Slavko Splichal

University of Ljubljana · Faculty of Social Sciences

Knjiga Slavka Splichala je odličen primer, kako obstoječe študije in empirične podatke pretvoriti v nove normativne konceptualizacije. Monografija pojasnjuje tveganja in priložnosti za demokracijo v digitalnih in podatkovno vodenih družbah s poglobljenim teoretskim pregledom širokega nabora socioloških in politoloških razprav. Monografija lahko pom...

Slavko Splichal was interviewed by Gabriella Szabó on the 14th October 2023.

Different understandings of what it means to be critical in the social sciences, especially in terms of the distinction between instrumental and reflexive knowledge, can be illustrated by the ongoing conceptual disputes about the critical epistemic value of public opinion and the public sphere as the main instantiations of publicness. The concept o...

The author reflects in this chapter on his engagement with media and communication research and with IAMCR from his perspective as a Slovenian scholar from the time that communication and journalism education and research programs became a component at universities in republics of the former Yugoslavia. The development of the new discipline was mar...

This article seeks to address current debates comparing polls and opinion mining as empirically based figuration models of public opinion in the light of in-depth intellectual debates on the role and nature of public opinion that began after the French Revolution and the controversy over public opinion spurred by the invention of polls. Issues of h...

In this article, I present an annotated (re)reading of some of my research and writings on mass communication and the development of socialist democracy in Yugoslavia published during the last two decades of the existence of this multinational federation before its sudden and violent collapse. The article is conceived as a reappraisal of key ideas...

The article discusses the reasons and conditions for the rise and fall of the popularity of the public sphere concept in scholarly discourse in four parts. The first part examines the peculiar circumstances of the emergence of the concept of the public sphere, and its rapid and widespread adoption in the social sciences. The second part discusses t...

Ferdinand Tönnies is the founder of German sociology as an academic discipline and author of the most famous conceptual dichotomy in sociology, Gemeinschaft–Gesellschaft. In his approach to the study of society, reconciling the organic and social‐contract conceptions of society, he distinguished between three branches of general sociology: social b...

Publikacija V senci digitalnih velikanov: sodobni trendi v slovenskem digitalnem novinarstvu preizprašuje komunikacijski potencial interneta in vlogo novih tehnologij v družbenem komuniciranju. Pri tem se osredotoča na vprašanje, kako se v času prevlade digitalnih komunikacijskih tehnologij spreminjata narava novinarskega dela in zmožnost novinarst...

Deprofessionalization denotes the weakening of professions as they decline in autonomy, status, power, and professional identity. It is conceptualized along five essential dimensions that contribute to the elimination of boundaries between members of the profession and “outsiders,” followed by the decline in authority of the profession: (1) routini...

This article is an abridged translation of the section “Produkcija in komuniciranje: nujnost in svoboda” (Production and communication: necessity and freedom) of Slavko Splichal’s book Množično komuniciranje med svobodo in odtujitvijo (Mass Communication between Freedom and Alienation, pp. 123-138), published in Slovene in 1981 after it was defende...

This afterword to “A Marxist Approach to Communication Freedom” reveals some features of the development of communication theories and empirical research in socialist Slovenia and Yugoslavia. The field started to develop in 1960s in the framework of other academic disciplines, mainly political sciences and partly sociology, but soon became the targ...

The paper discusses major changes in the reconceptualisations of public opinion across three fundamental historical periods and their dominant paradigms: (1) the early period of public opinion as a normative utopia soon to be crumbled by the economic changes that transformed the social role of the press, and empirical sociological analyses of “late...

Disputes over critical theory and administrative research have marked media research community for almost eight decades, but have shed little light on the issues that separate them or potentially bind them together. A network analysis of articles as clusters of interconnected concepts published in eight prominent communication journals during the p...

FREE ACCESS http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13183222.2018.1424004 A major feature of internetisation and internet-based hybrid modes of communication is the liquefaction of the boundary between publicness and privateness. For the first time in history, the mutual determinacy of publicness and privateness has been materialised within a s...

