e-parliament: Stretching the Public Space

Recent years have seen a large focus on e-government and the electronic delivery of public services, but the impact of new technology is also being felt in the wider context of governance and democracy. The emergence of ‘e-parliament’ is poised to transform both operations and legislature as well as their representative function and how citizens relate to the state.

As with the executive branch of government, information technology helps the legislative branch become more effective through the automation of procedures and administrative functions. Significant investments are being made in many countries to support the work of elected representatives through development of document management and decision-making information systems, as well as through the adaptation and integration of back-office structures to make them more cost-efficient and user-friendly.

For example, in Hungary, the National Assembly has been able to reduce paper use by a third as a result of digitalising parliamentary processes and disseminating official documents to representatives in electronic format.

In Switzerland, the Federal Assembly produces an average of 10,000 documents each month, which include minutes of meetings, draft laws, reports, and dossiers on specialised and procedural matters. The growing number and diversity of documents meant that archiving had become complex and difficult to manage. The parliament therefore standardised data storage using Microsoft SQL Server with Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 to enable users to work faster and more effectively by sharing and collaborating on documents.

Andreas Sidler, CIO of the Swiss Federal Assembly, says: "One of the key reasons we chose SharePoint Portal Server 2003 was that we were confident it could scale to meet our informational requirements as they grow, as well as the ability to switch on or switch off particular features. This was very important because of our focus on efficiency. We don't want users to be distracted by software options that aren't needed in their daily work."

In implementing the document management system, the Swiss parliament attached a high priority to transparency and a clear archive structure to make it possible for citizens to go online to access and easily search for parliamentary information.

Potential for transformation lies not only with the internal workings and administrative functions of parliaments but also with the external provision of information and citizen interaction and participation in the political process.

The Web site of the Scottish Parliament provides access to verbatim reports of all debates, background analysis, and cross-party discussion forums on all major issues. Public page views run at around 1.8 million per month and are increasing at about 30 percent every year.

In partnership with the International Teledemocracy Centre (ITC) at Napier University in Edinburgh, the Scottish Parliament also pioneered the e-Petitioner system, a dynamic Web-based tool structured around a Microsoft SQL Server database which allows any citizen to lodge a petition to Parliament over the Internet.

About one-third of all petitions to the Scottish Parliament are now submitted electronically, most of these are raised by individuals or community groups. In this way, e-Petitioner is empowering citizens to influence the political agenda and is providing a direct means of holding elected politicians to account other than through the ballot box.

George Reid, Presiding Officer (Speaker), Scottish Parliament, spoke at an e-parliament roundtable at the Microsoft Government Leaders Forum (GLF)-Europe, in Lisbon on 31 January 2006, he said "All e-petitions must be publicly examined in a process akin to a popular initiative, which can and has led to significant changes in legislation and regulations."

Some futurologists envision the emergence of an "e-Athens" where there is no need for the election of representatives because the Internet can facilitate a direct form of democracy in which political decisions are taken by everyone in society. While such theories probably represent more political utopia than reality, it is true that citizens in the digital age have access to much more information and knowledge of political issues than at any time in the past.

At the GLF-Europe e-parliament roundtable, Klaas G. de Vries, MP and former Interior Minister, the Netherlands, said: "Maybe 30, 40 or 100 years ago, a voter was someone who cast a vote every four or two years, and then left it to the representatives. But nowadays many people in the electorate are smarter than parliamentarians."

This is why, he said, Parliaments need to go as far as possible to enable citizen participation and include the electorate in the decision-making process. The challenge and opportunity for parliamentarians today is to harness the potential of new technology to create a system of representative democracy that is also more participatory.

"We have to understand that the classic relationship of government to citizen is changing," concluded George Reid. "Politics is far too important these days to be left just to the politician, and greater engagement with citizens doesn’t diminish representative government. Rather it strengthens it by stretching the public space."

Fuente: Microsoft