Participatory democracy and information and communications technology: A legal pluralist perspective

This article explains why democracy and the important process of democratisation include but go beyond the ambit of the state and state laws, and how democracy and democratisation are both negotiated, contested, engaged with and made up by diverse state and non-state actors within plural legal orders and across multiple sites and transnational networks. This article aims to re-imagine the conception of democracy vis-àvis information and communications technology from the perspectives of demo-diversity and legal pluralism. Furthermore, the author discusses why the transnational anti-DRM campaign is a successful example of democratisation in the digital networked environment. 1. The Democratic Promise of Technology The emergence and widespread use of information and communications technologies (ICTs) like the Internet in the 1990s gave rise to optimistic visions of a more participatory and inclusive democracy. [2] The Internet was touted as a solution to the democratic deficit that was symptomatic of the twin pathologies of lack of legitimacy and representation that hobbled most liberal representative democracies around the world. [3] Nation-states undertook various technological interventions from electronic government projects to online consultations and e-voting in order to achieve the objectives of making their governments more relevant and responsive to their citizens and fostering greater political involvement and civic consciousness in the latter. [4] However, despite the considerable attention and billions of sums spent on these techno-governmental initiatives, the aim of establishing a more participatory democracy had proved to be elusive. [5] As a result, the utopian belief in a technologically-mediated and enhanced democracy was first countered by a reactionary, dystopian view of technology, [6] which was also subsequently replaced by the currently dominant reinforcement view that sees technology as offering nothing substantially new to democracy and believes ICT merely reinforces existing political and social institutions and practices. [7] This article argues that the utopian,