Rachel K. Gibson is Deputy Director of the Centre for Social Research in the Research School of Social Sciences (RSSS) at the Australian National University, Australia. Andrea Römmele is Senior Research Fellow at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES) at the University of Mannheim, Germany. Stephen J. Ward is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the European Studies Research Institute, University of Salford, UK.

• Preface and acknowledgements 1 Introduction: representative democracy and the Internet 2 Electronic democracy and the ‘mixed polity’: symbiosis or conflict? 3 The citizen as consumer: e-government in the United Kingdom and the United States 4 Digital parliaments and electronic democracy: a comparison between the US House, the Swedish Riksdag and the German Bundestag 5 Digital democracy: ideas, intentions and initiatives in Swedish local governments 6 Cyber-campaigning grows up: a comparative content analysis of websites for US Senate and gubernatorial races, 1998–2000 7 Global legal pluralism and electronic democracy 8 Problems@labour: towards a net-internationalism? 9 Rethinking political participation: experiments in Internet activism in Australia and Britain 10 Conclusion: the future of representative democracy in the digital era