The question of a democratic deficit in Mauritius and reflections on how it might be addressed were the prompt for undertaking this book. In Mauritius, the seeming regularity of corruption scandals suggests that there is a growing democratic deficit (Transparency Mauritius 2013, 2015, 2017). This is not uncommon in many contemporary democracies even Australia, where concerns about a democratic deficit have been noted for some time (Zweifel 2002; White and Nevitte 2012; Ward 2002; Norris 1997, 2011, 2012; Beetham 2012). For present purposes, the idea of a democratic deficit can be understood as a perceived gap between what democratic institutions purport to be about and what they actually do. Put another way, âthe liberal democracies are failing to fulfil their normative ideals such as maintaining liberal values and practices and providing democratic channels for people to have a say in their own collective destinyâ (Stokes and Carter 2001: 3). However, the main research and analysis undertaken in this book is not going to be concerned with solving the specific problems of Mauritiusâs democratic deficit. Rather this book offers what could best be described as a thought experiment about how to operationalise an effective form of e-democracy.
The advent of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) via the development of the Internet in the 1990s was seen by many as providing a means to connect government with citizens. The communicative capability of ICTs initiated a new scholarly debate about the prospect for technologically enhanced forms of democracy to emerge in which people might be involved more actively in the decision-making processes of democratic government and governing (Rios Insua and French 2010; Qvortrup 2007; PĂ€ivĂ€rinta and SĂŠbĂž 2006; OECD 2003; Mulder and Hartog 2013; Meier 2012; Kneuer 2016; Hilbert 2009). The innovative and positive promises of ICTs also prompted some caution about their negative and even anti-democratic potential in terms of abrogating civil liberties and various taken for granted rights as well as concerns about privacy issues. However, as Chen et al. (2006: 9) suggested, âICTs can be seen as yielding considerable pluses against ⊠some likely negativesâ. Many scholars saw great promise in the development of ICTs and thought that ICTsâ capability could deliver a new form of democracy, one that came to be known as e-democracy (Rios Insua and French 2010; Qvortrup 2007; PĂ€ivĂ€rinta and SĂŠbĂž 2006; OECD 2003; Mulder and Hartog 2013; Hague and Loader 1999; Grönlund 2001; Dahlberg and Siapera 2007; Moss and Coleman 2014).
The initial claims for improvement to democracy created some conceptual confusion. It was not just e-democracy that was developed through the use of ICTs. There also emerged other forms of ICT-driven applications to governing, and hence new terms emerged: e-government, e-governance, and the like (along with a proliferation of other terms not necessarily concerned with governing such as e-business, e-commerce, and e-society) (Crespo et al. 2013: 2). The proliferation of e-terms was treated as an infancy issue for a new emergent field, loosely termed e-governance (Grönlund 2004). However, it was more than an infancy issue as the terminological confusion failed to disappear as the capacity and sophistication of ICTs grew, making it difficult to operationalise relevant research findings (Grönlund 2008). Of particular interest here are three key terms: e-democracy, e-government, and e-governance. These warrant some initial clarification so that we do not lose sight of the core focus of the book, namely e-democracy and the development of a possible means to implement it successfully.
There is often considerable confusion between the idea of e-democracy and e-government. While both concepts have arisen as a result of the development of sophisticated ICTs, they capture different activities and have different purposes (Lee et al. 2011: 444). E-democracy refers to some form of electronic democracy, also called âteledemocracy or digital democracyâ, whereas ICTs are used âto connect politicians and citizens by means of information, voting, polling, or discussionâ (Grönlund 2001: 23). The emphasis here is on the use of ICTs to connect ordinary citizens to political debates and decision-making processes (PĂ€ivĂ€rinta and SĂŠbĂž 2006: 3) with a goal according to Backus (2001) to move âcitizens from passive information access to active citizen participation in the governing processâ (Lee et al. 2011: 444). As we shall see, it is the prospect of engaging citizens actively in the processes of government decision making and policy making that gives e-democracy its appeal. It is this specific potential that differentiates e-democracy, in theory and practice, from e-government. It is also this potential that leads some to resist the idea of e-democracy since the emphasis on the potential for engaging in direct democracy gives rise to familiar arguments about âthe risk of populism, lower-level political discourse, loss of deliberation, creating an unclear role of politicians, and instability of democratic institutions, among othersâ, as well as concerns about âsecurity and privacyâ (Grönlund 2011: 23â24). Some of these concerns will be taken up later in the book but here it can be agreed with Grönlundâs earlier view that ICTs provide a means to improve democracy in representative systems (Grönlund 2001). To involve citizens in e-democracyâs political process, two requirements broadly identified as digital participation and engagement or e-participation and e-engagement are suggested as key processes (Lee et al. 2011: 445). As we will discuss from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) study of e-democracy conducted in twelve countries, digitising these key processes are challenging in practice (OECD 2003).
