Wharton-SMU Research Center

In-House Seminar

Guest Speaker:

Dan Hunter
Robert F. Irwin IV Term Assistant Prof of Legal, Studies, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

Topic:

A General Theory of Cyberspace Democracy

Venue:

Business Block, Level 2, Seminar Room 6
Singapore Management University
469 Bukit Timah Road, Singapore 259756

Date:

Wednesday, 12 March 2003, at 3.00pm

Reservation:

This seminar is free. Places are limited. Please confirm your attendance by Tuesday, 11 March 2003, 12 noon with Ms. Lim Lih Yeng at lylim@smu.edu.sg or telephone: 6822-0197.

About the Seminar:

"Any number of idealized conceptions of democracy have been projected onto cyberspace. Direct democracy advocates have suggested that cyberspace reduces political transaction costs to zero, and so we can at last have genuine self government with everyone voting on every issue all the time. Deliberative democracy theorists embrace the Internet because it offers the opportunity to engage the demos, informing each and every member of it, and providing them with a costless way of debating and deliberating. Participatory democracy advocates envision a vast sea of committed electronically-connected citizens directly engaging with their government—indeed, like the Ancient Greek ideal, actually supplanting government and becoming it. It seems that cyberspace is like Coke: any democratic theory goes better with it. Rather than simply agree that democracy must function better in cyberspace, I seek here to articulate an understanding of how the Internet is changing our conceptions of democracy, and ask whether we will be the better for our new transnational, electronic governance environment. I examine our conception of democracy and find that few, if any, modern states are democratic in any meaningful sense. For a number of reasons I suggest that "democracy", especially within the electronic arena, should be abandoned as a description of our modern political commitments. To understand our real political commitments I examine the way that the various organs of national governments work and look at their online counterparts. We are starting to see the emergence of wholly online government institutions that no longer owe their allegiance to any national sovereign. The question asked here is whether these institutions differ from national "democratic" institutions, and, if so, what normative expectations we should have of them. I ask what a general (ie descriptive and normative) theory of cyberspace democracy would look like for these new transnational institutions."