Digital revolution, high-speed democracy and the brave new working world: Learnings from an Austrian public online consultation process

Abstract

In the summer of 2015, the president of the Austrian Federal Council has initiated a parliamentary initiative on "Digital Change and Politics", in order to systematically investigate the political and legislative changes considered to be necessary for an optimal use of the Digital Revolution. Based on a comprehensive public online consultation process, the resulting Green Book discusses the impact of digitization to the working world, quality of life, society, politics and especially the future form of democracy. In this chapter, we reflect outcomes from and experiences with this deliberative process, focusing on economic policy, labour law and the development of future digital marketplaces. While our original material mainly reflects an Austrian point of view, the resulting conclusions are valid on a rather general level, and allow interesting insight into the fundamental challenges of digitization from the perspectives of a huge variety of related stakeholders. At the same time, we discuss opportunities and limitations of the process itself, and thus deliver an authentic description of first steps towards an Internet-based future high-speed democracy which may lead to rather disruptive forms of political debates and decision-making processes.