Towards Real Citizen Participation in e-Democracy

Krems.
I've now arrived at the 2010 Conference on e-Democracy (EDEM 2010) in Krems, Austria. I'll present my paper on the g4c2c concept with Adam Swift later this afternoon, but we start today with a keynote by Andy Williamson. He begins by pointing to the relative youth of e-democracy projects, and says that there's a lot to learn from the interesting failures of many such projects to date. Indeed, there's a problem with the academic language of many of these projects (democracy is a disputable enough term as it is - sticking 'e' in front only makes it worse).

So, what is it that we do, and how can we do it better? As societies, we have shifted from a culture of community to a culture of individualism; we are no longer just citizens but also (and perhaps primarily) consumers - including of government or democratic services. This is a problem - our behaviour as citizens should still be different from our behaviour as consumers, and if governments treat us simply as the latter, this undermines the democratic process. This applies especially also to online government services, of course.

Only 4% of the British adult population is actively engaged in local democratic processes; a further 5% aren't, but would like to be actively engaged (those 5% would constitute another 2.5 million citizens. This, Andy suggests, should be the primary audience for e-democracy processes. Another 24% (12 million Britons) want more of a say in how their communities are run, too. This is not a question of abstract involvement in democracy and politics, though, but participation in concrete local issues (municipal services, etc.) - national issues (like today's general election in the UK) remain substantially removed from this local level.

Importantly, there is also a strong cultural difference between these two levels: nobody trusts national politicians, anyway - the recent expenses scandal had little effect on politicians' standing, as it simply confirmed negative perceptions -, but local collections still continue to run deep. The issue here is related to the adoption gap between the innovators and early adopters of e-democracy approaches, and the majority of users (who remain disengaged). We have yet to move from the niche to widespread public acceptance.

This is related to the context for engagement, which privileges the rights and roles of individuals over the collective (echoing Thatcher's statement that 'there is no such thing as society') - this reduces the available opportunities for citizens to be engaged, debate, and modify their beliefs. If individuals are simply treated as individuals, we lose community cohesion and social capital. How do we reassert an independent public sphere, then, away from the powerful mass media sphere which continues to act as an individualising influence, and where other corporate and technocratic interests also interfere?

Andy points to citizen journalism and other grassroots media as an emerging if still limited corrective - but also notes that governments trust citizens as little as citizens trust government; governments tend not to be genuinely interested in citizen responses (and the few exceptions tend to prove the rule), because the outcomes of genuine consultation processes are unpredictable and difficult to deal with by standard policymaking processes.

A strong civil society is the sign of a healthy democracy, but this has been undermined over the past decades. Some NGOs have bought into the technocratic arguments of government, and positioned themselves as experts which 'represent' the views of the wider public, without actually engaging in significant citizen consultation. Many NGOs are simply lobbying organisations without any democratic legitimation - but they are nonetheless seen unproblematically as representing civil society.

The Internet is now seen as an opportunity to bring citizens back to the centre of democratic processes - but the way it is being utilised by governments and political parties is usually also simply as a symbolic and inconsequential show of participation rather than as true engagement. At any rate, how do you actually devolve decision-making down to citizens? And how do the outcomes of these processes filter back up to the local, state, or national government level? Technology certainly has a role to play here, but it is no panacea either.

There are many barriers to participation for citizens, too - mental, material, skills, usage, civil, and democratic access limitations all apply in various ways. Technology must be synthesised into community action - it cannot simply be a bolt-on addition, and this raises various practical problems. If done right, the Internet can lower the threshold to participation, but it cannot solve these problems of its own accord. The Net also facilitates single-issue politics - but there is a substantial gap between these new techniques and traditional democratic institutions. There is also the risk of astroturfing, and a lack of scrutiny of participants and their contributions.

So, we need strategies to support grounded leadership - and Andy makes a link between these questions and addiction theory: we have now recognised that we have a problem, and we have moved through the pre-contemplation and contemplation and preparation stages, but we have yet to move to the action and maintenance stages. These tasks are also distributed across various participants, whom Andy describes variously as citizens, reformers, change agents, and rebels; each of them has specific impulses to contribute to the change process. Telling bureaucrats to change the way they work and engage meaningfully with citizens is just as difficult as telling an addict to change their habits, in other words.

Digital media allow individuals to create effective campaigns in favour of specific goals, but ultimately, we need partnerships to establish effective e-democracy frameworks. We need effective community-government models to create real engagement. The challenge is to increase civic awareness and an attitudinal change towards digital media that positions them as an integral part of the democratic process, giving equal recognition to the outcomes of citizen-driven processes as is given to the views of experts. (The independent UK Patient Opinion site, driven by public feedback, is one successful example - and it contributes more than the official NHS feedback mechanisms. Andy also compares this with the academic publishing process, which is similarly confined to a niche area - much of the academic work that is published is using oscure language and hidden away in proprietary journals, minimising its ability to make a wider impact on society.)

Interestingly, Andy also highlights the work of the Australian federal government - in the context of the Government 2.0 Task Force - as an example of best practice. The fundamental question, he says, is how government 2.0 and e-democracy are empowering people.

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