What is digital democracy?

This paper asks: What is digital democracy? It outlines some foundations of a theory of digital democracy and introduces a novel approach. A review of influential understandings of digital democracy shows the dominance of the two models of deliberative and participatory democracy. In the contemporary poly-crisis of world society, there is an antagonism between digital communicative participation and digital fascism. Participation and deliberation can result in participatory fascism and deliberative fascism. As a consequence, we need an understanding of digital democracy that goes beyond the pure stress on participatory and deliberative digital democracy and foregrounds the potential combination of constitutional democracy on the one side and deliberative and participatory democracy on the other side. This paper suggests a novel approach to conceptualizing digital democracy that is multi-perspectival, multidimensional, non-dualistic, and based on a dialectic of technology and society. It suggests a typology of digital democracy that consists of four dimensions and six related and interacting models of democracy: constitutionalist digital democracy, representative digital democracy, direct digital democracy, pluralist digital democracy, deliberative digital democracy, and participatory digital democracy.