Digital Design and Politics

The problem with politics, Oscar Wilde once complained, is that it “takes up too many evenings”. In the digital era, though, it’s increasingly easy for people to engage one another and their political representatives without ever leaving home. That’s an attractive proposition for politicians: in 2002, then-leader of the House of Commons, Robin Cook, called the internet “a tool for participation without precedent in democratic history”.

The subsequent coalition and Conservative governments echoed New Labour’s techno-optimism, pushing ahead with e-government initiatives ranging from online forums to petition tools. Jeremy Corbyn has been getting in on the act too, peppering David Cameron with crowdsourced questions during his first prime minister’s questions as Labour leader.

But despite such efforts, British e-democracy initiatives remain “limited and largely unsuccessful,” according to University of Leeds researchers Giles Moss and Stephen Coleman. That’s not to say Brits have no appetite for it: indeed, many initiatives have met with a remarkably positive response. The government’s e-petition system, launched in 2011, drew 36,000 citizen-created petitions and 6.4m signatures in its first year online. But such efforts have been undermined, Moss and Coleman assert, by a tendency to use digital tools as window dressing, and a reluctance on the part of lawmakers to give up their monopoly on power.

Other countries have been more successful: in Estonia, citizens can now access hundreds of basic government functions – from filing taxes to starting a business – through a web portal, and even cabinet meetings are tracked online in real time.

Estonians take pride in e-government in the same way that other countries take pride in space programmes, says local tech guru Daniel Vaarik.

The crown jewel of Estonia’s e-government platform is an online voting system that lets Estonians cast ballots from anywhere in the world. Rolling out universal electronic voting was a big gamble, but with a third of the population now routinely voting online, it’s one that’s paid off, Vaarik believes. “Every product has its testing period,” he says. “Estonia has chosen to be the country that’s doing the testing.”

More than a dozen countries are tentatively following Estonia’s lead, with Switzerland, France, Australia and Panama all piloting online voting systems for expatriate citizens. That’s a big deal, says Sebastián Calderón Bentin, a Panamanian working in New York, who for years was effectively excluded from his country’s elections by rules demanding that expats physically return home to cast their ballots. In 2014’s hard fought presidential election, however, Calderón Bentin was able to register to vote by flashing his ID card during a Skype chat with a government official, and later cast his vote simply by logging on to a secure website and clicking a button.

That kind of real-world impact is a sign of what can be achieved through digital democracy.

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