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Teledemocracy in Local Government

Politicians in a small Norwegian municipality experience how telecommunications technology can support and impact the election process.
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  1. Introduction
  2. The Scope of the Project
  3. Identifying Needs
  4. The Field Trial
  5. Conclusion
  6. References
  7. Authors

Since the 1980s, there has been concern in Norway for the efficiency and effectiveness of local government and the high turnover among local politicians. The task load of municipalities has increased substantially, with added responsibilities for items such as environmental protection, refugee logistics, business support, and educational reforms. Scarce economic resources and a complicated financing system place a heavy decision-making load on local councilors and administrative officers. This is especially true for the rank-and-file councilors, who expect to have the final say in important issues. Their work is exacerbated because they perform their duties outside of normal working hours. Researchers at Telenor, the major Norwegian telecommunications company, realized that information technology had the potential to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of local government politicians, which might also increase decision quality, and in turn encourage more politicians to seek re-election. Consequently, a field implementation of the Telenor-designed politicians’ channel in the telecommunications network called "POT" was conducted from 1993 through 1995. The locale was the northern Norway municipality of Salangen, population 2,500.

The Salangen field trial is like an O. Henry short story; there is a twist to the tale. Most of the POT story is about success. POT increased communication between politicians. Previously silent observers engaged in electronic discussions, and those on the periphery of political power gained more influence. Political divisions were loosened when politicians started to use POT to communicate across party boundaries. In October 1995, the local politicians expressly noted the positive impact of POT in Salangen’s official records The twist? In 1996, the system was terminated.

Despite the increasing complexity of local politics, there have been few changes in how political work is performed in terms of organization, resources, and technological tools [6]. Communication is a central activity of politics [1]. Politicians must communicate with citizens, fellow politicians, and local government administrators. If politicians are provided with IT to make communication more effective and efficient, they might find local politics less demanding and more fulfilling. As in other areas of society, IT can potentially change the nature of political work and possibly encourage politicians to stay in office longer.

The core of organizational memory—the stored history of an organization—is about decisions made and problems solved. Individuals are a key component of organizational memory because they determine what information will be stored and what will be retrieved [12]. Politicians, like all decision-makers, improve with practice. Experienced politicians have learned from their mistakes and successes. They are also more likely to have developed general decision criteria and consistent, policy-based methods of conducting business. While new ideas may be desirable, an influx of many new politicians with each election is likely to lower the quality of decision making because of the inexperience of novice politicians. A lack of experience in local politics is likely to be exacerbated by the growing complexity of local government issues.

There are three roles in a political system—citizen, politician, and administrator. Most teledemocracy research has concentrated on communication between politicians and citizens, with particular emphasis on supporting communication among citizens [1]. Humans have limited processing capability, and politicians are no exception. The danger is that IT permits a deluge of information. Citizens find it far easier to fire off an email than write a letter. Thus, the danger is that if the electronic communication flow is too large, politicians will be forced to ignore it because they can’t process the volume. In this study, the goal was to support local government by improving communication among local politicians and facilitating their communication with the local administration. Thus, we assert that teledemocracy is broader than electronic pipelines between politicians and citizens. Teledemocracy must embrace the transmission of political information and opinion among and within all the groups involved in politics—citizens, politicians, and administrators. In other words, teledemocracy is using IT to enhance the democratic process.

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The Scope of the Project

The Telenor project was focused on learning how telecommunication technology could support local councilors in their everyday political activities. The project’s goals were to improve the information flow between politicians and strengthen the support provided to politicians by local government administrators. Moreover, there was interest in discovering whether the introduction of IT altered the way politicians organized their work.

We used participatory action research (PAR) in which the community under study actively participates in the research. PAR establishes a setting in which participants, the subjects, and the researchers exchange information and make informed choices. With origins in Norwegian work democracy research, PAR reflects a Scandinavian tradition of cooperative learning by the researchers and the organization’s representatives [4]. PAR is a cyclic process of investigation that includes the identification and diagnosis of a problem, planning of actions, implementation, and evaluation of results. The goals are to solve a current problem and advance knowledge about the particular type of problem investigated. Some of the participants were actively involved in the design, deployment, and implementation of the communication network.

