Push-button Populism: The Reform Party and the Real World of Teledemocracy

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Abstract
The past decade in Canadian politics has been marked by a growth in citizen dissatisfaction with traditional methods of political representation and the development of sophisticated communications technologies promising increased grass-roots participation in policymaking. In a series of recent teledemocratic exercises, the Reform Party of Canada has positioned itself at the centre of these trends. This paper examines the democratic quality of Reform’s use of these technologies to date and suggests that a performative analysis of these events reveals their deeper ideological character. Finally, it is argued that a performative focus on their deliberative potential might help to inform a more robust democratic application of these technologies.

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