Table Of ContentContributions to Political Science
Gilles Rouet
Thierry Côme Editors
Participatory
and Digital
Democracy
at the Local Level
European Discourses and Practices
Contributions to Political Science
The series Contributions to Political Science contains publications in all areas of
political science, such as public policy and administration, political economy,
comparative politics, European politics and European integration, electoral systems
and voting behavior, international relations and others. Publications are primarily
monographs and multiple author works containing new research results, but
conference and congress reports are also considered. The series covers both
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Gilles Rouet • Thierry Côme
Editors
Participatory and Digital
Democracy at the Local
Level
European Discourses and Practices
Editors
Gilles Rouet Thierry Côme
ISM-IAE de Versailles St-Quentin-en- Institute of Technology, LAREQUOI
Yvelines, LAREQUOI Paris-Saclay University
Paris-Saclay University Mantes-la-Jolie, France
Guyancourt, France
ISSN 2198-7289 ISSN 2198-7297 (electronic)
Contributions to Political Science
ISBN 978-3-031-20942-0 ISBN 978-3-031-20943-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20943-7
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Foreword
Science and technology have always fed utopias and often, unfortunately, violent
political ideologies. Humanity wants technological progress promotes social and
human progress. And this is particularly true since the 1830s with the Industrial
Revolution, up to the digital revolution, with this sentence constantly heard:
“Technology will adapt to Humans”. Alas, this is wrong. The opposite has always
been the case: Humans have adapted with difficulty to technology, and not the
reverse. Each time, we notice the illusion of a happier, free, egalitarian, humanist
society… Certainly, there has been progress but also a lot of “defeats” and “dam-
ages of progress”. Digital technology is the umpteenth symbol of this technological
utopianism, but it is even more seductive than the automobile, railroad, air travel
and space revolution because it concerns the brain, and the heart of the brain: the
information. Thanks to the abundance, speed of production, circulation and interac-
tion of information, people will know each other better, and society will be more
egalitarian.
In short, the Internet is the symbol of an optimistic utopia. Since information is
abundant, everyone can produce it and appropriate it, and debate. There is less
inequality, power and hierarchies. The reality? Humans are unfortunately as good,
or bad, in a digital universe than yesterday, and the inequalities and the power of
people are also decisive. The GAFA are today the first economic, technological and
financial powers of the world. If everyone can access everything, and we must not
forget the fake news, the information revolution is not synonymous with a “revolu-
tion” of truth or communication. There are as many inequalities and positions of
power in today’s information society as there were in yesterday’s industrial society.
Access to all information does not guarantee more equality. To inform is not to com-
municate (2009).
Today, three drifts illustrate the challenges of the political ideology of the dig-
ital era:
1. Direct democracy: Everyone would become the actor of politics and intermedi-
aries would be useless. It is the opposite, the more society is online, the more it
becomes necessary to maintain the intermediary cultural, social and political
v
vi Foreword
logics: teachers, doctors, judges and journalists, among others. Each individual
does not have the knowledge and the culture to do everything and decide.
Moreover, nobody can think naturally from the local to the global. Cultures and
civilizations are now establishing radical breaks. The more the world is “trans-
parent and interactive”, the more it is necessary on the contrary to add distances
which allow to respect each other and to cohabit. Direct democracy cannot man-
age politics from an “interactive sofa”. Moreover, the open technical world is no
more peaceful than the closed one of yesterday. The Internet individualizes
human and social relations to the maximum, with the risk of segmentation and
communitarianism. The risk of the twenty-first century is that of the defeat of the
collective. The same danger haunts “direct” democracy. To increase the capacity
of action of the citizen, giant of information and not of action, yes absolutely. To
lock up the political action in the localism under pretexts of direct social rela-
tions, no. People of “basic democracy” are not more democratic than the classic
citizen, and it is necessary to learn to cohabit at three scales, local and regional,
national, and European and global. Managing everything at home through
screens and without any experience other than that of the keyboard is not a
future. On the other hand, rethinking the frameworks of experience, action and
negotiation is indispensable. The challenge here is political, not technological.
2. On the other hand, globalization of information, culture and knowledge makes it
necessary to preserve cultural diversity. This is not a remnant of the past, but the
condition for respecting each other in an open, standardized and rationalized
world where everything circulates and is similar. Respect of cultural differences
is the indispensable condition to avoid transforming the fear of the other into
hatred of the other. The other, omnipresent thanks to the abundance of informa-
tion, becomes a threat and therefore a factor of instability, especially since the
other can only be as present as long as we remain at a distance from them.
Yesterday, borders in a closed world were an obstacle, today in an open world
they are a condition for peaceful cohabitation.
The problem of the twenty-first century is that of the right distance in cultural
cohabitation, of not feeling threatened by the other. Cultural diversity is an indis-
pensable and increasingly violent fact that forces us to think about political
negotiation and to build cultural cohabitation. There is nothing technical or digi-
tal in all this but only politics to domesticate the otherness and the fears of the
other. Learning to live together peacefully when everyone sees each other, with-
out understanding or caring about each other, is a challenge at least as important
as that of ecology, beyond respect for nature and animals, to invent a new politi-
cal cohabitation.
3. The third challenge, that of culture, communication and reception, is no less
complicated. The performance of “pipes” in terms of production and circulation
of information is not enough to create a knowledge society any more than digital
technology is enough to create an interactive and participative local democracy.