Internetization probably represents the greatest transformation in communication technology since the invention of the alphabet and writing. For the first time in history, the mutual determinacy of publicness and privateness has been materialized within a single technological platform. The unprecedented growth of public, private and hybrid modes of...

Publicness” has been considered one of the fundamental principles of democratic governance by normative theories of public opinion since the late 18th century. The idea of publicness arose in the context of the interaction of civil society and the state. As an ethical principle referring to discursive visibility, publicness was central to the criti...

The Journal Editor(s) hereby issue an expression of concern for the following review article: Legacy of Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann: The spiral of silence and other controversies by Slavko Splichal, European Journal of Communication, 2015, Vol. 30(3), 353-363. DOI: 10.1177/0267323115589265. An investigation is currently in process in relation to this...

At least since Aristotle's distinction between the public domain of political activity (polis) and the private domain of the household (oikos), privacy stands in dialectical tension with publicness. Since the earliest conceptualizations, privacy has also been closely related to “suspicious” secrecy. Assuming that privacy and publicness are opposite...

The article reflects on contemporary processes of de-professionalisation of journalism, its consequences for democratic processes and challenges to citizen journalism. It is argued that both the dilemmas of mainstream journalism and the emergence of citizen journalism are consequences of an array of evolving factors having to do with complex transf...

Public sphere as a specific sphere, domain, an imagined space of communicatively mediated social life, or a discursively constructed social space between the state and civil (initially bourgeois) society represents the infrastructure for social integration through public discourse. It is taken for granted that no specific social norms (e.g., privac...

Članek obravnava teoretske temelje, podobnosti in razlike med »integralnim raziskovanjem« in »integralnim novinarstvom«. Po sami naravi stvari tako družboslovno raziskovanje kot novinarstvo z obravnavanjem družbenih procesov, katerih dolgoročne posledice so za mnoge posameznike in družbene skupine pomembne, neposredno spadata v območje javnega. Med...

The following article has been partially retracted and a previously published electronic version has been removed for legal reasons at the request of Dr Ralph Erich Schmidt. If you have a concern about this, please contact SAGE. Splichal S (2015) Legacy of Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann: The spiral of silence and other controversies. European Journal of...

Democracy and Media Decadence. By Keane John. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 261p. $27.99. - Volume 13 Issue 2 - Slavko Splichal

Journalism was born in the seventeenth century as a supplementary, part-time occupation of printers, postmen, or tradesmen; with industrial and bourgeois revolutions, it became fully institutionalized in the mass media. In earlier periods, journalists largely belonged to self-sustained free professions of the middle class; with industrialization th...

Publikacija Meje razumevanja trajnostnega razvoja v slovenski politiki, ekonomiji, civilni družbi in medijih povzema klju čne raziskovalne izsledke in spoznanja raziskovalnega projekta Trajnostni razvoj v konvergenci javne sfere in medijev, ki smo ga izvajali v Centru za raziskovanje družbenega komuniciranja Inštituta za družbene vede v obdobju 201...

Public sphere as a specific sphere, domain, an imagined space of communicatively mediated social life, or a discursively constructed social space between the state and civil (initially bourgeois) society represents the infrastructure for social integration through public discourse. It is taken for granted that no specific social norms (e.g., privac...

The European Science Foundation (ESF) was established in 1974 to provide a common platform for its Member Organisations to advance European research collaboration and explore new directions for research. It is an independent organisation, owned by 66 Member Organisations, which are research funding organisations, research performing organisations a...

Media and communication research is often believed to represent one of the youngest research areas in the social sciences, but the first essays discussing the nature and social functions of newspapers were written long before the birth of the modern social sciences. The great variety in forms of communication is also reflected in the diversity of r...

