The Role of DPPs in Promoting Local Government-Citizen Collaboration and Participation

The aim of this chapter is to present the implementation of a pilot digital participatory platform (DPP) called “Baladiaty” in order to foster local government-citizens collaboration and participation in Tunisia. “Baladiaty” means in the Arabic language “My municipality”. “Baladiaty” is a DPP designed, developed, and commercialized by ARSELA in 2019, a Tunisian start-up located in the governorate of Sousse. This paper contains two main parts. The first is considered a theoretical part. The authors will focus on the two main terms and concepts of this research, namely: digital democracy and DPP. This first part will focus on the definition of the digital participatory platform (DPP), and its role in promoting participatory democracy, citizen engagement and their ubiquitous engagement throughout the open government concept. The second part would be considered as a case study presenting a recently designed pilot DPP “Baladiaty” in Tunisia. This paper could be considered theoretical by focusing on the presentation of a pilot DPP in Tunisia, a nascent democracy.

Exploring Experience at the Intersection of Migration and Digital Democracy in South Korea

This article examines how digital spaces for political participation by migrants are experienced and governed in South Korea. Drawing on semi-structured interviews conducted in Seoul, South Korea, between April and July 2018, this article argues that migrant participation in digital democratic processes in South Korea is hindered by a fragmented and centralized digital management, which can be linked back to the specific historical-political context in which this digital space was developed.

Recycling European Narratives in South Korea’s ‘Refugee Crisis’: Islamophobia, #MeToo, and Yemeni Refugees on Jeju Island

2018 was a politically tempestuous time for South Korea as a little over 500, mostly male, Yemeni asylum-seekers landed on Korea’s Jeju Island. Their unexpected arrival caught Korean society, already in the midst of its own #MeToo wave off guard, resulting in a wave of pro- and anti-refugee demonstrations across the country. Fueled by real and fake news about refugee illegal activities in Europe, anti-refugee backlash in Korea took an Islamophobic and feminist tone. Based on digital ethnography, this article presents observations from online voices – refugees, feminists, and media actors – expressed through Naver News and Naver Cafes to assess the ways in which Korea’s refugee crisis was represented in local and global anti-refugee and Islamophobic narratives, aimed in particular at Muslim men. This research highlights the impact of European narratives on Korean society and raises questions over how Korean society can create a wider, inclusive digital democracy.

Towards a More Inclusive Digital Democracy in Asia: Introduction to the Digital Democracy Special Issue of Asiascape: Digital Asia

This article provides an introduction to the Asiascape: Digtial Asia special issue on digital democracy. It provides readers with a brief overview of literature that deals with digital democracy and marginalized groups online, followed by an overview of the contributions that make up this issue. It argues that democracy is only as strong as the voices on its margins, and it calls for deeper reflection about how we can create more inclusive models of digital democracy in Asia and beyond.

Reducing the Burden of Decision in Digital Democracy Applications: A Comparative Analysis of Six Decision-making Software

The more digital democracy applications lower the costs of political participation, allowing ordinary citizens to propose their own policy initiatives, the more they increase the burden of decision for the very same citizens, who are required to debate and vote on many issues. Drawing from this paradox, this article considers how the designers and administrators of six popular decision-making software (DMS) have introduced software features and norms of use whose function is to reduce the aggregate burden of decision for participants in digital democracy initiatives (DDIs). Building upon Andrew Feenberg’s definition of the design code of technology as a technical stabilization of social demands, this article considers how different DMS stabilize the democratic interventions of a plurality of actors, affecting political equality along two axes of the democratic process: the relationship between the exchange of opinions and the synthesis of opinion and the relationship between agenda setting and voting. This article concludes that the design code of digital democracy software reflects an ongoing tension between the need of governing actors to make the democratic process manageable and the pressure of social actors to make it more equal and inclusive.

Improving On-Line Debates by Aggregating Citizen Support1

Currently, Digital Democracy is gaining momentum thanks to online participation platforms, which have emerged as innovative tools that enable citizens to participate in decision making processes. Through these tools, participants can issue proposals and engage into debates by both stating arguments in favour or against and/or by supporting other people’s arguments. In this paper we propose a new support aggregation method derived from the combination of two complementary aggregation methods previously introduced. Additionally, we propose a resilience metric for measuring the quality of the aggregated opinion. We apply our contributions to debates conducted in the Decidim participatory platform.