e-Democracy A Group Decision and Negotiation Perspective [Hardcover]

Internet is starting to permeate politics much as it has previously revolutionised education, business or the arts. Thus, there is a growing interest in areas of e-government and, more recently, e-democracy. However, most attempts in this field have just envisioned standard political approaches facilitated by technology, like e-voting or e-debating. Alternatively, we could devise a more transforming strategy based on deploying web based group decision support tools and promote their use for public policy decision making.

This book delineates how this approach could be implemented. It addresses foundations, basic methodologies, potential implementation and applications, together with a thorough discussion of the many challenging issues.

This innovative text will be of interest to students, researchers and practitioners in the fields of e-government, e-democracy and e-participation and research in decision analysis, negotiation analysis and group decision support.

We are all aware of political imperatives towards e-government and public participation which, together with pressures from the information and communications industry to sell their wares, mean that e-participation and e-democracy are coming, and coming fast, whether or not the processes involved are meaningful and valid. Indeed, the bulk of research in the field concentrates mainly on technologies to facilitate or automate standard democratic instruments. Typical examples include technologies of e-voting, which essentially refer only to facilitating voting through electronic means, and technologies of e-deliberation, which facilitate debate of issues through the web. We are concernelÃ(