E-democracy may be the 21st centurys most seductive idea. Imagine technology and democracy uniting to overcome distance and time, bringing participation, deliberation, and choice to citizens at the time and place of their choosing. Goodbye, then to attack ads and single-issue politics - and to dimpled chads. E-democracy will return the political agenda to citizens. Or so the dream goes.
Can the dream become reality? Will e-democracy develop into knee-jerk direct democracy, with every citizen voting on every issue? Will dangerous minorities gain new life online? Will what James Crabtree calls civic hacking, a new agenda of online citizen initiatives to advance social goals, take off? An a priori solution to these practical questions seems unlikely. We must look to practical experience to find the true merit of e-democracy.
Canada might seem an obvious place to look for a fair trial of e-democracy. The country is wealthy, internet-aware, and searching for ways to re-engage increasingly indifferent voters. Perhaps most important, Canadas small population lives in a slender ribbon along the worlds largest undefended border. Technologies to overcome gaps of time and distance are highly relevant to Canadian democracy.
Even in these favourable conditions, e-democracy has not yet flourished in Canada. Other challenges loom larger in political life. Yet there are emerging signs of progress in testing e-democracy in Canada, as the small, eastern province of New Brunswick dips into the information age.
A small province takes its chances
Innovation is never entirely risk-free.
New Brunswick is one of the have not provinces of Canada. Around half of its 750,000 citizens live in rural areas associated with old-economy jobs in forestry, mining and fishing. Citizens in urban areas are part of the shift towards knowledge-based economies, and there are noteworthy successes in forest management and aquaculture where these old economies are transformed by new economy-driven research.
E-democracy has a place in the effort to bridge the innovation gap between New Brunswick and wealthier provinces like Ontario or Alberta, but its precise role remains unclear. E-democracy is still seen as an expensive and risky investment. There is no guarantee that it really can play a part in creating social capital or new networks of trust and cooperation resulting in economic wealth through better decision-making. Yet innovation is never entirely risk-free, and this is understood in New Brunswick. A significant e-democracy experiment has been tried, with useful results and if e-democracy can survive in these conditions, it can survive anywhere.
Early lessons: online is best
How much did the e-consultation really change things? Not an iota, said one city official.
The port city of Saint John in New Brunswick is faced with a declining municipal income, a shrinking population of less than 75,000, stagnant incomes, and a lower than average number of home-internet connections. City officials there were faced with a stark choice: deep cuts to services or sharp increases in taxes.
City officials opted to include citizens in the decision-making by conducting a public consultation on the citys budget choices in October 2002. Brochures detailing the citys budget were distributed to every household, and citizens were offered the option of responding to questions on paper or online.
In a working-class city with no record of public consultation or of jurisdictionally representative government, there was little reason to hope for more than participation by the fervent few who attend any opportunity to tell government its business.
Yet at the close of the four-week run of the consultation, a total of 317 persons spent the approximately ten minutes it took to complete the questionnaire, with 218 (69%) of them actually participating online.
The implications of the experiment for good governance in Saint John will require more study. The basic facts are that the consultation did involve citizens, the results were presented to the city council, and the council directed that this report be referred to the City Manager for consideration as part of the 2003-2004 budget process. City officials interviewed agreed that the e-consultation was worth repeating, but remained sceptical regarding a permanent place for e-democracy in the life of the city. How much did the e-consultation really change things? Not an iota said one.
But what did change was the fact of consultation where previously there was none. And we now have fresh knowledge that many citizens do indeed prefer to be consulted online.
A union of passion and ambition?
Offering options to citizens is good; asking citizens to participate in building new options seems much better.
As we continue to evaluate, we are planning for the next consultation in Saint John. One particularly attractive topic suggested by officials is: renewal of the citys ageing water and sewage system. How should it be done; when; and at what cost?
This issue is complex. In Canada, both federal and provincial governments routinely fund infrastructural renewal. Public health issues are raised at provincial government level, which then receives much of its health funding from the federal government. The municipal government in Saint John needs a plan that can be supported financially by the citys citizens, who must be consulted and kept informed as policy options are developed, evaluated, and implemented.
How could e-consultation on this topic work? The University of New Brunswicks globally-recognised expertise in Geographic Information Systems (GIS), plus Service New Brunswicks web-delivery of government services, may combine to present geographical information to citizens perhaps in a toolkit enabling citizens to construct and share with one another model solutions to the central issues raised by government. Offering options to citizens is good; asking citizens to participate in building new options seems much better.
With hard work and luck, automated text summarisation tools may be sufficiently developed to enable rapid and accurate identification of families of opinion shared by citizens. If they can express their views in their own words instead of by multiple-choice questions, the danger of the consultation tools dictating the result can be minimised.
For the moment this sketch is just that. But this time, we have experience to add to our passion and ambitions for e-democracy.
The dystopian version of e-democracy
But in contrast to this optimistic vision, some predict that e-democracy will entail failure, obstacles, and gloom. Here, I will assess in turn three potential threats loosely associated with e-democracy which can be labeled as populist, elitist, and moral.
Populist threat
One worry about e-democracy is rooted in the tension between technophile culture and the culture of democratic theory. Some technophiles suppose that the proper goal of e-democracy is direct democracy, and that this will entail an end to representative government.
On the other side of this divide, democratic theorists wonder whether e-democracy is anything more than instant polling - suitable for selection of all-star teams, but hopelessly blunt as a tool for solving fine-grained problems of public policy.