The authors introduce the European Science Foundation Forward Look Report Media in Europe: New Questions for Research and Policy (2013) which summarises the conclusions and recommendations of a series of ESF workshops held in 2012 to draw up a strategic research and science policy agenda for media studies in Europe for the next 5–10 years. The pres...

Many philosophers have discussed the nature of human opinions at least since Ancient Greece, but the concept of ‘public opinion’ was not in use until the eighteenth century. It was missing despite the fact that the processes and phenomena that are at least related to, if not constitutive of, public opinion – judging by the historical records – clea...

With its first 2009 (April) issue, Javnost—The Public, journal of the European Institute for Communication and Culture enters its 16th year of existence. The quarterly—the flagship of the Institute—was established in 1994 as an interdisciplinary journal in the social sciences to address problems of the public sphere on international and interdiscip...

George Gallup was perhaps the most prominent but certainly only one among many scholars and researchers across the world praising the birth of polls as an impetus to democratic revival. He believed, exaggerating James Bryce's enthusiasm, that with “the science of measuring public opinion,” as he called polls, “it will not be long before we can say...

■ Since its earliest conceptualizations, publicity was believed to contribute significantly to the democratic social order; it normatively legitimized the press and other media as constitutive of the public and public opinion. Yet all the ‘old’ mass media rooted in the property rights of their owners failed to enhance and complement the corporate f...

The article deals with changes to the conceptualization of public opinion polls brought about by the invention of public opinion polls, and their structural similarity to certain institutionalised political processes, such as elections and referendum. Author considers that the opinion polls should be addressed as part of an institutionalized politi...

This article presents theoretical and methodological design of two research projects, whose results are discussed by several contributions in the 2009 supplement of Javnost-The Public. Political Communication Cultures in Western Europe (2006-2010) is an international project under the auspices of the European Science Foundation, whose objective to...

Članek obravnava spremembe, ki jih je v konceptualizacije javnega mnenja prinesel izum javnomnenjskih poizvedb, ter njihovo strukturno podobnost nekaterim institucionaliziranim političnim procesom, kot so npr. volitve in referendum. Avtor meni, da je javnomnenjske poizvedbe treba obravnavati kot del institucionaliziranega političnega sistema, ne pa...

V članku so predstavljena izhodišča in metodološka zasnova dveh raziskovalnih projektov, katerih rezultate obravnavajo prispevki v suplementu. Kulture političnega komuniciranja v zahodni Evropi (2006–2010) je mednarodni projekt pod okriljem Evropske znanstvene fundacije, katerega cilj je na podlagi podatkov, zbranih z anketnimi vprašalniki, analizi...

Almost 60 years ago, Lasswell (1949) asked, ''Why be quantitative?'' and vigorously argued that ''the study of politics can be advanced by the quantitative analysis of political discourse . [b]ecause of the scientific and policy gains that can come of it'' (pp. 40, 52). He suggested that severe ''limitations of qualitative analysis,'' such as impre...

This paper discusses the conceptual heterogeneity in the field of 'public opinion' in the light of a distinction between positions that reflect public opinion as a democratic-emancipatory category and positions that consider public opinion from an "anthropological" perspective - as an semi-institutional resource of social control. The paper discuss...

The present-day popular advocacy of the 'European public sphere' is not only a normative-theoretical endeavour, but largely also an expression of the general (political) dissatisfaction with a neoliberal domination of economy over other political issues essential for democratic citizenship in the 'New Europe', or a reaction to an imbalance between...

The paper develops the argument of two faces of censorship as a form of symbolic violence over individuals directed either inward or outward. In both instances, the resistance to disclosure and an effort to keep things hidden are normally complemented by strategic control over the process of making things visible. Silence is usually considered a si...

Članek obravnava odnos med vidnim in skritim izvajanjem moči, med normativno in instrumentalno vidnostjo ter vpletenost vidnosti in izvajanja moči v javnomnenjske procese. Dokazuje omejenost teorij javnega mnenja, ki pojasnjevanje mnenjskih procesov omejujejo na normativno in represivno moč, zanemarjajo pa druge razsežnosti izvajanja moči. Za zgled...

