Abstract
In an era of citizens’ discontentment on democratic institutions, parliaments as a democratic cornerstone, are constantly striving to create alluring services taking, at the same time, into account the difficulty of achieving accessibility and transparency in citizens’ e-participation. At the same time, the evolution of ICT tools presents opportunities to revamp the traditional character, functions and services of parliaments worldwide, giving rise to new capabilities and opportunities that can transform their political and social role. An e-enabled parliament can not only offer flexibility in parliamentary proceedings and facilitate the work of its members, but also strive for the inclusion of citizens, without annulling the representative character of the institution. In this paper, we present an initial overview of the characteristics of modern parliaments, recording existing service offerings and proposing a stakeholder-based categorization, with specific categories that can best accommodate explicit and active citizen participation within parliamentary functions. A number of existing citizen deliberation applications and research projects are highlighted as potential candidates for deploying novel extrovert parliament-to-citizen services, focused directly on citizen involvement. Moreover, the focus area based on the procedure from inclusion to feedback will give good evidence for all those factors that are necessary for a successful adoption of novel e-parliament services.
Highlights
Searching references from past and present bibliography, as far as the definition of the terms ‘parliament’ and ‘democracy’ are concerned, it has been concluded that these two terms are connected
Using an Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) platform for text visualization of the topics discussed in a public dialogue their “(...) understanding, discovery and summarization” becomes easier (VIDI Project, 2009, para. 1)
The introduction of serious games in e-participation is a means of giving players the opportunity to learn, rather than teaching them (Stapleton, 2004)
Summary
Searching references from past and present bibliography, as far as the definition of the terms ‘parliament’ and ‘democracy’ are concerned, it has been concluded that these two terms are connected. Cheibub and Limongi (2002) in their research about parliamentary and presidential democracies, conclude in the following definition: “The fusion of powers characteristic of parliamentarism is supposed to generate governments capable of governing because they would be supported by a majority in parliament, composed of highly disciplined parties prone to cooperate with one another, which, together, would produce a decision-making process that is highly centralized” These definitions help highlight the multidimensional role for a modern democratic parliament. All these characteristics imply that a parliament is the medium for citizens’ expression and connection with the elected representatives Meeting these prerequisites is a high and difficult priority of a parliament, so as to be proven sustainable and functional as far as the performance of its parliamentarians and the ‘production’ of better laws are concerned, and pertaining its role as an institution that fosters representative democracy by educating and embracing its citizens. That the transition of representative democracies into direct ones might endanger: (i) the credibility and sustainability of governments and (ii) the importance of national elections by weakening the political representation and lead to phenomena of populism, namely the emergence of ochlocracy
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