A study of e-participation projects in third-wave democracies

Abstract

The most useful questions to ask about the relationship between new media and new democracies are empirical and contextual: can the internet, in specific places and instances, facilitate forms of participation that strengthen citizens' capacity for collective action and political influence? To answer this question, we compiled an inventory of 79 e-democracy projects initiated within 'third-wave' democracies. From these, six were selected as subjects for descriptive case studies. The projects examined had a range of objectives, but all had in common the aim of using Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to mediate between established governmental power and the public.

Full text

302 Int. J. Electronic Governance, Vol. 2, No. 4, 2009
Copyright © 2009 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.
A study of e-participation projects in third-wave
democracies
Stephen Coleman*
Institute of Communications Studies,
University of Leeds, UK
E-mail: S.Coleman@leeds.ac.uk
*Corresponding author
Ildikó Kaposi
Division of Humanities and Art,
American University of Kuwait, Kuwait
E-mail: ikaposi@auk.edu.kw
Abstract: The most useful questions to ask about the relationship between new
media and new democracies are empirical and contextual: can the internet, in
specific places and instances, facilitate forms of participation that strengthen
citizens’ capacity for collective action and political influence? To answer this
question, we compiled an inventory of 79 e-democracy projects initiated within
‘third-wave’ democracies. From these, six were selected as subjects for
descriptive case studies. The projects examined had a range of objectives,
but all had in common the aim of using Information and Communication
Technology (ICT) to mediate between established governmental power and
the public.
Keywords: e-democracy; new democracies; e-participation case studies.
Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Coleman, S. and Kaposi, I.
(2009) ‘A study of e-participation projects in third-wave democracies’,
Int. J. Electronic Governance, Vol. 2, No. 4, pp.302–327.
Biographical notes: Stephen Coleman is a Professor of Political
Communication at the Institute of Communications Studies, University of
Leeds. His three most recent publications are (with Jay G. Blumler)
The Internet and Democratic Citizenship: Theory; Practice; Policy (Cambridge
University Press, April 2009), (with Karen Ross) The Media and the Public:
‘Them’ and ‘Us’ in Media Discourse (Blackwell, 2009) and (with David
Morrison and Scott Anthony) Public Trust in the News: A Constructivist Study
of the Social Life of News (Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 2009).
He is currently writing a book based on research conducted for his
AHRC-funded research project, ‘The Road to Voting’, which explores the
affective and aesthetic dimensions of democratic engagement.
Ildikó Kaposi is an Assistant Professor of Communication and Media at
the American University of Kuwait. She received her PhD in 2006
from the Department of Political Science at Central European University,
Budapest. Her publications include (with Mónika Mátay) ‘Radicals Online:
The Hungarian Street Protests of 2006 and the Internet’ in K. Jakubowicz
and M. Sükösd (Eds.), Finding the Right Place on the Map. Central and
Eastern European Media Change in a Global Perspective (ECREA, 2008) and

A study of e-participation projects in third-wave democracies 303
‘Deliberative ‘dissensus’: Talking Politics Online in Hungary’ in Villadsen, L.
(Ed.) Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation (forthcoming). She is
currently researching political communication in Kuwait.
1 Introduction
The aim of this research has been to arrive at some generalisable reflections about the
problematics and opportunities of new-media use in the context of emergent democracies
and to set out some practical recommendations for those planning e-participation projects
in ‘new’ democracies.
To speak of new democracies is to refer to two inter-related phenomena. First, there is
the wave of democratisation that occurred in the last quarter of the 20th century,
in which states as diverse as former Soviet satellites, Latin American military
dictatorships and developing African nations came to adopt the formal tenets of liberal
constitutional democracy: elections based on universal suffrage; competing political
parties; accountability of governments to governed; the rule of law; basic civil liberties.
Second, there is the sense in which 21st century democracies are departing
from the traditional model of state-centred sovereignty and adopting new forms of
substantive democracy characterised by participatory methods of policy making
and centrifugal delegation. In advanced democracies, these modernising strategies tend
to be associated with the collapse of traditionally centralised sovereignty, whereas
for newly democratised states, innovative approaches to policy formation and
decision making are seen to constitute evidence that power has passed from
unaccountable elites to the civic grass roots. In this second sense, the notion of
‘new democracy’ raises important questions about the extent to which governance need
to be characterised by elitist characteristics that we have come to regard as politically
inevitable. For example, even in the most historically developed democracies, the process
of government policy formation and decision making has tended to operate at some
distance (physically, culturally and politically) from most citizens; official information
has tended to be scarce and unequally distributed; opportunities to influence government
agendas have been limited to political insiders and professional lobbyists; political
culture has tended to be exclusive and unwelcoming to the demos who should
(normatively) be at the centre of the democratic stage. Are such characteristics inherent to
the governance of mass democracies or might new democracies do things differently?
Or, to state the question in socio-technical terms, are there ways of designing democratic
regimes in ways that place the demos in a more central political role?
The historical convergence in the last quarter of the 20th century between
the emergence of new democracies throughout the world and the advent of
publicly-accessible digital media networks characterised by many-to-many interactivity
are regarded by many as being conducive to what Giddens has referred to as
“the democratisation of democracy” (Giddens, 1990). Stark and Bach have observed that
the early 21st century is witnessing nothing less than

304 S. Coleman and I. Kaposi
“an epochal transformation in the analytically distinct domains of production
and communication. On one side, we see a shift from mass production to
network modes of organising, as hierarchical, bureaucratic forms coexist
with heterarchical, collaborative forms. On the other, we see a shift from
mass communication to interactive media, as the uni-directional channels of
one-to-many coexist with the hypertextual world of increasing interactivity.
The dual shifts are, in fact, a twinned transformation: from mass production/
mass communication to network production/network communication.” (Bach
and Stark, 2004)
The theoretical basis for much of this optimism is the assumption that we are living
in a new kind of society – an networked information society – in which centralised and
unilinear models of governing are becoming obsolete. According to Castells,
“Historically, power was embedded in organisations and institutions, organised
around a hierarchy of centres. Networks dissolve centres, they disorganise
hierarchy, and make materially impossible the exercise of hierarchical power
without processing instructions in the network, according to the network’s
morphological rules.” (Castells, 1996)
The consequence of pervasive social networks is the undermining of state-centred
politics. The emergence of horizontal, decentralised, acephalous associations makes
citizens freer than ever before to encode, circulate and debate their own accounts of civic
knowledge without needing to seek permission from elite gatekeepers. Whereas the
legitimacy of government has traditionally been authorised by periodic elections of
elected representatives who make decisions on behalf of citizens, new networks make
possible unprecedented interdependence in policy formation and decision making
between the state and a multiplicity of affected stakeholders.
The transition from centralised government to multi-level, interdependent governance
reflects a radical reconfiguration of political institutions and processes. Whereas
governments in the past tended to be centralised, vertical and hierarchical, exercising
top-down authority via a well-recognised chain of command, the exercise of power
through governance is less institutionally centralised and more diffuse, devolved and
collaborative. “Governance can be seen as the pattern or structure that emerges in a
socio-political system as … outcome of the interacting intervention efforts of all involved
actors” (Kooiman, 2003). Governance is more pluralistic than government, insofar as it is
a shared space of power contestation by many actors, some of which would have no voice
in traditional government. And governance is less predictable than government, in
that “the outcomes of administrative action are in many areas not the outcomes
of authoritative implementation of pre-existing rules, but rather the result of a
‘co-production’ of the administration and its clients” (Offe). The concept of
co-production, as first articulated by Ostrom, is based upon the recognition “that the
production of a service, as contrasted to a good, was difficult without the active
participation of those supposedly receiving the service”. The concept of co-production
describes
“The potential relationships that could exist between the ‘regular’ producer
(street-level police officers, school teachers, or health workers) and ‘clients’
who want to be transformed by the service into safer, better educated, or
healthier persons. Coproduction is one way that synergy between what a
government does and what citizens do can occur.” (Ostrom, 1997)