The article discusses the relationship between the visible and clandestine executions of power, between the normative and instrumental visibility, and how the mechanisms of visibility and execution of power are embedded in public opinion processes. It is developed as a critique of those public opinion theories that are limited to their normative an...

Bentham favored a free press as an instrument of public control of the state, in the interest of the general happiness. Kant favored free public discussion as an instrument for the development and expression of autonomous rationality. But a free press embodied in the property rights of the owners of the press may well fail to achieve either Bentham...

The principle of publicity was originally conceived as a critical impulse against injustice based on secrecy of state actions and as an enlightening momentum substantiating the “region of human liberty,” making private citizens equal in the public use of reason. Early debates on freedom of the press pointed toward the idea of publicity as an extens...

The European Institute of Communication and Culture (Euricom) and the University of Nijmegen are engaged in a long-term investigation into understanding the problems and possibilities of electronic networks in democratic life. The first of a series of seminars on this topic was held September 2001 in Piran, Slovenia. During this conference, 21 scho...

This article examines the intellectual history of the concept of ‘publicity’, originally defined by Immanuel Kant as the transcendental formula of public justice and the principle of the public use of reason, but later largely subsumed under the concept of ‘freedom of the press’. The notion of the press as the Fourth Estate/Power was a valid concep...

The essay examines a decade of changes in the media after the collapse of the socialist system in East-Central Europe. A unique transformation from socialism to capitalism makes traditional "middle-range" evolutionary theories of modernisation and (post)modern "detraditionalisation" inadequate to grasp the substance of the inordinate changes in the...

The article examines a decade of changes in the media after the collapse of the so-cialist system in East-Central Europe. Several structural tendencies in the ECE coun-tries may be identified which are, in different degrees, spread throughout the region and reflect the imitative nature of the new systems. It is argued that the imitative na-ture of...

The article examines three topics fundamental to contemporary media democratisation discourse: the principle of publicity, media agenda setting, and information subsidies. In complex democratic systems, the idea of publicity primarily refers to the media and the public sphere, where the “public use of reason” or “public discussion” can take place....

This article strives for the 'rehabilitation' of Ferdinand Tönnies' largely forgotten theory of the 'opinion of the public' which represents the most comprehensive effort to conceptualize public opinion as a form of social will which has, as moral judgement, normative validity; it is not enforced by the physical force or external means (e.g., money...

The existence of totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe during the 1960's, a time when telecommunications and information systems were expanding rapidly in the West, led to a considerable technological lag. With the opening up of Eastern Europe, governments are faced with huge difficulties. A weak economy hinders large-scale catching-up programmes...

This article analyses the position and development patterns of communication science on the periphery and examines the factors that may explain why it lags behind the progress made by intellectual centres in more developed scholarly communities. The analysis is concerned with the differences between the centre and the periphery in the growth of par...

The growing differentiation within the International Sociological Association (ISA) requires different forms of integration among Research Committees (RCs). The aim of this paper is to reveal some patterns of integrational versus differentiational activities and produce an organizational and conceptual typology of RCs. The problem is approached by...

International propaganda clearly shows a tendency of rapid growth since its first institutionalisation in the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide of Pope Gregory XV in the seventeenth century. In different historical periods and social systems (and likewise in different communication and political theories) diverse and even controversial concepts...

A nationwide telephone survey of 435 adult Slovenes examined the impact of alternative sets of predicting variables on individuals’ willingness to speak in public and their actual public conduct. The design of empirical study proceeds from a theoretical discussion of whether the model of “public opinion as social control,” such as the spiral of sil...

The article examines a decade of changes in the media after the collapse of the socialist system in East-Central Europe. Several structural tendencies in the ECE countries may be identified which are, in different degrees, spread throughout the region and reflect the imitative nature of the new systems. It is argued that the imitative nature of the...