Shefali Virkar

Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, UK

Over the last two decades, there has been increased

questioning of traditional democratic politics in
Western liberal democracies, largely due to a decline
in and a lack of opportunity for public participation in
these processes. Such concerns are largely thought to
be manifest in, amongst other phenomena, low voter
turnout during elections: a trend particularly noticeable amongst young people where only half of those
eligible to vote actually do so (Fagan et al., 2006). This
is especially problematic for national governments, as
it speaks of growing political apathy and a broader,
more general disillusionment with current political
institutions, actors, and practices.
Whilst it is impossible to comprehensively untangle
all the reasons behind the decline in civic participation,
there is little doubt that many citizens feel distanced
from any sense of political relevance or power, often
labouring under the impression that not only will
their votes and individual voices be drowned out in
the clamour of the crowd but also that the rules which
govern their daily lives are drawn up by politicians and
bureaucrats whom they will never meet and who are
usually extremely difficult to contact (Eggers, 2005).
The fundamental flaw lies in traditional decisionmaking practices which are, in their current form,
often democratically inadequate as they fail to provide
extensive and relatively equal opportunities for citizens,
communities, and groups to contribute towards the
shaping of decision-making agendas (Sclove, 1995).

The focus of discourse and scholarly activity, both in

academic and policy circles, has thus gradually shifted

away from a more centralised, top-down conception

of government, those formal institutions and processes which operate at the level of the nation state to
maintain public order and facilitate collective action,
towards the notions of governance, an idea which,
whilst traditionally synonymous for government has
been captured in recent theoretical work as signifying
a change in the meaning of government referring to a
new process of governing; or a changed condition of
ordered rule; or the new method by which society is
governed (Rhodes, 1996, p. 652).
Governance is thus seen to be ultimately concerned
with crafting the conditions for ordered rule and collective action, or the creation of a structure or an order
which cannot be externally imposed, but which is the
result of the interaction of a multiplicity of governing and each other influencing actors (Kooiman &
van Vliet, 1993, p. 64). It is thus a conceptual way of
capturing shifts in the character of political rule that
has been stretched to encompass a range of different
transformations including an emphasis on drawing citizens and communities into the process of collaborative
participation in political processes and the creation of
new forms of governable subjects (Newman, 2005).
The idea of governance may therefore be said to
comprise of two distinct but complementary elements:
that of government, which encompasses all the formal
institutional and legal structures of a country, and democracy, which can be said to refer to the participative
and deliberative processes which operate within those
structures (Virkar, 2007). In this view, facilitating the
involvement of different sections of society in the
process of government is now seen as a democratic
prerequisite in many advanced liberal democracies,
with commentators such as Fishkin (1995) highlighting
the need for mass deliberation, and emphasising the

DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-5888-2.ch271
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need for people and their representatives to be brought

together to collaborate on issues of mutual interest.

Whilst early speculations on the Internet and democracy

emphasised the potential for direct, unmediated debate
and discussion and stressed the radically transformative
nature of the process of public engagement (Margolis,
2007), this article follows the view of those who believe that whilst e-democracy in its purest sense may
be altogether incompatible with a political culture of
litism (often unavoidable within the framework of a
representative democracy), it is in practice sometimes
neither feasible nor indeed desirable to replace what
has evolved so far. Both theorists and practitioners talk
of creating a civic commons in cyberspace (Blumler &
Coleman, 2001) that would elicit and coordinate citizen
comments and reactions to problems facing public institutions in order to create a link between e-government
and e-democracy to transcend the one-way model of
service delivery and exploit for democratic purposes
the feedback paths that are inherent to digital media
(Coleman & Gotz, 2001, p. 5).
In employing this method of conceptualising
discussions surrounding e-democracy, this article
will focus on e-engagement, which as a policy, if
defined by an express intent to increase the participation of citizens in decision-making through the use
of digital media would involve the institutionalised
provision of resources and opportunities to facilitate
responsible and collaborative decision-making of the
sort that would result ultimately in institutional and
social change. Further, its central thesis would aim
to highlight areas of tension and synergy prevalent at
the interface of e-democracy theory and practice and
outline policy recommendations that would support the
use of technology as a means of complementing and
bolstering, rather than dramatically transforming along
any particular ideological line, existing institutions
and processes of representative democracy through
the enhancement of communication and information
flows between government and its citizens.
Simultaneous with the shift towards a more inclusive
process of participation has been an increased interest
in the new digital Information and Communication

Technologies (ICTs). Historically, developments in

communication technologies have resulted in changes
in the way in which governments function, often challenging those in power to find new ways in which to
communicate and interact with their citizens. In keeping
with this trend, the recent exponential growth in access to new digital media in the developed world, and
the expansion of a newly-created digital environment
wherein people shop, talk, and otherwise spend large
parts of their lives in online spaces, has opened up a
plethora of new opportunities for interaction between
power lites and the various constituent elements of
civil society. At the same time, however, the rapid
proliferation of these new technologies has raised
important questions and triggered debates as to who
is able to participate and to what extent they may do
so, as well as dealing with the types of participation
such technologies make possible at different levels of
government and their impact on different government
institutions and democratic processes.

