Per-Olof Ågren

Is online democracy in the EU for professionals only

Many hope information technology will help create conditions for political dialogues among citizens, as well as increase their participation in community issues. Both vertical and horizontal dialogues would be possible; problems could be defined and refined collectively, citizens could construe different political positions regardless of the established political party structure, and try different arguments among each other [2]. This makes a thin democracy a bit stronger. Today we can see attempts to create such conditions for a citizen dialogue on the Internet. One crucial condition for creating virtual forums with the purpose of strengthening democratic dialogues An essential part of democracy is the debate. In a thin democracy (see Åströms article in this section), the elected representatives do the debating. This is not only for ideological reasons, but also for practical reasons. It was relatively easy to gather citizens at agoras in ancient Athens and create dialogue, but harder to do so with millions of citizens over a large territory.