E-democracy and the Matter of Scale. Revisiting the Democratic Promises of the Internet in Terms of the Spatial Dimension

Abstract

The emergence of the Internet fueled euphoric—partially utopian—visions that can be summarized as democratic promises. In most cases, the normative and empirical discussion so far has considered e‑democracy tools and their potential, regardless of the scale of interaction—be it local, national, or transnational—as a one-size-fits-all approach, assuming that what is applicable for the national level will be equally true for the subnational and transnational levels. We argue that the question of whether the Internet and digital tools can fulfill the democratic promises must be confronted in a more differentiated way, examining under which spatial conditions e‑democracy is more likely to incentivize citizens to engage and to involve more citizens as well as marginalized citizens in public debates and decision making. The article introduces scale as a new element for a better theoretical understanding of e‑democracy. We establish a conceptual framework that enables us to capture scale as distance in terms of territorial, cognitive, and affective distance. The spatial perspective brings an innovative spin to the somewhat petrified positions on the mobilizing or reinforcing effects of digital tools as well as a new theoretical argument for the debate on e‑democracy in general.