ABSTRACT
The purpose of this second chapter is to elucidate the four models of informationage democracy which we introduced in Chapter 1: namely, the consumer, demoelitist, neo-republican and cyberdemocratic models. As we emphasised in our opening chapter, these models are not to be understood as ‘ideal-types’ of electronic democracy, as logically coherent constructs neatly abstracted from specific social settings or from competing political values. Rather, the approach adopted in this book derives from a perspective which situates both the practice and rhetoric of democratic politics in their specific historical contexts. By extension, it seeks to ground differing notions of ‘electronic democracy’ in a set of rival discourses connecting democratic values to technological change. As they are hard-wired into technologically mediated innovations in political practices (TMIPP), these discourses are both embedding and constraining the ways we think about electronic democracy and moulding democratic futures for the information age.
