Can The Internet Strengthen Democracy?

Stephen Coleman

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781509508402
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

From its inception as a public communication network, the Internet was regarded by many people as a potential means of escaping from the stranglehold of top-down, stage-managed politics. If hundreds of millions of people could be the producers as well as receivers of political messages, could that invigorate democracy? If political elites fail to respond to such energy, where will it leave them? In this short book, internationally renowned scholar of political communication, Stephen Coleman, argues that the best way to strengthen democracy is to re-invent it for the twenty-first century. Governments and global institutions have failed to seize the opportunity to democratise their ways of operating, but online citizens are ahead of them, developing practices that could revolutionise the exercise of political power.

1
The Great Missed Opportunity

Governments across the world, in both established and new democracies, have missed a huge opportunity to reinvent themselves, restore their legitimacy and connect with citizens. In the mid-1990s, as governments faced a global wave of disaffection and disengagement, a new public communication network emerged: the Internet. Since then, a range of social relationships – from friendship ties to market transactions to knowledge acquisition – have been transformed. Democratic governance is an exception to those transformations. There has been no shortage of e-rhetoric from governments at all levels (local, national and transnational), but in practice an ethos of centralized institutionalism has prevailed.

Democratic governments find themselves confused and embarrassed by the ubiquity of the Internet. There is a fundamental mismatch between its logic and theirs. Meanwhile, forms of communication with government that dominated the pre-Internet era – parties, the broadcast media and newspapers – are in decline, particularly in relation to the generation that has grown to adulthood in the past twenty years.

While institutions stagger from strategy to strategy, not capable of living with the Internet and not able to live without it, citizens are engaging with one another online in imaginative and efficacious ways. Horizontal (peer-to-peer) citizenship seems to be alive and well, while vertical (top-down) citizenship seems to be clogged up and unappealing.

Defined for the purpose of this book as a network of interconnected computer networks comprising a range of platforms, devices and protocols facilitating a global flow of data that can be used, shared, stored and retrieved by users, the Internet has come to symbolize contemporary aspirations to communicate without restraint. Attempts to evaluate the social significance of the Internet have prompted a framing war between those who regard late modernity as an era of listless decadence characterized by endless opportunities for people to speak without listening and those who discern progressive potential in the relentless advance of global integration and its attendant networks of interdependent but uncoordinated communication. Much of the scholarly literature has been dominated by those who believe that the Internet will fundamentally transform political democracy, replacing old forms of representation with new systems of plebiscitary technopopulism, and those who believe that digital politics will merely replicate long-established structural forms and conventions, shooing innovation to the margins. Fragments of hard evidence can be found to support both of these accounts (certainly enough to fill several half-persuasive books), but such arguments are ultimately strained and almost obsessive in their eagerness to excite or deny.

Both sides in this somewhat sterile debate argue about the Internet's role in recent historical events, from the election of the first black American President to the insurgent vibrancy of the Arab Spring. Rather like a group of historians arguing about whether access to the printing press did or did not cause the revolutions that swept across Europe in 1848, the impossibility of arriving at an intelligent answer lies in the vapidity of the question. Historical change is rarely dependent upon just one factor. Historical agency does not reside in artefacts. Claims that the Internet changes everything or that it changes nothing in the political (or any other) sphere are of little value, for they over-state the powers of technology, reducing history to a crude study of media effects.

Rather more interesting analyses are likely to emerge when, instead of asking whether the Internet does this or that to politics, we ask what kind of challenges political democracy currently faces and how, shaped by conscious human intervention, the Internet – or at least some of its features – might be utilized in tackling them. Consider two critical challenges facing both long-established and newly formed democracies throughout the contemporary world. Firstly, the problem of making democratic representation meaningful to people. How, instead of regarding representative institutions, such as congresses and parliaments, as remote, unintelligible, self-serving and insensitive to mundane experience, could represented citizens come to feel that they are – or, at least, could be – an integral part of the democratic process? Arguably, unless such a relationship can be fostered, the legitimacy of democratic governance will continue to atrophy and the capacity of elected leaders to depend upon the consent of citizens will be undermined. Secondly, a fundamental challenge facing anyone wanting to engage in collective political action is the problem of coordination. Put simply, it is much easier for people with many resources (money, status, networks) to work together towards a political end than those with access to few. A billionaire hedge-fund investor has few difficulties finding or meeting with others sharing the same material interest. They can jump on a plane, hire a hotel for an international conference, pay lobbyists to put pressure on governments and publicize their cause. An office cleaner on a zero-hours contract will find it more difficult to connect and organize with others in the same position. It is not easy to reach cleaners in other office blocks (less still in other countries), to find places to meet, money to sustain and publicize a campaign or confidence to deal with the risk of personal recrimination. Traditionally, the capacity of richer, higher-status, more confident people to mobilize resources for collective action has resulted in an unequal political playing field. Although many disadvantaged groups do engage in collective action, often with considerable success, the practical barriers to coordination make it harder for them to combine their efforts than it is for the more affluent.