A long-established way of engaging citizens in dialogue

with policy makers is that of Consultation, a process
whereby citizens are given the opportunity to provide
feedback to government on matters of public importance
and participate in the shaping of issues relevant to them
(OECD, 2001). Whilst there is a need for dialogue
at several different stages during the policy process,
the process of consultation has traditionally involved
discussion based around a pre-determined policy issue
defined by the government during its initial formative
stages, on which citizens views and opinions are then
sought (Rosen, 2001). The government also sets the
questions and manages the process, often laying down
the parameters within which the consultation is to take
place, and only in rare cases are citizens are invited
to suggest issues for discussion which they as private
individuals might consider particularly important.
At the core of the consultative process lies the
provision of information and the establishment and
maintenance of channels of communication between
government and its citizens. The use of ICTs in consultative processes is catching on as their potential for
allowing policymakers to interact directly with the

users of the services, to target the opinions of those at

whom a policy is aimed, and to seek general citizen
input on matters of national importance is gradually
being recognised. The speed and immediacy of ICT
networks allow people to communicate, give feedback,
ask questions, complain, exchange information effectively, and build relationships with their representatives.
Governments too may benefit from any information they obtain by using it to enhance the quality of
policymaking and general administrative functions.
Broad guidelines for conventional written consultation by more traditional means are already in place in
most of the Western world, and these are now being
used as a basis for e-consultation, with this type of edemocracy encompassing what may be referred to as
a continuum of consultation ranging from low level
information gathering and aggregation towards a fuller
quasi-deliberative level of interaction (OECD, 2003).
Despite contrary claims from scholars such as Rash
(1997) and Bimber (1998), however, the consultative
model is not without its problems as it is sometimes
presented as facilitating direct, unmediated access to
government for special interest groups of a sort that
may distort opinion on particular issues. Information
gathered from the consultative process is usually
regarded as a passive resource, largely due to the fact
that communication by direct questioning is based
on the need to generate quantifiable and comparable
responses to particular policy innovations. The result is
that the consultative model may only allow for inputs
that fit within parameters already set down by policy
makers, with a marked danger that opinions which
question the necessity or legitimacy of a policy or
otherwise be outside the ambit of pre-defined issues,
are deliberately marginalised or excluded altogether,
particularly if discussions are moderated.

Since the early 1990s a wealth of online applications

have emerged which have transformed the original
purely text-based read-only medium of the Internet
into one that supports dynamic and modifiable richmedia content and enhanced interactions between
people regardless of temporal and spatial constraints.
While these technologies are used most extensively in

a consumer and leisure context, some are beginning to

make inroads into and make an impact in the political
arena but are, in comparative terms, still to be taken
seriously as tools for facilitating greater public participation (Ferguson, 2006). These may be categorised
according to their frequency of use:
1.

2.

3.

Frequent-Use Technologies and Applications:

Those already used by government in its dayto-day functioning include e-mail, online polls,
online surveys, online forms, mailing lists and
newsgroups, and asynchronous bulletin boards.
Occasional-Use Technology and Applications:
These are occasionally used by government to
engage with the public, although they are primarily used in leisure and commercial contexts, and
include blogs, forums, and instant messaging.
Rarely Used Technology and Applications:
These technologies and applications have potential to engage citizens, particularly younger
generations who use them, but they are rarely
used in policymaking and to foster public participation. They include: file-sharing programmes,
virals, wikis, online games, mash-ups, budget
policy simulations, social networking sites,
virtual online environments and MMORPGs,
and chat-bots.

The emergence of new web-based media such as

weblogs, online forums, wikis, and web-chats (collectively known as Web 2.0 media, social software or
participative media), which support user-generated
content and are inherently network-oriented, have
further altered old relationship equations between
government and its citizens, principally by transforming
their roles in participative deliberation. The recasting
of citizens, in particular, from passive consumers of
that information into citizen-users or active entities
in the process of information broadcasting people
who upload, rather than merely download, information
online has broken down government monopoly on
the distribution of that information.
It is an inescapable fact that, despite the great hype
surrounding the use of the Internet and other technologies in reforming democratic processes and involving
citizens in policy consultations, there are still relatively
few examples of such initiatives in any one country.
In order to further the analysis of issues affecting the
impact of ICTs on existing democratic frameworks, this

paper sets out a three-fold categorisation of noteworthy

cases across the world along different axes depending on
their duration, the level of the participating government
organisation, and the audience from whom feedback
is sought. e-Consultation initiatives may be classified
into three categories, discussed briefly below:
1.

