E-government in Europe

Paul G. Nixon, Vassiliki N. Koutrakou

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780415599481
• eBook ISBN: 9781134143740
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civics & Citizenship
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book traces the development of e-government and its applications across Europe, exploring the effects of information and communication technology (ICTs) upon political action and processes.

Explores a range of concepts and topics underpinning e-government in Europe:

• the degree to which e-government translates into genuine reform of government and public administration
• the dual role of the EU as both a provider of e-government through its own internal activities and also as a facilitator or aggregator in the way it seeks to engender change and promote its ethos in member states across the EU
• cyberterrorism and its use both by terrorists and governments to pursue political agendas.

Featuring in-depth case studies on the progress of e-government in the UK, France, Germany, Denmark, The Netherlands, Portugal, Greece, Slovenia, Hungary, and Estonia. These case studies address the above issues, whilst at the same time highlighting commonality and diversity in practice and the paradox between top-down strategies and the effort to engage wider civil participation via e-government.

e-Government in Europe will be of interest to students and scholars of public policy, politics, media and communication studies, computing and information and communications technologies and European studies.

1 E-government and democratic politics

Michael Margolis

‘Using information technology to network government [is] relatively simple. The more complex and difficult challenges are to address issues of accountability, equity, and democratic process’

Jane Fountain (2005)

Introduction

As graphical browsers and the World Wide Web (WWW) popularised the Internet during the mid-1990s, political visionaries joined their economic counterparts in predicting radical changes for governance as well as for commerce. Just as the Internet would provide new opportunities for ‘dot.com’ entrepreneurs to restructure accepted business models, so it would provide new openings for political entrepreneurs to reshape the established political order. Interaction among citizens in cyberspace would enrich public opinion and increase participation in democratic politics. In contrast to the established mass media, computer-mediated information and communication technologies (ICT) would afford ordinary citizens the power to research and disseminate their own ideas about public affairs. Moreover, political activists – ‘netizens’, so to speak – could use e-mail, newsgroups, and websites to form new political groups and build new coalitions. Cyber-democrats like Howard Rheingold, Rhonda and Michael Hauben, and John Perry Barlow heralded the Internet’s promise for realising formerly impossible dreams of informed engagement in political and civic affairs.¹ They anticipated that once citizens discovered this potential, the Internet would foster greater individual freedom as well as viable new parties and interest groups that would challenge the dominant political groups.

It hasn’t happened. Established parties, together with their candidates and officeholders, dominate political activity not only offline, but also on the Internet.² Cyberspace is replete with familiar political and commercial interests, whose broadly linked and much advertised websites reflect their dominance of political and economic affairs of civil societies in the real world. This dominance is buttressed by a coterie of political and commercial consultants, who specialise in marketing their ideological concepts, candidates, groups, and interests online, much as traditional consultants specialise in marketing concepts and products in the real world. In sum, contrary to cyber-democrats’ predictions that the Internet would broaden democracy through citizens’ increased involvement in and influence over public affairs, we have witnessed a normalisation of the politics of cyberspace, the emergence of a political and economic order that largely replicates that found in the physical world.³

When democratically-inclined social scientists began studying the political impact of the Internet in the early 1990s, they hoped to discover many popular new political groups online whose members exercised intelligent civic and political participation that affected public policy in western democracies. Their research showed that they had been overly optimistic, however, particularly with regard to policy inputs, the process of translating citizens’ preferences into laws and regulations. Instead of revolutionising policy formulation in the real world, netizens’ political activities tended to reflect and reinforce the familiar patterns of behaviour they had brought from that world.⁴ Nevertheless, the Internet did present new possibilities for enlightened democratic participation, especially with regard to the policy outputs of government.

