Democratic Participation in the Discursive Management of Usenet

Internet voting, sometimes proposed as a means of enhancing democratic participation, is partly inspired by the democratic process of newsgroup creation on Usenet. To better understand how online voting might influence democratic participation more generally, we conducted an empirical investigation into the voting activity on newsgroups in the comp hierarchy of Usenet since 1989. Counter to expectation, participation does not appear to be organized into factions or interest groups, but rather there are distinct, individualized patterns of voting. At a coarser level of analysis, some interest-based patterns do emerge, but these appear to correspond to frequent individual voters instead of coherent groups of voters. Noting that the Usenet voting protocol is designed to function principally as a guage of participant interest, rather than as a genuine plebiscite, we conclude that the design of the Usenet voting system may not adequately guage the electorate’s will in an electronic democracy where voter turnout and democratic participation are chief concerns.