Enhancing Inclusiveness with Digital Democratic Innovations

Digital democratic innovations (DDIs) have often been presented by the academic community as a potential way to advance democratic participation. Many people believe that DDIs could help us overcome the limitations faced by the usual, non-digital democratic innovations (DIs), and bring citizen participation to a new level. Nevertheless, there is one vital issue that DDIs have not yet managed to resolve, and that is the issue of inclusiveness. How do we make sure that all the relevant groups of people, including marginalized and vulnerable groups, actually join digital participatory initiatives? Inclusiveness is already a problem in non-digital DIs. Given the digital divide and unequal access to technologies, DDIs could actually further worsen the issue, since only relatively young, educated and politically active citizens would participate. In this paper, I aim to critically engage with the issue of inclusiveness in DDIs. I argue that properly designed DDIs could be used to actually advance the democratic value of inclusiveness, instead of undermining it. Through DDIs, vulnerable and marginalized communities that usually do not have a lot of access to civic participation could be empowered and could make their voices heard better than in other, non-digital contexts. Digital spaces could minimize power dynamics, which in non-digital DIs often lead to certain groups (e.g., women, minorities) being less likely to speak up and elaborate on their opinions, while middle-aged educated men dominate the space. Participating digitally, vulnerable individuals would feel more freedom and confidence to express themselves and to put their views forward. Moreover, DDIs could be more inclusive since they would lower the costs of participation for people who do not have time and cannot afford to get engaged otherwise – for example, single mothers with a full time job or people who struggle financially. As a consequence, through DDIs perspectives of such marginalized groups would become more visible and influential in democratic processes.