Electronic Democracy: Achievements and Challenges

Transcription

1 RESEARCH CONFERENCES Electronic Democracy: Achievements and Challenges Vadstena Klosterhotell, Vadstena Sweden November 2007 Chair: Herbert Kubicek, University of Bremen, DE SCIENTIFIC REPORT Herbert Kubicek Introduction (up to 2 pages) The objective of this conference on Electronic Democracy (edemocracy) was to assess the state of the art of this rather young field of research and to identify the theoretical and methodological challenges for the future research agenda. This was to be achieved by combining a top-down and a bottom-up approach. Top-down means providing general inputs from a theoretical or methodological point of view; bottom-up means to assess and reflect actual research in different subfields in the area of edemocracy. General inputs by internationally well-known invited speakers on the state-of-the-art were to reflect research over the last thirty years, and look at the basic challenges to democracy in an extended Europe as well as in the face of new upcoming technologies. Within the bottom-up approach the achievements and shortcomings of edemocracy were discussed by leading researchers and doctoral students in six working groups with two in parallel sessions each: * einformation (freedom of information, access to public information); * econsultation and edeliberation; * ecommunities and emovements; * ecampaigning and eactivism; * epetitioning; * evoting. To link the top-down and the bottom-up approach, rapporteurs were assigned in each working group and exchanged their assessment in a separate meeting. Together with a few invited

2 speakers these assessments were presented in three panels, dealing with the practical challenges for proceeding with edemocracy in a more and more multi-cultural Europe as well as general theoretical and methodological challenges identified in the working groups, including the problems faced when assessing the impact of edemocracy activities. In the final session the chair dared a first summary, and participants agreed on a few concrete follow-up activities in the form of further conferences and research proposals. Figure 1 illustrates this architecture of the conference. It was a particular objective of the conference to have an exchange between about 20 invited experienced senior researchers and the same number of students working in this field and shaping research in the future. This objective has been achieved and the exchange turned out to be the most appreciated effect of the conference. Altogether there were almost 40 contributions (short or longer papers and/or power point presentations, which are still available for download at and there will be a forum for continuing exchange and discussing this report on I hereby authorize ESF - and/or the Linköping University (LiU) - to publish the above two-page Introduction on a special page dedicated to Conference Highlights within the Research Conferences website. Date & Signature: Bremen, 24 th January 2008 Herbert Kubicek

3 Scientific Content Why is a scientific assessment important? edemocracy is a rather new term for a political and scientific field of experimentation. It is broadly used since the early 90s in connection with the rise of the Internet. However, the field exists a bit longer, since the late 60s / early 70s and was then called Teledemocracy. edemocracy is mainly about technical support of processes of interaction between constitutional political bodies and citizens and their organizations (see the presentation of Herbert Kubicek). These processes have been subject to research for much longer, mainly by political science. Protagonists of new technologies predicted / hoped / promised to solve some of the problems of these processes such as low level of interaction, low engagement, distrust etc. In literature there are several arguments in favour of electronically mediated political interaction: - Interactive telecommunications can foster increased civic participation in the democratic process. - Telecommunications can link citizens together across the boundaries of time and space. It can also involve citizens who may ordinarily have no opportunity to participate. - A direct link between citizens and government ensures the accountability of representatives. - Electronic media can function as a mass feedback system, providing legislators with instant public opinion on issues. - Many new electronic media provide unmediated communication allowing citizens to be in touch with each other and their leaders without such traditional gatekeepers as newspaper editors, mail carriers, and television moderators. - The new media can facilitate direct public participation in governance through plebiscitary mechanisms or direct communication between citizens and policymakers. - New technologies can process vast amounts of information almost instantaneously. - New technologies provide improved access to government information and services. This may be true or not at least some of these effects have been reported in some cases. But as it often happens: new solutions raise new problems, such as the appropriate

