Electronic democracy in practice: one, two, three... countless variants

Abstract

Since the early nineties, digital democracy has been a major point interest for politicians, unions and employers' organizations in both the USA and Europe. Experiments into models for digital democracy in the age of Computer Mediated Communications have already led to a multitude of projects that vary in both form and content. Indeed, the diversification of approaches to digital democracy shows to a considerable extent how there is a lack of clarity concerning the notion of digital democracy and more generally the notion of democracy itself. Drawing upon an analysis of a number of important experiments in digital democracy, this paper constitutes an attempt to compare rhetoric and reality regarding the democratic potential of the multitude of digital democracy projects and argues that academic and other debate on the matter needs to be informed by an awareness of the diversity of intentions, forms, promises and potential of those projects.