EISCO 2007 – Inauguration Ceremony,
April 16, 2007.
Presentation by Halvdan Skard, President of the Congress of local and regional authorities
The digital revolution – a new step for European democracy
The new millennium has witnessed important and crucial social changes that will have a long term impact on the political and governing processes of our modern democracies.
Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have opened up new horizons and created different forms of human interaction, while important social and political changes have influenced the political and governing processes of our modern knowledge based
societies. As the evolution of our modern political and democratic processes is becoming inherent to the revival of the civic dialogue and the relationship between the different political, public and civil actors of civil society and the citizens, there is a growing need for the different actors of eDemocracy and eGovernment to redefine modern politics and governance in cyberspace.
Less than 10 years ago the terms eDemocracy and eGovernment were not part of our
vocabulary. Nowadays, they have become hot and vibrant topics in our modern world.
Two developments have increased interest in eDemocracy. First of all the continuing political disengagement which is materialized through low voter turnout in European, national, regional and local elections and the detachment of citizens from public services and political actors. Secondly the development and increasing uptake of new technologies like internet, mobile phones and digital TV by citizens. Information and communication technologies and eDemocracy are changing the relationships between elected representatives and their constituents, between governments and citizens, as well as creating new forms of participation for civil society in the decision-making and policy-shaping processes.
There is a widespread belief that the use of new technologies has the potential to help reverse this decline in political engagement. The main objective of eParticipation initiatives is to make representative democracy stronger by harnessing the power of new technology to encourage citizen participation, deeper democratic interaction and more open and transparent decision-making. It is about enabling participation, engaging citizens and empowering citizenship.
For practical purposes we can divide eDemocracy into two distinct areas -eVoting and eEngagement. eVoting involves of course the use of ICT in the election process. eVoting systems can be used in different types of elections, from professional or community elections to national or European elections. Nowadays, there are 2 types of eVoting systems. The most common are onsite systems that have networking capabilities, also called intranet voting, but which are not linked to the World Wide Web. The other type is Internet based systems also called Internet voting.
eEngagement is the use of ICT to provide public access to information, consultation or active participation. Information is a one-way relationship in which councils produce and deliver information for use by citizens, equipping them with the knowledge to participate further in the democratic process. Consultation on the other hand is a two-way relationship in which citizens take part in consultations instigated by the council, with the aim of enhancing the community involvement in democratic processes. Active Participation is a relationship based on partnership with councils, in which citizens actively engage in the policy-making process. It acknowledges the role for citizens in shaping policy.
The aim must be to become sensitive to workable combinations of political, economic, organisational and technological methods of engagement. To be successful, it must be integrated into a broader adaptation of government-citizen relationship building. The important factors in eDemocracy are thus people, institutions and processes.
In recent years there has been a shift with regard to discussion on eDemocracy from speculative futurology to piecemeal experimentation and embryonic policy. A number of pilot projects have shown good progress in utilising digital technologies to make representative democracy more effective. Estonia became the first country to have legally binding elections using the internet as a means of voting in the local elections of October 2005. Estonia also staged the world's first national general elections to include an internet voting option on 4th of March 2007. Some 3,4% of Estonians took up the opportunity offered to them and cast their vote electronically in the preceding on-line voting period. Other interesting initiatives include the European ePoll- and eVoice-projects, projects in the Flanders, Nord-Pas de Calais region, in Great Britain and of course the Demo-Net project which will be demonstrated later at the conference.
An important question when considering eDemocracy projects is what obstacles and barriers we are most likely to meet. There are at least four kinds of obstacles to the success of eDemocracy. They may be political, participatory, organisational or technological.
Some barriers are of an institutional nature. Politicians and administrations sometimes find eDemocracy initiatives disruptive – the risk of eParticipation working too well and the risk of administrations not being able to cope. There may also be a question of whether eDemocracy policies have adequate political backing and problems of locating eDemocracy practices within the complexity of governance.
