Affiliations: [a] Swedish Business School, Örebro University,
Sweden
Correspondence:
[*]
Corresponding author: 17 Coventry Lane, State College,
Pennsylvania 16803, USA. Tel.: +86 15136251249; E-mail: ovid@metamorphica.net
Abstract: eDemocracy political parties are an emerging and radically new form
of political party that enables citizen participation in the policy-making
process using ICTs. This paper compares the eParticipation systems of four of
the first eDemocracy parties (Senator On-Line, Knivsta.Now, Aktiv Demokrati and
Demoex) using an eParticipation ontology that describes eParticipation systems
according to 1) stages of policy-making, 2) levels of engagement, 3)
stakeholders, 4) participation areas, 5) eParticipation tools and 6) emerging
technologies. By applying this ontology a great diversity among eDemocracy
parties' eParticipation systems was discovered. Two overall categories, proxy
politician systems and deliberative community systems, are created to label the
current variety of systems. However, even within these overall labels there are
substantial differences and several subtypes of proxy politician eParticipation
systems are suggested: individualistic systems, citizen-review systems and
delegated-leaders systems. Additionally, a multi-channel system may be a
variety of the deliberative community eParticipation system.
Keywords: eParticipation, eDemocracy, grassroots politics, political parties, direct democracy, deliberative democracy
