Digital technology – a saviour of or threat to democracy?

• Be aware that we now merged this with Shauna's idea for a workshop and we are now putting together a proposal, but more co-organisers are of course welcome, so don't hesitate to get in touch!

It seems that a lot of DEN phd projects to some extent involve a focus on digitally enabled political participation, whether it be formal participation in democratic institutions or more informal activism, so I'd like to propose a workshop around this field. It obviously needs to be narrowed down, but for now I am just keeping it open to hear what ideas other people might have (Shauna has already proposed a more specific workshop in this area which sounds very interesting here: https://www.loomio.org/d/G3k2srju/online-democracy-what-could-it-look-like-)

There is a widespread notion that (western) democracy is in a state of crisis with declining trust in the political system and decreasing levels of participation in formal democratic institutions like elections and political parties. Since the proliferation of Internet access, digital technologies has both been highlighted as the miracle cure to address the shortcomings of current democracy, and it has been blamed for causing a democratic crisis. No matter what, it seems that digital technologies need to be part of a renewal of democracy – just like it is becoming a natural part of almost any other aspect of our lives. So I imagine a workshop in which we can discuss and learn from each other's experiences of how to research the role of digital technology in a future improved version of democracy.

Specific workshop activities could be:
- Discussions on a research agenda of digital democracy. What ought to be the questions we are interested in, in terms of learning more about the role of digital technology in democracy?
- Training in specific methods suitable for studying democratic innovations (like for instance the Deliberative Quality Index, experimental approaches, methods to study public spheres etc.)
- Presentations by practitioners of online/digital politics (politicians, activists, developers of political software, bloggers etc)
- Presentations by expert researchers in this field.
- Collaborative data gathering or analysis of data gathered before the workshop related to the subject.

These are just initial ideas. I am very interested to hear other ideas around this topic so please don't hesitate to comment and suggest other approaches to this.