Information Polity

Does enhanced transparency, through the Internet, boost the legitimacy of the EU? In this paper we present a critical perspective on the assumptions underlying the relation between transparency and legitimacy. We reconstruct three assumptions from EU policy documents – transparency strengthens input legitimacy, output legitimacy and social legitimacy – and then highlight several weaknesses. We conclude that transparency is a key element of democratic institutions but naïve assumptions about the relation between transparency and legitimacy can and should be avoided. We warn against a simplified trust in the benefits of the Internet: enhancing legitimacy is much more complicated than creating fancy websites.

The term eDemocracy refers to the usage of information and communication technology in the democratic process. This usage can vary in form and extent. This paper distinguishes three types of explanations for this variation: explanations based on the suggestion of objective rationalisation, explanations based on political evaluation and discretion and explanations based on the assumption that technology itself is a driving force of institutional change.

Taking the case of eDemocracy development in Dutch municipalities, these three types of explanation are subjected to an empirical test. A quantitative analysis leads to the conclusion that the perspective of technology as driving force behind eDemocracy finds most support, and that the rationalisation perspective has some merits as well. There is no evidence, however, that differential political traditions play any significant role in the development of local eDemocracy in the Netherlands.

The introduction of information technology is often considered to be important for increased organisational performance. Yet, in the public sector, regularly promised results do not (fully) materialise, and the actual systems delivered deviate strongly from those intended. In the literature, two perspectives are used to explain these outcomes: infighting in the initial phases of an information system's life, and continuous adaptation of the technology during its use. These perspectives are based on the awareness that mutual structuration between social and technical elements is a core finding in the analysis of system development. This awareness, however, has been translated into only one dominant paradigm for system development. In this article we argue that structuration leads to different means of intervention. In the initial infighting perspective the main concern with regard to influencing the information system is one of the inclusion of stakeholders and user groups in system design. These recommendations have to a greater or lesser extent found their way into systems development and design. Yet, the initial infighting perspective leaves the question unanswered as to whether, in the long run, information systems remain stable or whether ongoing changes and re-invention determine the way systems work out. Obviously, if the latter holds true, identifying the sources of change and monitoring the direction of actions in the workplace during the entire life of an information system are a necessary addition to the inclusion of stakeholders in its initial phase. In this paper we apply both perspectives to empirical material on the introduction of the information system 'GMS' in emergency rooms in the Netherlands. By doing so we try to establish which perspective should be applied and under what circumstances, and thus what path to intervention should be chosen.

This article analyses the potentialities of parliamentary www-sites to enhance the publicity of decision-making in representative democracies. We introduce two different models that emphasize the role of publicity in representative systems. Jeremy Bentham argued that publicity is needed to enable citizens to control the acts of the representatives. From the perspective of Kantian tradition, recently developed by the theorists of deliberative democracy, publicity is regarded as a test for the validity of the reasons given for public decisions. According to many theorists of deliberative democracy, legislative assemblies can be regarded as central forums of public deliberation in representative democracies. We analyse the contents of the parliamentary websites in 18 democratic countries and find that these contents are rather similar in established democracies across the world. We argue that parliamentary websites can be instrumental to citizens' capacity to control the representatives in the Benthamite sense, although information provided on parliamentary websites does not necessarily provide a sufficient account of all aspects of parliamentary decision-making, most notably in party groups. From the deliberative perspective, however, publicity on parliamentary websites cannot replace the role of such mediating actors as journalists, political activists and parties who "filter" and reflect upon the representatives' arguments and actions.

A conceptual framework is proposed for discussing the ICT strategies of intermediaries and their effects on democratic intermediation. The main line of reasoning is that both 'disintermediation' and 're-intermediation' have to be related to specific models of democracy and styles of citizenship. The linkage strategies of preference intermediaries, the supportive strategies of information intermediaries and the facilitative strategies of interaction intermediaries are discussed. The quality of democracy would be dependent on the interplay between different democratic practices, types of citizenship and intermediaries.