Funded by the City of Vienna in the context of its “Digital Humanities” programme, the research was undertaken by the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
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We launched If no vote, at least voice in order to explore in greater depth the substantial democratic deficit that springs specifically from the fact that, in Vienna, residents who are not Austrian nationals – those exercising their right to free movement within the EU and other migrants – are not eligible to vote in municipal elections. Hence, rather than elaborate in greater detail on just one of the aforementioned factors, we have prioritised breadth over depth in order to throw this nexus into sharp relief. Crucially, it is our contention that one gains a skewed view of the ability of both deliberation and digitisation to help alleviate disenfranchisement and diminish the democratic deficit if one fails to pay due attention to their socio-economic dimension – which is rendered even more significant in times of crisis. Rather than directing us primarily to one key issue, as research projects frequently do, our practice-induced approach alerted us to the complex interconnectedness of voting, deliberation, digital innovation and socio-economically determined self-exclusion in the context of political participation. Research has shown that deliberative formats, and digital tools, in particular, are unable to address this imbalance, and this holds true all the more in the face of social challenges such as those posed by the Covid-19 crisis. This disproportionately disadvantages the less wealthy, lending the resulting democratic deficit a specific socio-economic character (cf. To make things worse, the naturalisation regime is much more strict and the procedure far more expensive in Austria than in other European states. 1 Because they have the “wrong” passport, they are unable to influence the legislation by which they are nevertheless bound. Since only Austrian citizens are eligible to vote in municipal elections, almost a third (31.5%) of the city’s permanent residents are unable to participate in these elections. Our discussion draws on the findings of a research project that examined the increasing democratic deficit in the Austrian capital Vienna. In this paper, we discuss the extent to which innovations in participatory democracy might help address democratic deficits caused by the fact that socio-economically underprivileged segments of the population are neither able to vote nor overly interested in voting.