(7) Digital democracy

(7) Digital democracy

1. Easier participation

   • Digital Democracy allows the electorate to express there view easily from the comfort of there home.
   • This is likely to have a positive impact on turnout and political education.
   • The fall in turnout may have been a consequence of the failure to keep up to date with the ‘information society’.

2. Access to information

   • 'New' technology massively enlarges citizens' access to information, making possible, for the first time, a truly free exchange of ideas and views.
   • The internet already makes available to private citizens specialist information that was once only available to government
   • E-democracy could create a genuinely two-way democratic process, in which citizens become active participants in politics rather than passive recipients

3. Ease of organization

   • Virtual referendums using electronic democracy would be cheaper and easier to organize, and so could be held much more frequently, this would increase Direct Democracy in the UK.
   • Traditional Referendums uses significant time, cost and resources

4. Electoral malpractice

   • Making voting easy and convenient by using the internet and telephone is open to scrutiny and the potential lack of security.
   • There have been allegations of malpractice and corruptions in using the postal vote.
   • By using a physical vote people identity can be effectively check and the process of voting can be ‘policed’.

5. Virtual democracy

   • E-democracy threatens to turn the democratic process into a series of push-button referendums.
   • This would further erode the 'public' dimension of political participation, reducing democratic citizenship to a series of consumer choices
   • This would demean politics, turning it into something resembling voting in Big Brother

6. Digital divide

   • There is not universal access to the new information and communication technology.
   • There would be a political inequality, as the ‘information rich’ came to dominate the ‘information poor’.