Democracy in a knowledge based society: analysis of challenges and opportunities (2007–2009)

Project idea

In recent years, both in Lithuania and the West, there is much talk about the deepening problems of democracy - decline in voter turnout, increasing distrust in political institutions, transformation of politics into a show and so on.
These problems raise a question about the effectiveness and meaningfulness of traditional democratic mechanisms in modern knowledge based society and encourage the creative use of knowledge-based society possibilities to look for new forms of communication between citizens and governments.
The aim of the project is to identify key problems of the democracy functioning in today's knowledge based society and to assess their extent as well as to determine their root causes; to propose effective ways to deal with these problems using new information technologies
Main results of the project were presented at the international conference "Making Democracy Work in the Digital Age" on November 5-6, 2009 in Vilnius at the Institute of International Relations and Political Science.
At the end of the project two monographs were published - "The end of party democracy? Political representation and ideology" and "Talking at the margins: searching for the alternative public sphere in Lithuania".

Participating institutions

IIRPS VU (institution in chief), Kaunas University of Technology, Policy and Public Administration Institute and Mykolas Romeris university