Building strong e-democracy

Abstract

The idea of democracy had come a long way before it was given its first modern forms in the liberal ideas of the 17th and 18th centuries. Now the premises of this hierarchical and representative political system are crumbling, and we must seriously consider the need to revitalize democracy. This article aims at clarifying the overall preconditions for the revitalization of democracy, and demonstrates how to build a comprehensive framework for a multidimensional institutional design in which the potentials of ICTs are made to serve relevant democratic purposes. What conditions the functioning of any contemporary democratic system includes such contextual factors as increased global interdependency, extended use of market-based mechanisms, significant impacts of media and ICTs, new forms of governance, and individualism in its various forms. One of the most burning issues is how to develop new democracy in such a complex setting so that it accords with people’s ways of thinking and acting. To ensure this, citizens with all their collective actions and willingness to influence public affairs must be placed in the overall framework of e-transformation in politics [11]. This implies that we go beyond the dichotomous discourse that suggests that we have a choice to make between democracy-as-usual and direct e-democracy [9]. Beyond One-Dimensionality The underlying hypothesis here is that both representative and direct democracy are too one-dimensional for complex societies with increased interdependencies and technological mediation. A representative system of government is usually characterized as being too elitist and remote and even untrustworthy, but even if these particular weaknesses were overcome in an ideal model of direct democracy, serious problems remain. Direct democracy tries to find the solution to the democracy deficit from the quantity of direct citizen participation in decision-making. This is highly problematic in regards to the quality of decisions and decision-making processes, and also in regard to the decisional burdens of citizens.