E-Democracy: A Group Decision and Negotiation Perspective

ISBN-13: 9789048190447 / Angielski / Twarda / 2010 / 364 str.

David Rios Insua; Simon French

Opis

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 concerned that political and commercial imperatives towards the adoption of e-participation might lead to their use before we understand what they are actually achieving. Drawing on the experience accumulated from our previous research, we believe that the GDN community may have a lot to contribute and improve the current status, through the use of web-based decision and negotiation analysis tools to structure and articulate participative deliberations. We shall describe a general framework and architecture for e-participation and analyse in detail the required modules to implement such architecture, together with viewpoints referring to how may we support unsophisticated users to conduct, or at least explore, decision analysis; to discover and build consensus; on how to facilitate large, diverse, dispersed, multi-cultural groups, many of whom may share few common values, possibly interested in different decision methodologies. We also illustrate with several relevant case studies how such framework may be implemented. It behoves the GDN community to lead the debate and conduct the research to address these questions, so that society uses e-participation wisely, possibly through the type of architectures we propose.

Spis treści

Foreword. M. Shakun Acknowledgements 1. e-Democracy: A Group Decision and Negotiation Oriented Overview. D. Rios Insua and S. French. Political bases 2. Concepts in Democratic Theory. M. Arenilla. 3. Participatory Processes and Instruments. J.M. Lavin and D. Rios Insua. Methodological bases 4. Problem Structuring Methods for e-Democracy. A. Carreras and A. Franco 5. Decision Support Systems. S. French 6. Collaborative Decision Analysis and e-Democracy. R. Efremov and D. Ríos Insua. 7. Voting Theory. H. Nurmi. 8. Real World Decision-Aiding: A Case Study in Participatory Water Management. K.A. Daniell, C. Mazri, A. Tsoukias. Technological bases 9. The Internet and the Web. S. French. 10. e-Participation: A Discursive Approach. R. Lourenco and J.P. Costa. 11. e-Negotiation Systems for e-Participation. M.Benyoucef. 12. Web-based Decision Support: Creating a Culture of Applying Multi-criteria Decision Analysis and Web Supported Participation in Environmental Decision Making. R. Hamalainen, J. Mustajoki, M. Marttunen. 13. A Generic System for Remote e-Voting Management. C. Grima and D. Ríos Insua. 14. Explanation Systems. J. Geldermann. Case studies 15. Transparent Decision Making: Discussion and Case Study in Sweden. M. Danielson, L. Ekenberg, A. Larsson, M. Riabacke. 16. From Participatory Budgets to e-Participatory Budgets. C. Alfaro, J. Gomez and J. Ríos. 17. Internet Voting in Estonia. U. Madisse and E. Maaten. 18. Consensus Building by Blended Participation: The Case Study of the Public Stadium Swimming Pool in Bremen. H. Kubicek, H. Westholm. Future prospects 19. e-Democracy: The Road Ahead. S. French and D. Rios Insua.

O autorze

David Rios Insua is Professor of Statistics and Operation Research and Vicerector at Rey Juan Carlos University. He has previously been resercher or lecturer at Madrikd Techn. University, Purdue, Duke, IIASA and CNR-IMATI. He is the youngest member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences. He has chaired the e-democracy programmes of the European Science Foundation and the Government of Madrid. He has ten books and nearly eighty refereed papers under his name. His current interests are in group decision support over the web, e-participation and Bayesian Analysis of stochastic processes.

Simon French is Professor of Information and Decision Sciences at Manchester Business School in the University of Manchester. He was previously Professor of Information Systems and Operational Research at the University of Leeds. He has an international reputation in decision theory, analysis and support systems, risk assessment and Bayesian statistics. He has over 120 publications to his name, including three standard texts on decision theory, and was from 1990 to 2000 founding editor of the Journal of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis. In all his work the emphasis is on multi-disciplinary approaches to solving real problems and the innovative use of technology in supporting decision making. Currently he is working on e-democracy and e-participation. He was a member of the European Science Foundation's Towards Electronic Democracy programme and is part of a major research project, funded under the UK Research Councils Rural Economy and Land Use Programme, into public and stakeholder participation into the handling of food chain issues in the rural economy.

Blurb

Web-based interactions to support participation and deliberative democracy, called e-participation and e-democracy, are coming and coming fast. In some instances, the Internet is already permeating politics. However, it is far from clear if the processes involved in these interactions are meaningful and valid, and most of the research in the field has focused largely on the technologies to facilitate or automate the standard democratic instruments involved, such as e-voting or e-debating. This book, though, uses the point of view of the Group Decision and Negotiation approach to thoroughly discuss how web-based decision support tools can be used for public policy decision making. e-Democracy is structured into five main parts. The first part places democracy in context and reviews participatory instruments already in use in the physical world. The second part reviews methodologies that may be used to support groups in public policy decision making with a view on discussing how they may be used in the virtual world. The third part reviews tools already available on the web to support public policy decision making, such as debating, negotiating, voting and supporting decisions; it also identifies their various strengths and weaknesses. The fourth part includes a number of recent case studies, and the final part identifies challenges ahead. Complete with a comprehensive bibliography, this first comprehensive review of e-participation and e-democracy is intended for students, researchers and practitioners in the field as well as researchers in Decision Analysis, Negotiation Analysis and Group Decision Support.