Making eParticipation Policy - A European Analysis
57 Pages Posted: 4 Feb 2011
Date Written: 2009
Abstract
The creative and disruptive characteristics of digital networks have profound consequences for the production of citizenship, which has always been technologically constructed, but now derives its significance from a tension between elite intentions and network flows. Our aim in this paper is to explore this tension empirically by interrogating the process of policy-making with regard to eParticipation in six European countries.
This Demo-net Booklet proposes a new way to look at eParticipation. By now, eParticipation has become a field of policy itself. Thus, there is a growing need to go beyond (and behind) the analysis of its practices and to seek to investigate the logics and the strategies implied, explicit as much as ‘latent’. Crucially, within the frame of network society, eParticipation is a relevant ground of deployment of the dynamic nature of the institutional and non institutional processes of agenda setting and decision making. This fact has important implications for research about the transformations of polity, public policy and democratic participation.
The Introduction of this booklet (1) is devoted to explain such main idea. A better comprehension of eParticipation requires to contextualize the emerging practices with reference to different political system, social and communicational settings. A first step in this direction is provided through Chapter 2, which is focused on the institutional and social contexts of eParticipation in six European countries (Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, UK). For each country, institutional and political conditions, eParticipation infrastructure and policy, eParticipation initiatives initiated by civil society are sketched. Chapter 3 offers an introduction about the political role of civil society in network society and five brief case-studies about a range of quite differentiated experiences, promoted by non institutional actors in the different countries. The final Chapter proposes some methodological and comparative considerations, and a new research approach to cope with the growing complexity of this field.
Keywords: eParticipation, e-democracy, public sphere, European democracies
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