Abstract
Recently, we have heard many complaints about how democracy works these days—or maybe rather why it doesn’t work. In a recent Huffington post article, Dhruva Jaishankar, a Fellow at the Brookings Institution in India, claimed that digital democracy is the evil that makes our world ungovernable. We argue that Iaishankar defines digital democracy in a flawed and misleading way. This could cause serious misunderstandings of what the problems are and what are the possible solutions. In the following we will show that digital democracy—if properly understood—is the most promising way to build prosperous societies in the digital age.
This article by Dirk Helbing and Stefan Klauser was first published as OpEd in the Huffington Post under the URL http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/how-to-make-democracy-work-in-the-digital-age_us_57a2f488e4b0456cb7e17e0f and appeared in modified form in the German book “Smartphone-Demokratie”, edited by Adrienne Fichter (reproduction with permission of NZZ Libro).
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Notes
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D. Helbing and E. Pournaras, Build digital democracy, Nature 527, 33–34 (2015): http://bit.ly/1WCSzi4
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see also: Hotelling, Harold (1929). “Stability in Competition”. The Economic Journal 39: 41–57.
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The Bryce’s Law describes the tendency of a federal state to become more centralized over time. See: H. Badinger/V. Nitsch (Ed.) (2016): Routledge Handbook of the Economics of European Integration.
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L. Olai, L. Lehmkuhl (2012): Centralizing the EU? An analysis of the European Court of Justice’s tendency to rule in favor of centralization of the European Union.
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Dixit & Weibull (2007) present in their book “Political polarization” a model highlighting that different priors are necessasry conditions for polarization. In the context of this article here, filter bubbles and selective media engender heterogeneous priors amongst the population. Then, when a population is presented with the same information, people arrive at dichotomized conclusions, and politlical opinions shift toward extreme—and not toward the center.
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D. Landa/A. Meirowitz (2009): “Game Theory, Information, and Deliberative Democracy”, in American Journal of Political Science, Volume 53, Issue 2, pages 427–444.
- 8.
The Partido de la Red movement in Argentina makes digital democracy to the central element in its program. See https://www.ted.com/talks/pia_mancini_how_to_upgrade_democracy_for_the_internet_era?language=en
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Compare E. Ostrom (1990): Governing the Commons.
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Compare: James S. Fishkin/ Robert C. Luskin (1999): Bringing Deliberation to The Democratic Dialogue.
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Dryzek (1990): Discursive Democracy: Politics, Policy, and Political Science.
- 12.
D. Helbing, Society 4.0: Upgrading society, but how? https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304352735; D. Helbing, Why we need democracy 2.0 and capitalism 2.0 to survive, Jusletter IT (May 25, 2016), see http://bit.ly/1O5axWZ
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Helbing, D., Klauser, S. (2019). How to Make Democracy Work in the Digital Age. In: Helbing, D. (eds) Towards Digital Enlightenment. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90869-4_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90869-4_12
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