Electrifying Democracy? 10 Years of Policy and Practice

THE British government has been keen to promote political participation, and strengthen democratic practices more generally, through the use of Internet -based technologies. This is unsurprising, perhaps, given the perceived crisis of Britain’s traditional democratic institutions, highlighted by low electoral turnouts and declining trust in politicians. However, the very fact that we can talk of a decade of edemocracy experiments is itself a creditworthy achievement. Such experiments, although designed to support our representative form of democracy, have varied greatly with elements of both direct and deliberative democracy often to the fore.