Both worries share a core: that e-democracy is somehow a fundamental change to democratic practices, involving an entirely new mode of populist democratic life, bearing either great benefits or unbearable burdens. There is no easy answer to these worries. The real effects of e-democracy will largely depend on the technologies employed and on the political culture of the users. But such uncertainties should not lead to an automatic embrace of pessimism. There is nothing about e-democracy that entails populism and the attendant risk of a tyrannical direct democracy. It does not need to extend to voting at all, if we choose other techniques like e-consultation and online citizens advisory panels (to name only two). The technology will never determine its own application, and may even be a distraction; as Bill Thompson writes in openDemocracy, there is a need to look at how the network itself is governed, at the ways we democratise the e rather than making democracy electronic.
Elitist threat
Pessimists about e-democracy also point to the potential hijack of its technical devices. E-consultations, the argument goes, might become dominated by political parties, communities of special interests - or even a single, clever hacker who denies access to others.
The e-consultation in the City of Saint John could have been a prime candidate for such a hijack. The budget proposal included significant cutbacks to police and fire services, whose representatives appeared in force at council meetings. Yet this display of interest did not carry over to the e-consultation. There were no signs of any untoward attempts to dominate online discussion or to conduct the e-equivalent of stuffing the ballot box.
This might be attributed to the small size of the consultation, and citizens relative lack of familiarity with its methods or merely to New Brunswickers decency and friendliness. In any case, it is far from clear that e-democracy is any more susceptible to abuse than conventional methods of gathering public opinion.
E-voting can be conducted with the same level of transaction security as online banking. There are various strategies to limit the ease with which individuals or groups might dominate proceedings in online consultations, and some of those strategies may be much more respectful of the foundational ideas of democracy than currently popular mechanisms such as citizen panels or citizen juries.
The primary flaw in pursuing democracy via such sampling methods is that they deny the importance of the activity of choosing. Citizen panels, polling, and other techniques that involve sampling of citizens are offensive to autonomy as a complex cluster of rational capacity, emotional dispositions, interests, and crucially, activity that unites this cluster of characteristics. By contrast, automated text summarisation techniques are very close to my heart as techniques that both facilitate autonomy, and (if we get the algorithm right) allow each individual to count for one and none to count for more than one.
Moral threat
This leads to the final worry, the moral threat to real democracy posed by e-democracy.
A cynic might point to the current preoccupation with e-service delivery and Client Relation Management (CRM) as a harbinger of inadvertent yet genuine damage to existing democracy. This is no idle worry. Robert Randall and Alexandra Katseva, in CRM: Welcome to the Engagement Age argue that client or customer relations management is somehow the key to genuine democracy:
"CRM is not a technology as much as it is a business strategy, a service commitment, a business process mode, and a new organizational paradigm. As a catalyst for the Engagement Age, CRM is poised to take electronic service delivery to a new level a customer-led plan that enables true government, and indeed, true democracy." This strange recipe swirls together technology, strategy, service, process, and paradigm to generate true democracy. But there is nothing said about the troubling implications of assuming that citizens are just clients of government.
See Karin Geiselhart's rich, useful resource guide to e-democracy research and projects worldwide.
Isaiah Berlin famously asserted that, Liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or happiness or human conscience. E-democracy, we might say, is e-democracy, not customer service or client service or efficiency or good public relations or good business.
This proposition is of course not a full explanation of what e-democracy is. That is still hard to offer, partly because there isnt much data to explain yet, but perhaps more importantly because e-democracy is not an idea best understood by an explanation. Rather, e-democracy is a normative concept whose proper content is open to argument, as particular societies ask whether the new information and communication technologies (ICTs) bring tools or methods for renewal or replacement of their democratic institutions.
But how will we ask these questions? Again, I believe that practical experience and implementation is a better guide than abstract proposals. Thus, I will conclude with a down-to-earth anti-list of the four main obstacles to a full and fair trial of e-democracy.
Will e-democracy happen?
The first and most important obstacle to full evaluation of e-democracy is, simply, cost. After the bursting of the dot-com bubble, governments are quite reasonably suspicious of wise persons bearing ICTs. While here-and-now issues of service delivery, efficiency, security and inter-operability crowd public servants agendas, there is little incentive to invest money and effort in blue-sky e-democracy projects.
It may involve a higher level of risk than our societies are willing to accept.
The second obstacle, and only slightly behind, are the jurisdictional barriers to e-democracy. The issues most in need of public discussion often cut across departmental boundaries. E-democracy exercises are hampered to the extent that the inevitable problems of their introduction reinforce pre-existing problems of coordination.
A third obstacle to e-democracy is the absence of political will. This can emerge even when passion for democracy overcomes jurisdictional barriers. Politicians, the public service sector and citizens need to share willingness to take up the new methods of e-democracy. (In this light, the ideas of governance as learning discussed by Geoff Mulgan and Tom Bentley in openDemocracy are significant and welcome). It is difficult to assess when these wills have converged, and even more so to measure successful implementation of e-democracy: lower crime rates, better local services, more citizens expressing satisfaction with government?
It may involve a higher level of risk than our societies are willing to accept.
The fourth and final obstacle to e-democracy is precisely the element of uncertainty or risk. If e-democracy may involve a higher level of risk than existing democratic societies are willing to accept - in terms of the reform of institutions which have long worked well or at least adequately why choose it?
It is hard to justify supporting e-democracy while its goals and conditions of success remain elusive. But the experience of New Brunswick suggests that the imaginative use of e-democracy may in time make it integral to a healthier civic landscape.
