1 CONNECTING PARLIAMENT TO THE PUBLIC VIA THE INTERNET: TWO CASE STUDIES OF ONLINE CONSULTATIONS

Twentieth-century mass media have been described as producing a ‘one-way conversation’ (Postman, 1986). Instead of dialogical deliberation, political communication has tended to be monological, professionally produced and released for public consumption as a marketing exercise. For most citizens political debate has come to be perceived as something to watch- or switch off. The noisy vivacity of political speech, characteristic of the ancient agora or the market square, assumes a distant and romantic quality, while the political speech, witnessed via the broadcast transmission of parliamentary theatre, is regarded as performance. The analogue broadcast media, whose microphones tend to empower professional communicators and their invited guests, turns political talk into the political talk: a non-interactive political discourse. The prospect of using the inherent interactivity of the internet to enhance democracy has been raised by a number of scholars(Bentivegna, 1998, Hague and Loader, 1999, Coleman, 1999). In the early days of the internet cyber-democrats predicted that representative institutions would be radically transformed, or would even become obsolete, in the face of the public’s capacity to state views and vote on issues that interested them (Becker and Slaton, 2000, Morris, 2001). More recently, there has been criticism of the simplistic connection between e-democracy and direct, plebiscitary democracy. Rather than regarding the internet as a means of transcending representative structures, it has been seen as a tool for refashioning and strengthening the hitherto weak and neglected relationship between representatives and represented (Coleman and Gotze