Tax-paying citizens are not merely the government’s financiers; they are also its customers. As such they expect – even demand – that government implement public policies efficiently and effectively, particularly when those policies affect them personally. Indeed, the burgeoning numbers of governmental services and agencies online can be seen as efforts to realise the efficiency and goodwill that stem from doing business via the Internet. Whether or not governments intend it, providing services online increases the opportunities for democratic political participation.⁵

Pundits have argued that nations must deploy ICT via the Internet in order to benefit from the global economy. If the argument holds, it follows that regardless of their ability to control (or avoid) elections, nations that aspire to prominence in world affairs must permit their citizens to access millions of externally-generated databases in order for citizens to gather the information necessary to achieve their regimes’ immediate policy goals. It seems likely, therefore, that even authoritarian governments will loosen their restrictions on citizens’ accessing information from external sources, even though citizens could also utilise such information to develop economic and political resources that lie beyond the governments’ customary spheres of control. Preliminary evidence suggests that this argument is plausible. Even though institutional change lags behind technological innovation, governments with advanced technological sectors but few democratic traditions, such as Singapore, China, Malaysia and several Eastern European nations of the former Soviet bloc, seem to be tolerating more openness in domestic affairs as they seek more significant roles in the global economy.⁶

The next section contains a discussion of the proximate intellectual roots of cyber-democracy: the ‘New Left’ and the ‘Counterculture’ movements of the 1960s and early 1970s. The discussion suggests that cyber-democrats saw the Internet as the means to finally break the cycle of soaring promise and failed fulfillment that each new medium had engendered since the Industrial Revolution. The third section examines the difficulties of implementing direct participatory democracy despite the increased powers the Internet affords each citizen. It also questions the advantages of citizens’ direct participation in policy making in comparison to citizens’ judging the results of those policies. The final section discusses the advantages and dangers of democratic participation that emphasises the output side of politics. The discussion reviews how institutional arrangements, e-government and citizens’ habitual behaviours affect various desiderata, such as privacy, individual liberty, civic values, national security, and domestic and global economic progress. It argues that political uses of the Internet must take these arrangements and behaviours into account, and it concludes that encouraging citizens to react to governmental policies that affect them seems more promising for achieving positive democratic outcomes than does encouraging them to participate directly in formulating those policies. In the end, the evidence and the argument hark back to a necessary (and familiar) condition for democracy. Neither ICT nor any particular institutional arrangement can substitute for a democratically-inclined citizenry that can hold its freely-chosen governmental officials to account. The critical question may be whether or not ordinary citizens, their representatives and traditional democratic institutions still have sufficient capacity to oversee the largely unelected technological élites who control modern ICT.

The roots of e-government and cyber-democracy

The 1960s in the USA saw the growth of two distinct but interrelated radical movements, the New Left and the Counterculture. They shared a number of fundamental values, but had separate political agendas. Both were anti-elitist and egalitarian; they valued openness, sharing, community, and cooperation rather than competition. They opposed the manipulation of wants and desires that characterises a commercial economy. Many who participated in them shared similar musical tastes, clothing styles and recreational drug habits, but the two movements differed in political strategy.

The New Left viewed participatory democracy as a means for citizens to reestablish control of their lives. Citizens would realise that their private problems had public causes and political solutions, and they would transform the bureaucratic, impersonal society that had pacified them. Participatory democracy would wrest power and control from the corporate and governmental elite.⁷ Adherents of the Counterculture also rejected corporate America, but unlike the political activists of the New Left, they did so by dropping out rather than engaging in political struggle. They created alternative communities in which they could live as they pleased, unconstrained by the values, assumptions, material possessions and laws that governed the rest of society. While the New Left saw itself as struggling to transform American society through organised political activity, the Counterculture saw itself as subverting that society by creating freer and more attractive alternatives.

The radicalism of the 1960s had roots in previous radical movements. Many of the early leaders of the New Left were so called ‘red diaper’ babies, children of radicals who had been members of left wing parties and active in the trade union movement.⁸ The Counterculture was also connected with earlier forms of protest. Its rejection of established cultural values owed much to the revolt against the moral, sexual, and artistic conventions of bourgeois society exemplified by a variety of nineteenth and early twentieth century European avant-garde movements. To the extent that it tried to establish alternative societies, the Counterculture also borrowed ideas from the anarchists and the Utopian Socialists.⁹

Both movements fell short of their goals. The New Left’s leaders were mainly campus intellectuals who aimed to organise students and poor people to struggle for self-determination and participatory democracy. Unfortunately, they picked difficult target groups. Students and poor people had been among the least likely groups to engage in sustained political activity during the post-World War II period.¹⁰ The New Left’s efforts failed to bring about fundamental changes in the American political and economic orders, and the Counterculture failed to popularise their alternative ways of living.

