Web 2.0: New Challenges for the Study of E-Democracy in an Era of Informational Exuberance

By Andrew Chadwick. 2009

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This paper seeks to broaden the debate about edemocracy. Since the emergence of the e-democracy movement, most projects and analyses have used rich and sustained deliberation on an often-romanticized “Athenian” or “public sphere” model as a yardstick to both judge and empirically measure outcomes. This approach, heavily influenced by an ideal of rational critical discourse, has proved notoriously difficult to embed in political organizations. As a consequence, the use of digital network technologies to shape public policy is generally met with incredulity by most politicians, public servants, and citizens. Following a brief critique of the assumptions underlying the literature to date, this paper sketches out an alternative approach—one based on the incentive structures that seem to shape how public servants and citizens now behave online. The approach is derived from preliminary observations of the low threshold co-production behavior characteristic of what has come to be known as “web 2.0.” While it may not live up to the high ideals of the deliberative public sphere, * Head of Department, Politics and International Relations, and Founding Director, New Political Communication Unit, Royal Holloway, University of London: http://newpolcom.rhul.ac.uk. I am extremely grateful to the following: Vincent Price and Oren Perez for their helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this paper; Nick Anstead for his careful research assistance; the Moritz College of Law and the Mershon Center for National Security Studies at The Ohio State University for their financial support. This article is an output of the International Working Group on Online Consultation and Public Policymaking, an initiative of the National Science Foundation’s Digital Government Program’s project Building and Sustaining an International Digital Government Research Community of Practice (Award Number 0540069). Any errors or shortcomings are, of course, my own. I/S: A JOURNAL OF LAW AND POLICY FOR THE INFORMATION SOCIETY 10 I/S: A JOURNAL OF LAW AND POLICY [Vol. 5:1 some of this behavior has real value in online consultation and public policymaking. We should acknowledge that successful e-democracy programs may require a plurality of different sociotechnical values and mechanisms.

Subfields: Communication, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4c618c8867a979bb032fb4e44ec787be3761111f

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Citations in the corpus

Social media as a catalyst for online deliberation? Exploring the affordances of Facebook and YouTube for political expression (2013, background): “New information and communication technologies (ICTs) have been seen as mechanisms for increasing collaborative communication between the government and the public, especially in the past decade as democratic systems have become increasingly decentralized, interdependent and linked by new informatio”
Accidental exposure to politics on social media as online participation equalizer in Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom (2016, background): “The political relevance of this “information exuberance” (Chadwick, 2009) is enhanced by the constant presence of social media in people’s everyday lives—considering the countries included in this study, Germans spend 1.4 hours per day on social networking sites, Italians 2.5 hours, and British…”
Re-constructing digital democracy: An outline of four ‘positions’ (2011, background): “This liberal-individualist position is being advanced through a range of local and national government e-democracy initiatives (see examples in Chadwick, 2009, and at Steven Clift’s site at http://www.publicus.net/), as well as through commercial sites (for example, australianpolitics.com,…”
Studying political microblogging: Twitter users in the 2010 Swedish election campaign (2012, background): “Although many initial hopes for e-democracy (Chadwick, 2008; Hilbert, 2009) have gone mostly unfulfilled, the successful employment of the internet during the 2008 Obama US presidential campaign yet again raised voices claiming that so-called social media applications, microblogging services include”