Presented at NISPAcee 18th Annual Conference “Public Administration in Times of Crisis“ in Warsaw, Poland, May 12–14 2010.
"Elections in Information Society – the Estonian Case: Local Elections and Elections for the European Parliament in 2009“
Kristina Reinsalu, PhD
Estoniane-GovernanceAcademy, Program Director of local governments
Introduction
Despite the fact that several authors have concluded that e-government and Internet democracy are not separate terms (Grönlund, 2002), the political rhetoric on the information society frequently still treats them as separate phenomena. Even if mentioned in some e-government strategies, the claims about the benefits of e-democracy fundamentally lack empirical evidence concerning the effects of the proposed projects (Mahrer and Krimmer, 2005; Wilhelm, 2000; Anttiroiko, 2001).
Estonia gathered praise in international academic circles for successful e-projects in addition to positive reports on the indicators of information societies (Coleman, 1999; Driessen, 1999; Anttiroikko, 2001). Still, it has been claimed that while there are some successful projects of e-administration, the Estonian e-Tax office being one of them, the topic of Internet democracy is often addressed as a rhetorical promise only (Coleman, 1999; Anttiroiko, 2001).
Estonia seemed to need prerequisites such as flexibility and a relatively high level of education in order to make the necessary ICT-related changes (Estonian Human Development Report, 1996). The Principles of Estonian Information Policy (1998) promises, among other things, to provide a participatory forum where every individual could join the discussion about the future of Estonian information society. The forum that would have focused on the information society was never established, but one can see the early ideas of it in the posterior portal TOM[i]. Many of the national initiatives for increasing participation in democracy were in fact more related to representational democracy. For example, TOM also operated on the principle that decision-makers would choose the ideas proposed by the citizens and apply some of them. It was not the case that citizens themselves would have direct access to governing. Despite the revolutionary nature of TOM and the high international interest in it, the actual visiting of TOM remained rather low, decreasing after a fairly active beginning. Still, if one was to compare citizens’ attitudes towards traditional democratic ways of governing, then it could be said that there was great optimism in Estonia. As is also stated by Lauristin (Lauristin et al., 1997), technology as a modernist value and the idealist belief in progress, widespread during the socialist times, was still present, creating a favourable context for technological change.
In some sense, the development of traditional democracy in Estonia has been similar to other post-communist countries. It has been characterised by a rapid institutional development and a slower development of civil society. However, Estonia is exceptional due to its technological development which has been faster than in most other post-communist countries.
In building the e-State, Estonia has benefited from its small and adaptable population as well as from a favourable starting point in terms of economic policy a decade ago. Already in February 2000, the Estonian Parliament approved a proposal to guarantee Internet access to all citizens, essentially equating it with other constitutional rights. By 2009,75% of the population used the Internet, 67% of households had a personal computer and 91% of personal computers in Estonia were connected to the Internet. The whole territory of Estonia is covered with the possibility of dedicated links and public Internet access points. About 1160 WIFI networks for public use are officially registered.
The triumphal progress of Estonia as an e-State started largely due to banking. At the beginning of the 1990s, effective banking systems of that time were not copied in the banking sector. Instead, a modern electronic system was created that allowed money-owners to manage their funds in an electronic environment provided by the bank without leaving their home or office. The system won the approval of users and, at the same time, created the need for people to learn to use a computer and to acquire personal computers and Internet access.
Banks developed the infrastructure for identifying people in the electronic environment as a key solution. Soon, other organisations and institutions that wanted to offer their services in an electronic environment also saw their opportunity there. The abovementioned situation created a good basis for the emergence of an e-State. One by one, environments such as the electronic Population Register, e-Tax Board and cadastre, among others, were established. Soon after creating the first modern information systems, the need for interactivity between these systems arose. In the late 1990s, the project X-Road was launched with the objective of creating a secure and standard environment for interconnection or data communication between information systems. By now, X-Road aggregates 80 different databases with about 1500 services from which many complex services have been created. More than 500 different organizations have integrated their information systems into X-Road. Since 2005, it is possible to use a document exchange centre where mostly public sector organizations perform their document management. Currently, about 300 organizations use the document exchange centre via X-Road. Large-scale enterprises from the private sector also have joined X-Road and currently citizens, enterprises and civil servants all have individual views. Public e- and m-services of more than 150 organizations have been aggregated. In April 2009, the Governmental portal was visited by more than 107,000 people and it had 1.5 million page views.
In 2001, the first nation-wide identity card, which is the primary identity document for Estonian citizens both in the real and digital world, was commissioned. Today, over 90% of the citizens have ID-cards. It is possible to use the ID-card to affix a digital signature that is legally equal to a traditional signature. Approximately 15% of ID-card owners affix a digital signature every day. Digital signatures have been affixed over 14 million times.
