Testing e-participation : A case of e-voting system in Belgium

E-participation has been increasingly used to enhance participation and deliberation, and ultimately the quality of democracy. In the case of the development of new technologies, participative design defenders underline the importance of integrating final users into the product elaboration process. In this case, e-participation tools permit not only to include a large number of future users but also to better incorporate their expectations. In Belgium, such participative approach has precisely been mobilized for the design of an e-voting system for trade unions’ elections. This case study provides thus a fertile field to test the assumption that e-participation effectively leads to a ‘better’ participation and deliberation. How is it a pertinent way to enhance democracy? How does it reflect the actual fears and expectations of users? What are the limits and potentialities of this participative approach? Based on this e-participation experience (Delphi method), i.e. an online qualitative survey submitted to 200 future users, we seek to give tentative answers to those questions. Overall, we demonstrate that this kind of method may produce fruitful participative inputs to e-voting system design. Nevertheless, final decision-making process leading to the adoption of the system remains complex and the e-participative input can display second-order issues.