Culture and knowledge are not only accumulated information. This, plus some-
thing else, is tradition, erudition, negotiation between sciences and disciplines,
the weight of contexts… If digital technology accentuates the number and speed
Foreword vii
of circulation of information and data, that is not enough to create an egalitarian
knowledge society for all, and this is, first of all, because inequalities, from
childhood to adulthood, persist, and not because everything is more accessible
than everything is more equal. The division of labour and inequalities exist in our
continent as elsewhere. And above all the reception is never in line with the
sender and the message. Besides, the biggest problem in political communica-
tion is always the receiver, who is much more disobedient than we think, not to
mention the inequalities existing between civilizations. The great progress of the
Internet is freedom, free access, innovation and speed, but not necessarily, con-
trary to appearances, inter-comprehension. Its absolute limit is the confusion
between technological performance and the complexity of human and social
relationships. Not only does the increasing volume of information not create
more communication, it also does not create more cultural equality. To dissoci-
ate technology from society and culture is indispensable if we do not want the
technological ideology to impose itself. And never forget the “dark side” of the
Internet, which is at least as strong as the ideal side of the Internet. Man is not
better with the Internet.
The nineteenth century is the century of the information revolution; the twentieth
century is the century of communication, exchange and openness; and the twenty-
first century is the century of learning the most peaceful cultural cohabitation pos-
sible between cultural and political universes that everything separates, but those
are more and more visible to each other. The challenge? Not to confuse technical
performance with social and political complexities. If it were enough for there to be
more information in circulation and more interactivity for there to be more mutual
respect, peaceful negotiation and cohabitation between the two sides, this would be
a reality! The incredible progress of technology is not enough to create political
progress and to guarantee peace. We have already seen this for a century. There has
never been so much information, exchange, culture and openness without creating
proportionally more inter-understanding. In reality, the “progress” of information,
culture and knowledge does not naturally create more respect on a human and social
level. The solutions? Dissociate information and communication. To think of the
negotiation between different cultural worlds. Do not bring the logic too close
together, organize their cohabitation. In other words, dissociate technical perfor-
mance from human and social progress. In a word, to think the incommunication.
Distinguish the rare moments of sharing, as we all experience them, and avoid
acommunication, that is to say, ultimately failure then death. To think of the most
frequent situation, that of incommunication, that is to say the one which obliges us
to make mutual concessions which allow cohabitation, without illusions.
To think the incommunication? The condition is to save the ideal of the commu-
nication. To understand the limits of the technological performance, to learn to think
the human and social discontinuity. To understand that there are two great philoso-
phies of the communication, technical and political.
The paradox and the error are that for 50 years we have thought that progress is
technological, and we realize that it is not. Technology is not enough to bring
viii Foreword
humans together, and only politics, which values other logic than the circulation and
interaction of information, can try to understand and bring together heterogeneous
logic. The heart of technological ideology? To hope that the performance of tech-
nology will allow the decrease of human and social incommunications (2020, 2022).
The more technology progresses, the more politics becomes central, but politics
is much more complex and disappointing than technology. We would therefore
dream that technology, through its progress, could subvert the difficulties of poli-
tics. It is us humans who make peace and war, not computers or robots. The regime
of technology obliges us to revalue the regime of politics, which does not dissolve
in the regime science and technology.
Dominique Wolton,
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris, France
[email protected]
References
Wolton, D. (2009). Informer n’est pas communiquer. CNRS Eds.
Wolton, D. (2020). Vive l’incommunication. La victoire de l’Europe. Les
Peregrines Eds.
Wolton, D. (2022). Communiquer, c’est négocier. CNRS Eds.
Acknowledgements
This volume brings together the results of research by academics and experts from
12 countries of the European Union (Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark,
France, Germany, Italy, Lithuania, Netherlands, Poland, Romania and Slovakia), as
well as from Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates. A
total of 49 authors have combined their efforts and expertise to produce this multi-
disciplinary overview of the current evolution of participatory democracy and digi-
tal tools, adopting the proposed problematic and using different approaches from
political science, economics, public management, communication sciences, inter-
national relations or administrative sciences. We would like to thank all the authors
for their valuable contributions and for the patience and responsibility with which
they have always responded to our requests and solicitations for the editing and
revision of their chapters. We would also like to thank our colleagues from
LAREQUOI who participated in the revision of the contributions.
We started this project in 2021, after a presentation at ASPA, and a very fruitful
contact with Lorraine Klimowich, our editor in New York. She believed in the proj-
ect, and thanks to her, we planned a specific and, for us, original implementation
process. First of all, we organized an international conference in January 2022, at
our university and in hybrid mode. This conference was included in the programme
of activities of our management science research laboratory, LAREQUOI, of the
Jean Monnet ad personam Chair “identities and cultures in Europe”, and of the
European Marketing and Management Association (EUMMAS).
We are particularly grateful to Annie Bartoli, Professor of Public Management
and Director of LAREQUOI, for her support to this project.
After the presentation of nearly 30 contributions, we completed the list of authors
by mobilizing everyone’s networks. The following months were then devoted to the
production of this volume.
The elaboration of this project owes much to the numerous informal and friendly
discussions with the team of the Hermes Review, of the Centre National de la
Recherche Scientifique, and its director, Dominique Wolton, notably during joint
trips to Slovakia and Georgia, in the framework of the Hermes Offices abroad.
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