4 deployment of the new technical devices, access to and usage of these devices. These devices are only deployed in a few cases of all of these processes, and used only by a minority of people concerned in each case. So research should be devoted to analysing why deployment and usage of edemocracy tools is so low. Low usage may be due to lack of access to the technical channels, lack of media literacy, lack of interest in the subject at stake, lack of trust in the deploying institutions or in the political system in general. The research challenge put by political stakeholders is: How can we improve deployment and use of these tools in order to improve participation of citizens and the legitimization of political decisions and the representative democracy in general? What are barriers, what are success factors? The response is in socio-technical systems design and concepts for appropriate embedding of the technical means into the respective democratic procedures and institutions. From an academic point of view the research challenge is to analyse and explain why certain tools are deployed in some processes and not in others, how they are employed in different contexts, why they are used by some people and not by others, and what effects this use has on these people, on those initiating the processes and on others only observing. Thus ultimately edemocracy research is about evaluation of the deployment and use of electronic tools in democratic processes. But this evaluation cannot be conducted without evaluating these processes, too - what so far has neither been done frequently nor on a well developed scientific basis. Causes and effects of the tools and the democratic processes cannot be neatly separated. This is why edemocracy research has to be interdisciplinary. And this is why edemocracy research is so fragmented, heterogenous and shows little coherent progress so far, due to a lack of common objectives as well as of theoretical and methodological foundations of the academic disciplines concerned and involved. The Institutional Setting of edemocracy Research The Conference was organized in Cooperation with DEMO-net, an EU-financed Network of Excellence which for almost two years now is mapping the edemocracy research landscape with regard to institutions, methods, theoretical concepts, practical effects and many other aspects ( Regarding the institutional dimension, DEMO- Net asked European research centers engaged in edemocracy for the disciplines and research fields involved. The most frequently mentioned are 1. Political Science 2. Social Informatics 3. Political Sociology 4. Information Systems 5. Democratic Theory 6. Public Administration 7. Information Management 8. Media-/Communication Science 9. Sociology 10. Computer Science + Participatory Design

5 There has been a cumulative growth of research centers. The oldest ones started in Before 2000 there were only 22 centers focussing on eparticipation. 15 new centers joined them in 2000, and the majority of further 53 centers has been established since then. By concentrating on specific types of processes and their support by e-tools it was possible to advance in understanding causes and effects of their deployment and use. But it turned out that the context, i.e. the particular procedures and institutions of, e.g., citizens' participation or petitions do vary much more than expected between the European countries, between the old Member States and of course between the Old and the New Member States. And big differences became apparent between the subfields of edemocracy with regard to the specific challenges they pose but also with regard to the kind and the amount of research, which is dedicated to them. Session 1: Where we came from The first session was devoted to looking back into 30 years of research on technological support of democratic processes called teledemocracy in the 70s and 80s, and digital or electronic democracy since the 90s of the last century. Professor William Dutton from the Oxford Internet Institute showed that while in the first twenty years research was mainly speculative and based only on a few field experiments, e.g. with two-way cable television or modem-based dial-up computer communication, the diffusion of the Internet has strongly increased the availability of technical means over the last ten years. Because of this the social barriers have become more apparent, but they are largely independent of technical tools, rather have to do with cultural, legal and organizational aspects and long-time traditions in the respective areas and vary quite a bit between European countries. Brian Loader, University of York, pointed to the fact that edemocracy research too often focuses on the "e" and takes democracy for granted while he maintains that democracy is a "contested phenomenon" and that technology is not neutral. It can support and foster traditional procedures as well as provide new opportunities for new forms of democratic actions. These new opportunities are most of all opened within civic society, by and for social movements, in particular by increasing their communicative power. He also reminded the audience that when discussing the Internet and democracy, one should not forget the great increase of surveillance which happens at the same time as participation, petitions etc. are supported, but that these two aspects are discussed in separate communities while it would be worthwhile to assess the net effects. Lawrence Pratchett, De Montfort University drawing on a report by Trechsel, Schmitter et al. prepared for the Council of Europe looked at the state of democracy in the member states of the Council of Europe and supported the notion of democracy being a contested phenomenon. Although the signatories of the Council of Europe have signed several chartas and many resolutions, there is the paradox that there are more democracies than ever in Europe, but that there is no definite set of agreed principles or values on how institutions should deliver democracy. On a very general level, there is representative democracy in the prevailing form. But it is facing the biggest challenge in its history indicated by low voter turnouts, increasing disengagement and a growing mistrust of politics and political institutions. There is a strong need for change and reform. But one should not expect too much of technical innovations. Institutional reforms are required, and long-term global trends have to be considered as well such as economic globalization, aging effects, intercultural migration,

