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The Maturing Concept of E-Democracy: From E-Voting and Online Consultations to Democratic Value Out of Jumbled Online Chatter

2009; Routledge; Volume: 6; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/19331680802715242

1933-1681

Martin Hilbert,

Open Source Software Innovations

ABSTRACT Early literature on e-democracy was dominated by euphoric claims about the benefits of e-voting (digital direct democracy) or continuous online citizen consultations (digital representative democracy). High expectations have gradually been replaced with more genuine approaches that aim to break with the dichotomy of traditional notions of direct and representative democracy. The ensuing question relates to the adequate design of information and communication technology (ICT) applications to foster such visions. This article contributes to this search and discusses issues concerning the adequate institutional framework. Recently, so-called Web 2.0 applications, such as social networking and Wikipedia, have proven that it is possible for millions of users to collectively create meaningful content online. While these recent developments are not necessarily labeled e-democracy in the literature, this article argues that they and related applications have the potential to fulfill the promise of breaking with the longstanding democratic trade-off between group size (direct mass voting on predefined issues) and depth of argument (deliberation and discourse in a small group). Complementary information-structuring techniques are at hand to facilitate large-scale deliberations and the negotiation of interests between members of a group. This article presents three of these techniques in more depth: weighted preference voting, argument visualization, and the Semantic Web initiative. Notwithstanding these developments, the maturing concept of e-democracy still faces serious challenges. Questions remain in political and computer science disciplines that ask about adequate institutional frameworks, the omnipresent democratic challenges of equal access and free participation, and the appropriate technological design. KEYWORDS: Argument visualizationcomputerdemocracydigitaldirect democracyICTintermediationInternetITrepresentative democracySemantic WebsoftwaretechnologyvotingWeb 2.0 Notes 1. The "common will" refers to the republican tradition of "we want" (in Rousseau's words the volonté générale), while the aggregation of individual wills refers to the libertarian tradition of the intermediated "I want" (in Rousseau's terms the volonté particuliére). One is, of course, not the sum of the other, and the common will needs to be created constantly. See also Barber, Strong Democracy (1984, p. 200). For an in depth discussion in the tradition of CitationRousseau (1762) and CitationKant (1793), see also CitationSchachtschneider (2007). 2. A blog is a personal Web site with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video, commentaries, news, poems, or personal online diaries. 3. A wiki is a collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language. 4. The use of information-structuring techniques to gather collective intelligence is quite old. In the 1960s, the RAND Corporation pioneered Delphi forecasting techniques (CitationLinstone & Turoff, 1975), and the 1970s saw the rise of groupware, computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), and computer-assisted qualitative data analysis (CAQDAS) in business and academic environments (CitationJohansen, 1988). 5. For example, AraucariaDB is a software tool that hosts around 500 arguments, produced by expert analysts, and drawn from newspapers, magazines, judicial reports, parliamentary records, and online discussion groups. See http://araucaria.computing.dundee.ac.uk. 6. Given CitationArrow's challenge (1963) to the possibility of aggregating a certain arrangement of preferences in a meaningful way, reaching a stable mathematical solution cannot be guaranteed. However, in combination with formerly presented collective deliberation techniques that influence the rational evaluation of individual utility, the risk of running into Arrow's impossibility theorem should be significantly reduced. 7. In information engineering, an ontology is understood as a formal representation of a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between those concepts. It is used to reason about the properties of that domain and to define the domain. 8. In order to appreciate the ambitions of OWL, it is an interesting anecdote that its creators link it with the acronym "One-World-Language," in reference to an overly ambitious idea from the 1970s (CitationHendler, 2001). 9. Over the last decade, artificial intelligence research into the "understanding of natural language" has made great progress in fields such as automatic text classification, filtering, indexing, clustering, tracking, and mining, among others. Applied machine learning systems still face a number of challenges at the present time. Semantic text interpretation needs to consider the pragmatic meaning embedded in the document structure, grammar, causalities, and the relative importance of certain words, including the characterization of synonyms, antonyms, and homonyms. The ambiguity of human language is often a hurdle. For example, whereas in the Northern culture the word "guinea pig" would be associated with descriptions like "pet," a Peruvian Semantic Web classification system might assign connotations like "livestock." This might lead to confusion even if the word is set in context, such as in a phrase like: "On Sunday, Pedro will enjoy his guinea pig." Ultimately, the machine is confronted with the same problems as human deliberators when faced with the vagueness of natural language. Various approaches are currently being explored to tackle this challenge, including manually programmed keyword lists; supervised, unsupervised, and self-learning algorithms; and categories in a multidimensional space or a combination in classification committees. Various software programs are already being used in commercial applications to classify the semantic orientation of product assessments or film reviews. The machine reviews a large volume of unstructured online comments (in prose text form) to determine whether consumers are satisfied with the product or not. The categorization accuracy of these methods has already attained hit rates of some 80–90% (CitationPang, Lee, & Vaithyanathan, 2002). The potential is still large. In other areas, such as the recognition of faces at the airport control or the identification of cancer cells, artificial intelligence recognition systems have become much more precise than human classifiers. 10. Even the most successful Web 2.0 applications, such as the much-celebrated online Wikipedia, are actually only co-produced online, with members and managers of the community frequently working together physically or gathering at international conferences (such as the annual Wikimania). 11. The term "digital divide" refers to the gap between those people with effective access to digital ICT and those without access to it. 12. The Sixth EU's Framework Program on Information Society Technologies was a notable exception; see http://www.argumentation.org.