Page 253 - Comparing Political Communication Theories, Cases, and Challenge

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Political Communication and Electronic Democracy

Inasecond empirical part, we will narrow our focus to the represen-
tational dimension of electronic democracy. This theoretical dimension
representsonecrucialsegmentofthelargerdiscourseonthisconcept.We
will perform a comparative analysis of the use of personal parliamentary
Web sites in order to test for the hypothesis that electronic democracy
will be a secular development in American politics. We contrast the U.S.
House with the Swedish Riksdag and the German Bundestag to pro-
duce general evidence on the similarities and differences between the
American and the European context. This analysis goes well beyond the
current use of case studies in researching electronic democracy.
Ina third part we will discuss the findings of the analysis in order to
determine the relationship between computer networks, political con-
text, and political representation. This discussion has to deal with the
fact that most theories on electronic democracy stress the macrolevel of
political analysis. As a result, they reveal little in the way of details on the
politics of electronic democracy. They also suffer from overdetermina-
tion and fail to acknowledge the role of social actors as well as the role of
third variables they might be exposed to. We believe that much can be
gained by an actor-centred approach to electronic democracy. This third
part discusses the result of our comparative analysis from this perspec-
tive. It aims to utilize this perspective to generate explanations regarding
the promises and limitations of computer networks for representative
democracy.

WHAT IS ELECTRONIC DEMOCRACY ALL ABOUT?
The evolution of the concept of electronic democracy has done little
for its clarification. A short glance at the most recent publications on
the topic reveals that electronic democracy is being used as an umbrella
concept for all sorts of political uses of the Internet. The term electronic
democracy is being associated with phenomena such as party Web sites,
electronic voting, sending e-mails to political representatives, political
discussion fora, and even with administrative services provided over
the Internet (see e.g., Browning 1996; Hague and Loader 1999; Kamps
1999).
This usage of the term falls into the trap of conceptual stretching,
which produces vague and amorphous analytical categories (Sartori
1970). While comparative research is in need of general categories to
travel across the boundaries of single cases, electronic democracy ap-
pears to be a category that defines no boundaries at all. As a result, it

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