A. Mikheyev
Nizhny Novgorod.

INTERNET AND DEMOCRACY:
HOW NEW INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES INFLUENCE THE POLITICAL PROCESS

    It has become commonplace to say that we are living in the Information Age. The rapid development of information and communication technologies (ICTs) is changing our lives profoundly, in economics as well as diplomacy, culture as well as politics. One of the issues most widely discussed by social scientists and politicians is the possible influence of this process on democratic institutions and procedures of modern society. This paper is also intended to address the problem of the relationship between modern information technologies and democracy. However, the position it conveys is different from the optimism shared by many. In author’s opinion, the development of ICTs and the Internet as the most powerful part of them, not only does not presuppose the progress of democratic institutions and practices in the society, but can even lead to their further deterioration.
    In this paper several most characteristic features of the Internet will be looked at and their possible impact on the development of democratic society will be analyzed. Special attention will be paid to the proposals made by the advocates of WWW (such as digital hall meetings and electronic voting) and it will be shown that all suggested improvements have substantial drawbacks and will, in fact, jeopardize that very democracy they are supposed to promote. Ideas concerning democracy in general and its traditional form (representative) will be discussed, as well as proposals about using modern information technology to impose so-called direct democracy.
    The main problem the society will face with the wide spread of the information technologies is total passivity. People will have every opportunity to be involved in political life, but they won’t be interested in that. Modern democracies have already met this absenteeism phenomenon, when even the most important elections lack voters. There are two possible explanations of this fact. One is that with the development of information technologies people will be turning "to an expanding variety of electronic entertainment". Another is the destruction of the community. With the development of information technologies people will spend more and more time in the virtual world of Internet, which will become their new place to live. Most scientists believe that the new community people will be finding in the cyberspace could not be the center of political life as their "real world" community is said to be.
    Let us, however, take a closer look at the features of the Internet, which are mostly praised by its supporters and which are supposed to play the major role in promoting the democracy. As has already been mentioned, neither of these features presupposes by itself development of democratic practices and will more likely be an obstacle to democracy rather than its moving force.
    First of these features is extreme cheapness of dissemination of information. Whoever has Internet access today can make his/her ideas available to millions of people throughout the world. This multitude of sources is supposed to act against the "bias" and "indoctrination" of big news corporations and governmental sources. It is also thought to give an equal chance to individuals and small groups to make their ideas known, a chance that does not depend on the size of the group or its financial abilities.
    To place something in the Internet is, undoubtedly, extremely cheap. But one must keep in mind that with transmission of information becoming easier and easier, the cost of acquiring information itself remains high. Therefore small independent sources cannot compete with large news corporations as soon as the quality of information is concerned. Besides, it is not enough to create a web-site; the most difficult part of the process is to make it known. Small publishers cannot rely on excessive advertisement, because it costs a lot of money; and as we can see, they are again under unequal conditions from those of large companies and governmental sources.
    The Internet is praised as a democratic medium because everyone can put whatever information he wants on the Web-site, but this itself causes the problem of uncontrolled information. The increasing number of Internet sites maintained by different anti-democratic groups and individuals, such as ultra-left and ultra-right organizations (for example, Nazi) raises a question of whether such activity acts to promote democracy or rather to undermine it. Another problem of Internet is unauthorized home pages. It is very easy to make a copy of a politician’s homepage, change some information there and post it on the Internet as an authentic source. This gives way to unfair campaigning and different insinuations.
    Moreover, placing information on the Internet is not such an uncontrolled process as it may seem to be. Most providers now impose some certain rules about the contents of the page (for example, no pornographic information is allowed) and can deny hosting a page if these rules are violated. One can speculate on the possibility of such restrictions because of political contents of the site, especially if this provider is controlled by government or wealthy corporations. The same can be said about registering the site at a catalog like Yahoo! or Lycos - if there is any control exercised over it, for instance, by one of the political parties, any site containing unwelcome information can be denied registration.
    One can argue, however, that given the number of sites on the Internet, it is almost impossible to have any control over them. This, as we have seen, is not necessarily true. Modern searching technologies can be programmed to react to certain phrases or words and can check the contents of millions of sites in a short time. This is an even more serious threat if we are talking not about catalogs where sites are sorted by topic, but about search engines like AltaVista that search for pages containing certain keywords. If this seems to be a totally unreal perspective, just consider so-called "family filters" in modern search engines that exclude from search results all pages containing pornography and violence. One just needs to change keywords a site should contain in order to be excluded.
    Let us now take a look at another feature of the Internet, which is its interactivity. The idea of instant feedback, though very democratic in its essence, conveys serious drawbacks. The first of them is that the level of it is already very high now. Politicians are getting enormous amount of mail, E-mail, fax and phone messages every day. The question is whether it really influences the decision-making process to make it more democratic. Given the growing number of responses a politician has to deal with, we can assume that the more feedback he gets, the more of those who provided this feedback feel that their opinion has been neglected.
    There are, in fact, two possible ways a politician can deal with response he gets from the people. One is to use them, meaning to show that popular opinion is totally on the side of the politician. Sometimes this may require some distortion of the facts, sometimes even rather serious. Another way is to follow this vox populi unconditionally, what can be even more serious a threat to democracy. Being too concerned about the immediate reaction of the public can prevent the politician from reaching a compromise, which can be essential in the decision-making process. It can also be the reason for him/her to vote not for the decisions s/he sees as being the best, but for those that s/he believes would appeal most to the public.
    Another problem of intensive feedback is that it can be extremely disproportionate. Modern technologies allow a small interest group, especially if it is backed by substantial financial resources, to create an image of massive support or rejection of a certain decision, literally breaking the politicians fax machine and E-mail box with a great number of messages. There is no doubt that politicians and lobbyists will use such a possibility even more widely than just concerned citizens.
    The next drawback of the idea of feedback is that a lot will depend on who is in charge of conducting such polls. However uncentralized and democratic, such surveys still have to be initiated by someone, and someone must provide polling software and actually calculate the results. A lot in the results of a poll depends on such aspects as the formulation of the question itself, the order of questions, the procedure used and other details. That’s why if there is any influence of some political force on these aspects, we cannot talk about genuine democracy.
    The system we have today in democratic countries is mostly the representative type of democracy. Since the times of ancient Athens the number of people whose opinions are to be taken into consideration and the geographical sizes of the societies prevented direct democracy, where decisions are made by people themselves, from existing. Many advocates of the Internet say now that such form of government is today quite possible with the use of modern information technologies. However, this optimism is not as well-based as it may seem to be. There are basically two types of problems that make "digital voting" a threat to democracy rather than a useful tool of it: the problems of direct democracy as a phenomenon and the problems with implementation of this idea.
    The most serious argument against letting people themselves make all the decisions which are now made by their representatives is the idea, emphasized many times by the framers of the U.S. Constitution, that popular opinion must be "filtered" by a body of representatives in order to ensure that the decisions made suit best the national interests and that the needs of the minorities are taken into consideration. This threat of the "tyranny of the majority" includes several important aspects that will be now discussed, that make the ideas similar to those quoted above dangerous to democracy if ever brought to life.
    First of all, we cannot be sure that popular decisions would best suit the national interest mostly. The experience shows that people are sometimes driven by immediate emotions, demagogues’ "persuasive" arguments or personal considerations. Most such decisions do not take into account all the important sides of the problem, which makes them inconsistent with each other and impossible to carry out. Given the number of questions that would have to be discussed if all the decisions made today by Congress were to be made by popular vote, we can assume that this decision-making process will take most of time of the average citizen, which he would not probably like very much. The only thing we can be almost sure about, if such a system were brought to life, is that most people would abstain from this hard work of decision making. Because of such a shortage of time decisions would be made without much discussion and without presenting different points of view, which would surely impact the quality of the decisions made and would, in fact, make useless the very system of popular debate and popular vote.
    One should also consider the following problem: would the voters (especially given the fact that they would have to deal with large numbers of everyday decisions) take seriously their responsibilities and wouldn’t their choice be the result of mindless clicking on one of the options rather than of thoughtful decision making?
    These are probably the most serious problems we are likely to face if the perspective of direct "Internet democracy" comes true. But besides that, there is a whole series of problems connected with the implementation of this very idea. Some of them (such as who is to determine the exact questions and their order, who is to calculate the votes, how to avoid falsification of results) have already been discussed. Along with them is raised, for example, the problem of secrecy of the vote. Advocates of the described system suppose that, to ensure the authenticity of the results, everyone will have a number and a personal password, allowing him to enter the network and make his choice. This, however, gives a wonderful opportunity to anyone who has access to this network, to sort out people who have voted in a certain way, and then to identify them. Even if we assume that this system will not fall prey to the ever-existing problem of corruption (especially when the interests of governmental elites are at stake) it will be almost impossible to make all the voters believe this. Hence, their vote will hardly be motivated only by their political beliefs and not by fear, especially in countries where democratic norms don’t have a very long history.
    What has been said above does not mean that we are doomed to witness the decline of democracy as a result of development of modern information and communication technologies. The point is that this process, instead of promoting democratic institutions, could make them much more vulnerable and could make the democratic equilibrium much more unstable. Not only do objective processes (like people’s "transfer" to the virtual world from the real) convey threats to democracy, the development of modern technologies gives anti-democratic tendencies that always exist in society new powerful means to destroy the democratic system. And we are not to deceive ourselves that a country with established democratic traditions will not be affected by this process. Any official, even democratically elected, tries to preserve his power as long a time as possible - it is in the very nature of power. Democracy, in fact, is not a way to help rulers exercise their power, but rather a system of limitations intended to prevent them from abusing this power. The influence of modern information technologies could result in loosening of these limitations.