Electronic Democracy Research Paper

These political uses of IT (and there are many others besides those outlined above) do not secure universal acclaim. Just as there are those who see in electronic democracy a panacea for many contemporary problems—political apathy, alienation, democratic deficits, and so on—there are others who view it as creating new problems, or exacerbating old ones, by increasing the potential for surveillance and manipulation, for increasing inequalities of power rather than diminishing them. The emergence of the Internet has greatly increased the urgency and intensity of this debate, but it did not create it. The debate about electronic democracy, and the possibilities for its realization, predate the information superhighway.

1. The Origins Of Electronic Democracy

Electronic democracy is neither the direct product of technological advance nor of abstract thought, but rather of the engagement of the two. Although the discussion of electronic democracy came into focus in the 1980s, it can be argued that it was a feature of every change in the technology of communication, from the printing press to the World Wide Web. Each new system of communication raises questions about the distribution and content of knowledge, about who has the right to know and say what. Knowledge is a key resource in politics. Dictatorships tend to restrict and control it, just as democracies are supposed to make it freely available. So it is that with each new technology of communication new questions are raised about how these technologies should be organized and used. Should the press or broadcasting be privately owned? Who should have access to the newsprint and the airwaves? To this extent, the debate about electronic democracy is just another moment in the long history of the politics of communications.

Nonetheless, we can trace the particular concern with electronic democracy, the use of electronic means to enable citizens to participate in politics, to the late 1970s and early 1980s, when reports emerged of experiments such as ‘televoting’ in Hawaii (Becker and Staton 1981) and the QUBE system in Columbus, Ohio (Neustadt 1985). What both of these early initiatives represented was the use of television and telephone technology to encourage citizens to take a greater interest in politics, to reduce the costs of participation, and increase levels of knowledge. Both created the possibility of local referenda in which citizens were given information on a particular issue and then encouraged to register their views by electronic means. These initiatives were not confined to North America, and other experiments emerged in Europe, most notably the Netherlands (for a survey, see McLean 1989). Roughly parallel with these developments were changes in political campaigning, especially in the United States. Politicians began to use computer-based databases, themselves the product of interest group and consumer behavior, to organize systems of direct mailing so that particular constituencies could be targeted with customized political propaganda. By the late 1980s, it was possible to identify a large variety of examples of the use of IT in politics, and to talk of the emergence of ‘teledemocracy’ (Arterton 1987) and of ‘the electronic commonwealth’ (Abramson et al. 1988). These various uses of IT were often pragmatic and instrumental responses to particular political problems: to increase participation, to reach key voters, to raise money. What gave them a wider significance was the ways in which a number of political theorists incorporated these experiments into a case for a new notion of democracy—or perhaps more accurately to revive the fortunes of an old one. A key figure in this was Benjamin Barber whose book Strong Democracy (1984) used examples of electronic participation to advocate an alternative to the hegemonic dominance of liberal democracy.

There have always been positive arguments for a liberal democratic regime based on a respect for individual preferences, limited popular participation, and the principle of representation. Just as there have been good reasons for not advocating the direct system of democracy employed in Ancient Greece (and reincarnated in the writings of Rousseau and Marx). But while there are principles which help decide between these alternatives, practical considerations have also been implicated. The utilitarian case against liberal democracy, for instance, drew attention to the impossibility of assembling large numbers of people for political discussion, while other, later theorists have drawn attention to the difficulty of collating and comprehending the information needed for decision-making in complex modern societies. To this extent, the arguments against direct democracy have been practical ones.

What Barber argued was that, with the advent of new technologies of communication, these practical objections no longer hold the force they once did. They can be overcome by enabling people to participate electronically, recreating the experience of mass participation without the practical requirement of gathering them together. For Barber, given the ability to overcome the practical problems, the case for direct participatory democracy can be made, and can be seen to trump the rival claims of liberal democracy. Such thoughts have received yet greater impetus with the emergence of the Internet.

2. Cyberdemocracy

Set against the speed, flexibility, and apparently ever-proliferating possibilities of the web, the early experiments in televoting seem extraordinarily crude. Now every party and almost all politicians boast their own website, from which they solicit funds and set out their stall. More importantly, there has been an explosion of websites dedicated to advocating or realizing systems of direct participation. These extend from policy discussion forums to systems of direct participation. The accompanying rhetoric is now one in which politicians talk of the ‘electronic town meeting’ or of the ‘virtual parliament,’ and where academics produce volumes on ‘cyberdemocracy’ (Tsagarousianou et al. 1998).

This notion of a ‘cyberdemocracy’ refers to a number of different developments in democratic practice. The most obvious is the opportunity that the web provides for citizens to inform themselves. They can call up websites that provide reports and data on central and local government; they can access the arguments on any number of debates and issues. It is a small step from here to the opportunity to register a vote, simply by clicking on an option just as one makes a purchase from Amazon.com, or by entering a chat room to voice an opinion. From the other side, parties now tailor their websites to elicit support and to persuade the casual surfer. Mainstream interest groups do the same, while their more activist, radical colleagues go further. Campaigns against geneticallymodified foods and motorway building, together with such movements as Reclaim the Streets or those opposing the World Trade Organisation, have used the web to coordinate their activities. Meanwhile their opponents in government have increasingly used the web to re-establish their fraying legitimacy, by appearing to engage directly with their citizens and by bypassing the traditional means of communication offered by the mass media.

