Worth an Agora? 2003 E-lection Party Sites and Public Discourse

Abstract

Democracy started over 2,500 years ago in Athens. As the form of government was largely one of direct democracy, the focus of deliberation was the ‘agora’ – a forum in which Athens’ citizenry debated and decided on public policy and law. Modern democracy, on the other hand, is representative, so that policymaking and legislation by definition occurs within the parliament and executive branch. Nevertheless, the shift from public agora to governmental parliament need not in principle remove the populace from the deliberative process – certainly not when it is called upon tomake the only formal decision within the system: election of the representatives. The fact that this generally does not occur in the modern age is less a function of political philosophy than of logistics – how do millions find each other, not to mention carry on some sort of rational discourse? They normally cannot. As a result, election campaigns have also been removed from the purview of the citizenry and given over to the candidates and especially to the mass media. Consequently, almost all political communications researchers have focused on top-to-bottom election discourse: candidates (and parties)-topublic, as well as media-to-public. This traditional situation is now undergoing change for the first time in modern democratic history with the advent of a ‘mass’ medium – the internet – that renders bottom-to-bottom (‘peer-to-peer’) and bottom-totop (citizen-to-party) communication as effortless as its more traditional counterpart: ‘the media is [sic ] still monologic and one-way – the great and the good speak and everyone else listens or turns off. There is a way out of that tradition: a “civic commons” in cyberspace . . . intelligent spaces for public deliberation about policy issues online’. Of course, the internet not only empowers the citizenry, it can also be fruitfully exploited by the parties and the candidates for their own purposes – through top-to-bottom communication. However, as opposed to the public that has not had much opportunity to express itself during