ICTlogy

Innovating Government – Normative, policy and technological dimensions of modern government, the book edited by Simone van der Hof and Marga M. Groothuis, has finally seen the light. Its abstract goes as follows:

The aim of this book is to analyze four dimensions of innovating government and the use of new technologies: legal, ethical, policy and technological dimensions. By joining authors from a diversity of backgrounds (law, ethics, public administration, political science, sociology, communications science, information science, and computer science) in one book, readers (academics, policy makers, legislators and others) are confronted with a variety of disciplinary perspectives on persistent themes, like privacy, biometrics, surveillance, e-democracy, electronic government, and identity management, that are central to today’s evolution of new modes of modern government.

I took part in this book with a chapter called Striving behind the shadow: the dawn of Spanish Politics 2.0 on the wake of Spain to Politics 2.0. Though the chapter was initially drafted in 2009 and then corrected and slightly updated in 2010, I am sad to acknowledge that things have not changed that much in Spain since then. Indeed, despite the recent upheavals in Spain around the so called “15M movement” (aka #spanishrevolution), online politics in general have evolved but very slightly, most of the times only in the field of political marketing rather than towards e-participation or e-democracy.

Following you can download a preprint version of the chapter and also scan through the bibliography I used. I am most grateful and definitely in debt with Simone van der Hof and Marga M. Groothuis for their patient endurance through the whole writing and editing progress. If you can read this lines they undoubtedly deserve much credit for it.

Peña-López, I. (2011)
Striving behind the shadow: the dawn of Spanish Politics 2.0

Bibliography

The eJournal of eDemocracy and Open Government (JEDEM) has just published its Vol 3, No 1 (2011) featuring an article of mine, The disempowering Goverati: e-Aristocrats or the Delusion of e-Democracy.

This paper is the latest, improved and merged version of two previous lines of work. On the one hand, a reflection on e-Readiness, digital literacy and its role in participation, which I presented at the 4th International Conference on eDemocracy 2010 (EDem10) in Krems last year. On the other hand, the reflections on how the distance between governance and empowerment has been increasing due to Information and Communication Technologies (Empowerment and Governance in the Information Society (I): the hourglass of information power, Empowerment and Governance in the Information Society (II): digerati, goverati and the role of ICT4D) and which later became my position paper for the Democracy and the power of the individual conference at the Ditchley Foundation.

Abstract

When disaffection on political parties and politicians is pervasive, most argue whether it could be possible, thanks to the Internet – and Information and Communication Technologies in general – forget the mainstream political system and let the citizenry express their own opinion, debate in virtual agorae and vote their representatives and policy choices directly. In other words, the claim is whether the actual intermediaries can be replaced by citizen networks or, in the limit, just be overridden.

Our aim in the following lines is to (1) explain that some dire (socioeconomic) changes are actually taking place,(2) why these socioeconomic changes are taking place and (3) infer, from this, what conditions shall take place in the future for (4) another wave of changes to happen that could eventually a much acclaimed new (e-)democracy. In a last section, we will discuss that despite lack of data, the trend seems to be just in the direction of the impoverishment of democracy, partly due to the weakening of political institutions.

Citation and Download

Peña-López, I. (2011). “The disempowering Goverati:
e-Aristocrats or the Delusion of e-Democracy”.
In eJournal of eDemocracy and Open Government, 3 (1), 1-21.
Krems: Danube-University Krems.