Input – Throughput – Output: How Digitalization Transforms Democratic Political Systems

Digitalization and its consequences are an important topic on the agenda of researchers, policymakers, and other participants in public life. We read and hear on many occasions that the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) change society and democracies profoundly. New technological interfaces change communication between citizens, political organizations and government; new forms of communication, such as social media, alter the aggregation of political preferences; the use of artificial intelligence and big data permits to evaluate existing policies and develop new policy solutions. The existing literature has referred to these elements from different perspectives. On the one hand, there is a vast literature on e-Government, which started from the observation of digital transformations in public administration, but has extended its interest to the political process. On the other hand, significant research links digitalization with democratic innovations. For example, in using terms such as e-Democracy and e-Participation, scholars have analyzed how digital technologies have changed the democratic process, including the agenda-setting, policy formulation, decision-making, and policy implementation. We contribute to the literature in connecting these different research strands and outline how digital democratic innovations change political systems. Referring to the literature on input, throughput, and output functions and legitimacy, we discuss in a systematic way how digitalization transforms political systems. We argue that the functionalist approach to understanding the political system allows us to synthesize existing knowledge on the impact of digitalization on democracy in a descriptive manner. On this basis, we systematically organize concepts that link digital innovations to the democratic political process, including policymaking, and policy implementation. The scientific contribution of this study is two-fold: firstly, we explain how the use of ICTs impacts on different processes of the political system, namely on its input, throughput and output. Secondly, on this basis, we conceptualise the impact of ICTs on the legitimacy of these three processes and their interdependencies. In general, digital democratic innovations have an impact on input, as well as output legitimacy of the political process. On the one hand, new forms of digital citizen participation increase the input legitimacy of the political process. On the other, digital technologies improve throughput and output legitimacy of political systems through new possibilities for feedback on policies and public services. Additionally, we contribute to the existing literature by discussing how the use of digital technologies might limit the democratic legitimacy of the political process through augmenting state control over citizens.