Salangen was selected after a review of possible participants because of the strong initial positive response from Salangen’s political leaders. The idea for the project was then presented to the municipality’s local council, which made a formal decision to participate. A six-member project board constituted the interface between Telenor and the municipality. In addition, this board represented the politicians’ and administrators’ interests in the project. Political work was analyzed in terms of content, communication patterns, workload patterns, and advantages and drawbacks as perceived by the politicians. The outcome of the analysis was a detailed survey of political work in Salangen. The analysis identified formal and informal structures and processes, and the main elements of everyday political issues.

A 1992 Norwegian law defines the formal structure of local democracy. Norwegian government operates on three separate levels: the constitutional national assembly, 19 county municipalities, and (as of Jan. 1995) 435 municipalities, such as Salangen. Elected citizens and a supporting administrative structure govern each of these levels. Municipalities, relatively autonomous entities, have wide-ranging powers in terms of mandate and authority. Elections to the local council are held every four years, and the citizens normally choose from among 5–8 different parties, with each party listing in rank order its candidates. The representation of each party in the municipal council is proportional to the votes that it receives. Although most politicians carry out their duties on a part-time basis, the mayor, who is elected from among the councilors, is typically a full-time politician. The municipality is (with a few exceptions) free to organize its administrative structures according to local conditions.

Informal channels of communication facilitate the everyday tasks of local politics and how information is distributed and decisions made. In addition to formal sessions, meetings are held at different levels within local party groups. Political matters are discussed extensively on the telephone, at occasional meetings, in nonpolitical forums, or when politicians meet in the course of daily life. The informal structure, a loosely defined network operating alongside the formal bodies and relationships, is a critical element of effective local government.

Politics in Salangen are dominated by dialogue. Politicians discuss forthcoming issues within and across their political parties, with the local administration, and with fellow citizens. The telephone was used frequently as a tool to mediate dialogues. However, despite the existence of teleconferencing, it was seldom used. The majority of political work was carried out from 6 p.m. to midnight. There was an asynchronous relationship between the politicians’ working hours and those of their service institution—the administration—which may account for some of the problems politicians reported in contacting the local administration. Politicians claimed the key premises for issues to a large extent were defined by the administration due to issue complexity and the lack of time available for the politicians to study and discuss issues in detail. This also lessened the likelihood of politicians developing proposals before the council meetings that were different from those prepared by the administration.

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Identifying Needs

For telecommunication technologies to reduce the workload of municipal politicians and improve their means for making decisions and giving directives, we identified the following core characteristics:

  • Availability. Technology should make politicians more available to each other, to the administration, and to the local municipality as a whole. It should make the administration and the information it provides more available to the politicians. The technology should directly support and strengthen already established communication patterns.
  • Coordination. Technology should support the coordination of political activities such as meetings and discussions.
  • Connection. Technology should connect politicians to the established technological infrastructure within the local administration. A closer connection to the administration’s infrastructure should enable politicians to be aware of and respond to issues at an earlier and less mature stage.

A design specification was developed using these characteristics.

Computer-supported telephony—the use of IT to establish telephone connections and telephone conferences—was chosen because politicians already used the telephone extensively. Furthermore, there was a great deal of one-to-many interactions and small group communications that could be served by email. The asynchronous relationship between the working hours of the politicians and the administration also supported the introduction of email.

A key design goal was to create an interface that provided an illusion of proximity to communication partners. A graphical directory, along with telephone numbers, fax numbers, and email addresses, gave a pictorial representation of communication partners.

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The Field Trial

In many respects Salangen is a typical Norwegian rural municipality, albeit quite small in terms of geographical area, which means the benefits from the use of telecommunications due to the distance between participants could be greater in municipalities covering larger areas.

The project board members initially piloted POT. After some improvements, a one-day training session was conducted for all involved. Politicians with extremely limited computer experience were able to perform the basic operations needed for communicating within a short time. They identified the system’s intuitive interface and low user threshold as reasons why they were easily able to learn how to use the system.

Politicians initially feared that communication through the system would eventually replace face-to-face contact. Throughout the field trial, we observed that communication through more traditional media was replaced by email to a very limited extent. The more extensive users of the system claimed that contact between them improved. Some pointed out that POT introduced a common denominator in the political community by strengthening the ties between the different party groups because they faced a common challenge—learning how to use POT effectively.