A study of e-participation projects in third-wave democracies 305
Collaborative governance raises citizens from mere consultees, whose responsibility ends
at the point of making recommendations, to co-producers of policies that will affect their
everyday lives. In such an arrangement, the administrative state takes the form of a
steering agent, building and managing relationships between a range of horizontal
networks. In such a context, the rationality of governance becomes “dialogic rather than
monologic, pluralistic rather than monolithic, heterarchic rather than either hierarchic or
anarchic” (Jessop, 1999). The role of elected representatives within co-governance is to
speak for entire communities, including the unaffected and uninvolved, and to steer and
balance the inputs from diverse stakeholder networks. The role of civic networks in
co-governance is to bring the experiential knowledge and direct voices of stakeholders
closer to the centre of accountable governance.
According to this perspective, the internet has the potential to serve as an arena for
the critical, reflexive and democratic negotiation of governance between public networks
and political centres. The internet could be a new medium for horizontal communications
and interactions and thereby for new relations between citizens. Its transformative
potential lies in two fields: first, the conventionally political field of citizenship and
activism, where the internet could enable new modes of communication between
members of social and political movements and parties; secondly, the field of friendship
and association – that is, those social relations beyond kinship that are, according to some
traditions of political theory the fundamental political relations and the basis for
government founded on politics. Specifically, the internet could be used by citizens
to displace or supplement the older media that constitute ‘the public sphere’;
to recruit for and mobilise new social movements; to hold governments to account by
asking questions of representatives, ministers and parties, and protesting and talking back
about governmental and administrative failure; to be consulted by government on policy
options; to transform the institutions and the practices of political representation by
creating more direct channels of engagement, consultation and discursive interaction
between representatives and represented (Coleman, 2005).
But such potential could be lost, submerged or marginalised if not deliberately
harnessed for civic purposes. Nothing is guaranteed about the realisation of that potential.
Technology, after all, is democratically neutral; its development depends on how it is
shaped and used. Left to their own devices, the new media could replay the disappointing
scenarios that have shaped the fates of earlier ‘new media’ (radio, television, cable TV,
etc.), in which for a time high civic hopes were invested. As Misnikov has rightly
observed,
“It’s worthwhile to remember that computers – both mainframes and
PCs – themselves have not led to the information revolution and prompted
democracy-related issues. These were widely but narrowly used for computing
and information storage in the 70s and 80s to support scientific research,
accounting, databases management, etc.” (Misnikov, 2005)
Misnikov’s observation provides a salutary reminder that there is no deterministic
relationship between new media and democratisation. New ICT can be utilised to
replicate forms of bureaucratic practice and hierarchical power. This is most likely to
happen when the socio-technical design of new-media hardware, software and content is
narrowly conceived and unaccountable; when elites retain exclusive access to ICT; when
interactive features are neglected or switched off, thereby blocking the feedback path
which makes new media inherently polylogical. The use of new media for democratic

306 S. Coleman and I. Kaposi
purposes has more to do with political motivation, design and cultural acceptance than
inherent technical affordances. But the relationship is dialectical: at any one time,
the structure, regulation and uses of specific technologies are the subject of competing
interpretive battles involving diverse actors, including producers, managers, users and
commentators.
2 Research questions and methodology
The most useful questions to ask about the relationship between new media and new
democracies are empirical and contextual: can the internet, in specific places and
instances, facilitate forms of participation that strengthen citizens’ capacity for collective
action and political influence? To answer this question, we adopted two approaches,
the second of which is reported here. First, we compiled an inventory of e-democracy
projects which have been initiated within what have tended to be referred to as
‘third-wave’ democracies (Huntington, 1991). Of the 79 projects in our inventory, a total
of 36 were initiated in former communist countries of Central Europe, Central Asia and
the Baltics, 30 in Latin America and 13 in Africa (A copy of this inventory is available
from the authors).
From the 79 projects listed in the inventory, six were selected as subjects for
descriptive case studies. The choice of the multiple, descriptive case-study method
enabled us to investigate “a contemporary phenomenon within its real-life context”
(Yin, 1994) with a view to generalising beyond specific contexts about the relationship
between the development of new democracies and the adoption of new-media techniques,
forms and content.
The selection of the cases aimed for diversity in terms of their country of origin,
category of activity, and level of success. For each of the cases selected, we tried to
interview the key actors who had been involved in launching the projects, as well as
people who were actively involved in them at the time of the research. To provide a
broader context for the case studies, we reviewed all available documents: internal
reports, memos, press releases, academic research studies, conference papers, media
accounts, evaluation reports.
On average, three people were interviewed for each case study. Once contact with the
key actors was established, they were offered the choice of being interviewed online
(by e-mail) or by telephone. (All of the latter were recorded on tape and transcribed.)
In some cases, interviews comprised a series of e-mail exchanges. Only in the Hungarian
case study was it possible to meet interviewees face to face.
Actors interviewed included former and current project coordinators, consultants,
ministry officials, NGO employees, and civic association members. The interviews were
structured, but interviewees were encouraged to add their own concerns and perspectives.
The initial set of questions asked interviewees about the reasons for starting the project;
the goals they wanted to achieve; the people and organisations who initiated the
project; the project design process; the obstacles the project had to overcome; ways used
to raise awareness about the project; evaluation and citizen feedback; the future prospects
for the project. After the case studies were written, they were sent to interviewees to be
checked for accuracy.

