Online participation: A three-dimensional approach to study digital political platforms

How should digital political platforms be compared, and what kind of participation do they actually enable? This article proposes a three-dimensional framework for the study of online participation that brings into dialogue political sociology, digital sociology, and science and technology studies (STS). Rather than classifying platforms within broad normative families such as direct, deliberative, or liberal democracy, it analyses them along three axes: political governance, software affordances, and infrastructural dependencies. This framework makes it possible to assess not only how participation is formally organised, but also how it is encoded in interfaces and materially conditioned by servers. Empirically, the article draws on forty qualitative interviews conducted between 2019 and 2025 with developers, public officials, civic-tech professionals, activists, and NGO actors involved in the design or deployment of participatory platforms across Europe, Latin America, Africa, East Asia, and the United States. The framework is applied to four emblematic cases: Rousseau, Decidim, Consulta Pública, and vTaiwan. The comparison shows that most platforms remain confined to reinforced forms of consultation, despite participatory rhetoric, because citizen power is limited either by top-down governance, constrained deliberative affordances, or strong infrastructural dependencies. Only Decidim approaches a more co-decisional, deliberative, and commons-oriented configuration, although even this project continues to rely on private cloud infrastructures.