23 February 2004

e-Democracy: What Technology can do to Widen Participation in Political Processes

By Erkki Liikanen, Member of the European Commission, responsible for Enterprise and the Information Society

Decision-making

Commissioner Liikanen

Across Europe and beyond, Information and Communication Technology is changing the ways in which people perceive politics and political power. ICT, and especially the internet, have huge potential to make government more open, and more actively involve citizens in political decision-making. ICT can enable citizens to watch every step that politicians take in formulating and enacting laws, and so to hold them accountable for the results. Increasingly, citizens will use ICT to watch their governments, as much as the reverse.

Influencing democratic processes used to take financial resources, political clout and an in-depth knowledge of process and procedures that were once beyond the reach of most citizens. But ICT is now empowering citizens or groups with limited resources to mobilise thousands of like-minded individuals behind a given cause. Non-governmental organisations, in particular, have shown how ICT can be used to mobilise opinion on specific issues.

Civil servants, along with business and industry, need to adapt to this new world. A "culture of consultation" in ministries and committees requires new skills and roles, new technologies and new ways of organising the processes of rule-making. Today's civil servants are expected to provide high-quality information and analysis within new, well-organised forms of democratic involvement.

Managing multiple and often-conflicting democratic "expressions of will" is complex and demands innovative solutions. Today, bombarding a minister with email is more likely to crash a server than change proposed legislation. This has to change.

Volume and variety of opinion

As a member of the European Commission, I have already seen the radical impact that business and citizens who harness ICT can have on our democratic processes. At the same time, I saw the massive challenge that the sheer volume, variety of opinions and time constraints can impose on both policy makers and civil servants.

Last summer, we held an eight-week, on-line consultation to test the workability of plans to overhaul and modernise the way we regulate chemicals in the EU. We asked people to focus on whether the new system would work in practice, including whether the system would provide the right scientific and technical input. We also invited suggestions for changes. By the time the consultation closed, on 10 July 2003, we had received around 6,500 contributions by mail, fax and via our Interactive Policy Making tool on our website.

All replies were published on a Commission website, so that everyone could see who had said what and which amendments had been proposed. This was a high point in the Commission's own internet-enabled government initiative to date.

The consultation revealed important flaws in the legislation, which we were able to put right before our proposal was finally tabled. The changes introduced resulted in savings of several billion euro in the costs associated with the system, with saving particularly focused on smaller companies.

One lesson from this consultation is that we need to develop context-aware summarizing tools. These would allow us to mine the huge volumes of often contradictory data and they would need to do this in natural language. Automatic analysis of the data would help us in using our political judgement in accessing the scope and range of opinions.

Knowledge management and workflow systems for monitoring each step in the legislative process would certainly help politicians and administrators to manage their workload. Some of these tools are already in place within the EU's europa website. However, in combination with GSM and 3G technology, they could perhaps even be used to provide issue-alerts to stakeholders and live web-casting of key moments in the legislative process.

Decision-taking

Using ICT to enhance decision-making, by helping stakeholders to ensure that a proposal is fit for purpose, is one thing. Using ICT to enhance decision-taking, as a form of direct democracy, is quite another.

Europe has several democratic models, including "representative" and "delegate" democracy. In the representative model, politicians are usually elected on a broad agenda, and often work in coalitions. They may nonetheless pose direct questions to citizens, via referenda. In the delegate model, politicians are elected for a specific period with an explicit programme, during which there would seldom be additional polling. Each approach is a well-rooted tradition. Each model and combination has different requirements for voting and polling, and each has its specific costs.

The annual cost of maintaining a traditional electoral register for around 50 million people is about €75 million, while the actual running costs can vary from €20 and 185 million¹. Each vote costs a minimum of 75 cents².

Experience suggests that we will be faced with many constitutional challenges

To date, electronic, mobile and internet voting solutions remain expensive compared to traditional methods. This is mostly due to immature technology and one-off infrastructure set-up costs. Nevertheless, as we develop better technological solutions, eVoting may eventually become cheaper than traditional methods. This would allow wider use of referenda. But experience suggests that we will be faced with many constitutional challenges.

The EU has so far supported some 20 innovative eDemocracy projects in the Information Society Technologies programme to the tune of €30 million. These have supported projects such as TrueVote, CyberVote, Webocracy, ePoll and ePower which are helping to develop voting and participation solutions. These are an important way in which the Community can support eDemocracy and such efforts should continue.

Notes

1 See estimates, "Funding Democracy: Providing Cost-effective electoral services", September 2002. Electoral Commission, London, (Page 10, 2.1).
2 See Rafeel Lopez-Pintor, "Electoral Management Bodies as institutions of Governance", UN Development Programme, Sept 2000.