Digital Democracy in Russia as an Element of the Digital State

The paper examines digital democracy as one of the elements of the digital state. Digital democracy is defined as an evolutionary transformation of traditional democracy due to the digitalization of the political and legal space, a new way of political participation through which citizens can express political will using information and communication technologies. It has been established that digital democracy in the country is developing nonuniformly, due to the problem of digital inequality. Other problems of the implementation of digital democracy that require a solution include: the lack of procedures that would guarantee equality of opportunity when citizens submit appeals on socio-political issues in various forms (oral/written and in the form of an electronic document); the problem of identification and authentication of subjects entering into interaction in a digital environment; the problem of the lack of effective tools to popularize e-democracy mechanisms among the population; information security problem. It has been shown that digital democracy, in comparison with traditional democracy, is more functional, ensuring the mass participation of citizens in public power activities. The adoption of the concept of the development of digital democracy will have a positive impact on the formation and implementation of public policy in the development of digital democracy. It is stated that in the future, the development of digital democracy will be aimed at crowding out non-digital ways of citizens’ participation in the political life of the country. However, digital democracy should not completely replace classical democracy. It is necessary to provide the right of citizens to refuse to participate in «digital» relations and the opportunity to express their political will in the traditional way.