Yet both movements helped to democratise the American polity and, by dint of the American mass media, to inspire political and cultural protests abroad.¹¹ Even though we cannot ascertain how much credit the New Left and the Counterculture deserve in comparison to other social, political and demographic pressures, the United States has become more open and inclusive de jure than it was in the early1960s, as have Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, and most Eastern and Western European nations where the political and cultural unrest of the late 1960s also took place.¹²

Elsewhere, David Resnick and I distinguished three categories of Internet politics: politics within the Net (intra-Net politics), political uses of the Net, and politics that affect the Net.¹³ Politics within the Net encompasses the political life of virtual communities and other identifiable online groups that regulate their own affairs, settle their own disputes and develop their own online lifestyles. Political uses of the Net refers to the ways in which the Net can be used by ordinary citizens, political activists, organised interests, political parties and governments to achieve their real world political goals, which often have little to do with the Internet per se. Politics that affect the Net refers to policies and actions that governments and other powerful institutions take to regulate the Internet as a new form of mass communication and as a vehicle for commercial activity. The first two types of Internet politics are relevant for sorting out the cyber-democrats’ claims for the democratising potential of political activity on the Internet. The last type is most relevant for explaining why so much of that potential remains unrealised.

Prior to the advent of user-friendly browsers and the expansion of the World- Wide Web, cyberspace looked like a reincarnation of the counterculture. Online communities of the technologically savvy flourished, each with its own intra-Net politics. Freedom could be achieved in a virtual state of nature. Netizens formed their own communities independent of the values, traditions and legal constraints of the ordinary world. Communities exercised authority over their own domains, based on a set of implicitly derived rules, or ‘Netiquette’, without interference from outsiders. Enthusiasts proclaimed that terrestrial governments should not attempt to extend their jurisdiction into cyberspace. Indeed, some argued that the very structure of the Internet itself made the attempt to impose outside regulation futile:

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. … Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective action.¹⁴

What the Counterculture promised, cyberspace could deliver. Intra-Net politics was humanistic, egalitarian and voluntary in contrast to the corrupt politics of organised special interests of the real world. Cyberspace created possibilities for liberation that even the most radical counter-cultural theorists never imagined. In cyberspace people could transcend their own bodies and the cultural baggage that they carried. Abandoning the familiar trio of race, class, and gender, they could create a new identity, indeed, a multiplicity of identities. Recall the famous New Yorker cartoon of a canine at a monitor proclaiming, ‘On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog’.¹⁵ Others saw the possibility of cyberspace deepening and strengthening identities that were denigrated in the real world.

Hopes for change did not rely solely on the expectation that powerful identities could be forged in cyberspace. Activists saw political uses of the Intern...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Routledge Advances in European Politics
• Tables
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1: E-government and democratic politics
• 2: Ctrl, Alt, Delete Re-booting the European Union via e-government
• 3: E-government under construction Challenging traditional conceptions of citizenship
• 4: Danger mouse? The growing threat of cyberterrorism
• 5: E-government and the United Kingdom
• 6: The digital republic Renewing the French state via e-government
• 7: E-government in Germany
• 8: Re-organising government using IT The Danish model
• 9: E-government in the Netherlands From strategy to impact – the pursuit of high-volume, high-impact citizen e-services in the Netherlands
• 10: The reform and modernisation of Greek public administration via e-government1
• 11: ‘Alt-Tab’ From ICTs to organisational innovation in Portugal
• 12: Estonia The short road to e-government and e-democracy
• 13: This revolution will be digitised! E-government in Hungary1
• 14: E-government and Slovenia’s multiple transitions
• Conclusions