There are several pertinent findings related to the field trial that offer great insight on the use of computer-mediated communication (CMC) for strengthening democracy:

The equality of email. Studies of local level politics have discovered that only a minority of politicians are deciders, while the majority are followers [7]. Through extensive use of email, the essential information passed between the most active politicians—the deciders—could now be easily shared with other politicians. In turn, this should make the followers more aware of the current situation and increase their level of activity. In this respect, email has the potential of serving as an egalitarian medium, contrary to telephony that can cement the existing information flow structures. Email is not as laden with social cues as face-to-face and phone conversations. Furthermore, informational influence is heightened while normative influence, such as sender status, is dampened when sender and receiver are physically separated [9, 10]. Thus, email can be a more effective means of communication for those who have low normative influence because it results in directing attention to the content of the message. There is a relatively equitable division with email between those who do the work and those who get the benefit. In some situations, everyone takes equal turns sending and receiving. At other times, the person with a message to communicate does a little more work to type it, while the receiver reads it easily or ignores it; thus the primary beneficiary does more work. Furthermore, the use of email to notify politicians of the occurrence of new issues increases the politicians’ opportunities to achieve a higher degree of influence. This use of email can be an important enhancer of democracy by disseminating information at an earlier stage and facilitating individual responses.

The technology involved in the trial focused especially on supporting the politicians as a group. The use of technology varied among the different parties. In some parties, information was distributed freely within the group. In others, some of the leading members were reluctant to use the system to spread information and to carry on discussions involving the whole group. Our observations suggest that some of the more peripheral members were motivated to use the system more extensively. One party group secretary reported that one of the members, who had been silent at meetings "for 20 years," now was able to contribute to the group’s electronic discussions. Further, POT gave those on the edge of power the chance to increase their influence. Email does not have the power-preserving features of traditional media (for example, the limited capacity for one-to-many messaging and the synchronicity of the phone).

Information and influence. POT and other teledemocracy initiatives potentially perturb the power balance. This effect is likely to be most evident in groups where information is held by a few. Frequently, barriers to communication are clearly more social and political than technological. Also, reluctance to adopt might be ascribed to differences in status (a source of influence) among organization members and, in addition, reflect the values of different political parties and structures.

The benefits derived from a new communication technology are frequently dependent on a successful realignment of norms and values towards greater collaboration and information sharing. For example, the result of introducing email depends more on the organization’s culture, social actors’ goals, and on local circumstances than on technology per se [8]. Our observations indicate that some politicians were reluctant to use the system because they feared that rapid and easy electronic distribution of information threatened their influence and position in the local party. CMC is deeply situated, its social and technological contexts are always highly specific, and therefore generalizing possible effects of using communication tools like POT within other groups of politicians should be made with caution.

Organizational memory and decision quality. The high turnover of politicians in local government, or for that matter people in any organization, jeopardizes the sharing of knowledge and can cause loss of organizational learning [2]. Thus, the organization finds it difficult to learn from the past, to generalize across problem environments, to recognize synergistic opportunities, and to transfer learning quickly and efficiently throughout the organization. A possible solution is to increase the retention rate of politicians. However, this objective is very difficult to achieve. Alternatively, the focus could be on empowering politicians to do as good a job as possible while in office. Thus, towards the end of the project, POT was extended to provide an elementary information system based on the Microsoft help file tools. Through this system politicians could get immediate access to all electronically stored information on issues at the municipality’s administration. This simple but effective way of improving access to the organization’s memory should contribute to the politicians’ ability to make better decisions.


Political power is not something that is distributed equally, nor can it be.


Increasing the efficiency and attractiveness of political work. A possible impact is that technology helps politicians do their tasks more efficiently (less time-consuming), stimulates a social network among them (makes their duty more rewarding and satisfying), and also makes them serve longer (seek re-election). We found indications that the POT system had these impacts. In addition, some of the politicians reported satisfaction with the flexibility POT gave them (it made it possible for them to do more of their work from home and whenever they wanted) and the structuring effects it had (it facilitated the personal archiving of issue information, the party secretary’s distribution of meeting minutes, and made meeting agendas more explicit).

