Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho
Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho
Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho
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•<br />
Civil society groups (ecologist, consumers, farmers, corporations,…)<br />
make a great effort in the communication of their opinion about GMO<br />
plants. The possibility of influencing the course of a debate about<br />
their main interests that ends into a crucial vote stimulates their<br />
communicative abilities<br />
• The wide range of political, ecological or economical associations<br />
which take part in the discussion creates a tendency to neutrality in<br />
the information. Neutral articles that detail, for instance, an institutional<br />
decision and the opinions or both partisans and opponents to<br />
that decision are a large majority.<br />
• Nevertheless, there is a difference between negative articles (134)<br />
and positive opinions (58) about GMO. Owing to the great number<br />
of organisations who refuse GMO plants, their important presence<br />
in public sphere can be considered as something logic.<br />
• The effort of Saint-Galler Tagblatt in the elaboration of non biased<br />
articles and even pedagogical contents must be praised.<br />
195<br />
10. Conclusion: Swiss Federalism has still Specific<br />
Deliberative Qualities<br />
The contrast between the way in which the GMO food debate appears<br />
in the three cases of Spanish and Swiss regional press that we have<br />
studied is surely a tiny empiric base to make general statements about<br />
federal systems, direct democracy and plurality of public opinion.<br />
Our little analysis allows us to show only some signs in favour<br />
of a general hypothesis whose confirmation would need a further<br />
compilation of information in which other regions, mass-medias and<br />
debate topics were included.<br />
Our deliberative approach to politics, in which the organisation of<br />
the public sphere and the possibilities offered to parties, citizens and<br />
associations to communicate about politics are considered as the most<br />
important characteristic of a political system is an impulse to focus on<br />
different aspects while speaking about federal systems.<br />
Other academic scholars keep on limiting their comparative analysis<br />
of federations to the study of the distribution of competences between<br />
federal and local entities. Federations can nevertheless be compared by<br />
FEDERALISM, DIRECT<br />
DEMOCRACY AND THE<br />
QUALITY OF PUBLIC<br />
DELIBERATION: THE<br />
GMO DEBATE<br />
José Luis Egío