Legitimacy 2.0. E-Democracy and Public Opinion in the Digital Age

Digital democracy has been cutting the edge in fields connected to legal, political and social theory over the last two decades but cross- fertilization and transdisciplinary approaches are still scarce. The impact of ICTs on political and governance processes seem elusive to traditional theoretical settings and mainstream conceptualizations. This is a selection of peer-reviewed conference papers originally presented at the workshop Legitimacy 2.0: E-democracy and Public Opinion in the Digital Age, at the IVR World Congress held in Frankfurt, August 18th 2011. They are also being published in the Law, Technology and Society - Proceedings XXV World Congress of IVR Special Workshop on "Legitimacy 2.0: E-democracy and Public Opinion in the Digital Age", Paper series B, ed. by Ulfrid Neumann, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main 2012. These papers offer different approaches to findings in the field, the purpose being to go beyond the polarization between the apologists that hold the web to overcome the one-to-many architecture of opinion-building in traditional democratic legitimacy, and the critics that warn cyberoptimism entails authoritarian technocracy.