A study of e-participation projects in third-wave democracies 307
The six cases are described with four key themes in mind: their explicitly-stated,
as well as implicit, objectives; their design, governance and accountability; their
approach to publicity; the criteria by which they assessed their impact, achievements,
constraints and sustainability.
3 Objectives
The projects examined had a range of objectives, but all had in common the aim of using
ICT to mediate between established governmental power and the public. Objectives fell
into three broad categories. First, there were initiatives, such as the Argentine Cristal
project and the Mongolian Open Government website, designed to make power more
transparent and less corrupt. Where governments enjoy monopoly power over resources
and patronage, rules and procedures tend to be neglected, opaque or discretionary,
and corruption amongst state officials and even legislators is common. Hill has shown
that there is a strong correlation between forms of democratisation which enhance
government transparency and low levels of corruption. While the internet is regarded by
some commentators as a weapon of intrusive state surveillance, there is another sense in
which it can be regarded as a surveillant tool that makes power vulnerable to public
observation and scrutiny. There are several specific ways in which the internet can be
used to expose political corruption: it can enable “the public to easily and relatively
inexpensively publish information through anonymous forms or simply by keeping a
record of instances of corruption reported by the press”; it can “discourage corrupt
officials from seeking powerful political offices”; it can support “law enforcement efforts
through easier access to information for prosecutors”; it can empower citizens by
providing them “with knowledge about specific rules and reduce, if not eliminate,
much of the discretionary power and uncertainty related to the process of obtaining
a government service or permit”; it can make media reports more accessible
(Hill, 2003). All of this had led Garcia-Murillo and Vinod to conclude that
“The internet is a tool that can help alleviate many factors that lead to bad
government. The publicly available information on the internet can potentially
expose criminal, corrupt, or anti-social deeds by those in power. Of course this
requires specific actions by people and organisations. The actions helping good
governance and improved internet usage as a tool for good governance include
training, technical assistance, direct awareness efforts, and greater diffusion of
information via the press or the internet.” (Garcia-Murillo and Vinod, 2005)
A second category of project, exemplified by the Latvian policy.net, sought to facilitate
the free flow of shared knowledge between hitherto under-resourced or dispersed
networks. Civic networks tend to be found in the space beyond government or the
market, serving citizens’ need for knowledge that can enable them to be more active,
resourceful, creative and influential, often at a local and personal level which is not
explicitly political (See Bang and Sorensen, 2000; Scott, 1998). Policy or issue
networks are not new: Heclo wrote in the 1970s about the need of governments managing
complex policy issues to connect with networks of experts and activists which come
to perform ‘subgovernmental’ roles. A consequence of networked governance has
been the decline of “governing by a central actor” and increased “interdependence
between … social-political-administrative actors” (Rhodes, 1997).

308 S. Coleman and I. Kaposi
The internet has made it easier for both elite and non-elite networks to distribute and
acquire information, as well as to identify and communicate with one another. A virtue of
online knowledge-sharing networks is that they can be accessed conveniently,
on demand, at low cost, entailing few ties of social commitment. Power within such
networks tends to be decentralised, resulting in qualitative changes in the distribution of
politically useful knowledge. As Bennett has observed,
“When networks are not decisively controlled by particular organisational
centres, they embody the internet’s potential as a relatively open public sphere
in which the ideas and plans of protest can be exchanged with relative ease,
speed, and global scope –all without having to depend on mass media channels
for information or (at least, to some extent) for recognition.” (Bennett, 2003)
Specific effect of networked knowledge sharing is the capacity of the third sector to
compete as knowledge producers with traditionally powerful centres of dissemination,
such as government and the mass media. In their review of ways in which civil-society
organisations influence policy processes, Pollard and Court note that
“The internet has enabled groups such as One World and Inter Press Service
(IPS)1 to become global hubs for the civil society media, publishing stories on a
wide range of development issues and creating opportunities for both large and
small groups to publish informative reports, commentaries and opinion pieces.”
(Pollard and Court, 2005)
The third project category involved opportunities for citizens to initiate policy ideas.
The Armenian Forum, the Hungarian Peticio project and the Estonian Täna Otsusta Mina
(TOM) i.e., Today I Decide project provide examples of the various forms that such
initiatives can take. The right to initiate laws or petition legislatures regarding proposed
legislation is well established in several constitutions. Ballot initiatives were first
introduced in the USA in the 1890s and in 1904 the citizens of Oregon voted on the
question of whether to impose local bans on the sale of alcohol. The statutory right of
voters to initiate legislation currently exists in 24 US states, as well as the District of
Columbia, covering a combined population of 120 million people. The more indirect
right to petition representatives to initiate legislation is even more widespread. The
first amendment of the US Constitution states that “Congress shall make no
law … abridging … the right of the people … to petition the Government for a redress of
grievances”; the British House of Commons declares that “The right to petition the
Crown and Parliament to air grievances is a fundamental constitutional principle”;
the Hungarian Constitution includes a chapter on petitioning Parliament under the
heading of ‘people’s initiatives’. In Europe, petitioning was rooted in medieval practices,
serving to refer local grievances to central authority without changing the norms of
privilege, deference and secrecy that governed political communication (Zaret, 1999).
During the 17th-Century English Revolution petitions increasingly referred to public
opinion as the source of political authority and this began to alter the content and scope of
political communication. The new practice of petitioning was facilitated by the new
technology of the printing press. Printing made it possible for petitions to be circulated
among people, changing the discrete flow of communication from periphery to centre and
whetting the public’s appetite for more.

A study of e-participation projects in third-wave democracies 309
The emergence of another new technology – the internet – has raised the hopes of
those who want to make the democratic process more accessible. Citizens would not only
be able to sign ballot initiatives or petitions online, but read background material about
them and debate their merits. The Scottish Parliament has pioneered the use of e-petitions
and they have been subsequently adopted by the German Bundestag and Queensland
government. But, as Baer warns in a paper submitted to the Speakers’ Commission on the
California Initiative Process, “security problems of networked computers make internet
petition signing potentially vulnerable to fraud and other abuse”. He goes on to consider
what could be the unintended consequences of online initiatives and petitions:
“The internet … can inform and encourage participation among voters in ways
other media cannot, but it could also stimulate and reward superficial,
emotional responses. It can be used for serious deliberation and debate on
proposed initiatives among informed citizens, but it could also lead to an
explosion of easy-to-qualify ballot measures with disastrous results for
representative government.” (Baer, 2001)
4 Governance and accountability
Our case studies comprised projects, which either emanated from or worked with
governments and donor agencies. We are aware of a number of other e-democracy
projects, which have arisen as oppositional or resistance movements against
undemocratic regimes. (Maidan in the Ukraine is a classical example.) We decided to
study such projects, as they fall into a different category of online campaigns intended
to expose or destabilise undemocratic regimes, rather than initiatives set-up with a view
to strengthening newly established democracies.
For all of the projects examined in this study, the questions of how they came into
being and to whom they are accountable are of key significance. Whether projects are
initiated and shaped from the top down (by governments or donor agencies) or from the
bottom up (by civil society) and whether they are accountable to external funders or
internal constituencies will determine their design, agendas and outcomes.
The problem of democratic importation is by no means unique to e-democracy,
but when political processes are technologically mediated, the extrinsic character of the
codes, protocols and values that are culturally embedded in hardware and software can be
at odds with culturally-specific aspirations. For this reason, interviewees for the case
studies were probed about the extent to which these projects were borrowed, imposed or
created from scratch.
5 Publicity
Most online projects fail because they do not reach their intended audiences – or, users,
to adopt a more interactive term. Unlike broadcasters, who aim to address a relatively
fixed, mass audience (at least until the recent emergence of satellite and cable
fragmentation), the online communication environment is much more competitive,
with most people preferring to encounter people they know and themes which make them
feel comfortable. We were interested to explore how the projects we examined marketed