6 terrorism and others. No prediction is possible of how edemocracy will change democracy. But for certain, democracy in Europe will still vary over time and geographically also in the future. Finally David Osimo, Institute for Prospective Technological Studies, Sevilla, took a closer look at recent changes in Internet technologies, called Web 2.0, participatory web or usergenerated content. From a few available quantitative studies, an interesting distinction can be derived which is quite relevant for edemocracy. Out of 100 Internet users only 3 % are producing content, but 10 % are providing ratings and reviews, and 40 % are using this user-generated content. This means that user-generated content has multiple effects beyond the still small group of producers and that possibilities for ratings and reviews can improve transparency beyond those who do the ratings but provide orientation for a much greater part of the users. Session 2: Where we are The second part of the conference was devoted to six subfields of edemocracy with several contributions each. These contributions presented individual research results, mainly case studies or reports. The second part of each session was devoted to assessing the state of the art and identifying theoretical and methodological challenges. Session 2A on evoting had attracted the largest number of papers by doctoral students. The session was introduced by Alexander Trechsel, European University Institute, and Robert Krimmer, Center for evoting and Participation. Two participants had come from Brazil to learn about the recent development in technical support of online voting. There is an increasing number of online voting options within board elections in associations, but as technical security cannot be guaranteed by 100 %, almost all political bodies withhold online voting for political elections. Protagonists argue that the paper-based procedures do not meet the 100% benchmark and that evoting should be evaluated with more pragmatic yardsticks. The security issues themselves are so sophisticated, that they are understood by a very small expert community only. Session 2B only attracted one paper by a doctoral student from Ukraine. It was chaired by Georg Aichholzer, Austria, who looked at the relationship between egovernment and edemocracy because within egovernment a lot of public sector information is provided to the public. While there are different basic assumptions, there is a certain contribution to improving democracy. Unfortunately one invited speaker had to cancel her participation who was to discuss the issue of intellectual property rights which are narrowing access to documents which so far were available for free on the Internet. The main presentation was provided by Ms. Helena Jäderblom, Sweden, who presented an overview of Freedom of Information legislation in Europe and a draft convention of the Council of Europe which shall establish a high level standard across Europe. This convention requires a monitoring of its implementation. But there are neither appropriate concepts nor methods for assessing the quality of FoI implementations. Therefore she would like to see more research on classification of documents and search functions, improving internal processes of providing documents on appeal and evaluation processes. Herbert Kubicek reported on attempts of improving electronic search functions in Bremen,

7 Germany, and Uddevalla, Sweden (EVOICE project), as well as on third-party platforms, which collect documents, which had been subject to a FoI request as well as trying to track and trace such requests. This role of third-party NGO involvement is an important political science research question. On the information systems side, there was agreement that the present dispersion of requests having to be directed to the agency who possess desired information calls for more integration. But there is need for a multi-dimensional comparative assessment of the integration of documents vs. the integration of meta-information on still decentralized documents. In addition, a comparison across sectors such as environmental information and information in personal registers could improve identifying barriers. Session 2C on econsultation and edeliberation was introduced by Lawrence Pratchett, De Montfort University, and had attracted four papers by doctoral students. Lawrence Pratchett maintained that consultation and deliberation are not just opposite ends of a continuum but rather belong to completely different political ideologies and traditions. While consultation addresses citizens as individuals, even as consumers, and citizens participate by stressing their individual interests, deliberation is about forming collective preferences and about community building. With regard to electronic tools, Lawrence Pratchett saw shortcomings of the present practice and research that very often only one tool is employed in one econsultation or edeliberation process thus covering only a certain phase of a larger and longer democratic process. Accordingly, he argued for looking at sequencing different tools and suggested the concept of democratic enactment by Saward. Hilmar Westholm, Institute of Information Management Bremen, Germany, also suggested to look at sequences of tool deployment and illustrated such sequences by practical examples. In addition, he pointed to the need for distinguishing and combining tools and measures of primary participation and meta-communication, i.e., publishing information about participation offerings in mass media in order to gain attention and increase involvement. In this view, eparticipation is supported by a specific media mix, depending on the theme, the target group, and the democratic procedure at stake. Steffen Albrecht, Germany, reflected several cases of edeliberation in Germany and argued for the need for comparative evaluation of the existing one-case case studies. While it is quite easy to analyze the arguments and dialogues in electronic processes, it is almost impossible to analyze the actors in order to elaborate on motivation and any impact. Michele Campagna, Italy, reported on a three-country comparison of ICT support, in particular by Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in urban planning (Austria, Denmark and Italy). While there is a great potential of GIS to improve citizen participation, they so far are employed mainly for internal processes only. Celia Colombo presented results from a survey on online participation in Catalan municipalities. Anton Shirikov raised the question whether it is possible to recreate republican institutions today employing deliberation, at least at local and regional level. At the European University, St. Petersburg, in an ongoing project, political processes are modelled in the republican mode by way of online simulation games in order to illustrate this concept. In Session 2D on ecampaigning and eactivism, Thierry Vedell, Center for Political Research, FNSPICNRS, Paris, distinguished two basically different kinds of campaigns. There are electoral campaigns, seeking to win voter support for parties or candidates, and there are advocacy campaigns trying to influence public policies or corporate strategies. Electoral campaigns are much more directed and carried out against a fairly homogeneous national background, while advocacy campaigns are much more heterogeneous, less clearly defined. Accordingly the ways of ICT support vary quite a lot. An important issue in both areas

