IS DELIBERATION THE DESTINATION? Analysing the effects of internet access on deliberative democracy

Abstract

The extant literature on the connection between the internet and democracy has so far been limited to liberal and electoral democracy. Studying how it affects deliberative democracy is crucial to understand public and government deliberation in the modern age, and also for broadening the debate about the internet and democracy to include other types of democracy. Deliberative democracy is defined in this paper as the interaction between government officials and regular people, and involves a process of public decision-making, where decisions are made using rationality. I argue that this type of deliberation should be boosted by internet access, but only in democracies, because autocracies are not interested in listening to public opinion, and will therefore not implement institutional changes in favor of deliberation, including changes involving digital technology. Utilizing data from the QoG Basic Dataset, I performed a series of regression analyses in order to determine the relationship between internet access and deliberative democracy. The results confirmed the hypothesis, that increased internet access has the strongest positive effect in democracies, a weak effect in democratizing states and a weaker effect in autocracies. I introduced control variables, but only one was statistically significant, that being Control of Corruption. Future research should focus on analysing different types of democracy, apart from only liberal and electoral, as well as studying the development of deliberative democracy and internet access over the long term.