Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho

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