In connection to the ID-card and the enactment of the digital signature, preconditions for the first nation-wide e-Elections or elections via the Internet were created. The 2005 nation-wide elections of local governments and the 2007 nation-wide elections of the parliamentary assembly were unique due to the possibility to make a choice at home or elsewhere where people had access to the e-election system. 30,243 e-voters took part in the election of the parliamentary assembly.
However, the focus point of the present paper is not the evaluation of the technical possibilities within the context of elections.In every society, elections are one of the most important milestones by which to evaluate the level of democracy and the level of development in civic and political culture within the society. It covers the whole civic society. There is no doubt that the rapid development of information society has its influence on the elections as one of the main mechanisms of representative democracy. As Estonia’s experience in the last European Parliament elections shows, the activities in the online environment have more and more tangible influence on representative democracy, and it is not always a good thing. There is the danger that the negative aspects and influences of marketing transfer to the virtual world.
To be able to describe and evaluate the influence of new media on elections and democracy in a broader scope, the analysis has to cover all the different online environments of the websites of political parties and social media platforms (called also tools of WEB 2.0 – blogs, wikis, YouTube, Twitter etc.).
The central questions raised in the present paper are:
-Whether the important pre-elections information (such as platforms of different parties) the electorate gets is of noticeably better quality and more transparent within the information society?
-Has the use of technology improved the clarity of the presented political argument and made it more available to a broader audience?
-Which online environments are preferred? Is there more communication and interactivity between politicians and voters?
The empirical material is based on the monitoring and analysis of the online-communication of politicians and parties during the 2009 elections in Estonia.
The paper is divided into the following sub-sections. The introduction provides a short background to the development of information society in Estonia. The first sub-section introduces the topic of e-voting in more detail and presents some Estonian statistics. The following sub-section presents the case of local elections held last year in Estonia, focusing on how the environments of new media were used. The last, theoretical subsection discusses whether the changed society (networked, wired) has facilitated citizens’ chances of getting adequate and balanced information to fulfil their civic duty and if and which barriers hinder their activism. The last chapter concludes and highlights some issues to be explored and discussed in future studies.
- E-voting in Estonia – some background and statistics
Although Internet voting itself is not a focus point in this paper, the following presents some background and statistics about e-voting[ii] in Estonia and the possible impact of e-voting on e-democracy.
In October 2005, Estonia became the first country in the world to have nationwide local elections where people could cast their binding votes over the Internet. This world premiere was followed by national parliamentary elections in 2007 where the number of Internet voters reached 3.4% of the total number of eligible voters. In the following European Parliament elections in 2009, the number of e-voters increased to 6.5% and in the local elections of 2009 to 9.5% of eligible voters. Figure 1 presents the growth in e-voters numbers and the overall turnout in elections (Drechsler and Vassil, 2010).
Figure 1.Turnout and the number of Internet voters (Source: Trechsel and Vassil, 2010).
E-voting and its influence on the development of democracy in general have been much discussed by various authors. E-voting has been approached with the aim of establishing the criteria by which to classify the different views on Internet democracy. For instance, Macintosh views e-voting as a definite part of Internet democracy, as one form of participation (Macintosh, 2004). Pippa Norris (2001) emphasises that although it is a form of representational democracy, it is an inevitable stage in e-participation which is the aim of Internet democracy. In addition to that, there are more radical opinions stating that such a representational democratic form as e-voting is unnecessary, that e-participation should be an alternative to representational Internet democracy not merely a complementary element (Fuchs, 2008). There has been too little research done into e-voting in Estonia to draw definitive conclusions in terms of its actual influence. Nevertheless, according to Vassil’s analysis (Vassil, 2007), it can be said that the availability of Internet voting has helped increase citizens’ involvement. As Vassil’s analysis of e-voters demonstrates, the number of people whose participation depends on e-technologies is small but present: 10% of e-voters claimed that they would not have voted if Internet voting was not an option and 95% of e-voters were convinced that they would not like to vote in the traditional manner if e-voting continues to be available (Vassil, 2007).
.
- Case study: 2009 elections in Estonia
In 2009, there were two elections in Estonia – European Parliament elections in June and local elections in October. Local elections are kept as the focus of the paper at hand and European elections are explored as background information and a source for concluding remarks. The main reason for doing so is the fact that voter activity was much higher in the local elections than in the European Parliament elections. Overall, the participation in the 2009 local elections was one of the highest in recent elections – a fact that has been partly attributed to the activity and increase in online campaigning. Also,on the level of local governments the mutual impact of different processes and the links between democracy, participation and services is much more visible, as Estonian people have a closer contact with this administrative level.
