Electronic participatory budgeting (e-PPB): increasing people participation in the decision-making process

Democracy originated in Greece and has been an ideal way of citizenry coexistence for centuries. History tellers say that Athens, the world’s first democracy, was an extremely high performing organization due to the high level of commitment and engagement of the people. The three pillars of democracy (representation, participation, and deliberation) were then feasible. When a population grows it is very difficult to secure full participation in State issues. Almost inevitably there occurs a decrease in people’s participation and in the deliberation of the State’s decision-making process. The utopian socialists of the XIX century have devised this and limited the population of the utopists Icaria, New Lanark and others to 500 to 1600 inhabitants. With the advancement of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT), new expectations are raised to bring back full-democracy. But, at the same time that ICT can enhance people’s participation it can also jeopardize this effort when it is misused. Unattended hopes are worse than no hopes at all. This paper discusses three unsuccessful attempts to revive Athenian democracy using ICT to deal with participation scalability. Our point is that ICT has created greater expectations. If we don’t use the necessary layers of technology this omission can lead to worse results than without ICT altogether.