Forms of direct democracy at the municipal level in the conditions of digital transformation
Authors:   Saratov State University named after N.G. Chernyshevsky, Amelin Roman V. , Lipchanskaya Maria A. ,   Russian State University of Justice; Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, Channov Sergey E. ,   Saratov State Law Academy
Published: October 2024

Electronic (digital) democracy should be understood as the use of information and communication technologies for the protection and development of basic democratic values and, above all, the participation of citizens in the decision-making processes of the authorities. At the same time, there is currently an urgent need for further digitisation (fully or partially) of various forms of direct democracy used at the local level. First of all, it concerns the holding of municipal elections with the use of DEG systems, which is already taking place at present. Despite all the advantages of the ECT in elections, practice shows that there are also problems in this area, primarily related to non-transparency of voting procedures and the emergence of doubts about the correctness of vote counting. The use of blockchain technologies, which do not allow changing or deleting previously added information, seems promising here. However, organisational and technological issues should not be left to the discretion of technical specialists - developers of the relevant SS systems, which caused negative perceptions of the use of these technologies in elections earlier. The implementation of the SS should be based on a sufficient regulatory framework that would contain detailed requirements for these technologies and the specifics of their use in the voting procedure. At the same time, these requirements should be unified for the whole country and be enshrined, accordingly, in acts of the federal level. Even broader prospects are offered by the use of ECTs in local referendums, provided that they are the only way of expressing the will at the referendum, and not an additional one (as at present). The introduction of local referendums in electronic form can fundamentally change the importance of this institution of direct democracy. The simplicity of holding and promptness of summarising the results, as well as the relative cheapness of the electronic referendum allows to make it not an extraordinary, but an everyday mechanism for making decisions on a wide variety of problems directly by the population of municipalities. Nevertheless, we believe that such a prospect within the framework of the digital transformation of local self-government is, if not inevitable, then at least very likely. In our opinion, taking into account the objectively existing digital inequality of municipalities, the issue of holding local referendums exclusively in electronic form should be resolved directly at the local level. Federal legislation on local self-government should only enshrine such a right for municipalities themselves. The very adoption of this decision in a particular municipality can be carried out only through a referendum (in the traditional form) or at a meeting of citizens. At the same time, a referendum with the use of DEGs may well partially supplant such an institution of direct democracy as a meeting of citizens, since many issues that are currently resolved at meetings of citizens in the future can be resolved at local referendums in electronic form. Also, modern digital technologies can significantly simplify the procedure for using such forms of direct expression of the will of the population at the local level as citizens' lawmaking initiative and initiative projects. In both cases, it seems promising to establish the possibility of forming initiative groups and registering, respectively, the acts submitted in the order of law-making initiative, as well as initiative projects in online mode (under the mandatory condition of identification of the participants of these initiative groups). It seems that this will somewhat simplify some mandatory procedures, however, in general, the implementation of these forms of direct democracy exclusively in a remote mode is unlikely to be expedient in most cases. In addition to existing legislation, digital technologies create opportunities for other, new forms of direct democracy at the local level. These include, for example, online debates, online protests and public crowdsourcing.