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A Multi-Criteria Approach to Analysing E-Democracy Support Systems

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Abstract

New information and communication technologies (ICT) have made the public sphere more diverse and fragmented, and consequently it demands a new kind of literacy to navigate. However, the inter-contextual understanding of democracy is still immature, making it sometimes difficult to have a more coherent view of the various concepts and ideas involved. Neither is the more limited concept of e-democracy uncomplicated and the design of tools and interfaces for e-democracy systems takes place in a highly multidisciplinary context, while there is still a need for some shared ideas of what democracy actually means, also in this new context. In this chapter, we suggest a general framework for evaluating tools for e-democracy and suggest some non-exhaustive criteria under which such tools can be evaluated. The framework is intended to enable users and developers to understand the varying degree of support a tool can provide for several aspects of democracy, and contains a ranking mechanism as well as a suggestion of a ranking-based index based on different criteria and the performance of a tool under these, while still being inclusive regarding different possible conceptions of the concept of e-democracy and its various forms.

This chapter is an extended version of [25].

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.votem.com.

  2. 2.

    http://votewatcher.com.

  3. 3.

    https://participedia.net/organization/316

  4. 4.

    See [69] for an overview.

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Acknowledgements

The work in this chapter was supported by the EU project Co-Inform (Co-Creating Misinformation-Resilient Societies H2020-SC6-CO-CREATION-2017) and the EU project Open-Science Evidence-Based Methodologies for the Development of Epidemic Combating Policies, European Open Science Cloud EOSC, Covid-19 Fast Track Funding.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University, Kista, Sweden

    Mats Danielson & Love Ekenberg

  2. International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis, Schlossplatz 1, A-2361, Laxenburg, Austria

    Mats Danielson & Love Ekenberg

  3. Centre of Excellence for the Study of Cultural Identity, University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania

    Adriana Mihai

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Danielson, M., Ekenberg, L., Mihai, A. (2021). A Multi-Criteria Approach to Analysing E-Democracy Support Systems. In: Facebook Nation. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-1867-7_13

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