A Two-room E-Deliberation Environment

In representative democracies, citizens and politicians are coupled by a double link: citizens elect politicians to govern and to represent them in deliberative assemblies (local, regional and national parliaments); governments and parliaments make decisions (in the name of those they represent) and citizens have to then comply with these decisions. Traditionally, the communication channel is basically a broadcast from public institutions (governments and parliaments) to citizens to inform them and create consensus about decisions already made. However, this one-way channel has shown myriad limits, and a great deal of literature exists (which, for the sake of space, we assume is generally known to the reader) about the need to enhance communication in the other way around, i.e., from citizens toward public institutions. This may occur at different levels: in accordance with the OECD report Citizens as Partners: Information, consultation and public participation in policy-making (Caddy and Vergez, 2001), which has become a standard reference of sorts in European countries, we identify three levels, each representing an increasing degree of citizen participation: