International Journal of Communications Law & Policy

ICTs AND THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY
By Ignace Snellen

Download the Paper in PDF Format: IJCLP Web-Doc 6-6-2001

Abstract

Democracy theory is in need of a new foundation, a new paradigm. The existing paradigm is that people's representation by parliamentarians, members of Congress and local councillors is an inevitable, but second best democratic arrangement. The weaknesses of existing democratic arrangements that are perceived, are, that members of the representative assemblies represent partisan interests under the guise of the general interest, that they tend to follow only their own partial understanding of what is good for their constituencies, and that they are more responsive to the requirements of the political party they belong to, than to the citizens whose mandate they have received.

From their first being in existence ICTs are eroding the basis of legitimacy of the representational arrangements of the traditional democracy even further. The growing popularity of referenda, recall, co-production of policies and interactive policy-making underlines that people prefer direct democratic arrangements for the existing representative arrangements. ICTs make the distortion or misrepresentation of preferences of the electorate visible. Robert Dahl, the leading American thinker on democracy theory once cheracterized representative democracy as "a sorry substitute for the real thing". Representative democracy was deemed to be necessitated by the impossibility to realize direct democracy, by giving all citizens an equal opportunity to participate in the collective decision making process. ICTs' promise of direct democracy in the form of continuous opinion polling, instant referenda, teleconferencing, digital cities and discussion groups, makes the erosion of the legitimacy of representative democracy even more poignant. As a matter of fact, the promise of direct democracy through ICTs cannot be fulfilled.

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