E-democracy: in search of tools and methods for effective participation

The field of e-democracy has approached the problem of improving democratic decision making by emphasizing encouraging broad participation. This is due to a perceived lack of credibility on part of politicians, indicated by decline in both turnout in elections and recruitment to political parties. Experiences so far show that while in local contexts use of electronic tools in combination with redesigned democratic processes have indeed affected participation positively, both scaling and quality requires more sophisticated technical tools of at least two kinds. One kind, recognized by the e-democracy community, are tools supporting cooperative work for facilitating communication among humans. Another kind, this paper argues, is tools for more formal problem modelling. The e-democracy field has so far almost exclusively been concerned with encouraging and – at best – modelling, moderating, and reviewing discussions. Experiences from e.g. citizen juries point to the importance of expert participation. Decision Support Systems could provide – mediated – expert participation in virtual groups and in communication with the public. To achieve this, there is a need to carefully consider both the usability of Decision Support Systems and their role in the overall democratic system.