The E-democracy issue at the Annual Conference of the Italian Society of Political Science (SISP)

During the XXII Annual Conference of Italian Society of Political Science (www.sisp.it), held in Pavia last September, a wide space was dedicated to a theoretical and empirical reflection on participation and deliberation, on national and international political communication through the web, on participative and deliberative public policies, on ICT tools used for implementing participative and deliberative processes, promoted by political institutions as well as by civil society, and on the quality of these processes.

The panel on “Quality of deliberation” (Qualità della deliberazione, chairs: Bobbio and Lanzara) focused on some Italian experimentations of deliberative processes: three citizen juries which took place in Piemonte between the 2006 and the 2007 were analyzed by Chiari («Come valutare un processo deliberativo? Riflessioni a partire da tre giurie di cittadini”); a deliberative poll carried out in Turin was studied by Manca («Effetto deliberative polling: un tentativo di misurazione») and by Fiket («La democrazia deliberativa nella pratica: il cittadino ideale e il cambiamento degli atteggiamenti. Uno studio sul Deliberative Poll di Torino»); and a local experimentation of deliberative democracy was analyzed by Floridia («Democrazia deliberativa, strategie negoziali, strategie argomentative: un’analisi del dibattito pubblico sul “caso Castelfalfi»).

The thorny problem of the “politics of regulation of cybernetic networks” (Politiche di normazione delle reti cibernetiche) was tackled by Amoretti and Santaniello; in the same panel there was also discussion of the use of the web by extreme-right political groups and about its effects in terms of the establishing international links and of the building and reinforcement of identity (Caiani and Parenti: «Right-wing extremist groups and Internet: Construction of Identity, Source of Mobilization and internationalization»).

Finally a whole panel was dedicated to “participative and deliberative public policies” (Le politiche pubbliche partecipative e deliberative, chairs: Freschi and Raffini): particular attention was paid to those public policies that used ICTs. Freschi, Raffini and Mete examined the two electronic town meetings carried out by the Regional Government of Tuscany in 2006 and in 2007: the first one was about the provision of guidelines for a regional law on participation; the second one was dedicated to the citizen participation in decision making about public health expenses («Electronic town meeting regionali in Toscana: dal 2006 al 2007»). Balocchi and Tizzi presented four case-studies of local e-democracy («Quattro casi-studio di e-democracy locale in Italia. Le esperienze di Agoradeidiritti, Cossatosiprogetta, PaìS e PartecipaPug»), which are part of wider research focused on the implementation of the National call, launched (April 2004) as part of the second phase of the Italian National plan for e-government. The main findings show serious difficulties in terms of political inclusion, a discontinuous commitment by the institutional actors, a scarce coordination between different administration sectors, and an uncertain quality of deliberation processes: while some good practises exist, there are much others which are merely symbolic, making clear the risks of a distorted usage of e-participation.

Michela Balocchi (Research fellow, University of Bergamo)