ICTs and Democratic Governance The Latin American experience Yanina Welp Center for Research on Direct Democracy (c2d) Aarau, Switzerland yanina.welp@zda.uzh.ch Anita Breuer German Development Institute (GDI) Bonn, Germany Anita.Breuer@die-gdi.de Abstract—This paper examines if and how far the spread and use of new ICTs affect central aims of democratic governance such as strengthening citizen participation in political decision making; increasing the transparency of legislative processes or providing free access to government data and information, among others. In doing so, the first section analyzes current theories relating ICTs and democracy, while the second sets out to explore the effects of ICTs on Latin American democracies. Finally, some conclusions are drawn. Keywords—ICTs; governance; democracy; transparency; Latin America; inclusion I. INTRODUCTION 1 Although following the third wave of democratization, democracy has gradually become consolidated in most Latin American countries, problems such as inequalities, discrimination, corruption, lack of government accountability and transparency persist, consolidating the notion of citizens that their governments’ decisions are designed to serve privileged minorities rather than the majority. Against this backdrop, the spread of the new information and communication technologies (ICTs) has opened opportunities for democratic governance. However, since the Internet became available to the general public in the 1990s, scholars have discussed how it would work to transform human society. Within the social sciences, the most vividly debated questions concerned how ICTs would affect political processes and outcomes, as well as social stratification. To deal with it, the first section of this paper analyzes current theories relating ICTs and democracy, while the second sets out to explore the effects of digital technologies on Latin American democracies and particularly [1] This paper summarizes findings of our edited volume “Digital Technologies for Democratic Governance in Latin America. Opportunities and Risks” (Routledge, 2014). The 11 studies collected in the volume adopted varying approaches to address the impact of ICTs on political stability and inclusive development, developments in the field of open government data, the ways in which Latin American governments use ICTs to communicate with their citizenries, and the ways in which they attempt to promote access to ICTs, as well as the ways in which the use and perception of ICTs have shaped social movements and the strategies they use to pursue their claims. to assess if and how far the ongoing diffusion of ICTs has made a positive contribution in strengthening democratic governance over the past years. Finally, some conclusions are drawn. II. STATE OF THE ART A. The effects of ICTs on national-level democratic growth Beginning with the creation, public availability, and ensuing expansion of the Internet, scholars have taken great interest in the question of whether or not it would act as a driving force in the worldwide diffusion and consolidation of democracy. Yet, to date, only few studies have approached this question with cross-national, quantitative data-based analysis and the results are not overwhelmingly encouraging. By means of statistical studies of a data set containing records from 188 nations between 1992 and 2002, Best and Wade [1] find that while Internet-enabled increases in government transparency and NGO efficacy were responsible for much of the Internet’s statistical success in countries that were at least partially developed and democratic, in less developed and non-democratic countries such positive effects may be hampered by governments which purposefully limit public access to the Internet, state and self-censorship, and poor ICT infrastructure. Using panel data from 152 countries between 1994 and 2003, Groshek [2] arrives at a similar conclusion. He too finds Internet diffusion to be associated with those countries becoming more democratic that had already reached a minimum level of democracy, while the democratizing effect of the Internet was severely limited among non-democratic countries. A criticism leveled against both these studies is that they operate with datasets that predate important ICT innovations such as Web 2.0 features and social media platforms 2 . While the ability of the Internet to act as a catalyst of national level democratic growth remains to be proven, empirical evidence suggests an inverse dynamic of democracy as a determinant of Internet access. [2] This critique is especially germane given that social media platforms, such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, were only launched in the mid-2000s but are nowadays frequently used for political and civic activism.