Women, Digital Politics and Electronic Democracy: New Forms of Political Participation in Uncertain Democracies

Panel Description
Digital technologies are transforming democratic politics by creating new spaces for political communication, participation, mobilization, and representation. Social media, digital platforms, online campaigns, and emerging artificial intelligence technologies have expanded opportunities for citizens to engage with political institutions and movements. Yet these transformations also generate new democratic uncertainties, including digital inequalities, misinformation, online harassment, polarization, and exclusion.
This panel examines the changing relationship between women, digital politics, and electronic democracy, asking whether digital technologies are genuinely expanding political voice and representation or reproducing existing inequalities in new forms. Particular attention is given to women’s political behavior, digital activism, online political participation, feminist movements, electoral communication, e-governance, and the political consequences of unequal access to digital technologies.
The panel welcomes comparative, theoretical, and empirical contributions from Asia, the Global South, Europe, and other regions. Contributions may examine women’s political participation through social media; digital feminist activism; gendered misinformation and online violence; digital political campaigns; women’s access to e-governance; youth and digital citizenship; artificial intelligence and political participation; digital divides and democratic inclusion; and the relationship between online participation and offline political engagement.
The panel moves beyond the assumption that technological expansion automatically produces democratic inclusion. It asks under what social, institutional, and political conditions electronic democracy can strengthen meaningful participation, political equality, and responsive governance.
By bringing together gender, digital politics, and comparative perspectives, the panel contributes directly to the Congress theme of “Uncertain Democracies” and to RC10’s concern with changing forms of democratic participation in the digital age. It seeks to advance comparative understanding of whether electronic democracy is becoming a mechanism for democratic renewal, a source of new inequalities, or simultaneously both.