E-Governance in Slovenia

2012 ◽  
pp. 173-187
Author(s):  
Suzana Žilic Fišer ◽  
Sandra Bašic ◽  
Dejan Vercic ◽  
Petra Cafnik
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Citizen Participation ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Political Process ◽  
The Political ◽  
Direct Communication ◽  
National Assembly ◽  
Legislative Procedure ◽  
Citizen Initiatives ◽  
The Republic

Modern communication technology in principle makes political participation feasible. Information, consultation, and participation of citizens in the working of their highest political body – a parliament- should be easier than ever. This chapter analyses if this is really so on the case of Slovenia and its parliament, the National Assembly. Parliamentary website of the Republic of Slovenia is studied in terms of usability, usefulness and utility those are the key criteria in discussion about website performance. The analysis of e-democracy takes into account citizen participation in the legislative procedure, enabling direct communication with the members of the parliament, possibilities for citizen initiatives, and procedure and content transparency at each stage of the decision-making process. The chapter reports on limits of the current website of the National Assembly of Slovenia and proposes guidelines for better use of new technologies in the political process and for improving user experience.

Language Movement and Civil War in West Africa

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ericka A. Albaugh
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Citizen Participation ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Political Process ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
Language Spread ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter examines how civil war can influence the spread of language. Specifically, it takes Sierra Leone as a case study to demonstrate how Krio grew from being primarily a language of urban areas in the 1960s to one spoken by most of the population in the 2000s. While some of this was due to “normal” factors such as population movement and growing urbanization, the civil war from 1991 to 2002 certainly catalyzed the process of language spread in the 1990s. Using census documents and surveys, the chapter tests the hypothesis at the national, regional, and individual levels. The spread of a language has political consequences, as it allows for citizen participation in the political process. It is an example of political scientists’ approach to uncovering the mechanisms for and evidence of language movement in Africa.

Lottocratic Conceptions of Deliberative Democracy

2019 ◽  
pp. 101-137
Author(s):  
Cristina Lafont
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Deliberative Democracy ◽  
Political Process ◽  
The Political ◽  
Democratic Ideal ◽  
Democratic Control ◽  
Political Decisions ◽  
Decisional Power

This chapter analyzes “lottocratic” conceptions of deliberative democracy. Their defenders put their democratic hopes on the generalized use of deliberative minipublics such as citizens’ juries, citizens’ assemblies, and deliberative polls. Some propose conferring political decisional-power upon minipublics as a way of increasing citizens’ democratic control over the political process. Against this view, the chapter argues that such proposals cannot be defended on participatory grounds. By expecting citizens to blindly defer to the political decisions of a randomly selected group of citizens, the generalized use of minipublics for decision-making would decrease rather than increase the citizenry’s ability to take ownership over and identify with the policies to which they are subject, as the democratic ideal of self-government requires. Lottocrats are right to highlight the democratic potential of minipublics. But in order to unleash that potential we must resist the temptation of taking the “micro-deliberative shortcut” and keep our eyes on the macro-deliberative goal. Instead of empowering minipublics to make decisions for the rest of the citizenry, citizens should use minipublics to empower themselves.

Politics, Accountability, and Information Management

2010 ◽  
pp. 323-357
Author(s):  
Bruce Rocheleau
Keyword(s):  
Information Management ◽  
Citizen Participation ◽  
Web Sites ◽  
Political Process ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Appointees ◽  
Management Function ◽  
Municipal Broadband ◽  
Career Administrators ◽  
E Mail

This chapter provides examples of the politics of managing information in public organizations by studying both its internal and external aspects. Within the organization, politics is involved in structuring decision making, struggles over purchases of hardware and software, interdepartmental sharing of information, and the flow of communications such as e-mail among employees. The chapter analyzes examples of each of these internal aspects of politics. The chapter also discusses evidence concerning whether political appointees or career administrators are more effective as information managers. Externally, the chapter discusses how information management has been used to attempt to achieve greater political accountability through e-reporting and examples of cases where purchasing problems spill over into the realm of external politics such as through attempts to privatize governmental information management function. Certain topics such as municipal broadband systems and information management disasters are highly likely to involve information managers in politics. The attempts to use governmental Web sites as mechanisms to achieve e-governance and greater citizen participation in the political process also make it impossible for information managers to insulate themselves against politics.

Candidate Selection in Ireland: The Impact of Localism and the Electoral System

1980 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 489-503 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Gallagher
Keyword(s):  
Political Process ◽  
Electoral System ◽  
Candidate Selection ◽  
The Political ◽  
National Parliament ◽  
Republic Of Ireland ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Selection Of ◽  
The Way

Although the selection of candidates for elections to the national parliament is an important part of the political process, there is little writing on the way in which this is carried out in the Republic of Ireland. This no doubt springs largely from parties' reluctance to reveal details of this essentially internal matter. In Duverger's words, ‘parties do not like the odours of the electoral kitchen to spread to the outside world’.

scholarly journals Participatory Democracy in Local Government

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 246-268
Author(s):  
Ángel H. Iglesias Alonso ◽  
Roberto L. Barbeito Iglesias
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Local Government ◽  
Citizen Participation ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
Integrated Approach ◽  
City Government ◽  
Administrative Participation

