Open government, technological innovation and the politics of democratic disillusionment: (E-)democracy from Socrates to Obama

There is an intriguing dissonance between the optimistic democratic vision underlying the open government movement, which seems to be driven by a belief in the transformative power of technology, and the actual achievements of the e-democracy movement in changing the praxis of democratic engagement. The present article explores this dissonance in order to develop a better understanding of the potential and limits of the Internet in fostering democratic engagement. The article begins with a discussion of the competing theoretical concepts that drive the debate on open government and e-democracy (Section II). In this context, it contrasts between the political model of Plato in The Republic (governance by philosopher king) and the open government (OG) model, especially as envisaged by President Obama. The subsequent Sections (III-V) provide an in-depth study of three e-democracy projects involving three Canadian agencies and a transnational organization (AccountAbility). Together the three case studies expose some of the critical challenges facing the e-democracy movement. The article then proceeds to develop a new model of citizenship that I term 'punctuated citizenship', which seeks to capture the dissonance underlying the e-democracy movement, through a more nuanced understanding of political engagement (Section VI). The article concludes with a discussion of the pragmatic challenges facing the open government and e-democracy projects. I argue that the findings of the case studies discussed in this article (as well as preliminary assessments of Obama's OG initiative) demonstrate that the success of e-democracy projects depends on hierarchical coordination in matters that cover both technical and non-technical issues. This hierarchical intervention creates an agency problem that does not receive sufficient attention in the open government discourse. The open government project has to develop, I argue, new administrative law structures, which can cope with the inevitable dependency of e-democratic initiatives on hierarchical ordering. I consider in this context the possible emergence of a new form of hybrid regulatory mechanisms that bring together legal institutions and web-based agents and examine the problems underlying this phenomenon.