8 concerns the changing or declining role of mediators, in particular mass media, for example by using blogs. Aino Gallego reported on an ongoing project trying to assess the influence of the Internet on political participation in Spain. Dorina Gutu discussed the impact of new media on European campaign practice. She found that blogs are not yet frequently used in political campaigns all over Europe. Audrey Shakay reported on political campaigns in Slovakia where e-tools did not play a significant role and discussed whether it might become more relevant in the future. Session 2E dealing with emovements was very close to campaigning. Jens Hoff started by proposing a distinction between existing social movements using ICT to improve their internal and/or external communication, against Cyber-movements, which would not be possible without the Internet. He proposes to use the term emovement only for the latter because otherwise almost every movement would be an emovement and the prefix would not make sense. The question what different kinds of movements are using the Internet for is still an important one. For structuring this research field Jens Hoff referred to different affordances which the Internet provides. Ovid Boyd reported his research on how Swedish grassroot parties employ the Internet. Participants of this session questioned whether grassroot parties should be considered to be "movements" or whether at some point of the development movements decide to become parties. Andrea Calderaro reported research trying to analyze the role of mailing lists in a global movement using the case of the Global Justice Movement. Anastasia Karada has studied the role of lists in organizing the European Social Forum by the alter-globalization movement, in particular looking at internal changes in the structure of the movement caused by new organizing technologies. Custiano Maciel reported on virtual communities in Brazil and Arina Shadrikova about NGOs in Russia using ICT. There was a lively debate about the scope and characteristics of social movements and the use they make of ICT. But most important and controversial were the questions of how these movements are changing because of the use of ICT and how their role in society changes. Bill Dutton dared to predict that via the Internet social movements may become a fifth estate. In this lively debate there was a lot of speculation because there is little research on ICT in social movements. So far there is a big gap between social movement research and Internetrelated communication studies. In Session 2F on epetitions chaired by Ann Macintosh, Mathias Trenel reported on an evaluation study of the epetioning system of the German Federal Parliament, which has been borrowed from the Scottisch parliament. Daria Santucci added information about other cases such as the Romanian parliament or Norwegian municipalities. Session 3: Where we want to go In each session, several issues regarding the state of the art of research and future research challenges were discussed, which were summarized by rapporteurs. The chair had provided a list of questions for this assessment. But before discussing the research challenges from a researcher's perspective, a panel was to discuss the practical challenges of edemocracy in a multicultural Europe. This panel was

