Copyright ©2020 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Stealth Democracy? Searching for a Democratic Middle-Ground Marius Rohde Johannessen*, Lasse Berntzen** *School of Business, University of South-Eastern Norway, marius.johannessen@usn.no **School of Business, University of South-Eastern Norway, lasse.berntzen@usn.no Abstract: In this paper, we present a reflection on the need for an in-between, low-threshold type of democracy for involving the so-called "silent majority" of citizens. Based on our findings from various cases, we find indications that this type of system can contribute to what we call stealth or "implicit democracy", i.e., citizen feedback on particular issues raised by politicians. In a recent study, both politicians and participating citizens report that they were happy with the pilot results and would like to continue using the system. The second round of testing, with an extended version of the system, is planned for 2020/21. Keywords: eParticipation, implementation, survey, pilot study, implicit participation, evaluation Acknowledgements: The work presented in this paper was partially funded by the Oslofjord regional research fund, project 289252. 1. Introduction - eParticipation Systems and Complexity In this reflection paper, we ask the question "What is the 'correct' fit between system complexity and democratic outcomes?", as we over the years have observed issues with existing eParticipation systems: Many technological systems have been, and are being, developed to enhance democracy and participation. In the 1990s, open discussion forums were popular but had limited success (Sæbø, Rose & Molka-Danielsen, 2010). In later years, we have seen a number of complex and advanced systems, designed top-down for decision-makers to receive input on concrete issues. EU FP7 had several calls for the development of participation systems, and in the early and mid-2010s many different tools were presented in academic journals and conferences (See, i.e., Porwol, Ojo & Breslin, 2014)), along with evaluations of pilot projects (Taudes & Leo, 2014). The evaluations seem to conclude that these types of systems provide excellent feedback but are also complicated and time- consuming and therefore struggle to attract enough participants. In social media, the threshold for participation is lower and more people discuss politics (Elvestad & Johannessen, 2017; Enli &