Introduction

This report, now in its fourth edition, tracks the development of digital democracy technologies and seeks to provide an overview of the various fields of application (e.g. voting, participatory budgeting, public consultation, etc.). The goal is to provide a repository for policy makers, NGOs and academics, as well as for the democracy software industry itself. This year, we have evaluated 21 eDemocracy tools from 17 countries. 

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Since the publication of the last edition of this report in early 2022, the adoption of digital technology for civic purposes has undergone a turbulent period: some vendors have been acquired by larger, more generally focused, entities, while others have shuttered operations for the foreseeable future. As a result, this report looks out on a substantially altered landscape that betrays the effects of two years coping with the challenges we foresaw in our previous introduction. 

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These challenges were, to recap:

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1. that the extreme partisanship in some social strata would lead to an intense focus on the outcomes rather than the process of democracy. We predicted that this would necessarily result in constraints and preconditions being set on participation, destroying the legitimacy of results

2. that large private foundations which had recently begun to funnel large sums of money into ‘democracy’-related activities, would in following their own intense partisan goals seek to subvert equality-based democracy

3. that governments, due to the increasingly tense geopolitical situation, would seek to use digital tools to legitimize their own foreign policy goals or, conversely, discredit the ends of their alleged enemies. 

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While we have yet to see any noticeable impact of the third challenge, we do see a landscape that has already largely buckled under the first two, with many tools increasingly shifting their focus to rote ‘engagement’ with little commitment to equality, neutrality or implementation. While we have made every effort to continue to focus only on those tools which provide meaningful impact to citizens, and exclude those that do not, it cannot be denied that this field has thinned. 

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Despite these challenges, many of the remaining vendors continue to expand their functionality, including in the areas of electronic identification and participatory budgeting. In addition, many vendors have improved the back-end component of their software to facilitate the administrator experience.

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As a research institute, we continue to apply a rigorous and demanding lens to this report. While we have provided an overall score for each vendor, each use case is different, so by outlining the strengths of every solution across multiple categories, we are hopeful that you will find the right one for you, whether you are organising a participatory budgeting project for a small community or planning a major voting exercise for a large city or even country. 

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The Solonian Democracy Institute remains a voluntary organisation dedicated to creating the conditions for direct, digital democracy based on Athenian democratic principles of citizen participation.