Other barriers are related to scepticism about the public demand for eDemocracy and questions about trust and about data protection and user authentication. There is also a question about the so called “bottleneck of attention”, how to win the battle for people’s attention in an overload of available information and websites, and how to win “the rules of credibility”, whereby people decide what information to trust.
Then there is the possibility of e-participation exercises being dominated by special interest groups and danger of failing to reflect the diversity of society and ensure differential participation. There is also the possibility of creating barriers to digitally excluded groups, such as older people, versus younger people who have a stronger potential for engagement in eDemocracy initiatives.
Many people are also concerned about what we may call “pseudo-participation”. People will only want to participate if they believe that they understand how they can contribute to the political process and believe that their contributions will be taken seriously. Elected representatives and democratic institutions can contribute by employing eDemocracy initiatives only where participation is meaningful and can be shown to be so.
eDemocracy projects have often proved difficult to maintain as permanent democratic features. Reasons for this may be under-resourced organisational approaches and a tendency to develop pilot projects rather than sustainable strategies. It is also necessary to pay attention not only to the internet but also to other technologies such as television, cable television, digital TV, mobile phones, optical fiber and wireless networks. Modern eDemocracy projects must consider integration of technologies through multiple platforms.
Another question of relevance is that of identifying what response is needed by policy actors and research to help overcome existing barriers and to identify the most useful initiatives in making the best possible use of new technologies in representative democracies. We need to look more closely at how citizens use information and what they demand from eDemocracy projects and we need to better understand what people want from e-democracy, e-administration and e-services. We need to gain better understanding of how organisations adapt to new flows of information and communications, for example through quantitative research on amount and nature of information that elected representatives receive. We also need better studies on website usability and on the accessibility and neutrality of online consultations and polls. Furthermore we need research on how to build tools that are specifically designed for democratic purposes and research on low-cost technologies that could facilitate eDemocracy.
A final question is whether we do in fact need a “digital bill of rights” identifying the right for citizens to identify elected officials and contact them via email, the right to access retrievable videos of council and legislative body meetings; the right to free software to help citizens organise and lobby around issues of importance, free email accounts, publicly funded information in a digital format, electronic voting systems etc.
To facilitate eDemocracy at local and regional level is of course an important issue for national associations for local and regional authorities and for CEMR. In particular I would like to draw attention to the Cracow Declaration on Local Agenda i2010 urging “Each Local and Regional Authority to implement digital communication systems to allow individual citizens and relevant stakeholders in their territories to actively participate in decision-making processes on local matters directly affecting their living and working conditions”.
eDemocracy is also an important issue for the Council of Europe which has a special responsibility for supporting and strengthening democratic development in Europe. The Committee on Culture and Education prepared in September 2005 a report and a resolution on "Young people and new information and communication technologies (ICT) - a new opportunity for Local Democracy". The report recommends that Local authorities should seek to bridge the digital divide by adapting technologies and providing infrastructures in order to make them accessible to all user groups, regardless of any individual, social or cultural characteristic or geographical location. Therefore more efforts should be made by local politicians to promote youth participation in local life via ICT as to narrow the gap and ensure that the most economically underprivileged are not deprived of these new tools of communication and information access.
A special symposium is being arranged next week in Strasbourg where the main purpose is to discuss the nature and added value of e-democracy based on lessons learnt from e-democracy experiences in Council of Europe member states, while also identifying areas for future research. The symposium should also give input to the Council of Europe Committee of Ministers, and will also serve as a contribution to the 2008 session of the Council of Europe Forum for the Future of Democracy, to be held in Spain with e-democracy as main theme. This report and input should contain an e-democracy toolkit, i.e. a set of generic e-democracy tools, developed on the basis of good practices in member states and describing their core conceptual and technological features. Importantly, the Symposium will furthermore give all participants the possibility to learn about new developments in e-democracy and to exchange views and experiences with other researchers or practitioners of e-democracy.