Why e-government is going to change our lives?
Extract from an interview in the 2007 Summer Review magazine.
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Is e-government (or e-administration) an essential preliminary before offering the citizens/consumers new tools like e-voting, e-petitioning? In other words, can new technologies create a basis for “e-democracy”, providing, of course, that security and confidentiality are ensured? |
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| Many people argue that effective e-government (or e-administration) tools are an essential, though not necessarily sufficient, precondition for the development of e-participation: e-government creates and justifies the technical infrastructure for e-democracy and encourages citizens to have regular contact with public bodies through the Internet and other technologies. However, there is an important counter argument to this position. The tools of e-government view or “construct” the public primarily as consumers of services, encouraging service users to see themselves as being involved as individuals with particular bodies, often in an economic transaction, and emphasising their rights. Democracy, on the other hand, is about collective action and shaping the needs of a community: democratic processes should “construct” the public as citizens with shared responsibilities. Online democracy solutions that grow straight from e-government run the risk of reinforcing public identity as individualistic consumers rather than democratic citizens. Such an argument does not prevent e-government and e-democracy from sitting along side one another: it simply encourages those building e-democracy solutions to think carefully about how they want citizens to engage. |
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Do you think that the sum of local experiences should create a global e-democracy? How can we go from local to global in this case? |
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Our recent research in five European countries shows that there are not that
many different edemocracy initiatives out there. Most localities that are
experimenting with e-democracy are focusing on four or five key initiatives: e-voting,
e-petitioning, e-consultation, blogging and online discussion forums. However,
the ways in which these apparently similar tools are being used, and their
relative success, varies considerably between areas, due mainly to the different
political contexts in which they are emerging. These differences in experience
mean that we cannot expect a global e-democracy that will work the same
everywhere on the same technologies. However, what is emerging is a wealth of
experience among both politicians and citizens in relation to using these tools
for political engagement. In the sense that these skills are transferable at
different levels of governance and in relation to a wide range of policy issues,
so a global e-democracy is emerging.
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How can e-democracy, as we see in France in Issy-les-Moulineaux or in the UK (the recent e-petition against the transport policy), boost citizens’ freedom? |
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New e-democracy tools allow greater citizen freedom in at least two ways. First, they allow much wider engagement: citizens have much greater opportunity to join in, without the usual temporal and geographic constraints that they might experience in the offline world. Second, they allow for greater spontaneity in political engagement, because the old “rules” about who defines the political agenda and so on are changed by the new technologies. However, we should not get carried away. Old fashioned politics still dominates. Indeed, it is interesting to see politicians in France and the US A engaging with Second Life and My Space as a way of reinforcing their political messages. Web 2.0 may change the way in which messages are communicated but it is also possible to see great continuity in the way politicians (and citizens) behave in the world of virtual politics.