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The City of Rome inaugurated its open government programmes in 2016, but its heuristic relevance has been understudied. By analysing this peculiar case, this article proposes a reflection on the challenges of implementing open government in local settings, focusing on three barriers to civic participation: distrust towards public institutions, lack of digital skills and unawareness of participatory projects. Public policies and communication materials diffused by the administration of Rome are examined in order to highlight the tactics and tools used by the administration to overcome those barriers and promote participatory projects through on- and offline communication outlets. Particular refe-rence is made to three case studies: the Forum of Innovation, participatory budgeting and the Punti Roma Facile (distri-buted internet points). The results show that the City of Rome has implemented some promising participatory strategies, but still lacks a clear communication strategy. This article ends by elucidating some aspects of the participatory measures (institutionalisation of the process and impact on policy-making, salience of the specific policy in the broader strategic framework, and involvement of civil society coalitions), and how they are embedded in different perspectives on the role played by public communication in open government programmes.

In the last decade, the economic crisis and the mistrust in democratic institutions have contributed to a major crisis of political parties across Europe. These are some of the causes that led to the formation of political movements with purely populist characteristics as replacement of the traditional delegitimized intermediary bodies. The crisis of representation is the crisis of the post 1945 idea of representation as a tool to increase the people’s participation. We have noted a convergence between some populist appeals to direct democracy and the more radical neo-liberal approaches that pretend to reduce people’s participation, even if by appealing to some forms of “surrogate representation”. The theoretical background of this paper is based upon the relationships between “surrogate representation” and the institutionalization of the neo-populist movements, quickly transformed in neo-populist parties. In other words, we can highlight the strange coming together of technological storytelling on direct democracy with technocracy myths and the overlap of technopopulism with direct democracy and “direct e-democracy” (that is profoundly different from deliberative and participatory e-democracy). The aim of the paper is to analyse the connections between the emerging forms of populism (such as techno-populism), the rhetoric on the importance of digital communication for the improvement of democracy, and the depoliticisation processes. En la última década, la crisis económica y la desconfianza en las instituciones democráticas han contribuido a una gran crisis de los partidos políticos en toda Europa. Estas son algunas de las causas que llevaron a la formación de movimientos políticos con características puramente populistas como reemplazo de los organismos intermediarios tradicionalmente deslegitimados. La crisis de la representación es la crisis de la idea de representación posterior a 1945 como una herramienta para aumentar la participación popular. Hemos notado una convergencia entre algunos llamamientos populistas a la democracia directa y los enfoques neoliberales más radicales que pretenden reducir la participación de la gente, incluso si apelamos a algunas formas de “representación sustituta”. Los antecedentes teóricos de este documento se basan en las relaciones entre la “representación sustituta” y la institucionalización de los movimientos neopopulistas, que se transformaron rápidamente en partidos neopopulistas. En otras palabras, podemos destacar la extraña unión de narraciones tecnológicas sobre democracia directa con mitos de tecnocracia y la superposición de tecnopopulismo con democracia directa y “democracia electrónica directa” (que es profundamente diferente de democracia electrónica participativa y deliberativa). El objetivo del documento es analizar las conexiones entre las formas emergentes de populismo (como el tecopopulismo), la retórica sobre la importancia de la comunicación digital para el mejoramiento de la democracia y los procesos de despolitización.