E-Participation in Southern Europe and the Balkans: Issues of Democracy and Participation via Electronic Media by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780415623599
Google: LmaEtgAACAAJ
Goodreads: 13714397
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-01-15T08:20:01+00:00

Conclusions

This paper has analysed the development of the Participa.Net e-participation system, from its initial conceptual and planning phases through to its eventual implementation, in the region of Emilia Romagna. Consequently, it has been necessary to employ a dual perspective based on the concept of assemblage35 in order to investigate Partecipa.Net enhancement, and in Heidegger's work on the phenomenology of religious life36 in order to investigate its use in two specific contexts. Analysing this dual perspective has also provided an opportunity to focus on ontology issues. In particular, the sense of 'content', sense of 'relation' and sense of 'actualization' have been introduced as existential terms in the analysis of the phenomenon.

The consequences of introducing the stream of life in the analysis of social phenomena according to the perspective proposed, leads to a reconsideration of the role of theory in social research. Here, sense-making is not intended as a chain of events or as an established and rigorous order of entities. On the contrary, this rationale is exclusively connected to specific historical conditions rather than to a predefined order. It is from this understanding that the introduction of Partecipa.Net has been examined.

The objective has been to converge the sense of 'content', sense ot 'relation' and sense of 'actualization' in order to move from an object-historical understanding to an enactment-historical one. In other words, the purpose has not been to generalize the specific results obtained following a specific theoretical approach, rather it is to gain an active scenario of e-participation tools in action.

From this perspective, some further considerations on the development of these projects are necessary. Unquestionably, a fruitful level of discussion had been reached which took shape in an environment that was supportive of the interactions which led to significant results. However, would it have been possible to arrive at similar decisions if a far larger number of participants would have joined the debate? Of course, a low participation rate creates the problem of representativeness. On the other hand, is it conceivable that thousands upon thousands of citizens actively join such electronic forms of participation?

In this respect, the case of the local council, mentioned in the above section, is particularly revealing. Its role is deemed to be a negative one due to the large presence of local councillors in the forum who biased the debate. However, the scenario could have been different if other councils would have joined the project. Why? Different and established positions would have an opportunity to challenge each other head-on. In some sense, a combination of representative democracy and deliberative democracy work together in harmony. A citizen would have the chance to promote his/her personal opinion on a specific issue and the same would be also true for pressure groups such as local councils. In this case, the exercising of participation rights would be articulated and lead to the development of an equilibrium between the possibility of voicing an opinion, on the one hand, and the representativeness of a specific position, on the other. Therefore, a rather ambivalent

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