Democracy Online: The Prospects for Political Renewal Through the Internet [Paperback]

Peter M. Shane (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 4, 2004 | ISBN-10: 0415948657 | ISBN-13: 978-0415948654 | Edition: 1

Taking a multidisciplinary approach that they identify as a "cyber-realist research agenda," the contributors to this volume examine the prospects for electronic democracy in terms of its form and practice--while avoiding the pitfall of treating the benefits of electronic democracy as being self-evident. The debates question what electronic democracy needs to accomplish in order to revitalize democracy and what the current state of electronic democracy can teach us about the challenges and opportunities for implementing democratic technology initiatives.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Clearly written and well organized... An impressive number of authors who are also real-world policy practitioners.  The authors stay largely on track, complete with conclusions that actually reach conclusions.  The editor, Peter Shane, provides a brief but useful review of the essays, making his case for what he terms a cyberrealist approach to the possibilities of democracy online. Unlike some work in this field that gets bogged down in the details of the technology, this collection analyzes the actual or possible intersections of real political institutions and currently available hardware or software technologies that may affect the beliefs and behaviors of citizens, voters, and officeholders. --Perspectives on Politics

About the Author

Peter Shane is Joseph S. Platt - Porter, Wright, Morris & Arthur Professor of Law at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, where he directs the Center for Law, Policy and Social Science

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (August 4, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415948657
• ISBN-13: 978-0415948654
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,588,068 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Peter M. Shane is the Jacob E. Davis and Jacob E. Davis II Chair in Law at the Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law, where he regularly teaches administrative law, law and the presidency, and courses at the intersection of law, democracy, and new media. A frequent contributor to HuffingtonPost, he is also the author of over fifty law review articles and book chapters, as well as five books, including leading casebooks in both administrative law and separation of powers law.

In 2008-09, Peter served as executive director to the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, and was the lead drafter of its report, Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age (2009). Recent books include Connecting Democracy: Online Consultation and the Future of Democratic Discourse (with Stephen Coleman, MIT Press, forthcoming December 2011), and Madison's Nightmare: How Executive Power Threatens American Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 2009). Of the latter, former Congressman Mickey Edwards, the author of Reclaiming Conservatism (Oxford University Press, 2008), has written: "For anybody who cares about our constitutional system of protected liberties, this book is indispensable."

Peter's op-eds on public law issues have appeared in numerous papers across the country including the New York Times and the Washington Post. His research and outreach projects on public deliberation, media and democracy have been funded by the National Science Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Knight Foundation and the Battelle Endowment for Technology and Human Affairs. He chairs the Board of Editors for I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society, and is the originator, with Liv Gjestvang, of the Information Stories project at http://informationstories.org.

A graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, Professor Shane clerked for the Hon. Alvin B. Rubin of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He served as an attorney-adviser in the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel and as an assistant general counsel in the Office of Management and Budget, before entering full-time teaching in 1981 at the University of Iowa. Professor Shane was dean of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law from 1994-1998, and Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University's H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management (now, Heinz College) from 2000-2003.

His public service activities include positions as a Public Member of the Administrative Conference of the United States, as International Trade Commission agency team lead for the Obama-Biden Transition Project, and as a consultant to the Federal Communications Commission. Professor Shane inaugurated the Visiting Foreign Chair for the University of Ghent Program in Foreign and Comparative Law in 2001, and has been a visiting faculty member at the Boston College, Duke and Villanova Law Schools. A 2011 winner of Ohio State's Distinguished Scholar Award, he is also Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School in 2011-12.