E-Democracy in Switzerland. Practice and Perspectives

Electronic democracy is a relatively new subject of study. However, with the globalization of Internet use, the deployment of information and communication technology to improve democracy has rapidly gained worldwide attention. The authors of this book explore the practice of e-democracy in Switzerland using three examples that map roughly onto three stages of the democratic process: the pre-voting stage in the first case study of Smartvote, a candidate-voter matching system; the voting stage itself in the second study on the implementation of electronic voting (e-voting); and the post-voting phase in the third study on the use of blogs by Moritz Leuenberger and Christoph Blocher, a current and a former member of the Swiss government, respectively. The authors describe and assess the implications of these uses of the Internet on democratic processes in Switzerland. They conclude that developing the tools discussed would hold opportunities for Swiss democracy, as they contribute to central principles of the democratic process, namely voter participation and citizen awareness. This report is a contribution by the Research Center for Information Law (www. fir. unisg. ch) at the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland) to a series of related studies from various countries around the world produced by the Internet & Democracy Project at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, which investigates the impact of the Internet on civic engagement and democratic processes.