Abstract
It has been emphasized many times that contemporary democracies have been witnessing many profound changes like an unprecedented rise of the power of mass media enhanced by new technologies, a crisis of traditional forms of representation, and a steady decline in party membership and party loyalty leading to an advent of new forms of democracy referred to as "audience" or "leadership" democracy, to name just a few. These changes have also raised a number of challenges to our traditional understanding of democracy, becoming a source for many innovations in democratic thought.
One of these rehabilitated innovations is concerned with the role of citizens as spectators, one that has generally been overlooked or ignored by democratic theorists