- In full:
- electronic democracy
- Related Topics:
- democracy
e-democracy
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What is e-democracy?
E-democracy involves using digital communication to improve or replace aspects of traditional representative democracy. It addresses issues such as limited citizen participation, time constraints, declining community engagement, and few opportunities for policy discussion through online communication.
E-democracy projects, like Minnesota E-Democracy, aim to connect social networks with political processes independently of government influence. Governments are also experimenting with online policy discussions to bridge informal citizen deliberation with real-world decision-making. These projects generally follow consultative and deliberative models. Consultative approaches emphasize communicating citizen opinions to the government, while deliberative models focus on complex interactivity. E-democracy is being tested in countries worldwide, including Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
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How does e-democracy use technology in politics?
E-democracy uses technology to enhance or replace aspects of traditional representative democracy. It addresses challenges like limited citizen participation due to scale, time constraints, and lack of opportunities for policy discussion.
E-democracy connects social networks with political processes, often independent of government. Governments are experimenting with online policy discussions and consultations to bridge online deliberations with real-world decision-making. These projects generally follow consultative and deliberative models. Consultative approaches emphasize communicating citizen opinions to the government, while deliberative models focus on complex, multidirectional interactivity.
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What are some examples of e-democracy in action?
E-democracy uses technology to expand representative democracy. Examples of e-democracy in action include:
- Minnesota E-Democracy: Established in 1994, this project connects social networks with political processes and is one of the worldās largest political discussion forums at the subnational level.
- U.S. Federal Government's E-Rulemaking Program: This consultative approach allows interest groups and individual citizens to comment on department and agency rules as they are developed.
- Online Deliberative Forums in the U.K.: The U.K. has experimented with integrating online deliberative forums directly into policy discussions. The Hansard Society conducted several experiments, including a discussion on flood management and an online forum on the 2002 draft Communications Bill.
- Internet Voting in Estonia and Bulgaria: Estonia has used internet voting nationally since 2005. Bulgaria has installed e-voting machines in international embassies for its citizens abroad.
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How can e-democracy help citizens participate in government decisions?
E-democracy uses technology to improve or replace aspects of representative democracy. It broadens participation by overcoming traditional limits to citizenship, such as time and community decline.
E-democracy connects social networks with political processes, as seen with Minnesota E-Democracy. Governments are experimenting with online policy discussions and consultations, bridging online discussions with real-world decision-making. Approaches include:
* Consultative models that communicate citizen opinions to the government, like the U.S. federal governmentās e-rule-making program.
* Deliberative models that integrate online forums directly into policy discussions, as pioneered by the U.K.'s Hansard Society.1 Britannica SourceCreated from Britannica articles using AI. AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles. -
What are the benefits and challenges of e-democracy?
E-democracy uses technology to improve or replace aspects of representative democracy. Benefits include overcoming traditional limits to citizenship, such as geographical scale, time constraints, community decline, and limited policy deliberation opportunities. E-democracy projects connect social networks with political processes, and governmental bodies are experimenting with online policy discussions and consultations.
Challenges include security concerns, such as denial-of-service attacks, malware, and potential manipulation. Experts worry about the security of personal devices and the possibility of voter coercion and vote selling. Some argue that mathematical underpinnings of cryptographic systems are not comprehensible to the average voter.
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How can governments ensure security and fairness in e-democracy systems?
E-democracy, which uses technology to enhance or replace representative democracy, requires governments to ensure security and fairness. Measures include safeguarding against hacking and malware on personal devices to protect ballots. Cryptographic techniques can authenticate software and verify votes, but they may not prevent all attacks or be understandable to all voters. To enhance security, some systems use paper audit records, while end-to-end secure systems allow voters to verify their votes were accurately counted without revealing their choices to third parties.
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e-democracy, the use of information and communication technologies to enhance and in some accounts replace representative democracy.
Theorists of e-democracy differ, but most share the belief that some of the traditional limits to citizenship in contemporary liberal-democratic politiesāproblems of scale, scarcity of time, decline of community, and lack of opportunities for policy deliberationācan be overcome by new forms of online communication.