Faced with these barriers, some thinkers and practitioners have turned to the Internet, not as a technocratic panacea for the shortcomings of democracy, but as a contribution to the reconfiguration of political practice. Rather than claiming that the Internet ‘makes things happen’, they have sought ways of exploiting it in the service of democratic agency. Let's consider in some detail two of the most thoughtful and comprehensive recent attempts to demonstrate a positive link between the Internet and reinvigorated democracy. The first relates to the challenge of making representative institutions more open to public understanding, scrutiny and input. The second relates to the potential of digital technologies to overcome hitherto intractable barriers to political coordination and collective action.

Putting Parliament online?

Who better to initiate a programme designed to make parliamentary democracy more transparent, accessible and interactive than the Speaker of the British House of Commons? This is an old legislature which has withstood the arrival and consolidation of previous communication revolutions, such as the printing press and broadcasting. Suffused by tradition and somewhat resistant to the flurried rhetoric of modernization, the UK Parliament has been slow to adjust to the expectations of digitally experienced citizens. It has had its own website since 1996 and engaged in some experiments in e-consultation, but its sense of what it means to represent millions of people seems not to have changed much since before the advent of television. When the Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, established a Digital Democracy Commission ‘to consider, report and make recommendations on how parliamentary democracy in the United Kingdom can embrace the opportunities afforded by the digital world to become more effective in making laws, scrutinising the work and performance of government, representing citizens, encouraging citizens to engage with democracy and facilitating dialogue amongst citizens’, this was regarded by political insiders as a potentially significant initiative. It was not to be a merely speculative exercise, but a project intended to achieve outcomes that would refresh the terms of democratic representation. The Commission took a year to collect evidence and produce recommendations, which were published in January 2015 in a report entitled Open Up!¹

The Commission's acknowledgement that the Internet was not a cure-all for the problems of representative democracy was reassuring: ‘One message that resonated very clearly was that digital is only part of the answer. It can help to make democratic processes easier for people to understand and take part in, but other barriers must also be addressed for digital to have a truly transformative effect.’² Equally impressive was the Commission's commitment to ‘the need for Parliament to develop an appetite for risk-taking and innovation, which is an essential component of doing digital well’.³ And, indeed, the Commission did come up with a range of worthy and sometimes ambitious recommendations to be acted upon between now and the next general election. If implemented effectively, the Commission's proposals would be likely to make the UK Parliament much better at telling its own story, appearing more open to public scrutiny and avoiding the risk of seeming to be behind the curve of other institutions with which people interact in their daily lives.

Missing from the Commission's report, however, is any consideration of what democratic representation means and how the terms of such a relationship might be changing. Institutional roles and practices in contexts ranging from healthcare to education to journalism have been reconceived in recent years, problematizing relations between experts and lay audiences, formal and vernacular expression, epistemological authority and plurality, and dissemination and gatekeeping. Why should political representation be any different?

Historically, political representatives have been products of distance, appointed or elected to travel to capital cities, there to speak for the people who could not make the journey to faraway royal courts and legislatures. As politics became more institutionalized and the franchise broadened, political representatives came to be regarded as bridges of cognitive as well as geographical distance. Lacking the time or knowledge to engage fully in the technicalities of policy formation and decision-making, people relied on political representatives to think through complex questions on their behalf. In time, the role became professionalized and politicians began to be accused of embodying the very distance they were supposed to be reconciling. The inherent tension between representation as substitution and simulacrum moved too far towards the former. Nowadays, political representatives are commonly accused of not listening to the people they represent; having partisan loyalties that casually override local mandates; taking citizens for granted; and emerging from such a narrow social base that they neither resemble nor empathize with the people they are supposed to be speaking for. At the same time, representative institutions seem to have lost their way: sometimes a perfunctory mechanism for the rubber-stamping of executive decisions; at other times an irrelevant theatre of circumscribed authority.

Can such relationships of distance be sustained in the era of the Internet? When the physical journey between institutional centres and the communities in which peop...