Smart cities and digital democracy have begun to converge around mobile computing, enabling, web services, and different operational and shared databases to create new opportunities for civic engagement for concerned citizens as well as new efficiencies for public services provided by local government. While many of these projects remain siloed to specific departments of local government, when ...

The expansion of new platforms of digital democracy does not necessarily entail an increase in citizen participation. The VOTESCRIPT group has made a sociological analysis to determine the causes of this apparent failure, reaching the conclusion that users are demanding capabilities that are not available in present systems. This paper presents a proposal for an advanced system of debate in an ...

Socio-economic development, which is seen around the world today, has contributed to the emergence of new problems of a social nature. Different political, historical, geographical or economic conditions cause that, in addition to global issues of social policy such as an aging population, unemployment, migration, countries, regions, there are also specific new problems that require diagnosis, ...

The correlation between social ties and political participation has been evident for some time, though very little attention is devoted to examining the causal mechanisms producing this relationship. This paper moves the literature in this direction by examining how an important feature of social networks – levels of political expertise – affect the attitudes underlying involvement. After outli...

In many parts of the world there is a growing demand for participation in public policy decision making. This demand could be satisfied by the design and deployment of webbased group decision support systems to aid large groups of, possibly, non-sophisticated, users in participating in such decisions. After describing several mechanisms for participatory democracy, we provide a framework for de...

T o evaluate whether public involvement on a national forest district fairly represents the public's values, this article proposes four hypothesis tests. First, it is hypothesized that public-invo1l)ement programs operute according to a participatory democracy logic, in which broad cross sections o f the public participate in public involvement opportunities. A second hypothesis is tested that ...

The British House of Lords is generally seen as an unimportant political actor. It is unelected and has a formal veto over only very limited forms of legislation. According to Lijphart this gives the UK a system of ‘weak bicameralism’, and contributes to its position as a majoritarian democracy. The alternative classification system offered by Tsebelis treats the UK as essentially unicameral, w...

Democratic governments constantly need to make sense of their citizens’ needs to make appropriate decisions that reflect the overall wishes and needs of the population. However, except for mandatory voting scenarios, a low rate of citizen participation in government decisions through democratic processes is an aspect that defies democracy itself. Brazil’s participatory budget policy emphasizes ...

The debate on the impact of the information and communication technologies (ICT) on contemporary democracy has lasted in political science since the beginning of the information revolution. Two dominating and antagonistic standpoints present the electronic democracy as either the cure for democracy crisis, or the factor deepening major problems of democracy. The text questions such a simplified...

This essay turns to ancient sources in order to rethink the relationship between political apathy and democracy. If modern democratic theorists place political apathy entirely outside of democracy – either as a destructive limit upon the full realization of a democratic polity, or, more sanguinely, as a pragmatic necessity which tempers democracy so that it may function in a workable yet watere...