In 2015, the local government of the city of Madrid (Spain) introduced an electronic participation system. This initiative stemmed mainly from the social movements that had occupied the squares of many Spanish cities since 2011. As a result of the local elections in 2015, many of those same activists gained institutional power, took citizens’ participation very seriously, and decided to use the possibilities offered by the internet for political and administrative participation. In this article, we seek to assess the impacts of the Madrid city government with the e-democracy experiment – based mainly on establishing an online platform to facilitate citizen participation in political and administrative decision processes. Drawing on qualitative and documental data, our research indicates that whereas the overall aim of the project was to give citizens a say in local policy and decision making, our case study shows that participation was very low since most of the population does not feel concerned by these processes. Indeed, one of our findings showed that citizens’ involvement offline surpassed in some cases their online participation. To identify who is politically active online and offline is a great challenge, to which the promoters of the project did not pay much attention. Although e-participation was meagre in relation to the electoral turnout, the case study also shows that many proposals from the public were incorporated into the local policies, indicating that from a qualitative point of view, e-participation influences decision-making processes. Perhaps local governments should use a more strategic and integrated approach towards the use of electronic technologies to foster and motivate citizens’ involvement in local politics and administration. This more integrated approach should be less dependent on ideological incentives, more institutionalized, and must incorporate citizens’ perceptions and inputs before the introduction of new technologies.

Chile's Neo-Liberal Revolution: Incremental Decisions and Structural Transformation, 1973–89

1999 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 399-427 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARCUS J. KURTZ
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Structural Transformation ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Developmental Model ◽  
The Political ◽  
Policy Outcome ◽  
Military Rule ◽  
Over Time

This article analyses the surprising emergence of a comprehensive and coherent neo-liberal developmental model during the period of military rule in Chile. Rather than reflecting a clear and definitive choice, the political process that produced this model was characterised by hesitation, policy contradiction, shifting priorities, and incremental choices. This was a result of the military's efforts to deal with two, often conflicting, overarching goals – economic and political stabilisation – as they evolved and were redefined over time. The focus on incremental, iterated decision-making weaves the insights of other explanations based in underlying institutional, coalitional, or ideational factors into a micro-political explanation that is consistent with the substantial variations in policy outcome across different phases of military rule.

scholarly journals Blockchain as Res Publica: Towards a Political Genealogy of a Distributed Ledger

2021 ◽  
Vol V (4) ◽  
pp. 175-200
Author(s):  
Olga Bychkova ◽  
Artem Kosmarsky
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Common Good ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cooperative Action ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Civic Virtues ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Individual

This paper focuses on the political genealogy of one of the most promising and influential IT technologies of our time: the blockchain (or distributed registry). We point at important commonalities between the principles of blockchain projects and models of republican governance. In contrast to techno-anarchist and democratic ideas, the republican genealogy of blockchain has so far failed to attract the attention of researchers. After examining the basic technical properties and ideological images of blockchain, we explore how the four main principles of classical republicanism (personal freedom and autonomy of the individual; civic virtues; common good; recognition of great causes) are realized in influential blockchain projects — Bitcoin (developed by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto) and Ethereum (developed by Vitalik Buterin). The functioning of blockchain nodes is supported by a community of miners, who are free, but at the same time agree to act for the development of a common thing. What the republic and the blockchain have in common is that it is impossible to have a community without cooperative action. At the same time, blockchain is a vivid illustration of Bruno Latour's argument on the role of non-humans in social relations: his code seeks to replace untrustworthy humans with rule-acting nodes, and to create a cryptographic society where untrustworthy human relations are replaced by computers' relations. This article is an invitation to begin a discussion of the political ideas that are embedded in new technologies and the models of governance that are mobilized through them, often without proper reflection on the nature of such ideas by their creators.

scholarly journals The Political Process in the Preparation of Public Policy A Case Study on the Preparation of the Constitution of Oil and Gas in the Republic of Indonesia’s House of Representatives

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-111
Author(s):  
Julizar Idris ◽  
Abdul Hakim ◽  
Sarwono Sarwono ◽  
Bambang Santoso Haryono
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
House Of Representatives ◽  
Oil And Gas ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Secondary Data ◽  
Policy Formulation ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Government

Abstract Public policy formulation as a political process is a dynamic formulation of policies involving many actors, ranging from the executive, legislative, academic, to non-governmental organizations. The purpose of this study was to find out the political process of drafting the Oil and Gas Law and determine the model for the formulation of the Oil and Gas Law in the Republic of Indonesia’s House of Representatives. This research method uses a qualitative approach, through observation, in-interview techniques and documentation of secondary data in the process of collecting data. Data analysis using the Interactive Model method by Miles & Huberman's. The results of the study indicate that the political process of drafting the Constitution of Oil and Gas takes place in the following stages: planning, drafting and discussion. Politically, the planning of the Constitution of Oil and Gas comes from several sources: (1) the bill from the President; (2) the bill from the House of Representatives; and (3) the bill from the Regional Representative Council. The long political process in the public policy formulation in the House of Representatives starts from the process of inventorying input from factions, commissions, and the public to be determined as a Legislative Body decision, then the decision is to be consulted with the Government; afterwards, the results of the consultation are reported to the Plenary Session to make the decision.

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