direct Parliamentarianism: An Analysis of the Political Values Embedded in Rousseau, the ‘Operating System’ of the Five Star Movement”

Picture description

This talk offers a preliminary analysis of the technological affordances and use of Rousseau, the decision-making platform of the second largest Italian political party, the Five Star Movement. Crossing an empirical observation of the platform’s functionalities with data regarding its use and qualitative data collected during the last National Meeting of the Five Star Movement, it will argue that Rousseau supports an emerging “direct parliamentarianism,” which allows party members to entertain an ostensibly direct relationship with their elected representatives. The emphasis on the decisional moment, however, is not supported by an equal emphasis on deliberation, which is virtually absent from the platform and confined to applications and events (such as Facebook, beppegrillo.it, and Meetup groups) that are not integrated with the platform. In compartimentalizing deliberation and decision-making, Rousseau tends to separate what Chantal Mouffe calls the political–that is, the unfiltered antagonisms that exist within society—from politics, understood as the institutional framework within which these antagonisms are channeled and regulated

News

Publications

Edited Volume - 2026

Conspiracism and Political Conflict

Manuela Caiani, Marco Solinas, Hans-Jorg Trenz

Monograph - 2025

Free download for "Contentious Politics of Global Health Movements"

Donatella Della Porta, Stella Christou

Journal Article - 2025

Communication creates partial organization: A comparative analysis of the organizing practices of two climate action movements, Youth for Climate and Fridays for Future Italy

Marco Deseriis, Lorenzo Zamponi, Diego Ceccobelli
This article focuses on a neglected aspect of the climate action movement Fridays for Future, namely, the relationship between its mediated communication practices and its early organizational processes. Drawing from a strand of organizational communication that underscores the constitutive dimension of communication to organizing processes, we analyze the significance of mediatized leadership and networked communication for the foundation and early development of two national chapters of Fridays for Future: Youth for Climate (YFC) Belgium and Fridays for Future Italy (FFFI).

Journal Article - 2025

Power resources, territory and labour conflicts in the logistic sector

Donatella Della Porta, Marco Antonelli