Should e-government design for citizen participation?: stealth democracy and deliberation

ABSTRACT

Cyberoptimists have heralded an age of citizen engagement enabled by electronic technologies that allow widespread citizen input in government decision making. In contrast, influential political scientists maintain that the preponderance of citizens quite reasonably wish to avoid political participation and that involving citizens could have very negative consequences for governance. In their widely-read book, Stealth Democracy, Hibbing and Theiss-Morse seek to show that much of the American public desires "stealth democracy"---a democracy run like a business by experts with little deliberation or public input. The authors maintain that stealth democracy beliefs are due to reasonable apathy rationales and that a more engaged democracy is simply of no interest to the public. This paper introduces an opposing "parochial citizens thesis" that suggests that stealth democracy beliefs may be driven by socially problematic beliefs and orientations, including reverence for authority and an incapacity to take other political perspectives. These views are rooted in simplistic conceptions of human agency and political leadership that might be ameliorated through deliberation. This paper examines survey and experimental data from the National Science Foundation / Information Technology Research funded Virtual Agora Project. The data comprise a representative sample of 568 Pittsburgh residents, who participated in face-to-face and online deliberations. Using OLS regression with cluster-robust standard errors, the paper finds that stealth democracy beliefs are explained by beliefs and orientations consistent with the parochial citizens thesis. It also finds that online democratic deliberation significantly ameliorates key stealth democracy beliefs and some of the factors that lead to these beliefs. Contrary to the stealth democracy thesis, e-government efforts to stimulate citizen deliberation may have positive consequences.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  K. Computing Milieux
  K.4 COMPUTERS AND SOCIETY
      K.4.0 General

General Terms:
Experimentation, Human Factors, Management, Performance

Keywords:
democratic deliberation, human agency, online deliberation, political apathy, political discussion, political participation, stealth democracy