Going online from a personal computer to access government services has been commonplace in some countries for several years. Now, in Estonia, Singapore and many countries in between, many of those same services are available through your cellphone.

“In emerging markets in particular, governments understand that E-gov services simply won’t reach the masses unless they become M-gov services,” said Gabriel Solomon, senior vice president for public policy at the GSM Association, an industry group representing cellphone operators. “Across sub-Saharan Africa, the fixed-line and PC infrastructure is only available for the elite, whereas the mobile access platform is near-ubiquitous.”

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To speak of new democracies is to refer to two inter-related phenomena, write the author Professor Stephen Coleman and Ildiko Kaposi in the introduction to the report ‘New Democracies; New Media: What’s New?‘.

Firstly, there is the wave of democratisation that occurred in the last quarter of the twentieth century, in which states as diverse as former Soviet satellites, Latin American military dictatorships and developing African nations came to adopt the formal tenets of liberal constitutional democracy: elections based on universal suffrage; competing political parties; accountability of governments to governed; the rule of law; and basic civil liberties.

Secondly, there is the sense in which twenty-first century democracies are departing from the traditional model of state-centred sovereignty and adopting new forms of substantive democracy characterised by participatory methods of policy-making and centrifugal delegation.

In advanced democracies, these modernising strategies tend to be associated with the collapse of traditionally centralised sovereignty, whereas for newly-democratised states, innovative approaches to policy formation and decision-making are seen to constitute evidence that power has passed from unaccountable elites to the civic grass roots.

In this second sense, the notion of ‘new democracy’ raises important questions about the extent to which governance need be characterised by elitist characteristics that we have come to regard as politically inevitable.

For example, even in the most historically developed democracies, the process of government policy formation and decision-making has tended to operate at some distance (physically, culturally and politically) from most citizens; official information has tended to be scarce and unequally distributed; opportunities to influence government agendas have been limited to political insiders and professional lobbyists; political culture has tended to be exclusive and unwelcoming to the demos who should (normatively) be at the centre of the democratic stage.

Are such characteristics inherent to the governance of mass democracies or might new democracies do things differently? Or, to state the question in socio-technical terms, are there ways of designing democratic regimes in ways that place the demos in a more central political role?