Public administration reforms in 1980 s–1990 s were provoked mainly by the urge to increase state management efficiency and to get back citizens’ trust to the government and democratic institutes. The progress of information sector and wide-spread of Internet made it possible to use e-government initiatives as the main tool for reforms. However the problem of the crisis of the traditional representative governance model in post-industrial society couldn’t be solved by these means. Making of Web 2.0 as an online interactive communication and public policy environment gave new life to conception of electronic deliberative democracy and to the model of Collaborative governance . The latter was realized in Open government initiatives. In the article are examined outlooks for realization of e-government principles in Russia,

Technology enabled participation is the key element of the open government movement. During the last decade plenty of e-participation initiatives have emerged across the European Union, mostly driven from above by different level authorities. Considering that these projects cost a lot of tax-payers money and that the citizens haven’t felt any significant results in their everyday life it’s logical to raise several questions. (1) How to measure the effectiveness and the success of e-particiation projects? (2) How could we be sure that prefix «e» added to conventional names of instruments and methods makes policy making process better? In this article the key components of methodological assessment of e-participation project in EU environment are discussed.

In this article various papers presented on the IV International conference on online-deliberation which took place at the University of Leeds (UK) in 2010 and was dedicated to the search of the proper answers to all social and technological challenges to this relatively new scientific field are reviewed. To begin with the author gives a brief history of theoretical premises which caused the interest to this agenda in contemporary political science. The main scientific trends are examined on the concrete research examples. In the conclusion the further outlooks of the researches in the field of political online-deliberation, including those in our country, are discussed.

The survey of empirical researches bearing on the design of online forums for deliberative civic engagement is given in this article. The dimensions of design are defined for different aspects of deliberation: its purpose, target groups, disconnection of the participants by time and distance, communication environment and the organization of the deliberative process. After a brief overview of all these criteria empirical data connected with each of them is examined. The effectiveness of online deliberation depends on correlation between communicative conditions and deliberation tasks. Trade-offs, e.g. between anonymous and identifiable participation, presuppose different designs depending on participants and their purposes. The authors make their conclusions relying on existing technologies, so they could change as technologies and users co-evolve.

In this article the first results of collective research dedicated to the ethno-political agenda in Russian Internet are given. Examining several hypotheses, the authors analyze discourses of 4 Internet-communities: the views of its members and their interpretations of intercultural relations. They make a conclusion that a so-called «Internet party» is untenable as a tool of democratization. They also emphasize the diversity and increasing strength of the nationalist discourse.

The results of empirical study of the use of of Jurgen Habermas’s «validity claims to normative intersubjective rightness» for understanding the epistemic value of online deliberations are given in this article. The analysis of the dialogically interactive process of validating such claims by discourse participants has made it possible to reveal the formation of mutual solidarity groups by aggregating positions «For» and «Against». It is concluded that the discursive form of public opinion could be articulated and studied in the Internet’s virtual realm.

The author gives us his point of view on the meaning and consequences of mass protest actions in 2011–2012, when its participants demonstrated the will to change the established social order. The performance type of such projects, based on Internet communication, and citizens’ inability to find a consensus made it impossible to implement this will. Russian politicians could exploit civic protest for their own purposes and once again excluded citizens from politics.

The representation of political parties in Internet is an important part of the development of political system in Russia as Internet is an auspicious environment for realization of different social projects and conducting political campaigns under the circumstances of direct and representative democracy. However Russian parties don’t take advantage all opportunities given by Internet, using only its formal functions. Russian Internet isn’t used for political fundraising because of lack of transparency in party financing and because of political parties are not interested in financial support from those who vote for them. Greater resort to Internet potential parties could strengthen their positions by involvement of new supporters. Besides Internet consistently becomes one of the means of formation of the civil society in Russia.

The article is dedicated to the problems of mediatization of political participation in the USA, with a focus on the media-centered strategies involved in the 2012 presidential campaign. It is characterized by complication of social stratification, marketization of US politics, transformation of political communication in the context of development of a new media culture and mediatization of political practices. The author tries to find an answer to the question how stereotypization and personalization of political communication answer the purpose of strengthening of media democracy. He also tries to understand whether the «mediatization» of politics is a one-way process, completely excluding the possibility of reversing the observed changes.