310 S. Coleman and I. Kaposi
themselves and attempted to overcome popular disdain for political and governmental
initiatives.
6 Evaluation
A final aspect of the case studies concerned the evaluation of outcomes. Critical,
independent evaluations of innovatory democratic methods are rare and under-theorised.
Webler has argued that such studies are “characterised by an interesting juxtaposition
of a rich experiential knowledge and a growing, but scattered theoretical literature”
(Webler, 1999). The OECD has noted that
“There is a striking imbalance between the amount of time, money and energy
that governments in OECD countries invest in engaging citizens and civil
society in public decision making and the amount of attention they pay to
evaluating the effectiveness and impact of such efforts.” (OECD/PUMA, 2001)
While there have been a few seminal case studies that have provided an explanatory
framework for appraising projects specifically designed to encourage public participation
(Selznick, 1966; Mansbridge, 1980; Levine, 1982), most case studies are either so
context-specific as to contribute little generalisable theory or are critically compromised
by their need to justify the worth of projects to donor agencies. The emergence in recent
years of a useful literature on evaluation criteria (Fiorino, 1990; English et al., 1993;
Webler, 1995; Rowe and Frewer, 2000, 2004) has contributed greatly to an understanding
of appropriate principles and processes of evaluation. Two aspects of evaluation that have
become widely accepted concern the assessment of the relative power of actors within
democratic projects and attempts to measure the impact of public participation upon
decision-making processes and outcomes. Typical questions raised by evaluators concern
the extent to which project initiators design projects to mirror existing power structures;
the relative accessibility to resources and hidden information between ‘official’ and
‘public’ actors; whether projects intended to consult public opinion are timed in such a
way as to make use of public input when policy is actually being formed or decisions
being made; the extent to which such projects influence policies in specifically
identifiable ways, as well as their influence upon the openness of policy makers and
corporate processes to voices that are not usually heard. The case studies that follow
provide only limited answers to such questions because our interviewees were project
initiators rather than project users. (Our sense of each of these projects would have been
much improved if we had been able to interview their users and observe the projects
operationally over time.)
A key aspect of evaluation concerns the sustainability of projects. Too often pilot
initiatives are funded for just long enough to show signs of potential social value,
at which point funding dries up and nobody knows what might have happened. Most of
the case studies explore projects that have now existed for at least two years, but this was
not the case when the interviews were originally conducted. It became clear from the case
studies that the organisational forms required for experimentation or externally funded
pilots were not always robust enough to ensure the endurance of projects in conditions of
economic and political uncertainty.

A study of e-participation projects in third-wave democracies 311
7 Case studies
7.1 Online transparency in Argentina: The Cristal Project – www.cristal.gov.ar
7.1.1 Project aim
The Cristal project was established as part of the Argentine government’s campaign to
promote transparency. The 1999 Fiscal Responsibility Law required the state to make
available information relating to the administration of public funds, and the Cristal
website was created to fulfil the requirements of the law. In addition to making available
financial information, Cristal’s goal was to create a citizenry who can exercise more
effective control over their political representatives. The internet was chosen as the
medium for realising these goals, as it allows the constant updating of large flows of
information in real time.
7.1.2 Governance and accountability
The Cristal portal was developed in the Secretariat of Public Administration
(Subsecretaría de la Gestión Pública (SGP)) at the headquarters of the cabinet of the
national executive authority. The project was financed by the SGP and a loan from the
national plan for state modernisation.
The history of the development and operation of the portal can be divided into four
major periods:
• the period leading up to and just after the official launch of the portal on 21 February
2000
• from May 2000 to Spring 2002, under a new team assigned to coordinate the
project
• the period from the 2002 economic and governmental crisis until 2005, during which
the site remained ‘under construction’
• the current period in which Argentina’s e-government portal is hosted at the Cristal
web address.
Throughout the first three periods, the content and technical design of the portal was
determined by the SGP teams assigned to work on Cristal. For Cristal’s first year, the
responsibility of monitoring and auditing the site was assigned to Foro Transparencia
(Transparency Forum), an alliance of 15 NGOs working for “greater citizen participation
and transparency in public administration”. As a result of the competing agendas of the
NGOs, however, civil-society participation in the design and monitoring of the portal
remained ‘extremely limited’ and ‘poor’.
7.1.3 Publicity
Cristal’s official launch was highly publicised, but the event proved to be something of
an embarrassment. The lack of careful strategic planning for Cristal led to promises about
services and benefits whose inclusion on the portal was neither viable nor feasible.

312 S. Coleman and I. Kaposi
The initial disappointment in Cristal was especially harmful to the project, because
journalists and NGOs were to play a major role in communicating the contents of the
portal to citizens. Internet penetration rates in Argentina were around 5% in 2001,
so Cristal’s coordinators had to rely on mass media to reproduce and disseminate the
contents of the portal to the wider population.
During the second phase of the portal’s history, the coordinators opted for a
low-profile strategy of spreading the word about the portal, contacting journalists for
suggestions about the information they would like to find on the portal. This strategy of
raising external awareness about the improved site was complemented by marketing it to
the public administration.
7.1.4 Evaluation
Although Cristal’s aim was to create a better informed citizenry and enable people to
exercise control over their political representatives more effectively, in practice Cristal
was closer to the broadcasting model of mass communication, referring citizens to
published government information rather than engaging in interactive discussion.
From a political perspective, the Cristal project might be regarded as having failed in
its broader mission of bringing about transparency in Argentine public life. It struggled
to preserve itself: throughout 2004 the website remained ‘under construction’.
Some proposed closing the portal down, while others suggested it could be fused with
other portals to create a single e-government portal. Currently, Cristal operates as the
single e-government portal of Argentina. However, its future as a democratic tool is
inextricably linked to the future of the Argentine public administration, and it is as yet
unclear how that will evolve.
7.2 The open government website of Mongolia: http://open-government.mn
7.2.1 Project aim
The Open Government website was founded in 2001 by the Mongolian Government and
by the prime minister as a top–down initiative to improve the transparency of
government. The site was designed to open channels of information between government
and citizens and encourage citizen participation in the policy making process through
online debate of draft laws and policy papers.
Such engagement was considered necessary to foster the rule of law, as informed and
engaged citizens are more likely to remain ‘law-abiding citizens’. Pressure from investors
and business entrepreneurs for greater information and opportunity to comment on draft
legislation was also a major impetus for the website’s launch.
7.2.2 Governance and accountability
Although a Mongolian governmental initiative, the project has received funding from the
US Agency for International Development (USAID.) The site was jointly designed and
launched by a content design team from USAID and a technical team from a local web
design company.

A study of e-participation projects in third-wave democracies 313
The project was designed to be participatory, enabling citizens to input their views on
policy making and the legislative process direct to the government via the online forum.
The site’s motto is “The Prime Minister is Listening”, and messages addressed to the
prime minister are passed on to him and his advisors personally, every two weeks.
The online conference feature provides an option for users to ‘chat’ with high-level
government officials and politicians, at a predetermined time on a preordained issue.
For example, the prime minister himself participated in a chat session in 2002 initiated on
youth and education by the Mongolian Youth Association. An online discussion in 2002
on foreign policy featured the Foreign Minister’s participation. In December 2004,
the site hosted an online chat to discuss the ‘Government Action Plan’ with the
participation of the prime minister; in 2005 the website sponsored a national “Open Talk
on Taxes” with the Ministry of Finance and General Department of National Taxation.
This was broadcast live on national TV, radio and internet. Over 600 visitors from five
different countries participated through the internet chat lines, and an estimated total of
almost 700,000 Mongolians tuned in to the programme.
7.2.3 Publicity
The website was made known to the public as a result of marketing efforts by the site
team and through high-profile online interviews and chat sessions with public officials.
Holding online events in 2005 in conjunction with other broadcast media such as
television and radio continued to keep the public informed about Open Government’s
activities.
7.2.4 Evaluation
So far, the project has not been officially evaluated. However, according to the site’s web
coordinator, open government has become “one of the most sought-after government
websites, pioneering the government’s path toward e-government”.
Although the website piloted access to the prime minister and the cabinet on
policy-related issues, there are some elements missing from the project that prevent the
open government website from fully utilising the opportunities offered by e-governance.
No thorough restructuring of the public administration system has yet occurred,
particularly relating to the responsibility of officials or the development of the regulatory
environment. No system of online correspondence or follow-up e-mails has been set-up
to ensure that public administration switch to electronic communication formats.
There have been no training sessions within governmental organisations on the use and
application of ICTs in their work. This failure to re-engineer internal government
communications could inhibit the website’s future prospects in building close cooperation
with government and developing into an e-governance portal.
7.3 Online knowledge-sharing in Latvia (Politika.lv – www.politika.lv)
7.3.1 Project aim
Politika, and its English version, www.policy.lv, is an online portal dedicated to public
policy in Latvia. Politika was set-up in response to two main concerns: the need for open
and responsible public policy making and the development of a Latvian information
society.