9 chaired by Michael Remmert, Council of Europe (CoE), who presented the engagement of the CoE in promoting democracy in its 47 member states. The CoE had issued recommendations for e-voting standards and recommendations on electronic governance back in 2004, and a declaration of human rights in Recently, an Ad Hoc Committee on edemocracy (CAHDE) has been established to elaborate recommendations for edemocracy. The chair of this committee, Thomas Buchsbaum, Austria, referred to the experience in this committee by explaining the complexity and practical difficulty arising from multiculturality, including different forms and traditions of democracy, concepts of minorities and their rights, different views of the state and citizenship and many others. He also pointed to the fact that edemocracy is most frequently treated as a national, regional or local issue, but not as an issue of transnational decision-making. The European Commission and Parliament are exceptions. But there is almost no transparency or participation regarding other supranational organizations. Regarding etools, he listed technical, organizational, cultural and legal challenges. There is a wide variety of tools, but little guidance what to use for which purpose. CAHDE will try to create some degree of standardization and would be happy to collaborate with academics from the emerging edemocracy field. Dylan Jeffrey, Programme Director for Local edemocracy and eparticipation, UK, reminded the participants that multiculturality is not only an issue in transnational decision-making, but also in local government with communities where members belong to more than 40 different ethnic groups with different languages etc. He addressed the changes in immigration as well as a radicalisation and new fundamentalism and the changes in public policy and public opinion in response to bomb attacks. He stated that there is great confusion of how to deal with these changes appropriately, in particular surveillance and/or trust building. He reported on a UK national programme to revitalize neighbourhoods to increase cohesion and race equality, "Connectivity, Capability, Content", which among other things provides grants to local initiatives to connect and give them a voice in the Internet. Dimitry V. Efremenko reminded the audience that Russia is a multicultural and multiethnic country with 240 million people speaking Russian, but there are regions with other languages. For example, the Jewish Authonomy offers an egovernment web portal in Chinese. There is a debate whether egovernment websites should be provided in the language of minorities and whether it facilitates building identities of small ethnic groups. RuNet provides a space for political and ethnical pluralism, and despite authoritarian tendencies on the national level there is pluralism on the regional and local level. On a second panel, the issue of assessing and evaluating edemocracy activities was addressed. Daniel van Leberghe, Political Institute, Brussels, presented the edemocracy Value index, which is used for ranking of websites in the annual European edemocracy Award. Mikael Sandberg, University of Halmstad, pointed out that the notion of democracy as a contested concept, mentioned in the first plenary session, is, according to Robert Dahl, a constitutive element and basic dimension. According to Dahl, contestation is the second dimension of democracy and much more difficult to measure than participation. He proposes to conceive edemocracy as a continuous institutional innovation. Statistical surveys may provide data for dynamic modelling, but these results are hard to understand and could not be used for feedback to the public. Finally the rapporteurs of the six working groups met in two parallel meetings and answered the questions regarding the state of the art of research in their areas. The results are compiled in the table attached to this report and were summarized by the chair in his final contribution.

10 He came back to the edemocracy or rather eparticipation research map trying to integrate different views or elements of eparticipation as well as the context factors and effects which he had offered in order to localize individual research efforts and to identify more crowded and less served areas. There were no references to this map during the conference. This may be because this mapping exercise adopts a rather abstract view on different edemocracy areas and processes, each of which has its own complexity. This is why the six working groups on different subfields had been set up. And looking back at the whole conference, this was most fruitful. Even the senior researchers working for a long time in this field have specialized in one or two of these subfields, and it is rewarding to recognize and compare the state of the art between these sub-areas. As the comparative table shows in all sub-areas, there is a dominance of single case studies, comparisons of a few cases or local or regional surveys. But there are no valid representative data on the extent of e-support to the respective process. The guess was that only a few percent of all processes where participation is offered or required include some online facilities. Also in all subfields there are no internationally agreed definitions of central procedures and institutions because of national differences, and there are even less standards for evaluating the quality, effects or impacts of these procedures and of their ICT support. There was huge consent that edemocracy research is entering into a second phase. After case-based exploration of what is possible, research now is turning to classification and explanation by comparative methods. Comparison may be carried out between edemocracy procedures and/or subfields, between countries. This is in line with insights from DEMO-net. In the first review of eparticipation research Ann Macintosh and Stephen Coleman conclude, that a great deal of research in the area of eparticipation is still exploratory and descriptive, asking general research questions that seek to understand eparticipation as a practice. While this kind of research is necessary and valuable in an early stage, meanwhile more analytical and explanatory research arises which is driven by disciplinary paradigms and contributing to the respective disciplines, in particular political science and political sociology. But his leads to partial insights only. The key challenge is to do more sophisticated collaborative multi-disciplinary research in order to establish a set of research questions and problems that are specific to eparticipation. One suggestion is to analyze, differentiate and compare ecologies of eparticipation, that means no longer study specific examples in isolation, but to explore differences and commonalities between different eparticipation activities in terms of technology, systems, structure, patterns of use etc. This applies not only to eparticipation but also to the other five subareas distinguished above and is in line with the approach followed in this conference, where the need for comparative research turned out to be the key issue. Comparing the six subfields discussed on this conference, there is a mismatch between empirical frequency and research efforts. While there is much research with a small but wellestablished community on evoting, there is almost no systematic research on emovements. Although almost every social movement today uses some kind of ICT for internal or external communication, there is no comparative research. While for evoting there is a discussion between legal and technical science, social movement research is not yet linked to ICToriented communication studies. Participants at the same time agreed that for social movements the Internet opens new opportunities which might change public opinion building more radically than in any other subfield and that therefore more systematic research is

