Anastasia Golubeva and Diana Ishmatova
nominated. However, the procedure for nomination requires candidates to submit the signatures of up to 10 % of municipal legislators from at least ¾ of region’ s municipalities. In addition, self‐nominated candidates are required to submit the signatures of up to 2 % of voters registered in a region. Besides the aforementioned, the law allows the president to initiate consultations with political parties and self‐nominated candidates. While the law doesn’ t require the candidates to follow a president’ s recommendations, this potentially can affect the voters, since a president can make his opinion public.
Expressing public opinions with democratic tools of political behavior has also been made difficult. A 2004 Federal Law“ About Assemblies, Meetings, Demonstrations, Marches, and Picketing” requires organizers of a public action to notify the government about it ten days before the planned event, and in this way granting the government an opportunity to sanction the action or ban it if there are procedural mistakes or any obstacles in carrying out the action. In addition, the 2012 amendments impose substantial increase of fines on participants and organizers for failing to comply with the requirements and rules of organization and participation in public actions.
Given current political environment characterized by the consequent legal constraints imposed on election proceedings and public participation in manifestations overcoming the problem of inability to impact government decision‐making is doubtful for e‐consultation and e‐participation level top‐down mechanisms. An assurance of transparency for participation results and citizens’ impact on government policy in e‐participation projects will likely face problems of institutional and political resistance. In the situation of suppressed political and civil freedoms, e‐participation tools if implemented are very likely to become“ Potemkin e‐villages”.
The next important reason explaining low involvement in conventional public participation mechanisms indicated by the respondents( 59 % in 2010 and 36 % in 2012) is low awareness and lack of information about government activities.
Only about 7 % in both studies indicated they knew everything they needed, while 50 % had a remote idea about activities. Nevertheless it is worth noting that the number of ill‐informed young people decreased from 18 % in 2010 to 11 % in 2012. The progress in political awareness of young people is probably the consequence of increased information availability due to development of public services portals, as well as more active discussion of political news in social networks. The percentage of young people with experience of visiting government web sites increased from 70 % in 2010 to 93 % in 2012 and the number of young people using government portals for public services increased drastically from 15 % to 44 % respectfully.
Given the recognition of low awareness about government activities as a participation barrier, provision of information level e‐participation tools which found to be the most in demand in our survey seems more acceptable for government as it affects distribution of power in a lesser extent compared to other e‐ participation tools. But on the other hand, the implementation of information level tools has little sense for citizens considering low levels of trust to government and government information: only 17 % and 22 % of respondents in 2010 and 2012 survey respectfully stated that they trust the information provided by government agencies.
Thus, given the current political context and citizens’ attitudes towards politics, implementation of top‐down information, consultation and participation level tools fails to counter the main participation obstacles indicated by the respondents and to fulfill their core corresponding democratic aims; to provide citizens with mechanisms for increasing their awareness about the issues of public importance and for influencing over policy formulation.
Now let’ s examine whether non‐institutional bottom‐up e‐participation is able to overcome these obstacles.
It was suggested that the most important opportunity provided by the Internet is the ability to practice democracy( Macintosh, 2003). In the absence of censorship, the Internet can be used as a platform for bottom‐up political organizing in the face of centralized control of other media and a lack of“ official” e‐ participation mechanisms capable to consider citizen input or to enable dialectical discussion on political issues.
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