Deliberation, EDemocracy, and the Virtual Public Sphere

1
Deliberation, E-Democracy, and the Virtual Public
Sphere

• Democratic deficit
• Participation
• Public Sphere
• Deliberative democracy
• Theory
• Practice
• WWW as self-generating public sphere?
• Engineering online deliberation

2
Democratic deficit

• Modern (liberal) democracies inherently deficient
• Ideal
• Greek word meaning rule by the people
• Government of the people, by the people, and for
  the people (Abraham Lincoln)
• Logistic problem
• Equal participation becomes impossible in large
  communities
• Emergence of elites unavoidable
• Historical prejudice
• Distrust in mass decision making by enlightenment
  philosophers, democratic theorists, founding
  fathers

3
Participation

• Voting
• From habitual to evaluative (rational)
• Ineffective form of citizen participation
• According to elitist theories (Schumpeter),
  voting is no more than a regularly recurring
  element of uncertainty in elite domination
  (incumbents could be thrown out)
• Declining turnout
• Party membership
• Parties increasingly centralised
• Professional campaign agents replacing members
• Members tend to be more radical than leaders,
  hence liability rather than asset in campaigns,
  in time of policy convergence
• Political activism (demonstrations, petitions,
  etc.)
• Increasingly disassociated from traditional party
  system and its power to mobilise
• Quasi anti-political participation

4
Participatory democracy

• Resurgence of substantive models of democracy in
  1960s/70s (e.g. Carol Pateman)
• Five building blocks of participatory democracy
  (Zittel 2003)
• Promotion of a new mode of decision making
  (deliberation)
• Strengthening of the direct mode of decision
  making
• Referendums/direct democracy (Switzerland,
  Ireland)
• Democratization of the local level (local
  democracy)
• Higher levels of political interest/efficacy in
  local matters than national
• More feasible to generate deliberative structures
  at local than national level
• Increased participation at local level could
  raise political interest/ perceived efficacy
• Democratization of functionally defined units of
  the political system (segmentation)
• E.g. workplace democracy, intra-party democracy
• Implementation of representation as delegation
• Not just responsible, but responsive
  parties/candidates
• Communicative and educative function of political
  representatives

5
The public sphere

• Habermas The Structural Transformation of the
  Public Sphere
• Defines public sphere as
• Autonomous (free from state/government
  intervention)
• Deliberative forum for open, equal debate of
  public issues
• Taking place in clubs, tea houses
• Mainly comprised of economically rising but
  politically marginalised bourgeoisie
• Distributed through (and taking place in) free
  press, which also confronts ruling elites with
  focus and state of public opinion
• Largely blaming mass media (centralization/commerc
  ialization) for transformation (destruction) of
  public sphere
• Degrading citizens from participants to audience
• Critical public transformed into apathetic mass
  (atomised individuals, who are being fed
  information)
• Reducing public opinion from collective opinion
  formation process into mere aggregation of
  (uninformed, unchallenged, underdeveloped,
  prejudicial) opinions

6
Deliberative democracy

• Modes of decision making
• Voting
• Aggregation of preferences
• Majority rule decision making
• Deliberating
• Aiming for unanimity/compromise
• Voting theories (in particular Rational Choice)
  assume
• that preferences are given (exogenous to decision
  making process)
• Deliberative democracy presumes
• Values are stable
• Preferences, opinions, tastes change
• Preferences change, although not compulsory, is
  the assumed purpose of deliberation
• Deliberation is successful if agreement is found,
  which implies some change in preferences
• Deliberation may help overcome decision making
  dilemma like vote cycles

7
Virtues of deliberation

• Civic virtue
• Discussion produces better citizens (more
  informed, active, responsible)
• Deliberation lowers propensity to (and benefit
  of) strategic behaviour
• Governance virtue
• Decisions taken following open discussions have
  greater legitimacy
• Deliberation enhances quality of decisions
• Cognitive virtue
• If opinions are not fixed, open dialogue gives
  rise to new, more articulated points of view
• Deliberation increases knowledge

8
Deliberative practice

• Deliberative polls
• Developed by James Fishkin in the 1990s
• Representative sample (ca. 300 participants)
• Invited to debate politics
• Measuring opinion change as a result of
  deliberation
• Findings
• Change occurs regularly
• Predominant tendency towards more liberal
  opinions through deliberation
• Moderation of opinions
• Deliberative organisations
• Goals
• Education
• Conflict resolution
• Cooperation
• Action
• Policy
• Deliberative groups predominantly goal-oriented
• Self-selection of members
• Deliberative practice tends to yield additional
  means of political participation for those
  already more politically interested and informed
  than the average

