Discursive e-Democracy Support

The expression ‘public participation’ in democratic decision-making processes may assume different meanings ranging from "the right to be informed" up to "the right to directly decide". An interesting approach to understand how citizens may influence these processes is provided by John Dryzek’s account for discursive democracy, a particular strand of deliberative democracy. His approach deemphasizes the role of voting mechanisms as a way to influence administrative power and favors instead deliberation within the public sphere. Early bourgeois European public sphere would comprise conversation in meeting places, debates on the newspapers, and political association. The Internet plays an important role on today’s public sphere but, in our view, still lacks the necessary tools to promote the creation of ‘constellations of discourses’ and support citizen’s deliberation on them. We propose to structure public participation as a collaborative writing effort, producing agreed documents reflecting different discourses used to influence public decision processes.