Theoretical origins
A distinct body of ideas forms the backdrop to e-democracy in both theory and practice. During the 1960s a generation of political theorists, including Benjamin Barber, C.B. Macpherson, and Carole Pateman, established an agenda for participatory democracy that persisted well into the 21st century.
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During the 1980s many sociologists and political scientists reconsidered the concept of community. Some, such as Robert Bellah and colleagues, bemoaned the intensification of individualism in American society and called for a new communitarian ethic. Others, such as Amitai Etzioni, argued in favour of strong, emotionally powerful community bonds based around family and locality.
The final theoretical inspiration for e-democracy is JĆ¼rgen Habermasās concept of the public sphere: an idealized autonomous sphere of communication in which citizens can freely engage in reasoned debate away from the controlling influence of the state, large media corporations, and structures of social inequality. The idea of citizens deliberating in freely formed associations in civil society before taking that knowledge up to the level of government recalls the direct democracy of ancient Athens, but e-democracy updates this by focusing on how political discourse is mediated. The Internet emerges as a communication medium uniquely suited to providing multiple arenas for public debate that are relatively spontaneous, flexible, and, above all, self-governed.
Community networks
Community networks first emerged during the 1970s but proliferated in many liberal democracies during the 1990s as the costs of software, computers, and networking equipment began to fall. Early networks, such as the Berkeley Community Memory Project near San Francisco and the Santa Monica Public Electronic Network near Los Angeles, used basic technologies such as text-based bulletin boards, e-mail, and public-access terminals in physical public spaces such as stores, community centres, and libraries. Most community networks are public-private schemes that incorporate three main features: a high-speed network offered free of charge or at a subsidized rate to households; some form of community technology center, often based in a community building; and an emphasis on creating content specific to the local community.
Community networks are based on the idea that by handing to ordinary people the power to shape the production of online information about their local neighbourhood, virtual communities can improve geographical communities by creating new social ties and reciprocal trust, the ingredients of social capital.
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From community to politics
Some e-democracy projects have attempted to connect social networks with broader political processes while remaining independent of government, parties, or interest groups. Foremost among these is Minnesota E-Democracy (later E-Democracy.org), which was established in 1994 and became one of the worldās largest subnational-level political discussion forums.
In the early 21st century there was a significant shift toward attempting to plug online networks into formal political processes. Central and local government agencies as well as legislatures slowly but surely started to experiment with online policy discussions and citizen consultations. These initiatives attempted to provide a bridge between informal online deliberations among citizens and structures of governance that provide an interface with ārealā decision-making processes. The deliberative turn in governance has already generated a range of non-Internet methods for involving citizens in policy making, such as citizensā juries, peoplesā panels, local policy forums, focus groups, mini-referendums, and petitions. E-democratic projects introduce the Internet into the mix. These have generally followed two broad models: consultative and deliberative.
Consultative approaches stress the communication of citizen opinion to government. The assumption is that information is a resource that can be used to provide better policy and administration. Probably the best example of the consultative model in action is the U.S. federal governmentās e-rule-making program. This is designed to allow interest groups and individual citizens to comment on department and agency rules as they are being developed.
Deliberative models conceive of a more complex, horizontal, and multidirectional interactivity. The United Kingdom was a pioneer in experimental attempts to integrate online deliberative forums directly into policy discussions. The U.K.ās Hansard Society conducted several experiments from the late 1990s, including a discussion on flood management, a pathbreaking forum on experiences of domestic violence involving more than 200 women in interactive discussion, and an online evidence and discussion forum on the 2002 draft Communications Bill. The latter was the first genuine attempt to integrate an online forum with an established parliamentary committee.
E-democracy has provoked much theoretical discussion. Yet, its main themes are increasingly embedded in political practice. They have been enshrined in a wide variety of national and local experiments, in many different settings, using different forms of computer-mediated communication, in countries as diverse as Australia, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Sweden.