Memorandum by Dr. Helen Margetts, Reader
in Political Science, School of Public Policy, University College
London
INTERNET-BASED PARTICIPATION AND THE DIGITAL
STATE
This note explores the possibilities of innovations
in citizen participation provided by one particular technological
development: the increasing use of the Internet by citizens and
by government.
The rate of Internet penetration in Britain
(as in other societies) is rising dramatically. In mid-1998 around
7.3 million people in the UK had access to the Internet and the
World Wide Web either at work or via home PCs. A year later this
number had grown to over 10 million. Other countries indicate
the possibilities for future growth: in the US and Australia,
where local telephone costs are low, rates of penetration are
around 40 per cent, and rising. As citizens increasingly use the
Internet to shop, to bank and to communicate with enterprises
and other citizens, they increasingly expect to interact electronically
with government also.
Thus the Internet is a key forum for political
participation of the future. Policy-makers are already turning
to electronic methods as a tool for communicating with citizens
and delivering services. But increased citizen participation in
government is not an automatic by-product of the increasing digitalisation
of government processes. Early evidence from governments across
the world suggests various alternative outcomes for the advent
of the "Digital States":
An Open State: Increased Citizen Participation
One scenario is where government organisations
"become" their Web sites, forming an on-line state with
new 24 hour citizen-government interactions. Such a state would
be characterised by:
— new types of citizen participation,
such as electronic consultation and forums, electronic voting,
planning consultations and policy "chat" rooms;
— self-financing electronic service
delivery, where simple administrative transactions are replaced
by "zero-touch" processes at marginal costs—leaving
public officials free to deal with more sophisticated forms of
interaction with citizens;
— responsive policy-making, where (automatically
generated) information about citizens' electronic communications
with government are fed back into the policy process;
— "holistic" government,
where the Internet provides citizens with a "joined-up"
view of government organisations; and
— a new kind of "open-book"
governance, where a combination of web sites and intranets are
used to make transactions more transparent.
An Invisible State: Decreased Citizen Participation
A contrasting scenario is one where government
organisations fail to develop innovative ways of using the Internet
to communicate with citizens and deliver services, and the Digital
State becomes more impenetrable to citizen participation, characterised
by the following:
— a confusing, fragmented view of government
for citizens, as the Web sites maintained by government organisations
proliferate and citizens struggle to find public information;
— government organisations lose control
of their Internet presence through confusion of site ownership
between internal and external providers;
— government has a lower Web presence
than other organisations in society (with a consequent loss of
nodality) and citizens turn increasingly to other organisations
(such as pressure groups, political parties and business enterprises)
with whom to interact; and
— new forms of government impenetrability,
as government's internal intranets reach spiralling heights of
complexity, making government processes more closed and opaque.
Both these scenarios have important implications
for the future of democratic participation. There is nothing pre-determined
about which scenario will develop. Public organisations across
countries and policy sectors already exhibit different elements
of each "state". It will be up to individual policy-makers
and government organisations to shape technological developments
so that they maximise the potential of the Internet for increased
participation and avoid the pitfalls of the second scenario. The
"Digital state" is likely to be central to the future
attention of the Public Administration Committee.
Dr Helen Margetts is a Reader in Political Science
at the School of Public Policy, University College London and
Director of the School's Msc in Public Policy. Previously, she
worked as a lecturer in politics at Birkbeck College (1994-99),
as a research officer at the London School of Economics (1991-94)
and as a computer programmer and systems analyst in the private
sector (1984-89). She has a Bsc in Mathematics (University of
Bristol, 1983), Msc in Politics (LSE, 1990) and PhD in Government
(LSE, 1996). She is on the National Executive of the Political
Studies Association, the Advisory Board of the Democratic Audit
of the UK (University of Essex) and is an Associate Editor of
the journal Political Studies. She has acted as a consultant
to the National Audit Office (since 1992) and the OECD (since
1997).
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