Political communication, the field of research of Rita Figueiras – a professor at the Universidade Católica, has a wide range of sophisticated tools at its disposal in the current era of new digital technologies, the Internet and social media, which can build a completely mediatised public space subject to manipulation on every level. Success on the political stage has thus become dependent on communication techniques developed within the digital ecosystem.

We hear a lot these days about a ‘decline’ or even a ‘crisis’ in political parties. In most Western democracies, parties have less and less members. Even mere ‘party identification’ − voters’ emotional and psychological closeness to a given party − has waned. At the same time, ‘electoral volatility’ − the proportion of voters who change behaviour between elections – has been growing, as might be expected.

In the field of political theory, there is today heated discussion about the metamorphosis and future of the party form, an institution which played a fundamental role in the construction of the modern body politic, but which, as a mass party, has now reached its end. To address this issue, we called on two ‘politologists’: sociologist Pedro Magalhães, a researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lisbon, and Damiano Palano, professor of Political Philosophy and author of Bubble democracy. La fine del pubblico e la nuova polarizzazione [Bubble democracy. The end of the public and the new polarisation]. Two reflections that coincide considerably in their diagnosis, but which sometimes differ in the conclusions they draw.

In this article, Italian philosopher Enrico Campo, author of a book dealing with the crisis of attention in the digital society, La testa altrove [Head Elsewhere], discusses the idea of attention as a resource in the process of degradation, finding arguments to challenge the commonplaces that we are on the verge of a cognitive apocalypse.

What remains of the Georges Pompidou Centre forty years after it was inaugurated? What remains of its innovative cultural project and its ideas on contemporary art? These questions are candidly answered by Yves Michaud, a philosopher and art critic, and Catherine Lawless, a member of the Centre's initial team.

Some time ago Pope Francis spoke about homosexuality and his words gave rise to various conflicting remarks. José Manuel dos Santos revisits the Pope’s statement, examining it from a historical perspective that allows us to consider it a symptom of the current state of the Church.

Populism – a highly current and rather elastic concept that has been used as a tag for diverse political phenomena of varying provenance – is defined in this article using nine hypotheses. The author, Yves Citton, is a French philosopher with a vast output in the field of political philosophy, a member of the editorial board of Multitudes, and author of Pour une écologie de l’attention and Médiarchie.
 

Rui Manuel Amaral, a writer from Porto, describes and analyses the ‘problem’ — i.e. the problematic — of his city, based on a number of symptoms that he examines with his literarily trained eye. And what he sees are the illusory representations cultivated by its citizens, the real city and the imaginary city, the objectivised Porto and the beautiful phantasmagoria that feeds it in its narcissism.

From the author of the concept of ‘post-democracy’, in a book with the same title, we have an article that revisits the prospective ideas that were developed there. Above all, the tendency to hollow out the notion of democracy and the weakening of democratic institutions are confronted with some current political and economic factors. Colin Crouch, professor at the University of Warwick (England), is a sociologist and scientist.

There is a gruesome scene in Mark Mylod’s famous film The Menu (2022) which takes place in a fine-dining restaurant with few tables and only twelve guests on an obscure and secluded island. At one point, Julian Slowik, the restaurant’s celebrated chef, who prepares a new special menu for his diners each time, full of all sorts of surprises (and not only gastronomic ones), introduces his guests to Jeremy, ‘the good but not great’ sous chef who, after the chef-genius’s spiel concludes, sticks a gun in his mouth and commits suicide.