How to Make Democracy Work in the Digital Age

Abstract

Recently, we have heard many complaints about how democracy works these days—or maybe rather why it doesn’t work. In a recent Huffington post article, Dhruva Jaishankar, a Fellow at the Brookings Institution in India, claimed that digital democracy is the evil that makes our world ungovernable. We argue that Iaishankar defines digital democracy in a flawed and misleading way. This could cause serious misunderstandings of what the problems are and what are the possible solutions. In the following we will show that digital democracy—if properly understood—is the most promising way to build prosperous societies in the digital age.