Communicative Mechanisms of Governance

Abstract

Significant claims have been made that developments in Information Communication Technology (ICT) can lead to e-democracy. The league tables that are regularly published rating different governments’ performance and the laudatory tones in which governments identify their own actions as more democratic in the field of e-government need to be treated with some caution. This chapter starts with a review of some of these studies of e-government and e-democracy trials. Finding these studies largely unsatisfactory for determining advances in democracy, the chapter then looks at the kinds of communication that are needed to facilitate the political conversation of deliberative democracy. In particular, the chapter introduces a communication typology, based on the work of David Bohm, to see how the new technology might be used to shape the architecture of the public sphere to create political conversation.