Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 18th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview II. Working Group on e-Government Author(s) Kristina Reinsalu e-Governance Academy Tallinn Estonia Title Elections in Information Society - the Estonian Case: Local Elections and Elections for the European Parliament in 2009 File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Abstract The topic is chosen because in every society the elections are one of the most important milestones to evaluate the level of democracy in society, the level of development of civic and political culture. It also covers the whole civic society. One of the main questions raised is: if the important pre-elections information (like platforms of different parties etc) the electorate gets is of remarkably better quality and more transparent in conditions of Information Society? Is technology used to present political argument clearer, to make it available for broader audience, to get feedback on it? Which online environments are preferred? The Estonian Society get’s more and more networked – already 2/3 of the populations are heavy Internet-users. The rapid development of Information Society has its influence on the elections as one of the main mechanisms of representative democracy. As Estonian experience with last European Parliament elections shows, the activities in online environment have more and more real influence on representative democracy. Definitely, there is also a danger that also the negative aspects and influences of marketing transfer to the virtual world. To be able to describe and evaluate the influence of new media to elections and democracy in a broader scope, the analysis has to cover all different online environments starting from websites of parties and publicity on online media until the social media platforms (called also tools of WEB 2.0 – blogs, wikis, YouTube, Twitter etc.) The empirical material is based on monitoring and analysis of online –marketing and online-communication of politicians and parties during two elections in Estonia. First, elections of European Parliament June 2009 are analyzed. Second, elections of Estonian local governments October 2009 are analyzed. The main theoretical topics covered in paper will be online marketing, political communication in the condition of Information Society, e-Democracy. On more practical terms also the effective e-tools for electorate will be presented (electors’ compasses etc.).