Contextual awareness. Communication is a central activity of politics [1]. Politicians exhort, haggle, orate, listen, and question as they attempt to fashion decisions that can be enacted. To be successful in these various facets of communication, they must remain acutely aware of the current context in which a decision is made and implemented, where awareness is one person’s understanding of the activity of the others in some collaborative scheme, which provides a context for personal activity [3]. Politicians need awareness mechanisms that provide information about what key stakeholders are thinking, discussing, and doing.

Since awareness develops through communication, there is an opportunity to use IT to facilitate awareness development. During the field trial, some councilors expressed a need to access the log of incoming mail to the municipality, but this had not been included in the POT system. Teledemocracy technology should enable politicians to be cognizant of the current concerns of their colleagues and why these concerns are prominent, since such information is often critical to shaping a coalition. In this respect, the email system provided an opportunity to operate across party divisions, thereby establishing cross-contacts that facilitated the formulation of decision proposals.

Framing problems. The framing of a problem can significantly influence the final decision [11]. In the Telenor study, politicians reported they became involved too late in the decision process on some political issues. The administration’s preparation of discussion documents and supporting information anchored a decision at a certain point, and politicians adjusted from there. Anchoring and adjustment result in poor decisions when the anchor is not well selected because decision-makers frequently fail to adjust sufficiently. Politicians should not have their thinking blinkered or directed along certain avenues. IT can alleviate the framing problem by giving politicians and citizens access to issues in their formative stages before an anchor point has been established by the administration. Democracy is more effective when the debate is initiated about where to set anchor points, than accepting an anchor point and making an adjustment. For example, the debate about how to spend the U.S. budget surplus has seen various parties attempt to create anchor points around saving social security and tax cuts. Teledemocracy enhances democracy when it nurtures the dialogue about anchor points by disseminating information to affected stakeholders earlier in the decision process. In the Telenor study, the POT system made it possible to disseminate administrative proposals immediately, instead of compiling them in the large packet to be delivered by surface mail just in time for the formal meeting. Admittedly, the administration’s proposal framed the solution for each issue, but the councilors had more time before the final decision and a better means of communication to enhance discussions on alternative options.

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Conclusion

The field trial and the POT system were evaluated as successful, both by the Telenor researchers [5] and by the Salangen municipality, which expressed in an executive committee decision (Oct. 4, 1995): "The POT project has, in total, been positive to the political work in the Salangen municipality." Still, the municipality decided to terminate the project. The 33 PCs with printers and modems were recalled from the politicians’ homes. Since 1996, councilors have returned to the traditional forms of communication-surface mail and the telephone.

Why did the council terminate the system? The official rationale was based on costs related to benefits, but the costs had been low, and the benefits were well documented. Obviously, there must have been other factors. We have no definitive answers, but we direct attention to:

  • The sudden death (1994) of the mayor, who had championed the project, and the reluctant support of his successor.
  • The position of some of the political leaders within the party groups had been challenged by the emergence of cross-contacts resulting in bottom-up politicking.
  • The municipal administration had experienced an added workload and was very likely to see the system expand into its inner regions if it were continued.
  • The technical problems experienced by some of the politicians and administrators, which might have influenced their adoption the system.

In a democratic system, all are granted equal voting rights. Political power, however, is not something that is distributed equally, nor can it be. In any political system, from a Norwegian municipality to the U.S. congress, some politicians manage to accumulate more power than others, and they relinquish it most reluctantly. Thus, while IT can be a powerful democratic instrument, its use will be resisted by those most able to resist (that is, the more powerful) when this technology threatens their power.

If a similar field trial were to be conducted today, we could implement a superior technical solution because more robust IT solutions are available, politicians are now more familiar with IT, and there is a general digitalization of communication and information. However, in order to have a successful adoption, we would have to implement a system that conserves the existing power structure or perturbs it very little. Simply put, power trumps technology. The Telenor project in Salangen indicates the effects of teledemocracy are constrained by the power structure. Democracy did not come without struggles, and even revolutions, to reduce the power of the dominant. Thus, it is hardly reasonable to expect technology in the form of teledemocracy to change the distribution of power by itself. On the other hand, we find it difficult to imagine a similar process of dismantling a communication system to occur in any municipality today—only some three years later—because the Web and email have entered everyday use. Power-holders cannot evade or rollback these ongoing changes, but they are likely to find new ways of maintaining their formal and informal influence. In any case, it is unlikely that power-holders can control access to information to the extent that they did only a few years ago.

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