The concept of “collaborative management” whereby citizens can directly participate in the decision-making process is increasingly the subject of discussion in the media and in academic literature. A key instrument of such participation is e-democracy. IMR analysts have assessed the tendencies in democratic countries and in Russia, where the “official” (imitative) e-democracy is being countered by the development of a civic alternative.

Like many of their compatriots, Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves (left) and Prime Minister Andrus Ansip cast their votes online.

E-Democracy: the Global Experience

The creation of new forms of interaction between the state and its citizens with the help of information and communication technology (ICT) is not a new idea: it has been discussed since the 1970s, when cable networks were used to increase citizen participation in elections. In the 1980s, a number of pilot projects on electronic voting and online discussions were introduced. However, only since 2000, with the active development of the internet, did considerable interest in utilizing ICT to advance democracy emerge.

Estonia is considered a pioneer in e-democracy: in 2005, it became the first country in the world to use online voting in local elections. In 2007, internet voting was used in parliamentary elections. Last year, 24 percent of Estonian voters chose to participate in the parliamentary election through the internet (in 2005, the figure was around 2 percent).

Another frequently cited Estonian initiative is the project “Today I Decide” (TID) (“Täna Otsustan Mina”) that was launched in 2001 and served as the basis for a new project, TID+. The idea is to create a portal that allows citizens to share their suggestions on improving public administration and the legislative system, as well as to discuss new initiatives related to different spheres of social life. According to the initiative’s developers, the principal objective is to increase voters’ participation in shaping public policy and eliminate the barriers between society and the state.

Similar ideas are at the core of the “Estonian e-citizen” project which incudes two online portals: an Information Portal and a Citizen Portal administered by the Estonian Department of State Information Systems. These portals, which serve as the “gateway to eEstonia,” inform the citizens of their rights and responsibilities, provide access to electronic services, multiple databases, use of a virtual office, etc.

In addition to centralized initiatives, many projects in Estonia were started “from below”: in 2002-2004, telecom companies and banks invested €2.5 million to implement a Look@World project that helped more than 100,000 people learn how to use the internet. With the development of the internet and online activism, many websites were created to discuss a variety of problems in Estonian society. An interesting example is the website Let’s Do It! My Estonia, which supports “good ideas.” In 2008, a website led by Rainer Nõlvak helped organize a one-day garbage collection campaign in Estonia: 50,000 people (4 percent of the population) participated in the initiative. In the last several years, similar efforts have spread through the world, and today 94 countries participate in the “Let’s Do It” movement.

In Iceland, ICT is also used to facilitate discussions and decision-making on key public issues. According to recent estimates, the internet reaches 97.8 percent of Iceland’s population. One of the most instructive examples was the collective discussion of the Draft Constitution in social media: as a result of active citizen participation, 3,600 comments and more than 300 official proposals were submitted to the website of the Constitutional Council. Based on the comments and proposals, an updated version of the Draft Constitution was presented to Parliament and the public.

Surprisingly, a large number of ordinary citizens (who, it might seem, are far removed from administrative and law-making activities) were actively involved in the online deliberations, while some of the experts and representatives of higher education institutions did not show any initiative. According to one of the Council members, the main lesson from Iceland is that positive results may be expected only when the authorities listen to citizens and respect their opinions.

Another interesting example of e-democracy came from New Zealand when it decided to review its 1958 Law on the Police. In 2007, a wiki version of the bill was offered for public discussion. As a result, the citizens submitted 234 proposals, which laid the foundation for the new document. According to experts, citizen participation was a key factor in the preparation of the new law.

The functioning of e-democracy mechanisms is directly tied to electronic participation (e-participation), which, in the definition of Professor Ann Macintosh, is “the use of ICT to increase political participation by means of offering the citizens an opportunity to interact with each other, as well as with their elected representatives”. According to a recent UN report “E-Government Survey 2012: E-Government for the People,” South Korea is one of the leaders in e-participation. Since 1995, the Ministry of Information and Communication has utilized significant resources to develop the country’s internet. In 2000, the majority of South Koreans had access to the internet, while a number of politicians had their own web-pages. Numerous websites offering political discussions began to emerge; as a result, there was a sharp increase in political activism on the internet.

The 2002 presidential election was a key moment in the development of e-democracy in South Korea. According to analysts, the victory of Roh Moo Hyun was, to a large extent, a result of the online support of the 47,000 virtual activists who organized themselves on the website www.nosamo.org.

According to the Russian sociologist Igor Eidman, the world is facing an internet revolution that will generate new ways for social development and new systems of interrelationships between citizens and the state. E-democracy should be viewed as a manifestation of these processes.

Revolution in the virtual world often takes a tangible shape in the real world. Consider the revolution in Tunisia that ousted President Ben Ali, who had created a police state and suppressed protests. Despite some achievements of his regime (primarily in the economic sector), a significant number of Tunisian citizens opposed his authoritarian course. Social media became the platform for protest action, allowing the opposition to share information that was not available from official sources. Facebook and Twitter permitted people to share opinions, establish contacts, and coordinate the protest movement.

The internet is often the target of attacks from authoritarian regimes. The authorities in Iran, for instance, have blocked access to Gmail on numerous occasions, most recently as a “response” to the film “The Innocence of Muslims.” According to official explanations, the email service was not in accordance with Islamic law. The Iranian government is currently developing its own equivalent of the internet.

