La crisi della rappresentanza politica e le prospettive della e-democracy

Faced with the profound changes taking place, does it still make sense to speak of a "crisis of parliamentary representation"? Are we not perhaps facing a crucial juncture in the history of our institutional system, which requires us to take note of the new role that the "political representative" is called to play? The cyclical problem of the crisis of representation raises the need to rethink the traditional forms of the liberal democratic representative model in the light of the new modalities of political participation in the c.d. "Information Society". The progressive use of information technology, in fact, has profoundly transformed the organization of society and has influenced the same circuit of political representation, creating new channels for democratic participation, modifying political communication and the process of forming public opinion. The present work aims to study the impact of electronic democracy on the dynamics of modern democratic systems and, in particular, on the forms of the c.d. representative democracy. In the background, the question remains about the scope - a revolutionary alternative - of the changes introduced by the c.d. "Digital democracy". The possibilities offered by the e-democracy instruments give rise to the temptation to meditate on the overcoming of the current constitutional system - focusing on the forms of representative democracy - and to inaugurate a new "digital agora", recognizing more ample space for the instruments of direct democracy and , even, imagining their - renewed - centrality. Ultimately, the alternative that arises, is if e-democracy is becoming fundamental for the decisive eclipse of political representation, rather, constitutes a resource a service of the same representative democracy, helping to renew the traditional channels of the representative circuit, now for some time affected by a systemic crisis.