Advanced Search

Journal Navigation

Journal Home

Subscriptions

Archive

Contact Us

Table of Contents

Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.
New Media & Society
This Article
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow References
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Right arrow Citation Map
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in Web of Science
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to Saved Citations
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Right arrow Request Reprints
Right arrow Add to My Marked Citations
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via Google Scholar
Right arrow Citing Articles via Scopus
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Wiklund, H.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Complore   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us   Add to Digg   Add to Reddit   Add to Technorati   Add to Twitter  
What's this?

A Habermasian analysis of the deliberative democratic potential of ICT-enabled services in Swedish municipalities

Hans Wiklund

Jönk öping International Business School, Sweden, hans.wiklund{at}jibs.hj.se

The aim of this article is to derive a critical standard against which institutional arrangements of e-government can be assessed in terms of democratic potential from Jürgen Habermas’s discursive model of deliberative democracy, and to illustrate how this standard can be applied through an assessment of the information and communication technology-(ICT) enabled services found on Swedish municipal websites. The assessment focuses on the potential of the ICT infrastructure to support deliberative democratic ideals and is based on a quantitative exploration of all 289 Swedish municipal websites. The results suggest that, if correctly designed, ICT-enabled services have a deliberative democratic potential. But this does not overshadow the fact that the services existing today only support to a limited extent processes of social learning through rational argumentation, the core idea in Habermas’s discursive model of deliberative democracy.

Key Words: deliberative democracy • democratic renewal • e-government • ICT-enabled public services • municipal websites

New Media & Society, Vol. 7, No. 5, 701-723 (2005)
DOI: 10.1177/1461444805056013
Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati   Add to Twitter Twitter    What's this?