Deliberative Democracy, Rational Participation and e-Voting in South Korea

Abstract

As information and communications technologies (ICTs) have revolutionised private and public lives in many aspects, to what extent and in what way electronic voting (e-voting) can improve citizens’ electoral participation and deepen democracy has become a critical issue in political science. From the theory of deliberative participatory democracy in conjunction with a rational choice perspective, this article examines the prospect of e-voting in the electoral process in South Korea. Prior experiences in the 2002 presidential election and the 2000 and 2004 general elections in South Korea have shown a meaningful, albeit limited and partial, impact of ICTs on citizens’ election-related information consumption, reshaping of their political stance and beliefs, and voter turnout. This article contends that the premises of e-voting can be attained with a higher degree of probability if the National Election Commission serves as an information gateway, bridges the digital divide, and is ready to provide voters and election officers with necessary and accurate information about voting procedures.

Keywords:

• e-Voting
• ICTs
• Election
• Deliberative Democracy
• Rational Participation
• South Korea

Notes

1. Technical concerns on the e-voting system are mostly raised by computer scientists and engineers. Inspecting a publicly available source code of an e-voting machine, Kohno et al. (2004) warn that commercial voting systems are neither reliable nor accurate because of security flaws, the vulnerability of outsider attacks, and other technical problems.

2. According to the People's Coalition for Media Reform (2002), an NGO in South Korea, which surveyed media influence in the 2002 presidential election, while 7.8% of survey respondents regarded the Internet as most influential to determine their support for a presidential candidate, 56.4% and 22.6% of them, respectively, thought that television broadcasting, newspapers and magazines were most important.

3. Other factors include the type of elections, the range of political parties and candidates, major policy agendas, domestic and international circumstances, and timing of voting (Norris, 2002a: 7–12). However, e-voting has a very insignificant influence on those factors.

4. Even if the costs of voting approximate 0, a politically apathetic voter does not have a strong incentive to vote because NEU _i is close to 0. In other words, if C _i >0 and if SEU≈0, NEU _i <0 regardless of p _i . If C _i ≈0 and if SEU _i ≈0, NEU _i ≈0 regardless of p _i .

5. This claim is supported by the turnout rates of the age group of 20s between the 1998 (68.2%) and the 2002 (56.5%) presidential elections (Yun, 2002). Furthermore, according to the National Computerisation Agency (2003) of South Korea, the number of Internet users in Korea exponentially increased from 3.1 million in 1998 to 26.2 million in 2002. With this increase of Internet users coupled with low voter turnout, the insignificant effect of the Internet on voting intuitively makes sense. However, additional analysis controlling other confounding variables is needed to precisely assess the low voter turnout of this age group in the 2002 election.

6. Kim and Yun's study is only partially consistent with this proposition. Their analysis shows that while males used politics-related websites in the 2000 general election more than females, the elderly visited those websites more frequently than the young. Furthermore, the level of education shows no correlation with Internet usage in this study (Kim and Yun, 2000: 141–142).

7. For example, in the 2000 general election in South Korea, about 50% of 1,040 registered candidates possessed an individual Internet homepage (Kim and Yun, 2000: 130).

8. W. T. Lee (2004) claims that Korean citizens engage in Internet-based political participation on the demand-side rather than on the supply-side because the latter operates on a voluntary basis. Although the NEC-generated website is one of the supply-side websites, there is no reason to make such an a priori assumption. What attracts more people should not be who provides and maintains a website. Rather, if the NEC can provide reliable, accurate and timely information and if it designs a website responsive to the demands of the users, the NEC website will be as attractive as other demand-side websites.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jin-Wook Choi

Jin-Wook Choi, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Administration at Korea University in Seoul, South Korea