The analysis of the elections concentrates on the central questions in the present paper: whether and how has the Internet changed the political discourse in Estonia and, especially, whether the possibilities of citizens to get adequate, updated and balanced information to educate themselves about the issues, parties and candidates in the elections have improved noticeably? In addition to that the question of interactivity is discussed.
Estonian local elections in 2009
Local elections are held once every four years in Estonia.There are 227 local governments in Estonia. Eight political parties and 15,322 candidates participated in the last elections.
Methods used to answer the research questions were straightforward. During the pre-election period, all online environments were visited and analyzed before specifying exact criteria which differed slightly depending of the specific environment. Altogether, 227 official web pages of local governments, 472 items of social media (including Facebook, Twitter and blogs) and 29 online newspapers were looked at. The period for analyzing the online environments was October 5–18 (Estonian local elections were held on 18 October 2009[1]).
On the official websites of local governments the structure (information on main page or on sub-pages); content (names of candidates, programs) and interactivity (references to blogs, special topics in forums and so forth) of the presented election information were analyzed.
It can be stated that the information presented on these websites does not support the rise of citizens’ awareness of the choice and consequences, neither are there opportunities for interactivity.
Graph 3. Information presented on the official web pages of local governments.
162 web pages out of 227 (there are 227 local governments in Estonia) had created a separate sub-page for the election period. From there, citizens mostly obtained logistical information (how to get to the polling station) or procedural information (which law regulates elections, when will elections be held etc). As Graph 3 illustrates, the information was limited to very basic information and really crucial facts (What was the background of the candidates of my region? What have they been doing until now and what are they going to do for me during the coming period of four years before next elections if they are elected?) was not presented to the electorate. The information about the programs of parties or unions was available only to a very limited extent. There is a central election portal in Estonia where basic information about parties and candidates is presented, and some web pages of local governments referred to this. However, in order to enhance citizens’ activism, this information has to be brought as close as possible to the voters and it should be presented on the web pages of local governments.
Only 3–4 forums were found on official websites where specific elections-related topics were raised, but there was surprisingly well-argumented discussions taking place.
On the official websites of parties, the transfer of messages was rather entertainment oriented – in the form of games, videos or audio clips. Interactivity was minimal because there was no place for citizens’ to ask questions or initiate discussion. All parties used Youtube or Flickr in one way or another, but their official websites did not refer to them. Links to social networks were only seen in the blogs of parties. Blogs, however, likewise do not allow for very active discussion. The average number of commentaries is “0” and only the blogs of party leaders are sometimes commented upon (an average of 10–20 comments per blog).
Regarding campaigns in online newspapers, the conclusion is that these environments were also dominated by colourful slogans and banners of the biggest parties in the largest cities, but the weak point was the lack of content. In terms of people who live in small towns or parishes, the campaigns on online portals and newspapers were nonexistent.
Differently from the forums of local governments, forums of online newspapers were very actively used, but mostly the commentators were commenting on the personal past record of the candidates and no serious discussion about programs or future plans took place. This can be partly explained by the already mentioned lack of information about platforms and personal programs. The opinions of the candidates themselves are not very noticeable on the forums, the only ones publicly attaching their names to the comments were independent candidatesand peripheral political forces.
Finally, social media networks were analyzed. Almost every 10th candidate was present in social media, mostly on Twitter and Facebook. The social network Orkut is considered to be a fading forum. It becomes fairly apparent in the use of social media that one of the most important discussion topics during the elections is e-voting. There is a broad overlap between the people who use social media and the people who e-vote. Twitter was surprisingly well-used – there are certain people, opinion leaders, whose twitter feeds have large numbers of followers. At the same time, there is the danger that due to the huge amount of information on Twitter (if one follows many sources), interesting or important information can easily go unnoticed. On Facebook, it can be seen that after the elections, the politicians’ Facebook pages have become much less interesting.
- Theoretical considerations
Fuchs (2008) claims that in the development of Internet democracy one can begin with the phase of participatory democracy and that e-voting which is the so-called ‘killer application’ of this phase of Internet democracy in Estonia has no impact on increasing e-participation. Although the paper at hand does not fully support Macintosh’s enthusiasm (Macintosh, 2004) either, it is still an important phase in participatory democracy. It is visible in Estonia that with its openness and receptiveness to information technology, representative or institutional democracy as a technical application has increased the number of people who vote, involving people whose general political activity is low and who would not have voted otherwise (see e.g. Vassil, 2007). It is also important to view the matter as a process, as with every new e-voting the space of communication surrounding it has also changed. In 2005, e-voting was really just another technical possibility in the local elections and the election process itself and the discussion surrounding it still mainly took place on traditional media channels.