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'E-democracy', a portmanteau of 'electronic' and 'democracy', comprises the use of electronic communications technologies, such as the Internet, in enhancing democratic processes within a democratic republic or representative democracy. It is a political development still in its infancy, as well as the subject of much debate and activity within government, civic-oriented groups and societies around the world.
The term is both descriptive and prescriptive. Typically, the kinds of enhancements sought by proponents of e-democracy are framed in terms of making processes more accessible; making citizen participation in public policy decision-making more expansive and direct so as to enable broader influence in policy outcomes as more individuals involved could yield smarter policies; increasing transparency and accountability; and keeping the government closer to the consent of the governed, increasing its political legitimacy. E-democracy includes within its scope ''electronic voting'', but has a much wider span than this single aspect of the democratic process.
E-democracy is also sometimes referred to as 'cyberdemocracy' or 'digital democracy'. Prior to 1994, when the term e-democracy was coined in the midst of online civic efforts in Minnesota, the term 'teledemocracy' was prevalent.

Contents

Practical issues with e-democracy

Internet as political medium

Benefits and disadvantages

Electronic direct democracy

References

See also

External links

Practical issues with e-democracy

The challenge for governments and bureaucracies, as well as for individuals and groups, is to develop tools and adapt processes so as to meet the aspirations of e-democracy. There are numerous practical and theoretical issues which have yet to be scoped, understood or solved, and work is underway in many democracies on a wide and diverse set of experiments and trials to test approaches and techniques.
One major problem which needs to be overcome for e-democracy to be a success is that of citizen identification. For secure elections and other secure citizen-to-government transactions, citizens must have some form of identification that preserves privacy and maybe also one which could be used in Internet forums. The need to allow anonymous posting while at the same time giving certain contributors extra status can be solved using certain cryptographic methods. In the United Kingdom there is much contention about the introduction of the British national identity card.
Another such problem would be that there are many vested interests that would be harmed by a more direct democracy. Amongst these are politicians, media moguls and some in big business and trade unions. These organizations may be expected to oppose meaningful application of e-democracy concepts.

Internet as political medium

The Internet is viewed as a platform and delivery medium for tools that help to eliminate some of the distance constraints in direct democracy. Technical media for e-democracy can be expected to extend to mobile technologies such as cellphones.
There are important differences between previous communication media and the Internet that are relevant to the Internet as a political medium. Most importantly the Internet is a many-to-many communication medium where radio and television, which broadcast few-to-many, and telephones broadcast few-to-few, are not. Also, the Internet has a much greater computational capacity allowing strong encryption and database management, which is important in community information access and sharing, deliberative democracy and electoral fraud prevention. Further, people use the Internet to collaborate or meet in an asynchronous manner — that is, they do not have to be physically gathered at the same moment to get things accomplished. Due to all these factors, the Internet has the potential to take over certain traditional media of political communication such as the telephone, the television, newspapers and the radio.

Benefits and disadvantages

Some traditional objections to direct democracy are argued to apply to e-democracy, such as the potential for governance to tend towards populism and demagoguery. More practical objections exist, not least in terms of the digital divide between those with access to the media of e-democracy (mobile phones and Internet connections) and those without, as well as the opportunity cost of expenditure on e-democracy innovations.
Contemporary technologies such as electronic mailing lists, peer-to-peer networks, collaborative software, wikis, Internet forums and blogs are clues to and early potential solutions for some aspects of e-democracy; equally, they are bellwethers of some of the issues associated with the territory, such as the inability to sustain new initiatives or protect against identity theft, information overload and vandalism.

Electronic direct democracy

Electronic direct democracy is a form of direct democracy in which the Internet and other electronic communications technologies are used to ameliorate the bureaucracy involved with referendums. Many advocates think that also important to this notion are technological enhancements to the deliberative process. Electronic direct democracy is sometimes referred to as EDD (many other names are used for what is essentially the same concept).

EDD requires the ability to register votes on issues electronically. As in a direct democracy, in an EDD citizens would have the right to vote on legislation before parliament, author new legislation and recall representatives at any stage.
Ross Perot was for a time a prominent advocate of EDD when he advocated "electronic town halls" during his 1992 and 1996 Presidential campaigns in the United States.
EDD as a system is not fully implemented anywhere in the world although Switzerland, already partially governed by direct democracy, is moving towards such a system.^[1]

References

1. Electronic Voting in Switzerland

See also

★ Democracy (varieties)

★ eGovernment

★ Electronic civil disobedience

★ eRulemaking

★ Emergent democracy

★ Hacktivism

★ Internet activism

★ Media democracy

★ Online consultation

★ Online deliberation

★ Open politics

★ Open source governance

★ Open source government

★ Participatory democracy

★ Radical transparency

★ Second Superpower

★ Smart mob

External links

★ access2democracy NGO — E-democracy: from theory to practice.

★ Council of Europe's work on e-Democracy - including the work of the Ad Hoc Committee on e-Democracy IWG established in 2006

★ Democracies Online Newswire (Do-Wire) — Announcements from Steven Clift about e-democracy, e-government, politics online and more.

★ e-DC (e-Democracy Centre) — Academic Research Centre on electronic democracy. Directed by Alexander H. Trechsel, e-DC is a joint-venture between the University of Geneva's c2d, the European University Institute in Florence and the Oxford University's OII.

★ Institute for Politics Democracy and the Internet

★ ICELE - International Centre of Excellence for Local eDemocracy, a UK driven international project exploring tools, products, research and learning for local e-democracy sponsored by Communities and Local Government Programme Director for Local e-Democracy and e-Participation, Dylan Jeffrey

★ IPOL - a portal on Internet and politics — Website including primary and secondary research resources related to online participation, e-democracy and the use of the Internet by parliaments and assemblies; edited by Stephen Ward, Wainer Lusoli and Rachel Gibson.

★ Publicus.Net — Steven Clift's articles, e-democracy resource links, and special section on e-government and democracy.