Democracy Online: The Prospects for Political Renewal Through the Internet [Hardcover]

Taking a multidisciplinary approach that they identify as a cyber-realist research agenda, the contributors to this volume examine the prospects for electronic democracy in terms of its form and practice--while avoiding the pitfall of treating the benefits of electronic democracy as being self-evident. The debates question what electronic democracy needs to accomplish in order to revitalize democracy and what the current state of electronic democracy can teach us about the challenges and opportunities for implementing democratic technology initiatives.Peter Shane is Joseph S. Platt - Porter, Wright, Morris & Arthur Professor of Law at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, where he directs the Center for Law, Policy and Social Science Clearly written and well organized... An impressive number of authors who are also real-world policy practitioners.  The authors stay largely on track, complete with conclusions that actually reach conclusions.  The editor, Peter Shane, provides a brief but useful review of the essays, making his case for what he terms a cyberrealist approach to the possibilities of democracy online. Unlike some work in this field that gets bogged down in the details of the technology, this collection analyzes the actual or possible intersections of real political institutions and currently available hardware or software technologies that may affect the beliefs and behaviors of citizens, voters, and officeholders. --Perspectives on PoliticsPart 1: The Potential for Democratic Technologies and New Political Practices 1. Technologies for Democracy 2. Cyberjuries: A Model of Deliberative Democracy? 3. Electronic Media and the Prospects for Transnational Democracy: Cyberspace as a cosmopolitan public sphere Part 2: Electronic Democracy and Democratic Revitalization 4. The Electronic Federalist: The Internet and the eclectic institutionalization of democrl¼