Memorandum by Christine Bellamy, Professor
of Public Administration, The Nottingham Trent University
A NOTE ON THE USE OF INFORMATION-AGE TECHNOLOGIES
1. The British Government is committed to
making 25 per cent of government services available electronically
by 2002 and 100 per cent by 2008. It is also committed to promoting
the UK as an important global player in the growth of e-commerce.
If these aspirations are fulfilled, British citizens will experience
major changes in the ways in which they transact business, including
business with government. It is therefore worth considering what
impact the development of e-commerce and e-government infrastructures
could have on other facets of citizens' relationships with government,
especially on opportunities for participation in decision making
and for holding governments to account. In principle, the development
of richer information sources and interactive communications could
have major consequences for the quality of democratic engagement
between governments and citizens. This short note is intended
to describe the context in which that is likely to occur, and
to identify some of the issues.
CONTEXTS FOR
ONLINE PARTICIPATION
2. If e-commerce and e-government are to
develop on a significant scale, they will do so by means of close,
symbiotic relationships between public agencies and commercial
enterprises. The private sector will provide most of the investment,
bear much of the financial risk and supply most of the know-how.
The drive to build markets for e-commerce will reinforce the growing
synergy between computing, telecommunications and entertainment
technologies. One implication is that talk of technology-enabled
participation ought not to be confined to discussion of computing
applications. Digital TV and digital telephony (including mobile
phones) will also provide access to the Internet and thereby to
a wide range of information and communications services. This
may be significant from a social inclusion perspective, in that
these technologies are likely to be perceived as more user-friendly
than PCs. They will be less dependent on the particular set of
skills we now think of as "computer-literacy" and will
be even more widely used.
3. It is unlikely, however, that sufficient
funding will ever be provided to develop a significant infrastructure
of civic nets on which public service applications can have a
privileged domain, as is the case with the Dutch digital cities
or the American Free-nets. This does not mean that governments
could not invest heavily in the development of sites and services
dedicated to public affairs, but it does mean that they will be
obliged to compete directly with a growing range of commercial
and entertainment services. Experience consistently suggests that
democratic applications can easily become trivialised or marginalised
in such company.
4. The spread of digital technologies may
also reinforce the declining interest—particularly among
the young—in "mainstream" electoral and party
politics, by providing outlets for other kinds of political and
civic interests, especially single issue politics. Many people
believe that the Internet is particularly well structured to reflect
the wide variety of identities, interests and opinions in a multi-dimensional
society, such as ours. They also claim that the Internet is less
susceptible to spin doctoring and sound bite politics than conventional
media. And we have already begun to see that the Internet can
provide a means of bypassing government media control in some
of the more oppressive regimes in the world.
TECHNOLOGICAL
SUPPORT FOR
LISTENING TO
CITIZENS
5. The question, then, is what scope there
might be, among this diverse (and increasingly issue-specific)
range of channels and voices, for democratic governments to speak
and listen to citizens. The Annex to this Memorandum sets out
four, increasingly important, ways in which digital technologies
might enhance representation, consultation and participation.
6. Governments (and Parliaments) have already
adopted new technologies to help them carry out their internal
processes more efficiently (Level 1) see p 96, and they are now
putting information resources (such as Hansard, Command
Papers, strategy documents, league tables and press releases)
on the Web (Level 2). In the UK, we can also expect that the shift
to e-government, and particulary the new emphasis on joined-up,
evidence-based policy will encourage knowledge-oriented government,
supported by richer data about the preferences and behaviour of
public service users. In other words, "information age government"
will probably increase the transparency between governments and
citizens, albeit in ways that are mainly controlled by governments.
7. It is also the case, however, that few
institutions are systematically developing new kinds of political
communication, such as facilities for online interaction with
the public either as consumers or citizens (Levels 3 and 4). Where
this is being done, there appears to be an irresistible temptation
to control or restrict their use. For example, both British MPs
and American congressmen are keen to filter out e-mails that do
not originate from their own constituents. This practice may reinforce
MPs' sense of themselves as constituency representatives but it
may also filter out wider expresssions of legitimate opinion on
the issues of the day.
SPONSORING ONLINE
PARTICIPATION
8. The Annex details a number of ways in
which new technologies could be used to support interactive consultation
and participation (Level 4). They include electronic support for
citizens' juries or people's panels. Such devices may be useful
in providing a statistically-representative sample of opinion,
but they do not recognise important facets of political democracy,
such as the right of people to join with others to make their
voices heard, or to lobby on issues they feel strongly about.
The Committee may therefore wish to consider whether citizen juries
and focus groups should be complemented by the development of
direct, open channels, ones that could enable citizens themselves
to initiate communication or choose to respond actively to issues.
I would particularly like to see the House of Commons sponsor
such channels, and thus reassert its important role as the political
forum of the nation. The unrestricted use of email could be useful
for this purpose, but of even more value would be the establishment
of online discussion forums—these could, for example, be
organised around issues coming before select or standing committees.
The advantage of such forums is that they would enable citizens,
as well as MPs, to be challenged by each others' views, as well
as to express their own.
SOME PRACTICAL
ISSUES
9. Such innovations would have to be carefully
undertaken and properly supported. There are three sets of issues
relating to online participation and consultation that I would
particularly like to mention:
— public participation cannot simply
be bolted onto existing institutions and be expected to make much
difference. Indeed, I am struck by the fact that previous evidence
to the Committee has made relatively little mention of the implications
of public participation for internal administrative practices
and decision-making processes. It is no use gathering opinion
and inviting representations if the institution is not (re)geared
to listen, sift, balance and respond to citizens voices, and to
do so in ways that individuals and groups will recognise as placing
value on their contributions. This undoubtedly involves substantial
changes in the working methods of both politicians and officials,
as well as an increase in staffing and information systems support;
— a commitment to public participation
and accountability implies that more thought be given to enabling
citizens themselves to become better informed. Information-age
technology probably has an important role. Government at all levels
has made huge strides in making official information available
over the Internet, and the Information Age Champions Group is
doing valuable work to ensure that government websites are easy
to use and able to be accessed with relatively cheap technology.
Democratic accountability and informed participation also imply,
however, that citizens be allowed to ask questions about the provenance
of information supplied by government, and to challenge the assumptions
on which it is based. They imply, too, that more systematic provision
be made for alternative policy options to be set out by organisations,
political parties or individuals with differing views; and
— a shift to the largescale, routine
use of online consultation or participation would mean establishing
clear rules for citizen engagement. For example, one question
that is particularly pertinent to the use of the Internet—a
technology that is blind to geographical boundaries—is who
would be eligible to participate and how their identity would
be authenticated. Another is whether participation should or could
be anonymous. Citizens will also need reassurance that engagement
with electronic democracy is not subject to electronic surveillance.
The practical ramifications of this last issue
can almost certainly be sorted out by means of privacy-enhancing
technologies and authentication techniques, such as those that
will (hopefully) become routine with e-government. In any case,
such techniques will have to be applied to the use of electronic
voting for parliamentary or local authority elections. But they
demand clear thinking about the crucial interrelationships between
anonymity, publicity, trust and democracy.
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