2.

Duration: Projects when classified according

to duration may be examined under three subcategories long term, short term, and one-off
consultations depending on the length of time
that they lasted for.
a.
Long Term Consultations: include those
consultation initiatives which were either
specifically set up as long-lasting initiatives
or which became permanent initiatives after
an initial trial period.
b.
Short Term Consultations: include those
initiatives that seek citizen opinions on specific political events or during a designated
fixed period of time. These initiatives are
thus intentionally short-term, are focused
on getting citizen input for a specific purpose, and come to a close once the event
or time period is at an end.
c.
One-off Consultations: are highly specialised issue-based e-consultations which
are held on an ad hoc basis for a fixed
period of time. Such consultations tend
to be used by government as a means of
gathering information from a well-defined
target group on a specific, often pressing
issue and, of the three types of consultation
discussed so far, are the most likely to have
a visible impact on government policy.
Level of Government: Case studies may also be
classified according to the level of government at
which they are implemented; more specifically
as projects implemented by local government
agencies, at the level of national government
and at the inter-governmental or supranational
level.
a.
Local Government: e-Consultation projects of note initiated at the level of local
government.
b.
National Government: e-Consultation
initiatives begun within national government ministries and associated institutions.

Inter-Governmental or Supranational
Initiatives: Initiatives that involve collaboration and cooperation across borders
between sovereign governments.
Nature of the Target Audience: Projects may
also be categorised and discussed according to
their target audience or in terms of the section of
the population from whom feedback is sought.
Whilst most initiatives are generally concerned
with obtaining feedback from the general public
on a variety of issues, a small number seek to
obtain specific information from a carefully
targeted, often specially selected group.

c.

3.

The development of the Internet and more generally

the constantly-evolving concept of the Information
Society are structurally changing public policies in a
number of ways, particularly affecting those dealing
with access to public information (Catinat & Vedel,
2000), introducing into the political system new ways
of conceptualising old values such as transparency
and new styles of public administration.
With the current generation of citizens being not
only information-consumers, but increasingly acting
as producers of web content, the innovative use of
Information and Communication Technologies offers
up the possibility of new consultation spaces and the
potential to increase the breadth and depth of citizen
participation in the public sphere. There is thus a need
to recognise top-level applications as being not simply
a means of communication but of two-way engagement,
and the citizens who use them to be not just passive
receivers of information, but instead active participants
interacting within already-existing creators of space,
tools, and data. Governments thus need to start focusing beyond the technology and begin engaging with
people in the spaces they create.
Representative democracy in its most traditional
form is therefore being increasingly challenged as
citizens demand more participation in public affairs,
including new forms of accountability and control
of government, and as the Internet and its associated technologies make the logistical distribution of

public information much easier and less costly. In addition, protection against the infringement of certain
fundamental rights particularly those pertaining to
privacy and personal data is often left either to selfregulation or to the market-place, with some arguing
that if citizens are concerned about their privacy then
they will use technical tools and services available to
protect themselves.
This form of laissez-faire regulation is, however,
usually based on the assumption that not only are users aware that their information is being monitored
and being used in particular ways by those collecting
it, but that there does exist ways and means by which
they might guard against unnecessary intrusions and
fraud. A purely market-driven or individually-regulated
approach and the commercialisation of data runs the
risk of eventually resulting in some users being rich
enough to afford to pay for enhanced information services such as encryption technology, with most others
would have to accept data monitoring to access the same
services; thus deepening existing inequalities from the
standpoint of geographical, social, and demographical
imbalances in access to network technologies (Catinat
& Vedel, 2007).

