What Kind of Democracy in the Net?

Abstract

The first part of this paper is the introduction to an international seminar held at Aosta (Italy) on June 2012 under the title of Democracy in the Net or on the Net. According to the author, it is unavoidable to set out, at least partially, if ICTs can help to improve the quality of our democracies. So, following the reflections of Bobbio about democratic method`s rules, he suggests to submit the so called “electronic democracy” or democracy through the Net to a double test. The first one consists on testing if e-democracy helps to reduce the gap between the ideal and the reality of democracies. The second one consists on evaluating if e-democracy fulfills the essential parameters that allow describing itself as a democratic regime. The second part of the paper analyses some works presented at the seminar and published at the third issue of Teoria politica. According to Bobbio’s minimum requirements for democracy, the result seems to indicate that ICTs do not offer interesting results.