The term "electronic democracy" has been present in the scholarly and popular discourses for more than three decades. It was introduced in Slovenia with some delay, but is now becoming well known. The paper analyses a development of the notion through time and addresses various ideas that contributed to itscontemporary understanding. However, theoretical and ideal contributions to electronic democracy were very complex and to some extent even mutually exclusive. This makes the fashionable expression not only very complex but also vividly contested. As a consequence, the article is limited to a specific set of ideas, in particular to those, which are related to communication and public participation processes. The central question of the paper is therefore: Does the spread of new communication and information technologies lead any closer to the realisation of certain demanding assumptions of democratic life?
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