Models of Democracy and the Design of Slovenian Political Party Web Sites

摘要

Web sites of Slovenian political parties do not fully exploit the Internet's potential for interactive and deliberative communication on political issues with citizens, because they favour a competitive-elitist perception of democracy. As result, political party's web sites are mainly used for political mobilization, agitation in persuasion. Supporting this model of democracy via web pages enables political parties to strengthen their position of power and control in decision-making process, to legitimise a hegemonic position of representative democracy within political system, to impose the perception of citizens as consumers of political information and to provide democratic legitimization for capitalist mode of production. In order to strengthen citizen's e-participation on political issues, a conceptual shift in designing political party's web sites according to participatory and deliberative model of democracy is needed.