Issues surrounding user authentication and information

security thus have the potential to impact the ability
of a deliberative process to generate trust and increase
participation by determining access to information,
the protection of citizen identity, and the prevention
of abuse of government systems. Whilst it is generally
agreed that citizens should have full access to public
data which inform them about the goings on of their
government, just as government is in a position to collect
data on individual citizens, there is a need for this to be
balanced out with data disclosure legalities and other
data storage requirements (Catinat & Vedel, 2000).
At the same time, legal barriers and inconsistencies, political apathy amongst citizens, and problems
of digital and social exclusion are still very much stumbling blocks that governments need to contend with.
Just as a government should not take on extra-legal
powers to increase surveillance or impinge on privacy
without strong justification and/or explicit consent
of its citizens, similar standards should also apply to

the collection and handling of citizens data. This is

because whilst certain types of data ought perhaps to
be available for use by all government departments,
it is clear that as individuals are citizens of the State
not of the current administration, the custodianship
and control of their data should reside with an independent body that might adequately guard it and set
appropriate permissions on the use of those data in a
manner devised to enable, empower and facilitate the
continuing involvement of citizens in public affairs
(Royal Academy of Engineers, 2007).
Solutions to tackle contingencies and issues arising
from the use of new technologies from a government
perspective might involve designing a new process
or system, or adding to an existing system in a manner that clearly demonstrates pro-activity and a clear
improvement on what has gone before; rather than
mere cut-and-paste activity which involves the direct
translation of an offline institution or practice to an
online one without clearly indicating that this is the
case. At the same time, there is a need to find a means
of tactfully reminding citizens that some institutions
have been built over hundreds of years and are not
going to change dramatically overnight. From this
perspective too, it is perhaps necessary to ensure that
some basic principles and standards are embodied
in national and supra-national laws and regulations,
making them mandatory.
From case studies documented in existing eConsultation literature, the key to successful projects
appears to be the ability of governments to combine
not only the creative use of new technologies with a
balanced understanding of the Internet and of what
actually works online, but also to adequately understand
citizens and their motivations and be able to anticipate and tackle the (often unrealistic) expectations of
citizens, politicians, and other government servants
regarding the technology. To this end, the timing of a
consultation is also of paramount importance: if held
too early or too late in the policy process there is likely
to be little policy impact, and outcomes may result in
disaffection for the Government and a backlash against
the technology that is not wholly justified.

From discussions of ICTs and public decision-making

it is amply clear that the process of governance, particularly in the digital age, is not simply a one-way or
top-down process: it has come to involve give-andtake from both government and citizen and a definite
expectation from both parties regarding the exchange
of information. When neither party trusts the other and
where each feels that the other is not providing them
with adequate information to allow for a trouble-free
flow of ideas and services, then governance breaks
down as neither is likely to be willing to sign up
to anything the other might put forth, regardless of
whether it might improve a system or not. The relationship between technology and trust thus needs to be
explored and dealt with thoroughly within the context
of e-Consultation if a meaningful and sustained twoway interaction between a government and its citizens
is to be developed and maintained whilst balancing
existing notions of privacy, data protection, and new
and emerging variants of Digital Rights.
In conclusion, any government that chooses to
use ICTs to increase citizen participation in decisionmaking processes would be wise to ensure that public
engagement in the Digital Age does not either completely supplant the offline decision-making processes
of elected representatives, or altogether reject online
public participation. Instead the Internet, together with
its associated technologies and applications, should be
harnessed to help elected representatives strengthen
their democratic mandate and develop better-informed,
popular policy proposals to further strengthen State
institutions. ICT-based public engagement may not,
in the long-term, wholly replace conventional, more
personalised methods of government-citizen interaction, but can definitely be used to complement them
so as to overcome their shortcomings and provide
government with new methods and innovative ways
through which it might reach out, communicate, and
interact with its citizens now and in the future.

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E-Administration: Which refers to the improvement of government processes and to the streamlining
of the internal workings of the public sector often using
ICT-based information systems,
E-Consultation: Refers to the process whereby
citizens are given the opportunity to provide feedback
to government online on matters of public importance
and participate in the shaping of issues relevant to them
via the new digital media.
E-Democracy: May be defined by the express
intent to increase the participation of citizens in
decision-making through the use of digital media and
the application of Information and Communication

Technologies to political processes. e-Democracy may

be subdivided into e-Engagement (or e-Participation),
e-Voting, e-Consultation.
E-Engagement (or E-Participation): Refers to
the overall enhancement of opportunities for greater
consultation and dialogue between government and its
citizens through the encouragement of online citizen
action and citizen participation in political processes
electronically.
E-Governance: Refers to the use of ICTs by
government, civil society, and political institutions to
engage citizens in political processes and to the promote
greater participation of citizens in the public sphere.
E-Government: Refers to the use of Information
and Communication Technologies by government
departments and agencies to improve internal functioning and public service provision. Broadly speaking,
e-government may be divided into 2 distinct areas:
e-Administration and e-Services.
E-Services: Which refers to the improved delivery
of public services to citizens through multiple electronic platforms
E-Voting: May be defined broadly as the expression and exercise of fundamental democratic rights
and duties online through specially developed digital
platforms.