ABSTRACT

New information and communication technologies (ICTs) have the potential to radically reconfigure the state-citizen relationship. The Internet, in particular, has the scope to have an enormous impact on state-citizen dialogue, given its capacity to surmount geographical barriers and allow interactive and simultaneous mass transmission. Forms of state-citizen interaction that have been dominant for over a century, such as constituent surgeries, public meetings and face-to-face consultative hearings can be replaced by email and online discussion forums. Such developments have led Grossman to argue, ‘Interactive telecommunications technology makes it possible to revive, in a sophisticated modern form, some of the essential characteristics of the ancient world’s first democratic polities’ (Grossman 1995: 48).