ICTs: Convenient, Yet Subsidiary Tools in Changing Democracy

Abstract

Within Western democracies there has been a growing demand to use ICT to enable citizens to get more involved with local political issues. Western local governments have claimed that ICT can empower citizens and strengthen local democracy. This paper will focus on one aspect of this and examine the provision of online direct democracy and whether citizens do indeed have the opportunity to vote more in local policy decision making. Using Michel Foucault’s concepts of power and domination this research will explore if local governments and their citizens, through strategies of power, use one type of ICT, online forums, to change local representative democracy. In order to examine whether online forums can increase direct democracy for citizens, a quantitative data collection method was implemented in this study which produced a data set of 138 online forums. This article argues that online forums do not increase direct democracy, because citizens along with local governments use ICT to maintain the political status quo online? ICTs: Convenient, Yet Subsidiary Tools in Changing Democracy