In Part I, it was argued that the fundamental changes brought about by the internet will lead to the decline of major political parties. This turns out to be the interesting paradox of a problem for democracy created by the enhancement of e-democracy.

But it does not mean a return to 1970s-style hung parliaments in the UK, with a handful more seats for smaller parties, or a rerun of the 1992 presidential election in the US when Bill Clinton won an Electoral College landslide on just 43 per cent of the vote.

Instead, it is a more fundamental permanent shift to dozens, possibly hundreds, of microparties.

As votes pile up with these smaller parties, virtually none of which will be represented in the existing political system, there will be mounting pressure for change.

But the existing democratic system cannot be reformed in any way which would lead to improved representation for these parties and the people who voted for them yet still deliver a government of the kind currently constituted.

Proportional representation may make for a fairer distribution of seats provided that votes are distributed around less than a dozen or so parties. But when there are hundreds of parties whose aggregate number of votes amounts to a significant proportion, it is barely more representative than a first-past-the-post system.

This means that elected bodies which already use forms of proportional representation will suffer the same problems as those which do not. And those which have a threshold requirement of, for example, five per cent of the total vote before a party can claim a seat will also appear increasingly antiquated. Such measures will no longer deliver stability but will contribute to the crisis of legitimacy.

So new ways of involving citizen in the running of the state will be required if legitimacy is to be maintained. And e-government can provide the answer to the problems caused by e-democracy.