Italian Political Science Association (SISP) Annual meeting, Luiss University, Rome, 17-19 September 2009 Panel on Disintermediation Processes and New Media Section of Political Communication Convenors: Lorenzo Mosca and Cristian Vaccari Discussant: Sara Bentivegna By promoting processes of disintermediation, the new media stimulate the production of autonomous information flows, which bypass gate-keeping practices by both political actors and traditional mass media. While journalists maintain an important filtering function between society and the mediated public sphere, they have to face a double challenge. On the one hand, they are by-passed by the proliferation of alternative media, especially online (web radios, portals, blogs, forum, street televisions, and so forth). On the other hand, they have to deal with the possibility for political and social actors to autonomously represent themselves via the new media, not least through social networking tools (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc.). In turn, these new communication arenas enable actors that are outsiders in the institutional political sphere to autonomously organize themselves and, in some cases, to incisively participate to public life. How does, then, the functioning of the public sphere and political communication change as a result? How does the relationship between communication producers and receivers change when disintermediation processes occur? Under which conditions can effective participatory spaces be opened up for actors excluded from the institutional sphere? Which strategies do political actors devise to take advantage of these opportunities, and to what extent are they motivated to doing so? During the last decade, the scientific literature on these issues has produced comparative analyses on the online presence of political parties, unions, representative institutions, civil society actors and groups, or of some combinations of these different actors. Most of these studies have utilized standardized codebooks for website analysis. Other studies, however, have developed insightful qualitative analysis, while at the same time being limited by their focus on single case-studies. While this line of research has mostly focused on the organizational (meso) level, research on the individual (micro) level has only episodically relied on fully representative surveys capable of solid generalizations. The surveys conducted so far have often been based either on samples representative of the whole population – where, as a consequence, a limited amount of items focused on internet usage – and surveys on self-selected samples of internet users, which in some cases featured articulated sets of indicators on information consumption and production online, but offered little in terms of generalizability. Moreover, to date the literature does not feature any longitudinal study of internet users. This panel aims at collecting contributions focusing on processes of disintermediation enabled by new media, focusing on both individuals and organizations. We particularly welcome proposals that integrate quantitative and qualitative methods and that shed light on the role of contextual factors in these participatory practices, thus illuminating the nexus between online and offline environments. *SUBMISSION PROCEDURE* Please send a title and an abstract of up to 250 words to lmosca@uniroma3.itor cristian.vaccari@unibo.it by June 15, 2009. Proposals and papers can be submitted either in English or Italian. A decision about which contributions to include will be made by June, 20 2009. See http://www.sisp.it/convegnofor rurther details on the meeting.