314 S. Coleman and I. Kaposi
The internet was seen as a way to provide quicker, easier access and engender mass
participation in policy debates. Politika also aimed to establish “a serious environment for
debates about policy”. By creating a non-commercial online space for discussion, Politika
would complement existing discussion fora.
7.3.2 Governance and accountability
The portal operates as a non-profit organisation. Originally sponsored by the Soros
Foundation-Latvia (SFL) and other Soros network programmes, from 2003 Politika’s
budget was raised increasingly from external sources including EU funds and the
US Embassy Democracy Commission. The prioritisation of independence does not
permit the portal to carry advertisements and sponsored materials, or to rely on major
state funding. To strengthen its independent standing, in 2003 Politika became associated
with the Center for Public Policy Providus, a Latvian think-tank.
In December 2000, the SFL invited tenders from Latvian companies for the technical
and design development of the portal. The winning design company also contributed to
making the site content more user-friendly. It was their idea to publish ‘op-ed’ (opinion
editorial) papers alongside the lengthy, specialised policy papers, which are less
accessible to users.
Participatory goals of the portal were supported by the acceptance for publication of
user-generated (non-commissioned) papers. Among interactive discussion features,
the option for posting comments on the papers or other materials has proved most popular
with users.
7.3.3 Publicity
The portal was launched on 25 July, 2001 at the second SFL public policy forum,
a high-profile event entitled that year “Open Policy and Decisions Behind the Scenes in
Latvia”. This event, where the keynote speakers included the prime minister and
the speaker of the Latvian parliament, provided an “ideal venue at which to draw the
attention of the policy community to politika.lv.”
The project developers continue to initiate special projects in connection with major
events, such as national elections or the referendum on European Union accession, with a
view to raising the profile of the portal in the media.
7.3.4 Evaluation
Of 450,000 internet users in Latvia, Politika attracts around 13,000 unique users per
month who produce 150,000 page views. In the first year of the portal’s operation,
the number of unique users per month grew ten-fold.
Apart from the public policy community, the portal users and international audiences,
it is the cooperation of Latvia’s political decision-making institutions and policy makers
which is a crucial factor in the recognition of the portal – the “real impact of virtual
democracy”. Initially, copyright regulations posed an obstacle for Politika’s receiving
policy studies from government bodies, but the SFL lobbied successfully the Latvian
government for a change and by now Latvian copyright law grants the SFL use of all
materials published on the site.

A study of e-participation projects in third-wave democracies 315
Directly or indirectly, the portal also managed to have an impact on policies on
several occasions. In some cases, the suggestions from the expert and NGO reviews
commissioned by Politika about government studies and draft laws have been ‘taken into
account’ by decision makers, while in other cases Politika managed to influence
policy making through agenda-setting in the media.
Mainstream media have come to acknowledge Politika as a neutral and reliable
publication site. Print and broadcast journalists have requested that Politika establish a
dedicated media section for monitoring journalistic ethics and hidden advertising in
Latvia’s mass media. This effectively assigns to Politika the role of a self-regulatory
professional media association.
The Politika team is satisfied with the niche it has established in using the internet to
“achieve policy goals and greater public participation”.
7.4 Online policy discussion in Armenia Forum – www.forum.am
7.4.1 Project aim
Forum’s mission was two-fold. Firstly, to employ ICTs to enable people to interact, share
information, and build consensus effectively. Secondly, to make Armenian public
opinion “much more powerful, targeted, and result-oriented”.
However, the developers were aware that Armenia as a transition country lacked the
infrastructure, resources and expertise to benefit from ICTs. Nor was the culture of
“constructive debate in the public domain where opinions are expressed openly and in
writing” rooted in Armenian public life.
7.4.2 Governance and accountability
The Forum website was set-up in February 2001 and is run by UNDP Armenia and the
National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia, which is the UNDP’s
‘executive agent’ or state partner in the project.
Forum hosts online discussion groups or ‘communities’. These communities are
organised thematically into groups including human rights, environmental protection,
politics, human development, gender and development.
To educate participants in understanding the rules of engagement for online
communities, Forum organised a workshop on community building and workshops for
training facilitators. For its technological design, Forum began by holding face-to-face
discussions involving those who were to take part in online communities. An online
forum was ‘simulated’ at these meetings to determine which tools participants would
most benefit from their ‘virtual meetings’.
Users are required to register to contribute to the discussion. The semi-closed system
and the registration requirement were designed to preclude undesirable contributions and
keep the communities ‘clean’.
7.4.3 Publicity
Forum was officially launched in December 2001 at a press conference held by its online
community facilitators. A slide show presented the website’s features and a presentation
was delivered to representatives from the print and broadcast media about advantages of

316 S. Coleman and I. Kaposi
online communication and discussions. Forum was branded as “the first website for
online community interaction in Armenian”.
7.4.4 Evaluation
Of the original groups, the online community on environmental issues has proved the
most active. The relative success of this community can be partially attributed to
Armenia’s environmental protection sector having had a ‘critical mass’ of people
motivated, knowledgeable, and technologically competent enough to engage in an online
discussion community. Another factor contributing to the environment community’s
success was that it had the most energetic and able facilitator.
Of the other founding communities, the offline activism of the gender group or the
human rights group could not be transformed into active online participation because of
the “apprehension of the community members about new technologies”.
By 2004 membership of the Forum communities presented a varied picture, with no
community boasting particularly high participation rates. Forum’s popularity depended
upon a “profound change in the culture of expression and interaction between society
members at all levels”. Civil society had to learn new ways of responding to
decision makers, and the government had to develop ways of interacting with the many
new facets of civil society. Forum, however, introduced a new medium of public
discussion, which may be expected to flourish in due time.
7.5 E-petitioning in Hungary peticio.hu – www.peticio.hu
7.5.1 Project aim
Peticio is a Hungarian-language website on which citizens can initiate and sign petitions.
Modelled partly on its English-language counterparts, the site is a citizen initiative,
started by a group of people who wished to support active citizen participation in public
life and to provide a new forum for expressing opinion.
7.5.2 Governance and accountability
As a citizen-led, ground-up initiative, it was imperative for the team behind Peticio to
ensure the civic nature and independence of the site. A public benefit association was
set-up as the organisational background to the website. Members based all decisions of
the association on democratic majority rule. They contributed from their own resources to
fund their initiative, the idea of carrying advertising was rejected, and all work on the site
has been carried out on a voluntary basis.
Petitions can be started by anyone, provided that they supply their e-mail address
and agree to the conditions listed on the website. As a means of facilitating basic
participation, signing a petition is a quick and uncomplicated process. The content of
petitions is moderated by the website team.
The team is aware that signing a petition tends to be the last step in forming
an opinion on an issue, and is often preceded by discussion or deliberation.
Separate discussion forums for each petition were considered, but such a feature
would have proved unrealistic for the workload involved in an ongoing moderation
of the site. Petition initiators now have the option of a link to a discussion forum