11 urgently needed. A concrete step might be to apply for a follow-up research conference focussing on social movements and the Internet and getting together to different disciplines dealing with social movements so far. The biggest challenge identified was to assess the effects and impacts of e-support in democratic processes. Participants agreed that there is a lot of speculation and ideology, but almost no hard data. At several points of the discussion during the whole conference there was the recommendation not to concentrate on the e-tools, but to put them in place and context by starting from the procedures and institutions. Taking up the idea of systematic comparison, one proposal was to choose a certain subject area, e.g., climate change, and to compare edemocracy programmes and tools which are employed on the local level in a number of selected countries. A mall group of participants agreed to prepare a proposal for a comparative project within the EUROCORE programme of the ESF. The chair agreed that there is a low level of knowledge available on the effects of e-support. But he warned not to pose unrealistic expectations on comparative research, because for the last 30 years the effects and impacts of offline democratic procedures has neither been assessed in a rigorous and valid way, and we cannot achieve more in the online world than in the offline world. Putting edemocracy into context does not only mean to refer to the policy field and the institutional context of participation, petition etc., but also, as Dylan Jeffreys showed, to countervailing trends. edemocracy is finally about human rights in society. Therefore research looking at enhancements via new technology should recognize restriction via the same technology as well. Monitoring of SMS and traffic is just one example. So far there is absolutely no exchange between research on edemocracy on the one hand and research on privacy, civil rights, censorship, surveillance, security etc., on the other hand. Although most of future research efforts will take place within the subfields, participants agreed that a conference looking at all the subfields still is worthwhile in the future. Three senior researchers agreed to look for national funds for organizing a bi-annual follow-up of the same format as this conference. Finally the Ph.D. students noted that the whole conference was very rewarding for them, giving them the opportunity to present their research in small expert groups with people from other countries but also learning about Ph-D. projects in other areas, thus broadening their perspective in two directions. As a means to continue exchange, the chair pointed to the online provision of all papers and presentations at and via a forum on the DEMO-net website, where this report may be discussed as well. Assessment of the results and their potential impact on future research or applications The conference for the first time brought together researchers dealing with different subfields of edemocracy such as evoting, eparticipation or emovement. There are similarities and

12 differences, which were considered highly relevant for progress within each subfield as well as for establishing the whole field. Forward Look Plenary Discussion State-of-the-art in the field In all six subfields, previous research is anecdotic, focussing on one or a few cases without being able to localize these cases in broader classifications. In most of these fields, only recently comparative research is being started. Emerging topics The biggest impact of new technologies is expected on social movements, existing ones as well as emerging new cyber-movements. But so far there is almost no link between social movement research and ICT-oriented communication studies. The most important aspect in all subfields is to assess the effects and impacts of employment of e-tools. Visions for the future of the research field identification of issues in the 5-10 years & timeframe There is a vision that e-tools research will be fully integrated into voting, participation or social movement research and not be continued as a parallel string besides research on the democratic procedures and institutions and that there are more comparative studies on the roles, effects and impacts of e-tools across these different contexts. Is there a need for a foresight-type initiative? A foresight activity could try to assess the net balance of ICT application and effects on human rights, comparing the new opportunities for enhancing and revitalizing democratic participation vis-à-vis more extended surveillance and monitoring, restricting privacy and similar measures in the name of security. The reaction of the participants to the location and the organization, including networking, and any other relevant comments Once people had arrived, they loved the location, but they all criticized the long and winding way to get there. Organization was perfect. Date & Signature: