4 Digital parliaments and electronic democracy

A comparison between the US House, the Swedish Riksdag and

the German Bundestag

Thomas Zittel

Parliaments on the net

As in many areas of social life, computer networks along with other kinds of new digital information and communication technology have entered the parliamentary sphere. This is the conclusion of a volume edited by Stephen Coleman, John Taylor and Wim van de Donk, which collects in-depth case studies on the digitalization of modern parliaments such as the British House of Commons, the Danish Folketinget and the Australian Parliament (Coleman et al. 1999). A comparative survey on new information technology among members of eleven legislative assemblies provides further comparative evidence on this trend towards digital parliaments. The respondents to this survey report the general availability of personal computers as well as widespread access to the Internet across all cases.² Intranets, videoconferencing technology, mobile phones and notebooks belong to the standard equipment of most of the respondents to this survey.

These kinds of empirical data stress the efforts that have been made on the part of legislative assemblies to catch up with the most recent developments in telecommunication technology.

To many students of media and political communication the proliferation of computer networks heralds the coming of an electronic democracy, which opens up new avenues for political participation. According to former chairman of NBC Lawrence Grossman, a new political system is already taking shape in the United States. He argues that new digital media are turning America into an electronic republic, which vastly increases the people’s day-to-day influence on political decisions (Grossman 1995: 3). Journalist Wayne Rash concludes his empirical study on digital politics in the United States with the observation that the Net is already giving voters a voice that reaches directly to the highest levels of government ( Rash 1997: 181).

From a theoretical point of view, these so called ‘cyberoptimists’ point towards the vast technological potential of the Internet for decentralized and interactive mass communication. They subscribe to the notion of technological determinism that assumes a causal relationship between major technological breakthroughs such as computer networks on the one hand and social structure on the other.

According to this perspective, the social diffusion of new digital media will trigger far-reaching social change in almost automatic ways (Toffler 1980; Naisbitt 1982;

Street 1992: chapter 2; Hoff 2000). From an empirical point of view, cyberoptimists emphasize new strategies of digitalized political communication in the parliamentary realm to argue their case.

Parliamentary websites are one of the most visible indicators for these changing strategies in political communication. In her book, Pippa Norris reviews on the Digital Divide the whole universe of parliamentary websites around the world.

Her numbers indicate that legislative Websites have become a universal trend throughout Scandinavia, North America and western Europe with the exception of Cyprus (Norris 2001: 132–3). A count by the Inter-Parliamentary Union found out that 87 per cent of all national parliaments in Europe have established a pres- ence on the web by April 2000 (Inter-Parliamentary Union 2000). A variety of case studies offer more in-depth analyses on the history and the content of particular parliamentary websites. Some of these studies emphasize the fact that these digital publications have been launched during the mid-1990s in an attempt to increase the transparency of the parliamentary process and to exploit new opportunities for interactive communication. To achieve this goal, legislative websites allow among others easy access to the full text of plenary transcripts and to information on the progress of legislation. Interactive elements such as email addresses or discussion fora are designed to foster interactive communication with citizens (Casey 1996; Coleman et al. 1999; Fühles-Ubach and Neumann 1999;

Mambrey et al. 1999; Coleman 2000).

In contrast to cyberoptimism, some students of electronic democracy are sceptical regarding the significance of digital parliaments for democratic government and political participation. These so called ‘cybersceptics’ claim that digitalized political institutions do not live up to the standard of electronic democracy and thus represent examples of technological modernization rather than political transformation. A substantial number of students of digital parliaments, for example, voices concern about the suboptimal uses of the Internet in many parliaments that have been subject to research (Coleman et al. 1999: 369–70).

According to Michael Margolis and David Resnick, legislative websites can be expected to reinforce support for the dominant political attitudes and established political parties rather than to transform current systems of interest representation ( Margolis and Resnick 2000: 93– 4). While cyberscepticism should be applauded to reintroduce a more realistic tone to the debate on electronic democracy, it nevertheless shares two important shortcomings with its counterpart.

First, many empirical studies on electronic democracy raise the question of relevance. They suffer from a lack of political theory in failing to define and explain a standard or a theoretical frame that could be used to identify relevant empirical phenomena from the perspective of democratic theory. Most of these studies take conceptual shortcuts by drawing far-reaching conclusions on democracy that are based upon the analysis of political communication. These analyses take strategies of political communication and the implementation of interactive mass communication on the Net as a vantage point to evaluate progress towards

electronic democracy. However, while the use of new technological opportunities for the purpose of political communication is an important prerequisite of political impact, it is not a sufficient one. In this chapter we argue that we have to take the procedural and structural implications of a specific act of political communication into account in order to be able to draw conclusions regarding its larger impact on democracy. We thus need a standard that identifies relevant acts of digital communication from the perspective of democratic theory. This standard has to be based upon technology as well as upon structural and procedural considerations.

A second shortcoming concerns the lack of general evidence regarding the impact of new digital media such as computer networks on democracy. Most of the available empirical analyses are impressionistic or in a case study format. The explorative nature of most of these case studies and the lack of a common relevant theoretical focus does not allow for cumulative knowledge and for general conclusions regarding the impact of new digital media on democracy (Lijphart 1971; Peters 1998: chapter 6). In order to produce more general conclusions on this question, we need more case studies based upon a relevant common theoretical frame. A second strategy of empirical research on electronic democracy should be based upon the comparative method in order to unveil the current political ramifications of new digital media in general and to understand the impact of digital parliaments in particular.

This chapter touches upon both problems to shed light on the political ramifications of digital parliaments. It will proceed in three distinct steps: In a first step, it will sketch an ideal model of electronic democracy. The aim is to define a meaningful standard that takes into account the procedural and structural dimen- sion of politics in order to assess the relevance of digital parliaments for democracy. In a second empirical section, we will analyze different digital parliaments on the basis of this model in order to test the two hypotheses sketched here. In this empirical section we compare the US House, the German Bundestag and the Swedish Riksdag. This empirical analysis draws from a quantitative content analysis of personal websites in these three parliaments and from qualitative case studies on institutional reform in digital parliaments. A third section takes the result of this analysis as a vantage point to reconsider the link between technological change in telecommunications and political change and to speculate about prerequisites of electronic democracy beyond technological change in telecommunication.

The rational for the selection of our cases is based upon the magnitude of technological change in telecommunication. Each of the three parliaments in our sample experienced change in telecommunication infrastructure at a similar level.

The German Bundestag, for example, started in the mid-1980s to equip its members with personal computers (Lange 1988; Einemann 1991; Mambrey et al.

1991). By 1989, forty-seven German MPs had access to this new technology either directly in their own office or indirectly via committees or parliamentary party organization (Einemann 1991: 11–14). Today, almost every single work- place in the German parliament is equipped with state-of-the-art desktops, which run on the basis of the most recent software. Along with this proliferation of

personal computers, the Bundestag built up a powerful network infrastructure. In 1995, when the World Wide Web (WWW) took off, only very few members had access via modems and commercial online-providers, sometimes at their own expenses. With the move to Berlin, the Bundestag implemented a Local Area Network that connects all computers internally as well as externally.

A quite similar development took place in the Swedish Riksdag. According to a Swedish MP, thirty years ago, his predecessors were restricted to only two telephone booths in the lobby to enter into contact with the media or their con- stituents (Gylling 2000). Today, there are mobile phones, fax machines and personal computers all around the place. The number of personal computers in parliamentary buildings increased, for example, from 10 in 1987 to 1,800 in October 2000.³ Moreover, an increasing number of Swedish members use portable notebook computers to connect via a 128 Kbit line to a Local Area Network with a 100 Mbit Backbone and a 2 Mbit connection to the Internet.

A mobile videoconferencing system with cameras, screens and a sound system that can be used at various studios within the buildings of the Riksdag supplements this new communication infrastructure in the Swedish Riksdag (Ulfhielm 1998).

Similar developments in the US House are summarized by a story published in the Washington Times in 1999. This story reported the tremendous investments made over a time span of five years to equip the US House with the most recent communications technology. In the course of these efforts, the US House provided congressmen and their staffers with new personal computers and software, renovated congressional office buildings with new fibre optic cables and provided at least one T1 Internet connection line to each office with an access rate of 1.5 million bits per second (Archibald 1999; see also Casey 1996). Apart from internal technological change, each of the three parliaments we selected experienced far-reaching external technological change in telecommunication as well.

In Sweden, Germany and the United States significant numbers of the population own personal computers and have access to the Internet. According to survey research, by early 2000, almost half of the population in the United States and Sweden was online while in Germany, about 20 per cent of the population had access to the Internet at this point in time (NUA 2001).

In this chapter we ask whether our three digital parliaments use the Internet along the lines of our model of electronic democracy or rather whether these three digitalized legislative assemblies are falling behind this standard. While the first observation would support the claim of cyberoptimists, the second finding would stress the cybersceptics point of view. Our comparative design furthermore allows testing for differences between the three cases under study regarding the implementation of electronic democracy in the process of technological change. This outcome would point towards the impact of intervening contextual variables.

What is electronic democracy?

The term democracy has been linked to many adjectives during the course of its history: direct democracy, representative democracy or parliamentary democracy

are some of the most widely known combinations. The term electronic democracy marks a more recent version. Adjectives are analytical tools to empirical theorists of democracy to specify and clarify this very broad concept. They are a means to characterize specific forms of democracy and to distinguish between different basic types of this form of government (Collier and Levitsky 1997). This observation raises questions regarding the meaning of electronic democracy and the specific form of democracy it signifies.

In the debate on electronic democracy this term is frequently used as a catch- all concept. It combines different empirical phenomena such as the websites of political parties or parliaments, electronically mediated debates on political top- ics, community networks, electronic voting or even the provision of administrative services via new digital media (Leggewie and Maar 1998; Kamps 1999). We argue that this type of usage is too unspecific and not suited to foster a clear understanding of electronic democracy. More important, its most serious shortcoming lies in the tendency to take conceptual shortcuts by drawing conclusions on democracy on the basis of the study of political communication and communication technology. This general usage of the term ignores the fact that democracy cannot be reduced to communication but rather that it is also about institutions.

A definition of electronic democracy has to take these defining elements of democracy into account.

There have been some efforts to conceptualize electronic democracy in a more explicit and comprehensive manner (see e.g. Arterton 1987; Hagen 1997;

Bellamy 2000). These mainly theoretical undertakings chose to model this concept in terms of a real type on the basis of empirical developments and dis- courses regarding the use of new digital media in the political realm. While these analyses give way to a more sophisticated understanding of the phenomenon at hand, they still suffer from major shortcomings. We argue that at this early stage of technological developments one cannot assume to capture relevant phenomena with this kind of method. Real types simply do not provide analytical lenses that are sharp enough to distinguish the relevant from the irrelevant and to detect small and so far hardly visible trends in the transformation of democracy. As a consequence, most of the available models of electronic democracy are somewhat fuzzy and hardly able to give us a clear idea what electronic democracy is all about and how to distinguish it from other types of democracy. They also do not put their finger on the general problem of conceptual shortcuts in the debate on electronic democracy. Most theoretical models of electronic democracy are therefore ill-suited to guide systematic empirical research on the political impact of new digital media.

In contrast to these earlier theoretical analyses we model electronic democracy as an ideal type that is based upon basic ideas of democracy and is structured along three different levels of political analysis. By using this method, we aim to forego the problem of conceptual shortcuts and to sharpen our analytical lenses in the study of electronic democracy. We define electronic democracy, as outlined in Figure 4.1, as a three-layered concept that emphasizes political participation as a core value in the process of decision-making (conception of democracy),

sketches three different strategies for institutional/structural reform to make democracy more participatory via new digital media (democratic design) and aims at influencing individual behaviour by increasing all types of political participation via the use of new digital media (participatory behaviour).

This definition marks a sharp distinction between political communication on the one hand and electronic democracy on the other. At the level of participatory behaviour, it excludes individual acts of digital communication that are not aimed at influencing political decision-making such as exchanging ideas in a USENET group or retrieving information on community services (see e.g. Barnes et al.

1979: 42). At the level of democratic design our model emphasizes the need for digitalized communication and interaction to be integrated into the decision- making process in order to count as an element of electronic democracy. We do not consider acts of digitalized public relations such as discussion fora run by the parliamentary bureaucracy as an element of electronic democracy per se.

Our definition of electronic democracy also makes a strong statement regarding our third level, which focuses on different conceptions of democracy. At this level, we do not consider electronic democracy as a distinct type of democracy. We argue instead that most of the discourse on electronic democracy closely resembles the debate on participatory democracy and that electronic democracy rather becomes a distinct phenomenon at the other two levels of our model.

Conceptions of democracy focus on the level of ideas and primarily ask about the nature of citizenship ( Rawls 1971). At this most general level, we distinguish between two basic ideas (conceptions) of democracy: participatory and liberal

Conception of democracy

Democratic design

Participatory behaviour

• Individual as part of the political community

• Antagonism between individual and political community

• Direct democracy via electronic means

• Direct, participatory system of representation via electronic means

• Foster civil society via new media

• Strictly representative system

• Indirect system of representation

• Protect private sphere

• Taking decisions via electronic means

• Deliberate via electronic means to prepare political decisions

• Getting political information via electronic means to learn about political decisions and decision- making process

• Voting

Participatory democracy Liberal democracy

Figure 4.1 Electronic democracy: a three-layered concept.

democracy. Participatory democracy perceives the self as part of the political community. It therefore strives to involve individuals as much as possible into the political process. From this point of view, democracy becomes a way of life (Pateman 1970; Barber 1984; Fishkin 1991; Habermas 1992). This perspective is in stark contrast to a liberal conception of democracy, which perceives individuals as autonomous entities independent from the political community and which assumes a basic antagonism between individuals and their social environment.

Individuals are perceived as consumers and private beings who do not care much about political involvement, who develop interests apart from the political community and who are sometimes in conflict with the political community.

Liberal theory emphasizes the legitimacy of these interests and aims at protecting the private lives of citizens. From this point of view, democracy merely becomes a process of collective decision-making (Schumpeter 1950; Sartori 1987).

The liberal conception of democracy is considered the dominant paradigm of modern democracy. It owes part of this dominance to the problems of its counterpart to design a participatory scheme of democracy under conditions of the modern nation state. Theorists of participatory democracy are ardent critics of the liberal model. They perceive liberal democracy as ‘thin democracy’ that threatens the stability of democracy, creates negative policies and leads individuals to live isolated and estranged lives. But a community of millions of citizens and an area of hundreds of thousands of square miles silenced many protagonists of participatory democracy when it came to questions of designing participatory democracy in terms of specific political institutions (Schmidt 2000: 175).

This is where electronic democracy comes in. Electronic democracy shares with the participatory model its general conception of democracy. Its goal is to make democracy more participatory, to involve citizens more into the political process and to strengthen political community (Hagen 1997; Kleinsteuber and Hagen 1998). Theorists of electronic democracy perceive new digital media as means to implement their ideal under the conditions of the nation state and to overcome most of the technical obstacles to participatory democracy (Krauch 1971; Etzioni et al. 1975; Becker 1981; Slaton 1992). This definition provides a standard at the level of ideas and motivations to evaluate current developments regarding the use of new digital media in general and regarding digital parliaments in particular. We should assume that digital parliaments matter to democracy in cases where this kind of motivation prevails among political actors.

Apart from this macro-analytical perspective, most critics of participatory democracy focus on the micro-analytical level while arguing against this conception of democracy. They emphasize low rates of political participation and the lack of political interest among ordinary citizens as an indicator that speaks against the feasibility of participatory democracy (Berelson et al. 1954; Campbell et al. 1960). According to these critics, individuals have more important things in their mind than politics, and voting should be considered the only type of political participation citizens might be able to squeeze into their busy schedules. As a reac- tion to these claims, early theorists of electronic democracy stressed digital media as a tool to foster various types of individual participation beyond voting such as

Dalam dokumen The Impact of ICTs on Representative Democracy (Halaman 87-113)