Self-Governance of the Public Sphere? Applying Ostrom to Political Communication

Can the 'public sphere' be a self-governing commons? In a recent paper, Farrer (2022) argues that political communication leads to a tragedy of the commons. As long as politicians are free to ask for public attention, and as long as there’s not enough attention to go around, there will always be an incentive for politicians to use more extreme messages to get more attention. Eventually this leads to polarization and a breakdown of the public sphere. Social media exacerbates this process. Contemporary political communication therefore looks less like a town square or public sphere, and more like a natural resource. And like many natural resources, it is being overused. In economic terms then, it is a common good, not a public good. This points to the relevance of Ostrom's (1990) template for self-governance of common goods. In this paper I examine three case studies where political actors attempted to govern a shared communication commons. I measure the success of each, and compare them to Ostrom's (1990) template. These three cases – the negotiations over the rules of televised debates in US presidential elections, the negotiation of pre-election pacts with post-election coalition partners in Western Europe, and the 'Blue on Blue Crime' in the Brexit referendum – show how even rival politicians can sometimes agree to limits on speech. Such agreements can be refined using Ostrom’s (1990) work, to ensure that political communications serve broader democratic ends, as well as the narrower electoral ends of the political actors doing the communicating. I conclude that the issues of populism and polarizations are unlikely to have a purely technological fix, and that incentivizing self-governance of political speech is a promising avenue for promoting deliberation. References Farrer, Benjamin. 2022. “Political Communication as a Tragedy of the Commons” Political Studies Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the Commons. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.