e-Democracy A Group Decision and Negotiation Perspective

Internet is starting to permeate politics much as it has previously revolutionised education, business or the arts. Thus, there is a growing interest in areas of e-government and, more recently, e-democracy. However, most attempts in this field have just envisioned standard political approaches facilitated by technology, like e-voting or e-debating. Alternatively, we could devise a more transforming strategy based on deploying web based group decision support tools and promote their use for public policy decision making.

This book delineates how this approach could be implemented. It addresses foundations, basic methodologies, potential implementation and applications, together with a thorough discussion of the many challenging issues.

This innovative text will be of interest to students, researchers and practitioners in the fields of e-government, e-democracy and e-participation and research in decision analysis, negotiation analysis and group decision support.

Political Bases.- e-Democracy: A Group Decision and Negotiation-Oriented Overview.- Concepts in Democratic Theory.- Participatory Processes and Instruments.- Methodological Bases.- Problem-Structuring Methods for e-Democracy.- Decision Support Systems.- Collaborative Decision Analysis and e-Democracy.- Voting Theory.- Real-World Decision Aiding: A Case in Participatory Water Management.- Technological Bases.- The Internet and the Web.- e-Participation: A Discursive Approach.- e-Negotiation Systems for e-Participation.- Web-Based Decision Support: Creating a Culture of Applying Multi-criteria Decision Analysis and Web-Supported Participation in Environmental Decision Making.- A Generic System for Remote e-Voting Management.- Explanation Systems.- Case Studies.- Transparent Public Decision Making: Discussion and Case Study in Sweden.- From Participatory to e-Participatory Budgets.- Internet Voting in Estonia.- Consensus Building by Blended Participation in a Local Planning Process: The Case of the Public Stadium Swimming Pool in Bremen.- Future Prospects.- e-Democracy: The Road Ahead.

David Rios Insua is Professor of Statistics and Operation Research and Vicerector at Rey Juan Carlos University. He has previously been resercher or lecturer at Madrikd Techn. University, Purdue, Duke, IIASA and CNR-IMATI. He is the youngest member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences. He has chaired the e-democracy programmes of the European Science Foundation and the Government of Madrid. He has ten books and nearly eighty refereed papers under his name. His current interests are in group decision support over the web, e-participation and Bayesian Analysis of stochastic processes.

Simon French is Professor of Information and Decision Sciences at Manchester Business School in the University of Manchester. He was previously Professor of Information Systems and Operational Research at the University of Leeds. He has an international reputation in decision theory, analysis and support systems, risk assessment and Bayesian statistics. He has over 120 publications to his name, including three standard texts on decision theory, and was from 1990 to 2000 founding editor of the Journal of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis. In all his work the emphasis is on multi-disciplinary approaches to solving real problems and the innovative use of technology in supporting decision making. Currently he is working on e-democracy and e-participation. He was a member of the European Science Foundation's Towards Electronic Democracy programme and is part of a major research project, funded under the UK Research Councils Rural Economy and Land Use Programme, into public and stakeholder participation into the handling of food chain issues in the rural economy.