The Idea of Electronic Democracy: Origins, Visions and Questions

WHEN the tenth anniversary of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was celebrated in 2004, visionaries and sceptics alike turned to reflect on what has been and what will be the reality and impact of the Internet in everyday life.1 Since the early beginnings of the global network, one major focus of these reflections has been the potential to transform political processes and provide new solutions to old obstacles through advances popularly referred to as electronic democracy. This article aims at presenting a comprehensive analysis of the several origins, interpretations and open questions in this field. Electronic democracy, despite the young age of its e-coded name, has a standing history of several decades, of which the current discussion focusing on online media is only the most recent extension. The idea of enhancing democratic processes with information technology did not appear with the Internet, but gradually developed since the end of the Second World War and the advent of computers. Depending on the state of technology on the one hand, and the political context and the public perception of the problems of democracy on the other hand, three stages can be distinguished (see Table 1).