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E-democracy & e-government: Present and future

Abstract:

Citizen participation in Government's decisions has been a constant struggle since the earliest civilizations. In the ancient Greece, Aristotle said that decisions of all things should depend on the general Citizens Assembly; that judges were elected by lot and for a limited time; and that election is not depended of the importance of his fortune. To reach this objective, the society, especially the occidental one, has been implementing different forms of participation in order to achieve this objective, in a process not exempt from difficulties. A solution to this problem has been the representative democracy; but in recent years, the so-called crisis of representative democracies has been so evident that we have seen decreases in the citizen participation percentages in elections, because they have seen no actions on their representatives, making long lasting the evils pointed by Aristotle more than 2000 years ago. To respond to this drop in participation, different initiatives seeking to bring closer to the citizen the daily decisions of society had emerged. The objective of this study is to analyze the major initiatives implemented and the main problems attached to them. Analysis has shown that security is the main problem facing the majority of the initiatives, meaning privacy, uniqueness, traceability and integrity.