Book chapter
Развитие института электронного участия в контексте политических режимов: Соотношение факторов agency и structure.
Currently, non-democracies are showing a significant interest in e-participation tools, i.e. in various online mechanisms for citizen participation in public policy, such as epetitions and e-consultations. Such instruments can be found in a vast range of countries from the post-Soviet space to the Middle East. This leads to new interpretations of the role ICT play in regime dynamics, and describes the peculiarities of contemporary authoritarianism. While the Internet has long been considered a liberation technology, it is currently viewed as providing stability of the authoritarian regime. In these circumstances, e-participation is becoming another pseudo-democratic institution, adapted as a tool for authoritarian consolidation. Although the number of works aimed at understanding this phenomenon is increasing, the research agenda is far from being complete. This paper, first, summarizes what we know and do not know about e-participation in authoritarian contexts, and second, outlines several prospects for further research. In this regards, the author considers e-participation as a policy, institution and process.
As a policy, e-participation is the result of the global innovation diffusion and policy learning. The most likely recipient of this innovation among non-democracies is a regime dependent upon internal and external legitimation, as well as having sufficient state potential for reforms. Quite often, e-participation becomes a window-dressing for a repressive Internet-policy and does not go beyond websites.
At the same time, e-participation can become a full-fledged institution of authoritarian consolidation, performing the same functions as other institutions, such as information gathering and monitoring the elites. For this, online mechanisms must have a certain institutional design and manipulation menu. It eventually helps dictators to channel Internet protests into the spaces that are fully controlled by the government.
E-participation in non-democracies as a process remains an underexplored issue. The evidence prove that the use of such mechanisms indeed makes citizens consider the government to be more legitimate. However, it is to be further explained who, why and with what result is engaged into non-democratic e-participation.
The author argues that a stronger integration between comparative authoritarianism and e-participation studies would be beneficial for both areas of research.
In this article various papers presented on the IV International conference on online-deliberation which took place at the University of Leeds (UK) in 2010 and was dedicated to the search of the proper answers to all social and technological challenges to this relatively new scientific field are reviewed. To begin with the author gives a brief history of theoretical premises which caused the interest to this agenda in contemporary political science. The main scientific trends are examined on the concrete research examples. In the conclusion the further outlooks of the researches in the field of political online-deliberation, including those in our country, are discussed.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th IFIP WG 8.5 International Conference on Electronic Participation, ePart 2016, held in Guimarães, Portugal, in September 5-8, 2016.
The 14 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 31 submissions. The papers reflect completed multi-disciplinary research ranging from policy analysis and conceptual modeling to programming and visualization of simulation models. They are organized in four topical threads: theoretical foundations; critical reflections; implementations; policy formulation and modeling.
The past several years there has been a stable interest of non-democracies towards the institute of electronic participation. The article addresses the possible reasons of the concept’s popularity and factors of its successful implementation. It is argued that e-participation allows solving internal problems of Internet - control and legitimacy, as well as boosting up international socialization and economic competitiveness. Hence functions of e-participation are quite similar to those performed by other “democratic institutions”. On the basis of the dictator’s digital dilemma and results of empirical analysis it is concluded that e-participation is better developed in countries with higher foreign incentives and lower political risks and economic costs.