Democracy in the dot.com era
Daniel Liu traces the evolution of the e-democracy movement.
Representative democracy, a hallmark of the modern Western state, offers an efficient method of exercising popular sovereignty by conferring political power upon a few elected representatives. However, the advent of new information communication technologies in the 1990s raises the question of whether the internet can transform how the social contract between states and citizens functions. Can the internet provide an avenue for citizens to contribute more directly to policy decisions and governance?
In the context of rapidly accelerating internet usage during the IT boom in 2000, Ted Becker and Christa Slaton in The Future of Teledemocracy envisioned a “direct teledemocracy” where policy would be introduced, voted upon, and passed by referenda online. This development would, as the then UK Minister for e-Commerce Douglas Alexander put it, “make citizens feel democratically empowered beyond their few seconds in the polling booth.”
“Despite the internet’s immense organisational and mobilisation potential, the vision of a direct democracy governed by an online citizenry has not come to pass.”
Since 2000, the internet has been a source of empowerment for billions of users, providing access to information and allowing mass communication and organisation on a scale and speed unprecedented in human history. For example, the recent nationwide strike that led to the deadly protest in Mahalla, Egypt, on April 6 was organised by a disparate group of cyber-activists on Facebook, after anger erupted over wages and living costs. This case demonstrates how the internet has provided alternative modes of political action.
Despite the internet’s immense organisational and mobilisation potential, the vision of a direct democracy governed by an online citizenry has not come to pass. Neither has there been any large-scale implementation of e-voting, arguably the most important element of a direct cyber-democracy. Although e-voting was tested in the Michigan Democratic primaries in 2004 and 2008, the viability of currently available systems is still being debated. In February 2004, the U.S. Pentagon abandoned the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment (SERVE), citing “security vulnerabilities that could jeopardize voter privacy and allow votes to be altered.”
However, while the internet has not yet delivered on its potential to facilitate direct democracy, it has been used to augment and enhance representational democracy and its existing institutions. Those concepts at the heart of the early e-democracy movement – namely using the internet to bring more democratic elements to governance and increasing the accountability of legislative and administrative processes – are still being achieved within a representational framework.
A study by Thomas Zittel in 2000 of the U.S. House of Representatives, the German Bundestag and the Swedish Riksdag, found e-mail was the most common method of interaction between the electorate and its representative. E-mail also accounted for more than 90 per cent of all internet interactivity across all three institutions. When also taking account of the increased internet expenditure by governments on online government services and advertising campaigns, this is clear evidence that the internet has brought both the politician closer to the electorate and the electorate closer to the politician.
Catherine Needham in Electronic Democracy claims that ‘e-government’, the movement of many vital government services and information online, has transformed the relationship between the state and its citizens to that of service provider and consumer. The citizen-consumer thus becomes “a passive recipient of electronically delivered outputs from the state”, such as parliamentary minutes, policy or legal documents and other services.
“Indigenous Australians are about half as likely to have Broadband access.”
With the internet both enhancing and entrenching representative democracy, one must question why it has not fulfilled the vision of the online Athenian Agora.
Perhaps the early advocates of a direct e-democracy overestimated technology’s impact upon human society. It is unlikely that such a dramatic shift from representative to direct democracy can be facilitated by new technology alone. Such a profound overhaul of the system is only possible if there is clear, widespread demand from the public. This is what has been lacking. Indeed, the model of the passive citizen-consumer, happy to enjoy the services of government while having a minimal desire to proactively participate in governance, may be an accurate description of today’s citizen.
While the Internet is increasingly being utilised as a forum for civil participation and interactivity, there is now a shift in the e-democracy movement to enhance the established political structure; to bring more transparency, accountability and accessibility to the voter-representative relationship via the internet.
However, the most pressing issue in the e-democracy movement is the universal availability of internet access. There is a growing gap between the connected and the disconnected. The 2006 Australian Census found Indigenous Australians are about half as likely to have Broadband access and only 34 per cent of Australians in low-income households have internet access at home.
In a context where the mechanisms of government are increasingly online, universal access to the internet is not just a challenge, but also a democratic imperative.
