Zusammenfassung der Ressource
(7) Digital democracy
- 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’.
- 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
- 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
- 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’.
- 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
- 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’.