âE-governmentâ, on the other hand, is much more diffuse in its scope. The United Nations (2005: 14) has defined it as the âuse of [information and communication technology] ICT and its application by the government for the provision of information and public services to the peopleâ. It thus describes the provision of âdigital government, one-stop government, and online governmentâ (Grönlund and Horan 2004: 713). These services are about delivering internal government operations to their citizens (who in the process come to be redefined as clients) through various interactive forms and payment facilities apparently under guise to improve electronic engagement of stakeholders. The aim would appear to be more about simplifying government operations in effecting efficiencies in the delivery of services than about empowering citizens. While there may be interactivity between citizens and the particular service or form of information being provided there is no necessary interactivity directly involved in the creation of that service or the provision of that information. The role of the citizen is essentially passive. The actual process of governing continues behind the scenes with little or no involvement of citizens.
Some scholars have suggested that e-democracy has the capacity to overcome these problems, and indeed of overcoming the problem of the democratic deficit (Rios Insua and French 2010; Dahlberg and Siapera 2007). The OECD suggests that better government, though not necessarily more democratic government, would result from digitisation for developing countries (Grönlund and Horan 2004). Variations on this view seem to be repeated with the announcement of every novel technology (Weinberger 1988). On the other hand, there is considerable evidence that e-democracy, despite its promises to improve existing democratic systems and practices, more often than not fails to deliver effectively on those promises (Scholl 2006; Norris and Reddick 2013). Thus, PÀivÀrinta and SÊbÞ (2006) describe some examples of e-democracy as fragmented experiments, and Moss and Coleman (2014) suggest that the reason for the failures of e-democracy is due to a lack in both strategic direction and coherent policy at national (macro) level, whereas others seem to attribute the failure of this initiative to an over-confidence in the capacity for digital technology to improve the existing system automatically in a more democratic direction (Wilhelm 2000; Hague and Loader 1999; Hoff et al. 2003; Hindman 2009). The continuing problems with designing and implementing a viable political system organised as an e-democracy provided this book with its central idea that perhaps a solution to these problems might lie in adapting the insights from Systems Engineering (SE).
SE was developed by the US Department of Defence to meet its need to design and use complex technological systems. SE is extensively applied by the US Air Force (USAF) to develop and operationalise new technological solutions, for example complex aircrafts from concept to operation to their retirement when obsolete. Although originating in the aerospace sector, SE has begun to be taken up in areas like medicine, emergency services and information technology (Eisner 2011; Nielsen et al. 2015). The success of SE in these fields suggests that it might have potential for use in political contexts understood as a system of processes. In essence, this is the core of the thought experiment undertaken in the book: to explore how SE might be adapted to address a systemic issue in political science, namely improving, if not solving, the limitations to the realisation of a genuinely democratic political system of government.
A thought experiment is a means to think through ideas and go beyond the text (Sainsbury 2017: 153). In political theory, thought experiments make it possible to communicate what may be feasible if it were to be implemented in some way or another and can be used as means to explore concepts (McCall and Widerquist 2017). A thought experiment allows âthe event of thinking [that is] reconstituted as a narrativeâ to conceptualise reality (Lambert 2012: 46). There were experiments of e-democracy carried as described in the book that failed to deliver an operational e-democracy. E-democracy for some scholars has generated theoretical discussions but âvery little in the way of concrete successâ (Chadwick 2006: 84). This lack of success needs further investigation. The thought experiment in this book develops an approach to e-democracy that can be actualised using the design methodology of SE.
While there are many ways that this experiment could be approached, for this book the driving idea is SE. It poses a what if experiment to be conducted using a system (e-democracy) as a construct to be realised through design for the people and by the people (citizens). The system is designed to be as dynamic as it is evolutionary. As will be discussed later in the book, the SE system approach emerged from a military context. However, SE was not developed to reinforce centralisation of the traditional command and control model of the military, but rather it emerged from a need to develop flexibility in allowing cutting edge, evolutionary technology to emerge. Decentralised decision making was the norm, to enable routine decisions at the lower level to be automated. The thought experiment culminates with an interpretative exercise concerning the Republic of Mauritius. Mauritius serves as a means to consider how a SE-informed e-democracy might be implemented as some of Mauritiusâs democratic institutions readily lend themselves to adaptation to the key features of a SE approach. Australia as described differs from the Mauritian context and so does the SE system to be developed.
Put somewhat simplistically, SE might provide a solution to the problem of the democratic deficit. It will be argued in this book that SE can be adapted and applied to address the problem of implementing e-democracy. That is, an understanding of SE will be used to explore how it might enable new approaches to implementing e-democracy, once e-democracy is understood as a system of processes. Thus, the book explores as a core question: how might a Systems Engineering approach address the currently perceived problems with e-democracy? This question sits inside a broader problematic, namely (as noted above) the promise of ICTs to provide workable solutions to the problem...