E-governance, E-voting, E-democracy, E-politics Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

This example E-governance, E-voting, E-democracy, E-politics Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.

The Internet has permeated the business of politics in society, and the various activities within government undertaken by political actors, including citizens, politicians, journalists, and activists, fall within the realm of e-politics. One of these activities is voting online, or e-voting. Beyond the act of voting, other activities such as paying taxes, registering motor vehicles, obtaining driver’s licenses, completing forms, and obtaining materials from the government via the Internet constitute what is known as e-governance. Should the Internet become successful in the democratization of political systems it can be said that electronic democracy, or e-democracy, has been instrumental in such a process.

The marriage of politics and the Internet was brought about by the desire to bring efficiency to governmental operations and provide transparency in what government does. By streamlining and computerizing operations, government agencies as well as individual actors are provided convenience in obtaining information as well as greater interaction.

E-Governance

E-government—short for electronic government but also known as e-gov, digital government, online government, or transformational government—refers to the use of information and communication technology to provide and improve government services, transactions, and interactions with citizens, businesses, and other agencies of government. As early as 2000 some of the most visited Web sites were in the governmental realm, including the Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. Postal Service, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and the Census Bureau.

The U.S. federal government, starting with the White House under Bill Clinton, encouraged the use of the Internet as early as 1993 as a means of providing information. Congressional sites for both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate provide biographies of members, press releases, legislation sponsored and cosponsored, floor speeches, recent legislation, the status of legislation, and newsletters. Individual officeholders have a Web presence to facilitate and promote fund-raising, continuous campaigning, and constituent interaction. Information on the Supreme Court site includes court cases, rulings, and opinions. The major, and even minor, political parties have their own Web sites that encourage partisans to contribute funds, no matter how small, and engage in activities, no matter how trivial, to bring the party’s and candidate’s name out in the general public. This was the method used by the Obama campaign to obtain the involvement of millions of people in its call for change.

In the United States state and local governments have also gone online to varying degrees. Numerous groups and organizations, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Organization for Women, and magazines such as Government Technology are dedicated to, and have undertaken the monitoring and measurement of, what is going on in the use of information technology in the states and in government. Since 1997 Government Technology has undertaken a digital state survey. In the 2008 survey Utah came in on top, followed by Michigan, Virginia, and Arizona.

At the international level, countries use the Web to inform the world about themselves, to entice those who have the money and the curiosity to visit them, or to facilitate communication with the rest of the world formally by government-to-government transactions or informally by citizen-to-citizen exchanges of e-mails and the sharing of audio and video. Although the state of a country’s technological development measured by the Globalization Index or the E-Readiness Index may provide insight into the usefulness of the Internet for delivering basic needs to its citizens, the digital divide is a constant reminder that the gap between the wealthy and the poor prevents billions of people from utilizing the advantages of connectivity.

Nevertheless, efforts are constantly being made to bring government connectivity to constituents. Various activities that constitute political connectivity, including e-voting, e-campaigning, and e-fund-raising (found in the articles about voting and blogging), have captured the attention of those who study progress in engaging the citizenry with the functions of government in a democracy.

E-Voting

Electronic voting, or e-voting, has become quite controversial among those who favor it and those who want to hold on to old ways of participation in the political choice of leaders and representatives. The U.S. states of Oregon and Arizona have paved the way in experimenting with the use of electronic voting. Aside from people’s reluctance to trust a computer to accept their vote—at times without a paper record of that vote—there is also the fear associated with the reliability and validity of using the Internet for choosing a nation’s leaders. Surveys in the late 1990s indicated that about 51 percent of surveyed netizens favored online voting as long as it was safe, while 42 percent disagreed with online voting. Younger citizens who are more tech savvy may be more inclined to, and more comfortable with, voting through a computer or the Internet.

E-Democracy

The online activities of governments have led to a debate about the ability of this medium of political communication to bring about greater and better democracy. Political life online may seem to be a mere extension of political life offline; however, being linked through the Internet provides an additional medium through which individuals can pursue the privileges and obligations of citizenship. It is a good way of communicating one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many and improves on the conventional ways of dealing with government. This direct democracy brought about by Web connectivity has been billed as what will connect citizens to mass decision-making processes, such as the election of Barack Obama to the U.S. presidency. Obama’s Web presence mobilized millions of Americans to campaign and fund-raise. Politicians have been using, and will continue to use, online formats to maintain and enforce their existing power. They cannot help but be more responsive to citizen demands since it would be difficult to withhold information as well as censor information in an open society where information is available online. Misinformation, deception, and manipulation can still come about, but overall, proponents of government presence on the net see it as a factor in the revitalization of democracy everywhere.

When evaluating e-government from a balanced perspective, it is true that as of the early twenty-first century there exist many gaps in online government service delivery, some of which are the result of security issues. The Internet is merely another mode of delivery and participation; despite the existence of blogs, discussion groups, instant messaging, various social networking platforms, and assorted types of communications delivery methods, the Web does not give power to the powerless unless they take that power into their own hands.

Bibliography:

Crumlish, Christian. The Power of Many. Alameda, Calif.: Sybex, 2004.
Davis, Richard. The Web of Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Feld, Lowell, and Nate Wilcox. Netroots Rising. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2008.
Klotz, Robert J. The Politics of Internet Communication. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004.
Margolis, Michael, and David Resnick. Politics as Usual. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2000.
Saco, Diana. Cybering Democracy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.
Sunstein, Cass. Republic.com. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Towns, Steve. “Digital State of the Art.” Government Technology, October 2008, 50–51.
Van De Donk,Wim, Brian D. Loader, Paul G. Nixon, and Dieter Rucht, eds. Cyberprotest. London: Routledge, 2004.