Broadening Democratic Participation?

An exploratory study of e-democracy in 188 Finnish municipalities

Authors

  • Henrik Serup Christensen Department of Political Science, Åbo Akademi University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.58235/sjpa.v17i3.15724

Keywords:

E-democracy, Finland, Local democracy, Participatory innovations, Municipality

Abstract

Municipalities in several countries have adopted measures of e-democracy in order to strengthen citizen involvement in the political decision-making. For this reason it has been expected that the Internet would lead to a deepening of democracy. However, e-democratic measures do not necessarily entail a deeper involvement of citizens in the political decision-making; it can also serve to strengthen the traditional representative structures. This study examines the implementation of e-democracy in the websites of 188 Finnish municipalities in order to assess whether the initiatives offered adapt a representative, participatory or deliberative perspective on democracy. The results suggest that the Finnish municipalities largely use their websites to inform citizens on on-going decision-making processes, thereby strengthening the traditional representative democracy rather than deepening the democratic involvement of citizens.

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Author Biography

Henrik Serup Christensen, Department of Political Science, Åbo Akademi University

Henrik Serup Christensen is an Academy of Finland post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Political Science at Åbo Akademi University. His research interests include political participation and how the proliferation of new forms of citizen involvement affects the functioning of democracy.

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Published

2013-09-15

How to Cite

Christensen, H. S. (2013). Broadening Democratic Participation? An exploratory study of e-democracy in 188 Finnish municipalities. Scandinavian Journal of Public Administration, 17(3), 3–21. https://doi.org/10.58235/sjpa.v17i3.15724

Issue

Vol. 17 No. 3 (2013)

Section

Original Articles

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Authors contributing to Scandinavian Journal of Public Administration agree to publish their articles under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC 4.0 license. This means means articles are free for anybody to read and download, and to copy and disseminate for non-commercial purposes as long as appropriate credit is given, a link is provided to the license, and any changes made are clearly indicated. Authors retain copyright of their work.

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