Democracy in the Electronic Government Era

This article describes Electronic Democracy as an emergent statecraft model. Electronic Democracy is analyzed from a theoretical perspective that proposes edemocracy as the new millennium democratic system. In order to achieve this goal, an e-government concept was required. It is proposed that Electronic Government is presented as the appropriate environment to originate a new role model for managing the public engine: e-democracy. In this particular case, the analyzes focuses on the most important democracy theories - Classic Democracy and Radical Democracy - intending to demonstrate that Electronic Government contains the democracy ideals from both of these theories. Although E-democracy is shown to provide solutions to many social problems, some drawbacks are also discussed. Finally, as a result of this analysis, the ways in which Electronic Government can help the Information Society to become more and more democratic is described.