Participating in the Digital Society
Article No.: 17, Pages 1 - 13
Abstract
Many signs today indicate a decline of both democracy and trust in the Internet and social media. This seems to make digital democracy a hard sell. Furthermore, for digital democracy to be globally relevant, it is necessary to find ways to also make it useful in countries with less-democratic or even authoritarian regimes. This is where a majority of the world's population live and where improvements are most important for the world to become more democratic.
Drawing on the concept of “citizen participation” [Almond and Verba 1963] and the Information System Artefact model [Lee et al. 2015], we discuss how participation can be improved in countries of any regime in terms of the technology used, the information flows, and the social systems in which technology and information are used to communicate. Examples from Sweden and Uganda, countries with very different regimes, illustrate how improvements can be made everywhere, however, only with considerable effort.
The main conclusion is that democracy is not something you have but rather something you do. It has to be implemented every day, mostly in small steps and often in the context of administration rather than politics. Because such contexts occur also in authoritarian countries, technology can be used to improve participation everywhere.
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- Participating in the Digital Society
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Published In
April 2020
120 pages
EISSN:2639-0175
DOI:10.1145/3394083
- Editors:
- Soon Ae Chun,
- Beth Simone Simone Noveck
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Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 09 April 2020
Accepted: 01 September 2019
Received: 01 August 2019
Published in DGOV Volume 1, Issue 2
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