This edited volume discusses digital democracy at the local level in Europe. Contrasting the political discourse surrounding participatory digital democracy with actual experiences of implementation, the book provides a wholistic view of digital democracy across Western, Central, and Eastern Europe. The book is divided into three parts. Chapters in Part I analyze discourses about participatory democracy in Europe. Chapters in Part II provide case studies of digital democracy practices at the local level in the EU. Chapters in Part III discuss the risks and challenges associated with digital democracy. Written by a panel of international, interdisciplinary experts, this volume will be of interest to researchers, students, and practitioners across public administration, political science, economics, management, and sociology.

Provides academics, journalists, and general readers with bird's-eye view of data-driven practices and their impact in politics and media.

This book investigates participatory budgeting—a mainstay now of World Bank, UNDP, and USAID development programs—to ask whether its reforms truly make a difference in deepening democracy and empowering civil society.

Representative democracy is often seen as a stable institutional system insusceptible to change. However, the preferences of the broad public are changing and representative, group based democracy has lost importance. This development made it necessary to change established ways of decision making and to introduce participatory democratic innovations. Many national and sub-national governments followed this route and implemented various kinds of participatory innovations, i.e. the inclusion of citizens into processes of political will-formation and decisionmaking. The authors analyse and evaluate the various effects of these innovations in Europe, providing a bigger picture of the benefits and disadvantages different democratic innovations can result in.

Public authorities from all levels of government increasingly turn to Citizens' Assemblies, Juries, Panels and other representative deliberative processes to tackle complex policy problems ranging from climate change to infrastructure investment decisions. They convene groups of people representing a wide cross-section of society for at least one full day – and often much longer – to learn, deliberate, and develop collective recommendations that consider the complexities and compromises required for solving multifaceted public issues.

This book discusses the implications of recent innovations in information and communication technology for civic and political engagement. The international mix of contributions offers insights across a broad spectrum of studies into the form of engagement: explaining the reasons, incentives and motivations for engaging, and the different forms and levels of engagement; contrasting traditional and non-traditional forms of engagement and how they interlink; and asking why people utilize or avoid certain forms of engagement. It is a must-read for any scholar interested in the impact of social media on citizens’ propensity to get involved in political actions. It depicts the role that parties, organizations and peers play in mobilizing or demobilizing others and how online behaviour can act as a springboard into what might be called real-world politics. The book gathers together prominent scholars, who offer their understanding of social and political phenomena and give theoretical and empirical insights into the highly complex questions around political participation in the digital age. ​ This book was originally published as a special issue of Political Communication.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a [CC BY-NC-ND 4.0] License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com. Exploring academic and policy thinking on e-participation, this book opens up the organizational and institutional 'black box' and provides new insights into how public administrations in 15 European states have facilitated its implementation.