The Promise of E-Democracy and the Internet: Myths about Digital Agoras?

The advance of digital technology in the field of politics in the last 20 years has raised expectations about enhancing the potential of the long dominant model of representative democracy. The need to reinvigorate the overall political process has been talked about since the first signs of a decline in civic engagement in the second half of the twentieth century. In the meantime, technological gadgets, and, especially the great versatility of Internet applicability have indeed contributed to better communication between political elites and their people and for sharing information on an unprecedented scale. Yet, the key challenge still seems barely to be touched upon: how to provide the meaningful participation of politically awakened individuals in decision-making processes within states. In this chapter we offer a brief survey of the European and United States achievements in the field of e-voting and Internet-voting in order to show how political, technical and security concerns still prevail in debates thereby undermining trust in the new modes of casting votes. Also, we present the results of the survey carried out with 120 students in the Republic of Macedonia and their considerations about the eventual possibility of Internet voting in the country. By applying descriptive and analytical methods, we would argue that the immense possibilities for using the Internet in politics are far from being fully exploited, so any initial miscalculation or failures should not discourage communities from observing new pathways for improving the unavoidable digital component of democracy.