Anastasia Golubeva and Diana Ishmatova
falsification, which were ignored on TV for nearly a week, leaving people relying on TV as a primary source of information unaware about the protests. And though in this particular case the news finally reached TV, proving the potential of online activism for bottom‐up agenda setting, the example clearly illustrates the obvious limitation of online activism by the number of Internet users. This limitation is expected to be gradually reduced, as Internet use grows, which in turn might provoke government’ s extended presence in or even control into the digital sphere.
But the Internet divide is only a partial explanation for the low online civic engagement. Interesting results were obtained by the journalists of Public Post who interviewed people in other cities regarding their awareness about the protests that were taking place in December in Moscow and St. Petersburg( Public Post 2011). It was found that even those who had Internet access and spend a substantial time online have not come across the news about protests as their interests and activities on the Internet are not concerned with politics and reading news in general. This can be a demonstration of specific Internet usage behavior favoring entertainment activities for example, as well as an indication of a disinterest in political affairs. In our reported survey, citizens’ ignorance was revealed as a significant participation barrier, especially for those respondents who were found disengaged from participation in conventional political life. Notably, the current online activity of these respondents was also found to be limited by reading news; the majority of them indicated that they do not use the Internet for social or political purposes.
5. Conclusions
The goal of this paper was to explore the potential of e‐participation in Russia for increasing public involvement in decision‐making, taking into account current political conditions. We approached the problem by examining the ability of top‐down and bottom‐up e‐participation mechanisms to overcome the current obstacles preventing Russian young citizens from becoming motivated and engaged in issues of public importance.
Non‐institutionalized online public participation demonstrated its potential in overcoming the factors inhibiting public participation revealed in the survey. The emerging political activism in Russian Internet space already showed the potential of committed citizens to impact the distribution and access to power by bottomup agenda setting and by forcing empowered decision‐makers to change decisions. The marginal effects of such activities are evident but should not be dismissed.
Comparison of the results of two studies can lead us to some controversial conclusions and assumptions. On the one hand the overall percentage of informed young people who expressed the willingness to use electronic means of communication with the government grew. This could be a direct result of the recent development of bottom‐up online social and political activity in Russia. A positive experience in various online actions contributes to the growth in public participation. In addition, the growing belief in the power of ICT to solve the problems of democracy is also a consequence of these trends. On the other hand, the analysis of the attractiveness of certain e‐participation tools shows that the interest in interactive e‐participation tools has fallen. The political events of the last two years which have significantly undermined public confidence in the integrity of government and official democratic participation might serve as the explanation. In this regard, the direct influence of government‐society relations on the perception of any form of interaction with the government has made itself evident.
Political ignorance has proven to be a serious issue preventing people from becoming engaged citizens irrespective of participation mechanisms. And as Masters et al( 2004) noted, there is not a quick fix to achieve any lasting shift in attitudes towards active citizenship. The only way to establish a practice of political awareness and participation is to experiment with democracy. For motivated people opportunity to practice democracy is open and aided by the Internet encompassing various options of active political participation and civic actions.
Our study has not captured causal relationships for the reasons for low public participation and thus we can only speculate whether political ignorance is partly explained by other factors of low engagement in participation processes such as an inability to influence government decisions, a lack of information about government activities, distrust of government and fear of repression. Thus the problem of political ignorance clearly needs further exploration.
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