Some Citizens Are Ill Informed and Lack Basic Knowledge of Politics. Should We Limit Their Right to Vote?
Some Citizens Are Ill Informed and Lack Basic Knowledge of Politics. Should We Limit Their Right to Vote?

Summary/Abstract: This article tries to examine some of the anti-democratic messages that appeared in social media during the Romanian presidential campaign of 2014. My hypothesis is that the idea of limiting the right to vote gained the sympathy of the middle class – highly trained and remunerated individuals as a result of those messages disseminated during the 2014 presidential campaign. Namely, for the first time the electoral messages did not targeted only a political candidate but also his voters who were supposedly old, poor, ill-informed, dependent of social aid and prone to sacrifice their political power for material benefits. In the first part of my article I shall focus on the way the new media are shaping the political competition trying to find out whether these media are indeed alternative media fostering rational political debate and encouraging political engagement. In the second part of my article I shall focus on some of the onlineanti-democratic messages that were distributed during the first and the second round of the presidential elections. In the third part of the article I shall present the result of an empirical research composed of the semi-structured interviews I conducted having as subjects people working in the IT field. The theme of my interviews was the possibility of limitation of the right to vote.

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