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

Abstract

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’ 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 correctly designed ICT-enabled services have a deliberative democratic potential. But this does not overshadow the fact that the services existing today only to a limited extent support processes of social learning through rational argumentation, the core idea in Habermas’ discursive model of deliberative democracy.

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