Digital transformation of democracy and politics: sustainable development as a crucial dimension for conceptualization and measurement of democracy and quality of democracy

Abstract

What the digital transformation appears to be requiring (and also should achieve) is the transition of a “knowledge-based” society, economy and democracy (the 4.0) to a knowledge society, knowledge economy and knowledge democracy (the 5.0), which are driven by knowledge and innovation, in a certain sense even being created and co-created by knowledge and innovation. The analysis here deepens the discussion about the importance of governance and governing, and policy and policy output as criteria for the quality of democracy, by examining the issue of sustainable development. Could or should sustainable development be identified as being crucial for an assessment of quality of democracy? Would an ignoring of sustainable development undermine the foundations of democracy? The currently available standard model of democracy categorizes three basic (conceptual) dimensions: freedom, equality and control. During the course of the analysis, being presented here, it is being suggested to extend the standard model by introducing sustainable development as a further basic dimension. Conceptually, this would result in a Quadruple-dimensional structure of democracy and quality of democracy. The clear consequence in this line of thinking obviously is that democracy and quality of democracy are more than input only. Governance and governing matter in producing policy output in support of sustainable development. The obvious challenge for every governance is, how a governance support for sustainable development refers to the other dimensions of democracy, for example freedom and equality, and what effects of trade-off there may be. Between different dimensions there may be a functional overlap (from sustainable development to freedom and equality), but also phenomena of dimensional trade-offs (for example, freedom against equality), meaning that governance, governing and policy-output must define priorities. This continuous re-shifting of priorities feeds furthermore into fundamental political processes (in a democracy), such as government-opposition cycles and political swings. One general context frame for this could be furthermore the concept (and theory) of knowledge democracy. One benchmark for a successful digitalization or a successful digital transformation of democracy and politics of course is, whether this reinforces a further advancement of sustainable development.