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Compared to internet elections, the concept of online-consultation poses considerable
structural and organizational problems. The question here is how a system of
electronic debates between citizens and the state based on specific political issues can
be incorporated into existing processes of decision making that are primarily based
upon the electoral connection and the notion of party government. So far,
developments in the UK provide the most far-reaching experience with this question,
as the lower chamber has undertaken several experiments with internet-based
consultations in cooperation with the Hansard Society (Coleman 2000; Needham
2001). In the US Congress the idea of online consultation has been realized within the
framework of the existing procedure of committee hearings. Here, the physical
presence of ‘witnesses’ is increasingly abandoned and they instead give testimony and
participate in the hearing via digital means.
This strand of electronic democracy exhausts by no means the agenda of an efficiency
oriented approach to participatory engineering. One alternative measure for example
has been debated and implemented in the context of the so called motor voter
legislation in the US that was designed to decrease the costs of registering to vote
(Franklin and Grier 1997). However, electronic democracy is one important feature of
efficiency-oriented democratization that shall serve as an ample to clarify the core
assumptions of this approach.
Efficiency oriented democratization does in no way aspire to transforming established
liberal democracy. In some cases the focus is simply on reducing negotiation and
cooperation costs within the framework of established forms of political involvement.
It can therefore be emphasized that this approach is not wholeheartedly affiliated with
the participatory democracy paradigm, which has been characterized as an alternative
to liberal democracy at the institutional level. However, these reforms are debated
with regard to their effects on the level of political participation and they could have
considerable effects if their theoretical assumption holds. For this very reason cost
efficient democratization can be perceived as a third approach to participatory
engineering.
Convention