A study of e-participation projects in third-wave democracies 317
where issues could be debated, but the most used deliberative mechanism on Peticio is
counter-petitioning, i.e., starting a petition, which is almost identical to the original,
but opposing it.
7.5.3 Publicity
The site was officially launched in January 2004 and proved to be fairly popular with
Hungarian citizens: it was downloaded from 50,000 different addresses in the month of
its launch. This success was aided by two lucky publicity breaks: news of one of its first
petitions arguing for open source software was posted to the Hungarian Linux forum
and spread in the IT community. Next, a petition was started against the television
appearances of a Hungarian rally racer. One of the signatures on this petition was the
name of the person against whom the petition was started, and this caught the attention of
the tabloid press.
7.5.4 Evaluation
Although there has as yet been no official evaluation of the site, Peticio’s primary
mission of establishing a Hungarian site for petitioning has undoubtedly succeeded.
The grassroots, word-of-mouth support and publicity for the site indicates that there was
a real demand among Hungarian internet users for such an online service. The association
notes that there are intermittent waves of popularity coinciding with topical petitions
becoming live.
Peticio’s success can best be judged in terms of how it is able to influence
Hungary’s political institutions. However, in Hungary’s current legislative environment,
internet-based citizen participation has little chance of influencing political
decision making. First, Hungarian law does not recognise electronic petitioning. Second,
Peticio struggles with the perceptions circulating about all internet and civil-society
initiatives in Hungary.
In the absence of a legal requirement for government to hear and respond to petitions,
Peticio as a form of cyberactivism may be satisfying to some activists who want to set an
agenda, but ultimately ineffective in determining policy.
7.6 Online legislative initiatives in Estonia
Täna Otsusta Mina (TOM) – https://www.eesti.ee/tom/ideas.py/avaleht
7.6.1 Project aim
The Estonian government launched its e-democracy portal, TOM, as part of a larger
e-government project under the www.riik.ee domain. TOM was devised with a view to
bringing citizens closer to the government and making the operation of the government
more transparent to citizens.
What TOM enabled effectively for the first time were two kinds of opportunities for
citizens to become involved in policy making and legislation. First, draft laws from
ministries are published on TOM and citizens can comment on them. This serves the
purpose of consultation. Second, the portal provides for a citizen-initiated process in
which any Estonian citizen can submit their own proposals for laws or policies.

318 S. Coleman and I. Kaposi
7.6.2 Governance and accountability
TOM is run by the Estonian government and is under the auspices of the State
Chancellery. The State Chancellery owns the software for TOM, and is responsible for
the portal’s document management.
There are no restrictions on who may submit ideas to the portal, the only requirement
being that users must register on TOM. Although submissions are moderated, it is rarely
necessary to take messages off the site.
From the outset, the right of users to remain anonymous was regarded as an important
principle of TOM. For some of the project team, however, online anonymity came to be
regarded as problematic, potentially undermining the quality of comments. One solution
to the problems presented by anonymity is to use digital signatures on TOM.
Digital signatures for citizens have been legal in Estonia since 2002, but voting on TOM
with digital signatures is, for the time being, optional.
7.6.3 Publicity
The launch of the site was timed to coincide with the traditional dearth of media stories
during the summer season. Press releases were sent out and “the news spread all over
Estonia, via newspapers, radio and television”. Issues discussed on TOM continue to be
often covered in the media, as on the forums of the biggest online commercial portals,
which up to 40% of Estonian internet users may log onto daily. Whenever TOM or an
idea discussed on the portal receives news coverage, the number of visitors to the site
increases for approximately one week.
7.6.4 Evaluation
TOM has not been officially evaluated, but there are some strong indicators of its
success. The portal has helped Estonia gain international recognition for its e-democratic
initiatives.
There are 80,000 visitors to the site per month and the number of registered users has
grown steadily from around 3500 in 2002 to 6026 in November 2005.
However, the number of active contributors to TOM remains small. When the portal
first opened, there were days when between 10 and 20 proposals were posted.
This dropped to on average two or three per week and the number voting on proposals
dropped to around 20.
Twenty to twenty five percent of all proposals submitted via TOM have qualified to
be sent to ministries, of which approximately 3% have been either developed into
legislation or acknowledged with a response that a similar proposal is already being
considered by the relevant ministry. The protocols associated with online initiatives have
placed an additional workload for civil servants, who are required to respond to all
proposals that their departments or agencies receive from TOM.
Of the two main kinds of discussion options on TOM, legislative proposals have
proved to be the most popular. The Estonian Minister of Justice, whose department deals
with 75% of all of TOM’s proposals, claims that their quality is generally low, mainly
because they are impractical or lack sufficient national support. Nonetheless, TOM has
met with the approval of subsequent administrations in Estonia and continues to enjoy
support from high-level government officials.

A study of e-participation projects in third-wave democracies 319
8 Conclusions
The aim of conducting the case studies was to arrive at some generalisable reflections
about the problematics and opportunities of new-media use in the context of emergent
democracies and to set out some practical recommendations for those planning
e-participation projects in ‘new’ democracies. The following grid (Table 1) is intended to
provide a basic summary of the six case studies in relation to the research questions that
we asked of each of them.
Table 1 Summary of case study results
Project aim
Governance and
accountability
Publicity
efforts
Evaluation
mechanisms Overall results
Cristal Project,
Argentina
Transparency Government-led Yes No Transitory
Open Government
website, Mongolia
Transparency,
citizen
participation
Government-led Yes None
published
Still exists
Public policy portal,
Latvia
Knowledge
sharing
Nonprofit,
NGO-led
Yes Yes Still exists; a
successful model
Forum policy
discussion, Armenia
Citizen
participation
Nonprofit,
NGO-led
Yes No Modest
e-Petitioning,
Hungary
Citizen
participation
Nonprofit,
citizen-led
No No Still exists
Legislative
e-consultation,
Estonia
Citizen
participation,
transparency
Government-led Yes No Still exists, but
use is limited
The printing press and mass-circulation newspapers were vital to the emergence of
political democracy in countries such as Britain, France and the USA. Can the same be
said about new-media and third-wave democracies? We can observe from our case
studies that there are both barriers and opportunities facing new democracies in their use
of new media. We begin by identifying seven significant barriers.
The need for distinct civic spaces
While new democracies have, by definition, adopted norms and practices which meet the
constitutional standards of polyarchy, they tend to be characterised by “weak or
intermittent horizontal accountability” (O’Donnell, 1998). Vertical accountability is
secured through constitutional norms, such as the organisation of fair elections and
adherence to the rule of law. Horizontal accountability is dependent upon robust civil
society, which must have the capacity to scrutinise, challenge and advise government.
While the vision and energy of civic movements have often contributed in historically
exciting ways to the creation of new democracies, civil society in most third-wave
democracies tends to be weak. For example, in his study of post-communist European
countries, Howard has shown that membership of civic organisations is significantly
lower (0.91) than in advanced European democracies (2.39) (Howard, 2002).
Comparisons between mean memberships of parties, trades unions and environmental
organisations in old and new European democracies are striking (Table 2):