Internet freedom is significantly limited in China, Saudi Arabia, Belarus, and Vietnam. In the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the situation is somewhat complex. On the one hand, the country is one of the leaders in e-government, having the highest level of e-participation, including electronic decision-making (a 100 percent rating in the UN report). The UAE government website www.government.ae (eGovernment Forum) provides citizens with the opportunity to ask questions, participate in discussions, and share opinions on a whole range of key public issues. On the other hand, e-democracy in the UAE successfully coexists with authoritarian tendencies. It is strange to hear about the achievements in e-democracy and, at the same time, about government intrusion into all spheres of public life, the closure of the offices of foreign organizations, and the arrests and prosecutions of alleged “rebels.”

E-Democracy in Russia: The Official Version

In Russia, at first glance, the development of the information society and e-democracy looks excellent: the country is now the first in Europe (and the sixth in the world) in terms of the number of internet users. Russia’s web audience continues to expand and was estimated by the Ministry of Communication at 70 million people in 2012. According to the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (WCIOM), 60 percent of Russians now use the internet, and 40 percent go online on a daily basis.

Officially, the Russian government supports these processes. In May 2010, at a United Russia party meeting, then-President Dmitry Medvedev declared that the world is approaching an “era that in some sense will mark the return from indirect, that is, representative democracy to direct democracy supported by the internet.” Vladimir Putin dedicated one of his campaign articles (Democracy and the Quality of the State) in February 2012 to the question of e-democracy. According to the article, citizens should have an opportunity to “assess all public documents” and participate in the collective selection of solutions.  Moreover, they should be given the opportunity to influence the legislative agenda: any citizen initiative that is supported by at least 100,000 online signatories should be considered by Parliament.

In April 2012, the Ministry of Communications and Mass Media issued a draft program entitled Russian Federation E-Democracy Development Concept through 2020, and in May, at the first Federal Congress on E-Government, it presented a new tool for online interaction between citizens and the state: an Integrated Portal of Electronic Democracy of the Russian Federation. The developers expect that this tool will provide not only the government, but also citizens and organizations with the opportunity to “develop, discuss, support, and publicly distribute their requests, and then direct them to the appropriate agencies; report emerging problems to the authorities; submit proposals and offer initiatives.”

At the same time, Oleg Fomichev, the deputy minister of economic development, proposed another online tool entited “Russian Public Initiative.” In his words, the idea emerged from Putin’s campaign article. The portal would become a “unique specialized internet resource for public proposal and deliberation of citizens’ legislative initiatives” and will help to promote the mechanism of e-democracy.

In late June 2012, the Russian president established a new Directorate for Information Technology and E-Democracy which is currently headed by the former Communications Minister Igor Schegolev. Ilya Massukh, the former Deputy Minister of Communications, became the founder of the Information Democracy Foundation, which was tasked with transferring virtual communication between the citizens and the state into real policy. At the first meeting of the Foundation’s expert club, Massukh said: “The Foundation was created to advance all the good things available on the internet, as well as to support regional projects … We have to demonstrate to the citizens that a click leads to some action by the government.” One of the Foundation’s key projects is “Russian Public Initiative”, an alternative version of the Ministry of Economic Development idea under the same name.

Such a plethora of official initiatives could give the impession that, in spite of some difficulties, Russian e-democracy, under governmental leadership, will shortly lead to a political democratization in Russia (Iliya Massukh, for instance, wrote as much)  A closer look at the situation, however, does not confirm the purity of government intentions. When Schegolev held the position of Communications Minister, he said the following about his vision for Russian e-democracy: “It is a rather promising project because it works in accordance with outsourcing principles. When we are able to see – with the help of analytical tools – which areas of our work receive the largest number of complaints, then we will be able to assess the performance of particular entities, agencies, and managers.” His words demonstrate that the purpose of Russia’s e-democracy initiative is not about expanding citizen participation per se, but about improving the government machine through a form of citizen participation. The public interests, in this view, are therefore secondary.

To many analysts, the ambitious government project on e-democracy is merely an attempt to play a democratic game while actually strengthening control over society. Commenting on “Russian Public Initiative”, Lev Gudkov, Director of the Levada Center, asserted that “the authorities are trying to find solutions by creating fictitious, imitative entities. The Public Chamber, Open Government, and similar websites, are extremely ineffective and useless, because they are in no way part of the decision-making process… These democratic decorations of the authoritarian regime [just serve as] an exhaust valve for protest sentiments.”

Judging by recent initiatives, Russia’s official “e-democracy” is unlikely to be developing in a free environment. According to many experts, the new law “On the Protection of Children from Information Harmful to their Health and Development,” which prescribed certain limitations on publishing information in the mass media and the internet, was designed to further strengthen government control. There is a good chance that pressure will continue to increase. A recent proposal offered by Vadim Dengin, a member of the Duma Committee on Information Policy, would require a person’s passport data as a condition of registering on a social media website. Alexey Pimanov, a member of the Federation Council, proposed subjecting internet resources to the same regulations as the mass media.

Despite all the talk of “e-democracy”, the circle of actual decision-makers is likely to remain as narrow as it has been before. A good example is the recent internet discussion of the draft law “On the Police.” As Kommersant reported, the “legislators commented favorably on the experiment with citizen participation, while the representatives of the opposition did not feel that this participation had any effect.” According to official sources, the bill received 20,000 online proposals, but their impact was minimal. Prominent human rights campaigner Lev Ponomarev observed that “experts proposed amendments to the Law ‘On the Police’, sent them to President Medvedev, but did not hear back from anyone.” This situation hardly resembles New Zealand. It is difficult to imagine a truly democratic deliberation on a legislative initiative (to say nothing of a Draft Constitution as in Iceland) in today’s Russia. Or, rather, the deliberation might take place, but key decisions will still be made by a very limited group of individuals.

Dmitry Medvedev's enthusiasm for modern technology did not result in the development of a genuine e-democracy in Russia.