Overview of Cyber-Democracy

Abstract

Advanced democracies or democracies of a high quality are also a “knowledge democracy.” One underlying understanding here is that knowledge, knowledge creation, knowledge production, and knowledge application (innovation) behave as crucial drivers for enhancing democracy, society, and the economy. Knowledge democracy fosters and excels innovation, and the interplay of knowledge and innovation enables, supports, and carries sustainable development. Between political pluralism in democracy and the diversity and heterogeneity of knowledge in a knowledge society and knowledge economy, there operates a congruence in structures and processes. Knowledge democracy does not only apply to industrialized countries but offers, in principle, also important references for developing democracies, the newly industrialized countries and the emerging (and developing) markets. The implication of “cyber-democracy” is to look at knowledge democracy from the perspective of a globally evolving knowledge society in configurations of a multilevel architecture (global, transnational, supranational, national, subnational, and local). Ramifications of cyber-democracy are: (1) the networking opportunities and capabilities of interaction and communication increase; (2) the volume of codified knowledge cumulates, and the possibilities to access (publicly access) this knowledge also improve; (3) digitalized (electronic) information and knowledge, and the World Wide Web, created a network-style fundament and infrastructure of knowledge, allowing a knowledge conversion of the local into the global (gloCal) and vice versa, resulting in a gloCal platform for communication and knowledge interaction and knowledge enhancement. How does cyber-democracy relate to cyber-development and cyber-defense? Cyber-democracy raises challenges for governance and of governance and the next steps of further development of society and democracy.