320 S. Coleman and I. Kaposi
Table 2 Party, trade union, environmental organisation mean membership in European
democracies
Political party (%) Trade union (%) Environmental (%)
OLD democracies 17 32 12
NEW democracies 6 20 4
New democracies face the paradoxical task of having to nurture civil society, often from
the top down (by government encouragement and resources) or from without (via donor
funding). But, by definition, civil society is the most robust when it acts autonomously,
without having to depend upon ‘official’ endorsement or funding. A key question for new
democracies, therefore, concerns the extent to which horizontal accountability can
simultaneously hold to account and be sustained by vertical governance structures.
For new democracies to move beyond vertical-elitist democracy, they need to
establish and nurture spaces within which the public can speak for themselves in
spontaneous and unregulated ways. Such spaces are often referred to as a public sphere:
open to all, where any opinion can be expressed without fear. In most developed
democracies public spheres have evolved over the past three centuries, over which time
patterns of recognising, making sense of, contesting, ridiculing and reshaping political
power have been absorbed into popular culture. In short, the citizens of advanced
democracies have access to a repertoire of ways of responding to those who claim
authority over them which must be newly cultivated in new democracies.
Overcoming bureaucratic resistance
Most new democracies have inherited governing bureaucracies that resist openness and
are unwilling to share information with citizens. In the spirit of elitist democracy,
government actors believe that their job is to make decisions for rather than with citizens.
Pre-democratic traditions of official secrecy, street-level corruption and intimidation of
dissenting voices combine to produce a culture of suspicion in which citizens regard the
democratic aspects of governance as a veneer, behind which works the real operation of
power. While the emphasis of e-participation in advanced democracies has tended to be
upon engaging citizens through new channels of communication, attempts to broaden
effective public participation in new democracies have been much more concerned to
monitor state activities and make official information transparent. For example,
the response of civic activists to the Argentine financial crisis of 2001/2002 was to
establish a campaign for “More Information, Less Poverty” which contributed to “public
awareness of the urgent need to democratise public information” (Baron, 2004). A fatal
flaw for the Cristal project was the mismatch between the government’s ideal that it
should provide any information demanded on public finance and the non-compliance of
the relevant ministries in providing this information.
Substituting weak media structures
In most of our case-study countries, public communication is limited by weak media
structures, characterised by inadequate supervisory regulation, residual cultures of
censorship and self-censorship and under-developed telecommunications infrastructures.
While several of the case-study projects relied upon the mass media to broadcast
information to a public that could not easily be reached online, there is also a sense
in which online projects were performing democratic, public-service functions that

A study of e-participation projects in third-wave democracies 321
could not be expected from the established media. Unlike new-media initiatives in
advanced democracies, several of which have emerged from within mass-media
organisations (such as the BBC), and others of which provide distinctly alternative
services which supplement the old media, in new democracies there is a tendency for new
media to be used to redress the informational deficiencies and editorial inadequacies of
existing mass media.
Low internet connectivity
Internet connectivity in most new democracies is low (Table 3). With the exception of
Estonia, which is widely regarded as having taken an exceptional fast track to the
information society, in most of our case-study countries, access to the internet is confined
to a privileged minority. While that minority often includes well-organised civil-society
organisations, they are compelled to adopt the role of information intermediaries,
using online platforms to set agendas for the mass media or to support face-to-face
activism. Indeed, the Armenian and Mongolian projects bolstered participation in their
online events by engaging radio and television to simultaneously broadcast them;
in Argentina the team relied on broadcast media to reproduce the contents of the site and
this ultimately became a proxy interface for the portal between the government and
citizens. The Armenian project educated users in face-to-face workshops to overcome IT
literacy barriers to participation.
Table 3 Internet connectivity in the case-study countries
Internet access in homes (%)
Estonia 50
Latvia 35
Mongolia 8
Armenia 5
Hungary 30
Argentina 20
Source: http://www.internetworldstats.com/sa/ar.htm
The problem of low internet penetration is compounded by the fact that the hardware,
software and skills, which constitute the internet are not indigenous products, but involve
the purchase of costly and restrictive licences; present major problems of linguistic
adaptation; often entail partnerships with suppliers who have little sensitivity to local
political cultures.
Establishing representative legitimacy
Several of our case studies grappled with the problem of anonymity and
representativeness. By allowing citizens to participate without being identified, they feel
freer to say exactly what they think. But because it is impossible to be certain about the
origin or representativeness of anonymous public input, its legitimacy is diminished.
This was remarkably the case in the Estonian case study, where extremely small numbers
of unidentified people were proposing to set a legislative agenda on behalf of the
Estonian public. Although anonymity undermines representative claims, in consultative
projects, where the public’s role is principally advisory or expressive, it might be more

322 S. Coleman and I. Kaposi
useful to elicit high-quality views from unidentified sources than demographically
representative opinion from known sources. An elegant solution to the dilemma between
anonymity and representativeness is to have third-party registration, where citizens must
identify themselves to an independent body which oversees the site, but need not reveal
their identities in public.
The need for effective moderation and facilitation
Much has been written about the potential for richer and more inclusive public
deliberation via many-to-many online interaction (Brants et al., 1996; Coleman, 2004a;
Coleman and Gotze, 2001; Sassi, 2001). Several studies have recognised the importance
of effective moderation as a means of facilitating civilised democratic debate
(Edwards, 2002). Those running the Hungarian Peticio project recognised their
failure to generate deliberative discussions around petition proposals, but felt that the
effort required to moderate such interaction was beyond them. The relative success
of particular communities within the Armenian Forum was attributed to the quality of
facilitation. It is clear that discussion moderators have a key role to play in the online
democratic environment. Coleman and Gotze have set out six main functions for online
moderators:
• set out clear and transparent rules for participants, e.g., maximum length of
messages; maximum frequency of messages; attitudes to offensive language
and defamation
• regulate the discussion, both by implementing agreed rules and adhering
to ethical principles, such as data privacy, political neutrality
and non-coercion
• moderate discussion messages, ensuring that any participant with a point
to make receives a fair hearing and that the discussion is conducted on a fair
and friendly basis
• help discussion participants to reach conclusions (not necessarily shared ones)
rather than incessantly rehashing old arguments
• summarise the deliberation so that key points of evidence and main conclusions
are set out in a balanced and accessible form
• seek to ensure that there is feedback to the participants, so that they do not feel
that they have contributed to the policy process without any response from the
policy makers.
Evidence of political impact
The most persistent problem facing our case studies concerned the extent to which they
made any impact upon policy formation or decision making. This is precisely the
question asked about most e-participation projects in advanced democracies.
Measuring political impact is a complex matter. It might seem at first that a project
involving information transparency, as in Argentina and Mongolia, has little effect upon
government behaviour, or that online policy discussions, as in Armenia or Estonia,
are an empty exercise. But the same could be said for most acts of political participation,
from voting to demonstrating to attending a party meeting. It is very rare to find a direct

