Public Management and Administration - Owen E.hughes

common. There are those who advocate referenda carried out by e-mail or
website vote. Political parties are already using websites; e-mails to politicians
have largely replaced earlier mail and telephone responses on issues. In 2000,
Arizona held its Democratic party primary as an on-line election and more such
events are likely to follow. Since the early 1990s Brazil has used computer tabulation
of elections, although the voter still has to attend in person to verify
their eligibility to vote (Holmes, 2001).
Bellamy and Taylor (1998, p. 117) argue that representative democracy may
become a form of consumer democracy:
In an era when representative politics has become delegitimated and when, at the same
time, bureaucratic and managerial capability is being increased through the application of
new ICTs, there is a strong possibility that the information and communications capabilities
of the information age will simply augment and speed up the decentring of representative
democracy, helping to dissolve it into a highly managed form of consumer
democracy.
Even if the articulate and informed always receive disproportionate attention in
any political system, relying on electronic responses to political issues would
disenfranchize large numbers of voters. The result could be a kind of populism
and, as has been shown in a number of countries, the use of the Internet makes
it easier for extremists to organize and gain attention. The system of representative
democracy has evolved over centuries and, for all its faults, continues
with the support of most of its people. There are real problems with the idea of
electronic democracy.
Difficulties with implementation
E-government 199
It is, of course, possible that the e-government changes will not happen and
there are major hurdles to overcome. There may be active resistance from staff.
Also, government information technology strategies have tended to be very
expensive, exacerbated by a tendency to buy systems badly, and to lock-in to
short-lived technologies. Much money has been wasted; failure is common
(Heeks and Bhatnagar, 1999). A related problem is that of standards, whether
or not they should be open or proprietary and the continued difficulties of communication
across different kinds of computer. The standards issue may be able
to be addressed by the Internet itself, in that, as it operates in disregard of the kind
of computer system used. A further possibility is the apparent acceptance of
Extensible Markup Language (XML) as a standard to overcome the problem of
proprietary software.
A more systemic problem is the distance between hype and reality. Bellamy
and Taylor argue that ‘despite the powerful hyperbole which surrounds the
notion of an information age, heroic scenarios for reinventing government
through the application of ICTs are fundamentally misleading. The institutions