THE CONCEPT OF E-DEMOCRACY

The article describes the concept of e-democracy and analyzes the prospects and ob- stacles to its realization. In the article stated that the development of communication technologies contributed to the formation of global information space, which includes political, economic, social and cultural institutions and as media plays a significant role in the restructuring of socio-political reality, the e-democracy is definitely the subject that should be analyzed. The relevance of the article is to study the phenomenon of e-democ- racy, its forms, as well as the prospects and constraints that exist on the way of its realiza-tion. In the text there are named different multiple prerequisites for e-democracy imple- mentation. Among some of them are: the lack of qualified management decisions and as a result the necessity to adopt new ways of decision-making; increasing levels of political participation as nowadays a significant power relies not only on state authorities, but also on civil society (as a result, in order to increase the activity of citizens in social and po- litical life of the country it is necessary to introduce new mechanisms of policy-making); the opportunity for the citizens to make real actions at different levels as e-democracy is not confined to voting via the Internet. Also in the article there is a given classification of e-democracy (open-source democ- racy, e-government, semi-direct democracy, e-consultations, computer lobbying) and its features (publicity, collectivity, assessment by the population the quality of work of the authorities). The article indicates the stages of development of informational and com- municational cooperation between the authorities and the population. Moreover, the problems of implementation of e-democracy are also analyzed. Among named are: legal regulation problems (while implementing e-democracy, the question of Internet control by authorities arises), necessity of political and moral problems solution (there is definitely the risk of «black» technologies usage), technical problems (unfortunately, not every citi- zen of our country has a possibility to find Internet access). In the conclusion, it is stated thate-democracy promotes transparency of activities of public authorities through the usage of modern technologies and providing citizens access to information. It is said that e-democracy is a tool supporting the political activities and ensuring greater transparency and accountability of politicians to the electorate. Finally, it is stated that e-democracy is a tool to improve the quality of high-rank decisions relating to how each individual and society as a whole participate in the political process