A study of e-participation projects in third-wave democracies 323
line of causation between political participation and outcomes, but few would doubt that
all of these have indirect impact upon a range of consequences. It would be a mistake,
therefore, to judge the success of e-participation projects simply in terms of measurable
and unambiguous direct outcomes. Instead, it makes sense to consider the effects of
e-participation upon policy makers (Do they listen? Do they respond? Do they learn?);
participants (Do they become more informed or tolerant citizens? Do they feel that they
are being heard? Is collective action made easier for them?) and policy itself (Does it
reflect public experience more than it would have done? Does it contain new ideas that
did not come from politicians or officials? Is its quality improved?). These are complex,
multi-dimensional questions which go beyond simple, instrumental accounts of who gets
what or who does what to whom.
It was clear from our case studies that policy makers did buy in to these projects,
often with a good deal of enthusiasm. In Argentina the backing of the Cabinet chief was
key to the project’s capacity to uncover information; in Mongolia the prime minister’s
office was closely involved; in Estonia the State Chancellery required government
departments to take the project seriously. Such direct support for e-participation by
high-level government contrasts starkly with most advanced democracies, where most
governments have failed to engage in this way. On the other hand, a persistent frustration
in our case studies was the failure of governments to adapt internally to cope with the
culture of e-participation. For example, in Mongolia, government has encouraged
web-based input from citizens, but is not yet organised to respond to such input
electronically. In Latvia, obsolete copyright restrictions delay publication of useful
government material. Even in e-friendly Estonia, where the prime minister welcomed the
increased workload for civil servants presented by the online initiative project, there is
evidence of bureaucratic resistance to making time for TOM. In a contest between
high-level enthusiasm from politicians and middle-level resistance by bureaucrats,
the latter could blight the prospects of effective e-participation.
At the citizen level, there is some evidence that the projects we studied did
meet a public demand, both for greater government transparency and for more
public involvement in the policy process. None of the projects has reached the public
as a whole, or even the internet population as a whole, but building such support is a
gradual process. We did not interview project users as part of this study, so we are unable
to draw conclusions about the extent to which they are satisfied with them. It would be
very useful for user-based evaluations to be conducted for all of these projects.
Although we cannot say what impact the projects in our case studies had upon users,
we can suggest three likely effects that should be investigated. First, there are politically
instrumental effects: the extent to which citizens can report examples of policies
changing as a result of their participation. Second, there is an impact upon efficacy: the
extent to which citizens feel that they can influence government as a result of taking part
in these projects. Third, there is an impact upon political socialisation: the extent to which
citizens know more about their role as citizens, the role of government and the nature
of various policies that effect them. E-participation projects might result in any of these
effects, although the second and third are unlikely to be sustained for long if the first is
absent.

324 S. Coleman and I. Kaposi
The most difficult aspect of impact to judge from our case studies is the effect upon
policy itself. Although most of the projects in our case studies claimed to be opening up
the policy process, it was hard to find specific examples of policies, agendas or
legislation which changed as a result of online input from citizens. In this respect,
the Latvian project, based on the relatively modest intention of stimulating more
informed and cross-sector debate within the public-policy community, may well have had
the most significant impact upon the policy agenda.
Several of the barriers faced by the new-media initiatives that we have considered are
strikingly similar to those faced by e-democracy projects in advanced democracies.
Indeed, each of the last three problems identified earlier would apply to most projects of
this kind in Western Europe, North America or Australia. While recognising the range of
difficulties facing those attempting to use new media as democratic tools, we are
ultimately confident that e-democracy can play a valuable role in new democracies,
specifically in relation to the cumulative process of creating a cultural environment of
free public expression.
Research on new democracies has shown that a society’s pro-democratic mass values
are a necessary condition for the establishment of effective, as opposed to merely formal,
liberal democracies (Inglehart, and Welzel, 2005). Eckstein’s congruence theory states
that political institutions are unlikely to endure unless they are consistent with mass
culture and that therefore the most important prerequisite for a functioning democracy is
a democratic culture, based on broadly shared democratic values (Eckstein, 1998).
Inglehart’s recent research, using the World Values Survey, has shown that countries’
a priori ‘self-expression values’ (as measured in the early to mid-1990s) have a strong
effect on the extent to which they are de facto democracies (as measured for 2000–2002).
By contrast, there is no such correlation between these values and a regime’s subsequent
classification as a democracy.
Focusing on the WVS scores for the countries featured in our case studies, the same
trend is clearly visible: there is a direct correlation between countries’ scores for mass
democratic values and as de facto democracies.
This data suggests, first, that strong self-expression values are a necessary condition
for effective democracy, but their absence does not preclude a regime from being
classified as a nominal democracy. Second, the research has important bearings on the
significance of self-expression values, implying that rising levels of pro-democratic
values serve to strengthen effective democracy, closing the gap between nominal and
effective democracy.
These are important findings for our research, as they imply that any means of
strengthening self-expression within new democracies are likely to have a positive effect
upon their de facto health as institutional political systems. Stated another way, it seems
that the use of new media could help to bridge the gap between nominal and effective
democracy. Table 4 indicates a strong correlation between internet penetration,
connectivity and diffusion, democratic behaviour (such as newspaper readership and
signing petitions) and scores for freedom and transparency. While we should not interpret
these correlations as having a causal significance, they do at least suggest that new media
might contribute to an atmosphere of democratic openness.

A study of e-participation projects in third-wave democracies 325
Table 4 Internet, democratic behaviour, freedom and transparency in the case-study countries
Country
2005
Internet
p
enetration
% of
population
2004
Internet
connectivity
index
(2002)
2004
Internet
access
index
(2002)
2004 ICT
diffusion
index
(2002)
TI
CPI
2005
Freedom house
aggregate
No. 0–12. F:
‘Free’; PF:
‘Partially Free’
1992/3 2005
2004
Newspaper
Circulation/
1000
inhabitants
WVS
percentage
signing a
petition during
early-mid-
1990s
Argentina 20 0.12910 0.56290 0.34600 2.8 3(F) 2(F) 123 0.22
Armenia 5 0.05810 0.50440 0.28130 2.9 5(PF) 7(PF) 5 0.18
Estonia 50 0.17345 0.31320 0.48670 6.4 4(PF) 0(F) 174 0.39
Hungary 30 0.30690 0.54270 0.42480 5.0 2(F) 0(F) 465 0.18
Latvia 35 0.23690 0.52630 0.38160 4.2 4(PF) 1(F) 135 0.65
Mongolia 8 0.04170 0.49920 0.27040 3.0 3(F) 2(F) 27 NA
EU Ave. 50 0.43000 0.63680 0.53320 6.7 0(F) 0(F) 217 0.45
World Ave. 19 0.16461 0.48473 0.32461 4.0 6(PF) 4(PF) 96 0.34
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank the Open Society Institute for funding the research and Helen
Hardman of the University of Oxford for her contribution to the study.
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Note
1One World is a consortium of CSOs which gathers news from 1500 organisations worldwide.
IPS is the largest reporter of global issues. It is a network of journalists in more than 100 countries,
with satellite communication links to 1200 outlets.