Roza Tsagarousianou, electronic democracy in practice: One, two, three... countless variants

Abstract

Since the early nineties, electronic democracy is tarted to occupy a not insignificant position in the political agenda of some political and social forces in both the USA and Europe. The search for models of electronic democracy in the age of Computer Mediated Communications has already been in earnest with a multitude of distinct, inform and content, projects. Indeed, the diversity of approaches to electronic democracy reflects to a considerable extent the lack of clarity of not only the notion of electronic democracy in particular, but also, the notion of democracy in general. Drawing upon the career of a number of prominent electronic democracy experiments, this paper constitutes an attempt to assess the correspondence between rhetoric and reality in the democratic promise embedded in diverseprojects of electronic democracy and argues that the debate, academic and otherwise, on the matter needs to be informed by an awareness of the diversity of intentions, forms, promises and potentials of the multitude of electronic democracy projects.