Saving Democracy
from the Information Age
Copyright 2004 - For
free reprinting/translation permission, contact
me.
Saving Democracy from the
Information Age
Steven Clift, for CIO
Government Magazine, Australia
April 2004
For the past 10 years, governments
have had unprecedented opportunities to use technology to connect directly
with citizens. So why haven’t they?
“Is this the end of politics
as we know it?”
In the United States, journalists
around the country were recently falling over each other to write their
local article on the Internet and the presidential election. People are
using the Internet to “MeetUp.com” and get involved in the presidential
campaign of their choice. It is a real story.
I was actually asked the
“end of politics” question by a reporter back in 1994 when E-Democracy.Org
created the world’s first election-oriented Web site. Since then I have
seen waves of excess hype and scepticism about the role of new media in
elections, governance and community.
As far as I can tell, the
outcomes of elections, despite the Internet, are pretty much the same —
someone wins and someone loses. Most citizens remain cynical about politics
and government. Beyond sorting through their e-mail and putting their biography
online, politicians seem content to ignore online opportunities in governance
until the next election cycle.
Something has changed.
For the past 10 years, governments
have had the opportunity to use information and communication technologies
through e-government to connect directly with citizens. Government has
had the opportunity to become more accountable and transparent, and to
build the trust of citizens. Instead, most governments have taken the path
of services first and democracy later. Access to information has become
easier and many representative processes are more open than before the
Internet, but for the most part, what citizens experience has changed little.
Taking a path is different
from choosing a path. The vast majority of government “customers” want
convenience and efficient service delivery; however, in democracies we
are also “citizens”. We are the owners of government. Government has focused
on the one-way uses of the Internet and service transactions because few
citizens have asked for anything different. Democracy in the information
age is not a choice that will exist based on citizen demand.
What has changed is that
“politics as usual” has figured out how to use the Internet to further
their narrow interests. Online advocacy, while democratizing in many ways,
is primarily used to generate noise geared towards our representatives
and public processes.
Governments in wired countries
now face a fundamental challenge. Political interests are raising their
voices online, but governments, including our elected officials and representative
institutions, are largely unable to “listen” online. When speaking in Eastern
Europe, it really hit me: as designed, e-government is not able to accommodate
the will of the people. The lack of investment in the online needs of representative
democracy, compared to large investments in administrative services, is
changing the balance of power in our democracies.
Despite significant policy
explorations by governments in the United
Kingdom, Sweden and the Victorian
parliament, for example, it is amazing that the only state or nation
to adopt a formal e-democracy policy is Queensland.
(Also note the CitizenScape
project in Western Australia.) Not that you need a policy to have significant
government-based e-democracy activity, but it helps to move beyond rhetoric
and experiments to real investments that save democracy from the negative
aspects of the information age.
What Should Be Done?
At a World Summit on the
Information Society session in Geneva, I promoted “democratic evolution”
over the path of partisan “virtual civil war”. (Check back with me after
the 2004 US election. I predict online campaigning by “politics as usual”
will poison many a citizen’s view of the medium in politics and governance.)
Governments, as democracies, must act now in specific ways to ensure their
ability to e-listen to citizens, to make better public decisions and to
more effectively engage the public, civic organizations and business as
they implement public policy.
In my
Geneva speech, I suggested that the following best e-democracy practices
be made universal thorough the rule of law:
1. All public meeting notices
with agendas and all public documents to be distributed at that meeting
must now also be posted online.
2. All representative and
regulatory bodies must make all proposed legislation and amendments available
online the minute they are distributed as a public document to anyone.
3. Every citizen must have
the ability to access up-to-date listings of all those who represent them
at every level of government. Technology and practices must be implemented
to allow citizens and, very importantly, elected and appointed officials
to communicate effectively online with one another.
4. Funding must be provided
and technology implemented to ensure citizens the right to be notified
via e-mail about new government decisions and information based on their
interests and where they live.
Overall, when it comes to
e-government funding, I suggest that no less than 10 percent be set aside
for citizen input and democracy. Citizen input embraces “two-way” communication
including usability testing, user focus groups, site feedback systems and
surveys, and special applications designed for representative institutions
and elected officials.
After speaking hundreds of
times across 24 countries, mostly to e-democracy interested governments,
it is clear to me that what is possible is not probable. The best practices
and e-democracy technologies are not being effectively shared. If we want
the demonstrated potential of the new medium to spread, democratic intent
will be required. The default path I see, without a political and resource
commitment, is democratic decline. As we enter the second decade of e-democracy
activity, now is the time to use the amazing online tools before us and
build information-age democracy for our own and future generations.
Steven Clift is an international
e-democracy expert and board chair of E-Democracy.Org. His article for
the United Nations on e-government and democracy is available from: http://publicus.net/e-government/