9
Technology and promise

• Internet emerging in early 1990s, coinciding with
  increased emphasis on deliberative democracy
• Technology promoted as solution of participatory
  deficit in Western democracies
• Means of communication (one-to-one, one-to-many,
  many-to-many)
• Decentralised
• Outside state control
• Allowing anyone to produce and receive text
• Parallel to 18th century media landscape
• Less exclusive than Habermas bourgeois debate
  clubs in 18th century

10
Technology and theory

• Instead of deliberative theorists embracing
  ICT/WWW as basis for reinvigoration of public
  sphere, it was cyberenthusiasts who incorporated
  deliberative thinking in their appraisal of the
  promise of online use
• it is through the free wheeling and rambling
  discussion that the online medium makes possible,
  that one can more thoughtfully consider diverse
  views. The Internet helps to remove the
  constraints to communication, to make it possible
  to explore what the underlying dispute or
  agreement is, and then to determine the new view
  that will resolve the issue in contention.
  This helps to generate the diversity of the
  variety of viewpoints that one has to consider to
  analyze a question or problem. In this process
  the wide ranging discussion made possible by the
  Internet is not limited to two communicators, but
  can include a large and almost unlimited number.
  (Hauben, 1999)

11
Online debates

• Internet - a self-reflective medium
• Most of the literature on virtual public sphere
  is published only online
• Extensive meta-debates within discussion forums
  (netiquette)
• Patterns of online use
• User adaptation to the medium
• Segmentation
• Social exclusiveness of technology
• Medium of use not consumption
• Unlimited filtering

12
Internet communities

• Self-selection
• Altering the concept of community (different
  entry/exit conditions than in face-to-face
  communities)
• Observed homogeneity in usenet groups
• groups that are evenly divided in opinion, or
  approximately so, must be rare. Asymmetry in the
  distribution of beliefs within groups is likely
  to be prevalent, particularly since it is known
  that individuals tend to seek out politically
  like-minded individuals. (Huckfeldt and Sprague
  1995)
• Group polarization (possibly detrimental effect
  on democracy)
• With respect to the Internet and new
  communications technologies, the implication is
  that groups of like-minded people, engaged in
  discussion with one another, will end up thinking
  the same thing that they thought before but in
  more extreme form. (Sunstein 2001)
• Tendency towards monological (rather than
  dialogical) mode of communication
• little more than a middle-class residents
  association in cyberspace (McClellan, 1994)

13
Blogging

• Participatory journalism
• sophisticated listening posts of modern
  democracy (Coleman 2005)
• Skewed distribution of weblog influence
• Partisan nature of blogosphere (in US)
• Cyberapartheid/cyberbalkanization (Putnam)
• http//www.drudgereport.com/
• http//www.dailykos.com/
• Networking and political influence of blogs
• Co-opting the counter-culture ties between media
  elite and blogs
• Material incentives (maintaining web traffic
  through free weblog content)
• Personal network ties (establishing trust in new
  medium)
• Expertise (providing local knowledge)
• Speed (first-mover advantages and online agenda
  setting power)

14
Engineering online participation

• UK under New Labour at the forefront of
  development of e-governance and e-democracy
• http//www.e-democracy.gov.uk/aboutus
• Tony Blair promising
• a new relationship between the individual and
  the state. We want to give power back to the
  people, and in return we expect them to take on
  greater responsibility for themselves.
• changing how national government is run as well
  as devolving power outwards to the people.
  (Blair, T. New Britain my vision of a young
  country London Fourth Estate, 1996)

15
Labours online strategy

• Stephen Coleman, Professor for E-Democracy,
  Oxford
• There are far more online communities in
  existence than most people realise, constituting
  an autonomous civic network that can only be
  healthy for democracy. We are interested in
  exploring how governments can connect with such
  online communities, but the main emphasis of this
  report is to examine whether and how governments
  themselves can initiate and sustain democracy
  exercises aimed at involving the public in the
  policy-making process. (Stephen Coleman and John
  Gøtze Bowling Together Online Public Engagement
  in Policy Deliberation London Hansard Society,
  2001)
• Two-way governance
• Information
• Consultation
• Active participation
• Moderation and mediation
• Deliberation requires trusted facilitation. In
  short, it does not just happen. (Coleman and
  Gøtze 2001)
• Rules for participants
• Regulate discussions
• Moderate messages
• Help reaching conclusions
• Summarize deliberations
• Ensure feedback to participants

16
Online citizenship in Britain

• Instrumental mode of communication
• Predominantly, information operates on a passive
  receiver
• Emphasis on government targets (delivery of
  government services online)
• Participation/Conversation
• Design shortcomings
• Building on commercial online technology use
• State interference/usurpation of public sphere
• Deliberative but undemocratic, hence impossible
  to institutionalize impact on decision making