‘Cyberdemocracy’, in encompassing all these different practical forms, also displays a similar theoretical eclecticism. For some, the opportunities offered by the web allow for the emergence of new democratic forms, ones that, as with Barber’s strong democracy, allow for the rediscovery of the direct tradition. The emphasis, though, is less upon participation as control, as taking hold of the levers of power in the name of the people, as deliberation: the use of the net to constitute a public sphere within which people deliberate upon the collective good. The web is seen to enable a new deliberative democracy, which sets itself against a liberal democracy concerned, according to such critics, only with realizing pre-established individual preferences. The web allows individual citizens to revise their preferences in the light of this knowledge and understanding of other people’s preferences. But cyberdemocracy is not claimed just by those who oppose liberal democracy. Liberal democrats too see in the web the potential for enhancing the practices and principles that enhance their version of democracy. The opportunity of unmediated contact between citizens and parties or interest groups, the potential for online accountability, provide means for enhancing the efficiency and efficacy of liberal democracy.

To the extent that the web produces new forms of access and participation, it does represent an important moment in the constant transformation of politics. But to the extent that traditional political divides replicate themselves in the use of the Internet, electronic democracy also forms part of an established continuity. The debate about the implications of electronic democracy similarly straddles the familiar and the novel.

3. The Debate About Electronic Democracy

The argument about electronic democracy runs along several different dimensions. Three are singled out here. The first is that of access. Critics of electronic democracy argue that its credibility depends on some principle of universal access. Where traditional forms of political participation (visiting the polling station to vote) allow for near universal access, computermediated participation is exclusive rather than inclusive. The barriers to entry include limits on access to computer technology—not everyone in the industrialized West has access to a telephone let alone a computer. Furthermore, the networks which form the web are not evenly distributed; as Manuel Castells (1996) has illustrated, the political economy of systems of communication marginalizes the less-developed world. Finally, even where technical access is possible, there are political, social, and cultural factors which intervene to thwart the capacity of some people— women, for instance—to make full use of the technology (Wajcman 1991).

Other critics of electronic democracy (Lyon 1994) focus on the technology’s capacity to centralize power rather than devolve it. The network of computer databases can become the infrastructure for a system of surveillance which allows central state authorities to monitor the activities of its citizens. Such fears have become linked to discussion of the desire for, and capacity of, the state to regulate the web. Through such devices as ECHELON it has become possible for states to monitor citizens’ use of email and the web. In such circumstances, the democratic capacities of the web are replaced by dictatorial ones. For skeptics of electronic democracy (e.g., Sussman 1997), the democratic prospect held out by the web is illusory.

The last dimension of the critique of electronic democracy focuses on the underlying theory, the ideas which animate the interpretation of IT as opening up a new or improved form of democracy. Insofar as electronic democracy appeals to any one version of democracy—whether direct or liberal—it relies upon the principles which sustain that particular version. Those unimpressed by such claims will be equally unimpressed by the claims made for electronic democracy. As Iain McLean (1989) points out, the division between competing notions of democracy does not derive from a lack of conceptual clarification or from technical inadequacies in existing forms of participation, but are fundamental to the very idea itself. The thought that the deliberative democracy promised by the application of electronic democracy is simply the ‘best’ fails to recognize the case to be made against the deliberative form (Weale 1999). In summary, there is an important debate to be had about electronic democracy, but it will not be resolved by the application of technology; it will be just another phase in the endless debate about democracy itself.

4. The Future

Whatever the future brings, and it will establish undreamt of forms of participation and transformative moments in the conduct of politics, it will not bring an end to the arguments around principle and ideology that fuel our notion of democracy.

Bibliography:

1. Abramson J B, Arterton F C, Orren G R 1988 The Electronic Commonwealth: The Impact of New Media Technologies on Democratic Politics. Basic Books, New York
2. Arterton C 1987 Teledemocracy. Sage, London
3. Barber B 1984 Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age. University of California Press, San Francisco
4. Becker T, Staton C D 1981 Hawaii televote. Political Science 33(1): 52–6
5. Castells M 1996 The Rise of the Network Society. Blackwell, Oxford, UK
6. Lyon D 1994 The Electronic Eye. Polity Press, Cambridge, UK
7. McLean I 1989 Democracy and the New Technology. Polity Press, Cambridge, UK
8. Neustadt R 1985 Electronic politics. In: Forrester T (ed.) The Information Technology Revolution. Blackwell, Oxford, UK, pp. 561–8
9. Sussman G 1997 Communication, Technology, and Politics in the Information Age. Sage, London
10. Tsagarousianou R, Tambini D, Bryan C 1998 Cyberdemocracy: Technology, Cities and Civic Networks. Routledge, London
11. Wajcman J 1991 Feminism Confronts Technology. Polity Press, Cambridge, UK
12. Weale A 1999 Democracy. Macmillan, London