Of E-Democracy & Digital Governance
Democratic institutions across the world have been under the threat of populist leaders, big business and corruptive forces. E-democracy is used as a mechanism that can revitalize democratic processes and enhance public trust in government.
E-democracy can be intuitively defined as the practice of democracy using digital tools and technologies. These tools and technologies can be used to provide information and promote transparency, or they can enhance public participation in decision-making processes.
As a prominent example of e-democracy is the US portal regulations.gov, which provides an online implementation of the notice and comment doctrine. Regulations.gov provides easy access to draft regulations as well as convenient online commenting system. Nevertheless, regulations.gov does not facilitate the dialogue between the citizens and the government or among the citizens themselves. The regulatory agency is the one that consolidates and interprets the comments. Similar initiatives are available in other states such as Canada and UK.
Another example is the British petitions website. On this website, British citizens can create a petition and if they are supported by five people and meet the standards for partitions, they are published on the site and can receive the support of other citizens. A petition committee reviews all petitions and select those of interest to learn more and sometimes press for action. If the petition gets 10,000 signatures, it gets a response for the government and if it reaches 100,000 signatures, the petition will be considered for a debate in the Parliament.
E-democracy platform serve three main functions. The first function, enhancing transparency. E-democracy platform facilitate deeper transparency by giving better access to draft regulations, legislative protocols, and by also allowing live broadcast from parliamentary debates and internal regulatory processes. The live broadcast of the FDA Advisory Committee meeting regarding Pfizer, Beyond Tech and Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine is one example of the transparency enhancing qualities of e-democracy. Promoting transparency is a crucial precondition for rational deliberation and for effective monitoring of government action.
The second function of e-democracy platform is to provide a cost-effective mechanism for allowing citizens to comment on draft regulations and to provide local knowledge and ideas to the government. Finally, e-democracy can also provide the conditions for more substantive involvement of citizens in governance processes by creating a new virtual public sphere for deliberation and by using new technologies such as Wikis for collaborative rulemaking or participatory budgeting.
This idea of democracy has first surfaced about a decade ago with the belief that the Internet and enhance and reinvigorate democracy. According to this approach, reducing the cost of participation could allow more people to take an active role in democratic deliberative processes and to contribute to the development of solutions to come on dilemmas. Giving people a voice through the internet would have a positive impact on decision making processes across every dimension of the political arena, such as legislation, urban planning budgeting and more.
This cyber optimism has been a prominent feature of the first wave of digital democracy initiatives. An important manifestation of the first wave of e-democracy applications in the US, is the US Portal regulations.gov.
The second wave of e-democracy can be characterized by the attempt to create hybrid models of participation, which brings together digital tools with more traditional forms of participation and by the development of new technologies that can facilitate more intensive dialogue.
A prominent example is the hybrid model Regulation Room, developed by a team of legal experts from Cornell Law School. This web based consultation platform is based on a design of digital tools with intensive human support. The Regulation Room team succeeded in increasing participation levels and in facilitating richer contributions from the public. At the same time, the project underscores the fact that eliciting significant participation requires the investment of considerable effort, both by citizens and by those who seek their informed policy input. An example of a more advanced technological model is the Wiki architecture, Wiki platforms such as Wikipedia provide an opportunity for collaborative learning and knowledge production. Using Wikis allow for multiple users to jointly create one hypertext. However, along with the great benefits of using Wiki in democratic processes, one should acknowledge that Wikis are cognitively more complex than the simple commenting tools used in the first wave of e-democracy and in platforms such as regulation.gov. Despite the high hopes that were initially raised by Web Democracy technologies, reality is more complex. The naive approach that was implemented in websites such as regulations.gov showed that it is difficult to create engagement and to achieve meaningful participation in democratic processes.
We now understand that it is not enough to simply provide an opportunity to comment on regulatory drafts, in order to achieve significant public participation. The second wave of digital democracy was characterized by the emergence of more sophisticated tools such as, wikis and e petitions. But these new models do not provide satisfactory response to the challenges we identified.
The main challenge for democracy is to facilitate broader participation, and to increase the systemic quality of the deliberation process. One suggestion introduced recently by Livermore Edelman and grown, is to use advanced language processing tools. To extract more meaning from the royal corpus of comments received by regulatory agencies. Using AI tools, they were able to highlight the more significant comments from the large pool of comments. Using modern AI techniques such as topic modelling agencies can identify, subject matter categories in an unstructured corpus. And exposed trends and themes still from a democratic point of view, this approach does not assist in improving the quality of the deliberation process. Another problem is that using AI to extract meaning from a large corpus raises concerns, regarding accountability, control and agency.
The future of digital democracy is to use especially designed autonomous social votes, intelligent democracy votes to enhance the democratic capabilities of citizens. Leading to augmented democracy. While the term social votes has been recently used primarily in a negative fashion, the idea of democracy boat shows the positive potential of such autonomous agents. Autonomous social votes are designed to act in ways similar to how person might act in a social interaction. And
E-democracy both can receive as input the political preferences and views of their principles. And according to them, participate on their behalf in digital consultation processes, exploiting sophisticated AI algorithms. Of course, citizens can invest in greater effort and participate themselves in some participatory processes, while leaving others to their social boat. Although current social both technology is not sophisticated enough to realize these visions, it seems that less sophisticated social boats, based on simple heuristics are within our reach. For example, environmentalists can use social boats in order to adapt their opinion of the most reputable, environmental NGO that took part in the consultation. Alongside the positive potential of democracy boats.
This technology raises various challenges. First, we need a reliable authentication mechanism that would enable agencies to distinguish between, legitimate boats used by authentic citizens and malicious ones. In addition, boats can be used to spread false information. Furthermore, the introduction of artificial agents into the deliberation process, can depend the polarization of the deliberative space. Without enhancing the systemic value of the comments. The internet has great potential in enhancing participation in democratic processes and promoting open democracy. This understanding led to the first wave of E-democracy applications which was mainly based on notice and comment doctrine.Ie notifying interested citizens about the initiatives and allowing them to comment by email. This doctrine was implemented in the US regulations.gov website and in similar websites in other countries.
However, despite the initial optimism, it became apparent as more experienced was gained that getting people to participate in digitally mediated processes, and achieving an epistemological significant output constitutes a difficult challenge. This understanding led researchers to look for new approaches, such as using collaborative tools and combining online and offline interactions in a hybrid form. Further approaches, which are still at the experimental stage, are using data analysis and natural language processing to enable the extraction of meaning from a large corporate of comments and the introduction of the democracy votes.
