Scaling Up Democracies with E-Collecting?

In most advanced democracies there is a host of ancillary participatory instruments that operate "between elections". The aim of such participatory instruments is to allow citizens to put new issues on the policy agenda. The range of so-called "between election" participatory instruments that are the focus of this paper can be grouped around three basic categories, the petition, the agenda initiative and the citizens' initiative. This paper deals mostly with the extent to which new technologies are used to enhance the functioning of the endorsement mechanism, so called e-collecting. Our core argument is that harnessing the full potential of the "e" dimension, especially the e-collecting aspect, will be conditional on two factors: (1) the specificity of the participatory instrument and (2) the institutionalization of the instrument, namely whether it is an established instrument or whether it is a recently introduced democratic innovation.