Internet parlamentario en España (1999-2005): los recursos para el contacto ciudadano y su uso, con una comparación europea

Abstract

The websites of parliamentary chambers and of the representatives themselves, together with the public email addresses of the deputies and senators for exchanging messages with citizens, open up expectations of an electronic democracy or cyberdemocracy, in line with the aspirations of so-called "deliberative democracy". The comparison made between the resources for contact offered by the British, French, Italian and Spanish parliaments show a relative backwardness in the Spanish case. The additional experiment of electronic consultation with all of the Spanish deputies and senators with a public contact address generated an index, with a highly minority character, of answers to the supposed common citizen who sent messages. The figure for answers obtained is even lower than that of a similar study from 2001, which, together with another prior study from 1999, is used as a basis for comparison. The distribution of answers by chamber, political party, region, etc., is analysed comparatively with the earlier studies we have mentioned, and leads to a reflection on the conditions for fomenting a viable cyberdemocracy.