Seeing Politics through Intermediation and Intermediaries

This seminar proposes to look at politics through the lens of political intermediaries and what they do, i.e. intermediation. Intermediaries can be defined as an assorted group of actors (political brokers, political parties, interest groups, movements) who acts as a hinge between two or more levels, actors or social institutions; while intermediation , as a process, encompasses all the mediations that these actors perform in order to keep the political system intact (Zaremberg, Guarneros-Meza, and Lavalle 2017; Gunther, Puhle, and Montero 2007; Kitschelt 2004; Smith 2007). The question we are interested in relates to the transformations in the roles of these agents and processes of mediation since the neo-liberal transformation has engulfed the processes of public policy formulation, contestation and enactment.