Differences in eDemocracy parties' eParticipation systems

Abstract

eDemocracy political parties are an emerging and radically new form of political party that enables citizen participation in the policy-making process using ICTs. This paper compares the eParticipation systems of four of the first eDemocracy parties (Senator On-Line, Knivsta.Now, Aktiv Demokrati and Demoex) using an eParticipation ontology that describes eParticipation systems according to 1) stages of policy-making, 2) levels of engagement, 3) stakeholders, 4) participation areas, 5) eParticipation tools and 6) emerging technologies. By applying this ontology a great diversity among eDemocracy parties' eParticipation systems was discovered. Two overall categories, proxy politician systems and deliberative community systems, are created to label the current variety of systems. However, even within these overall labels there are substantial differences and several subtypes of proxy politician eParticipation systems are suggested: individualistic systems, citizen-review systems and delegated-leaders systems. Additionally, a multi-channel system may be a variety of the deliberative community eParticipation system.