Page 193 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Local Political Communication

depend on the innovative capacity and the eagerness of the city agencies
thatdeploythem.E-governmentissupposedtoprovide,firstofall,better
access to documents and materials of local governments. A best-practice
setting can be visited on the government Web site of the city of Seattle,
that has posted so far about 36,000 pages of searchable informational
resources on the Web (Lang 2003). Seattle’s Web presence empowers cit-
izens to follow policy processes through different agencies and thereby
introduces a fair level of transparency in regard to policy formulation
and implementation. Allowing this, e-government has the potential to
make government more accountable as well as reciprocal. If govern-
ment Web sites have workable and professionally managed interactive
features, citizens can get in touch with government employees directly
using e-mail and thus communicate about work in progress. Chances are
that these interactions will bear some positive result for both sides: They
might increase the possibility for citizens to hold government agencies
accountable, but they also might introduce new communication venues
that, if handled responsibly, could reinstitute more reciprocity in com-
munication. Third, video streaming using cable has been put to use
by some communities to transmit City Council meetings, committee
meetings, and hearings in real time. Government decision making is
awarded potentially more legitimacy with this increase of transparency.
Andfourth, new media can be employed on the local level to organize
participatory communication processes such as “electronic town halls,”
which again can be used to deliberateortofoster deliberatively based
decision-making processes (Grosswiler 1998; Weare et al. 2000). But
even though there have been a few interesting experiments here, the vast
majority of local communities makes use of new technologies simply to
expand the flow of informational output and to communicate its image
as an investment-friendly and livable community. Dialogical settings are
only rarely established, and if so, often not adequately managed. Fears
that e-government on the local stays at the level of symbolic use of poli-
tics have yet to be disseminated. Yet local e-governance holds promises
to reinvigorate the interactive and participatory potential of local
publics, and we might see some surprising experiments here in the near
future. 11

11 In Germany, at present the Bertelsmann Foundation is working with several cities to
develop more participation-driven e-governance experiments. In the United States,
the Santa Monica PEN-network has been heralded as offering a viable technological
solution to foster civic engagement and responsive government.

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