This paper aims at connecting democratic theory with civic technologies in order to highlight the links between some theoretical tensions and trilemmas and design trade-offs. First, it reviews some tensions and ‘trilemmas’ raised by political philosophers and democratic theorists. Second, it considers both the role and the limitations of civic technologies in mitigating these tensions and trile...

Corruption and good governance have been a widely debated topic in the study of emerging democracies worldwide. The importance of considering corruption in new democracies is highlighted by studies showing that corruption is associated with, among others, low trust in political institutions, economic costs and inefficiencies, and low interpersonal trust. This is particularly important for new d...

We examine the effect of a sudden influx of government spending, the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), on support for the President’s party. Using a difference-indifferences design, we find that stimulus spending had a modest positive effect on Democratic vote share, but only in counties that were already Democratic-leaning. In Republican counties, by contrast, government spen...

We describe XTreeNet, a distributed query dissemination engine which facilitates democratization of publishing and efficient data search among members of online communities with powerful full-text queries. This demonstration shows XTreeNet in full action. XTreeNet serves as a proof of concept for democratic community search by proposing a distributed novel infrastructure in which data resides o...

In a variety of group-oriented applications cryptographic primitives like group signatures or ring signatures are valuable methods to achieve anonymity of group members. However, in their classical form, these schemes cannot be deployed for applications that simultaneously require (i) to avoid centralized management authority like group manager and (ii) the signer to be anonymous only against n...

The concepts of electronic government and electronic democracy have common roots in that electronic government must rest on, and support, democratic principles. This article discusses how the components of a democratic society are treated as they are built into the emerging electronic infrastruc-tures, dealing with services and dialogues pertinent to the functioning of the public sector, and tr...

The article provides a discussion of Mark Bevir’s important book on ‘Democratic governance’. It first discusses the conceptual part and in particular the categorisation in terms of ‘modern social science’. It disputes the analysis of neo institutionalism. Second, it stresses the UK case, which is the base of Bevir’s analysis and suggests that the author relies far too much on policy networks. H...