Digital Democracy Demonstration

Tracy Westen
Annenberg School for Communication, USC

Elenia Saloutsi
Center for Governmental Studies

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     Last modified: April 14, 2005

Abstract
The Center for Governmental Studies has created a prototype and proposes to give a demonstration of Digital Democracy, a system of web-based email communication between citizens and elected officials. Inspired by increasing levels of civic apathy and the failure of existing communication systems to adequately include citizen feedback in the policy making process, Digital Democracy is aimed at educating voters, make their voices heard and do so in a matter that does not overwhelm elected officials. Although elected officials have attempted to use the Internet in order to communicate with the public in policy making they are bombarded with so many emails that citizen feedback goes largely unnoticed.

The aim of Digital Democracy is to strengthen year-round communication between citizens and government officials, help government officials inform voters of public policy decisions and finally present citizen feedback in a manner that is easy for officials to decipher and use when formulating policy.

Digital Democracy will allow citizens to:

• Check off issue boxes on their elected officials’ websites indicating that they wish to be notified of issues or pending decisions in subject areas of interest to them
• Email their opinions to elected officials on these issues
• Receive legislative updates and feedback on their emails
• Respond to polls and constituent outreach efforts from that elected official

Elected officials will be able to:

• Receive constituent opinions on pending policy issues
• Notify constituents when particular issues are coming up for debate and invite public comments
• Conduct online polls to gain insight into constituent attitudes
• Automatically sort citizen responses into useful categories and display them in graphic formats
• Provide batch-answers to constituent emails