Electronic Participation

E-participation projects are complex socio-technical constructs integrating different concepts such as participation techniques, stakeholders, objectives, information artefacts, and technical facilities. To conceptualise comprehensive solutions of e-participation projects in a holistic way – i.e. comprehensively integrating the different concepts forming an e-participation project–, enterprise architecture frameworks are increasingly studied. Effective use of enterprise architecture frameworks demands a comprehensive conceptualisation of e-participation projects, which should embark on a common metamodel. In this paper, we study existing conceptual models structuring the e-participation domain and metamodels of enterprise architecture frameworks. From the insights of the comparative analysis, the e-participation metamodel is developed using design science research. The metamodel provides the conceptualisation and taxonomy for an e-participation reference framework to develop comprehensive architectures in e-participation projects. It is presented in a UML 2.0 diagram and involves six viewpoints: Participation Scope, Participant Viewpoint, Participation Viewpoint, Data & Information Viewpoint, E-participation Viewpoint, and Implementation & Governance Viewpoint.

Employees demand high responsibility and empowerment, while keeping their work communal and flexible. Initiatives that foster organizational participation can contribute to the fulfilment of such work conditions. Research in sociology and psychology demonstrated positive effects on job satisfaction as well as productivity. However, although adoption of social software is widely spread in firms, research on the determinants of computer-supported organizational participation is scarce. We conduct 20 guided expert interviews to propose a research framework for computer-supported organizational participation. We describe the elements to consider when designing processes that aim to be beneficial for both the employer as well as the employees. Building on the expert interviews, our process model includes a topic horizon and a collaboration phase, which creates proposals that have to be decided on in order to produce results. We show how employee competence and leadership commitment are as important as the workload and supporting features as well as an option for anonymous communication. We propose a set of features and discuss implications for researchers and practitioners.

The use of collaborative platforms and eParticipation has turned out to be a promising channel to integrate citizens and external experts in various scenarios. While initiatives from institutions like political parties, governments or municipalities have been the target of influential research, another public service, namely higher education, seem to run below radar level. In this paper we analyze the project “Tomorrow’s MBA” of the College of William & Mary, Virginia, and show through hands-on insights key success factors on how co-creation initiatives have to be designed in the field of higher education. The bottom-up strategy to create a new MBA program together with external stakeholders, students and the faculty delivers substantial results, which can be transferred to other fields within the public sector.

As a consequence of the interdisciplinary nature of Electronic Participation (e-Participation), current research on the field is fragmented and scattered. The exciting blurry boundaries and the immature identity of the field are making difficult the understanding of the main domain themes being investigated, in particular for “neophytes” researchers. In practice, several e-Participation initiatives often attract a wide audience but face serious limitations regarding involvement of those who attract. Recently, the potential of using social media to address citizens’ involvement deficit has been subject of academic debate. By consulting 44 e-Participation papers, considered highly relevant to the aforementioned challenges, this paper produces a general overview of e-Participation research, particularly through social media. The findings show that the e-Participation field still faces the challenge of identity and strive for gaining wider recognition as an independent research area. Concerning e-Participation through social media which seems to be partly overlooked in the field research, the politicians-citizen’s interaction has dominated scholars’ attention and the adoption of such initiatives sponsored and driven by governments are rarely examine. Based on the findings, several research suggestions, which could play a significant contribution to advance future e-Participation research, are proposed.

Estonia has acquired the reputation of a successful e-voting country, and perhaps justifiably so. It was the first country in the world to enable remote online voting in nationwide elections in 2005 and the share of e-voters has been on a rise ever since, now reaching one-third of all voters. Against this backdrop of a seemingly flourishing e-democracy, we set out to ask if the country’s success in e-voting also implies its success in e-democracy in a broader sense. In a qualitative case study, we compare Estonia’s experience in e-voting with the implementation and outcomes of three e-participation projects to demonstrate that considerable discrepancies exist between the take-up and perceived success of e-voting vis-à-vis other e-democracy instruments. In light of these findings the paper further discusses the factors that are likely to account for these differences and highlights the need to look beyond the success of online voting for a holistic evaluation of the state of e-democracy in a given country.

The paper examines linkages between the type of the digital media resources that host internet discussions on publicly important issues and the outcomes of such debates viewed from the perspective of online deliberation theory and practice. The presented case-based study analyses seven online discourses that debated the destruction of western agricultural products imported to Russia after the embargo imposed by the Russian government on such food in August 2015. The study hypothesized that the digitally enabled discussions would be similar to face-to-face deliberation practices that tend to attract the like-minded people and thus reinforce the already established beliefs and worldviews among discourse participants. Specifically, it was assumed in this context that the attitude towards the policy of food destruction would differ across the media and depend on its public identity viewed from the perspective of political allegiance. The paper presents empirical evidence that supports – with some caution – the postulated assumption.

This paper sets out to critically examine the mobilizing potential of e-participation. The extent to which citizens beyond the usual suspects are engaged is studied by way of survey data from two novel e-participation case studies: one Swedish, one Finnish. Besides from the traditional socio-demographic variables, the analyses highlights cultural attitudes and ask: Do e-participation processes succeed in mobilizing citizens dissatisfied with the way democracy works? Can e-participation bring critical citizens back in? Certainly, the empirical analysis indicates critical citizens are clearly overrepresented in these two cases.

With the growing utilization of “smart” technologies, social media and “Internet of Things” applications, citizen-government interactions are rapidly changing. These changes have substantially transformed participatory models where governments apply e-participation measures not necessarily for participatory goals. As cosmetic e-participation applications and mass online surveillance increase in scope, there is a critical need to re-assess the applicability of dominant frameworks of analysing participatory practices. The paper aims to provide a nuanced understanding of the role of the internet in citizen-government interactions in authoritarian contexts based on a critical assessment of dominant participation models. It first maps key analytical typologies and models of public participation based on an extensive literature review. This is intended to help identify potential models that explain public participation—or lack thereof—in authoritarian contexts. The outcomes of this review are (1) revealing a scholarly gap of substantial policy relevance on e-participation in authoritarian contexts, and (2) assessing the applicability of dominant e-participation analytical models in such contexts. The findings indicate that, in the digital era, the transformations in citizen-government interactions lack contemporary understanding. Based on this comparative review, an analytical framework is proposed which extends and adapts Arnstein’s ladder of participation to the digital era. The paper argues that the proposed model helps better understand emerging practices of citizen-government interaction, especially in authoritarian contexts, but also in some democratic contexts where e-participation measures are utilized for mass-surveillance or as political façade.

The paper presents the results of research on factors explaining the level of e-petitioning in Russian regions. The main goal is to reveal socio-economic, technological and institutional problems the regions face, and hence to embed the Russian case into the broad research agenda on online engagement. We concentrate on the federal e-petitions portal – Russian Public Initiative – and use the automated monitoring system to analyse subnational dynamics of online petitions submissions and voting on the aggregate level. The data are used to quantitatively assess the drivers and obstacles for e-participation. Our findings suggest that more active e-petition portal usage in regions is associated with higher socio-economic and technological development, as well as with democratic institutions and better e-government policy. One of the main obstacles to active use of the portal is its institutional design that at the moment provides regions with different opportunities and reinforces participation divides. Future steps, implications for automated monitoring system and some policy recommendations are also discussed.

Social media is used by the majority of Swedish municipalities. However, the highly interactive features of social media are often not taken advantage of. The study aims to get a better understanding of why social media is not used to its full potential in the municipality. Findings from an interview study with communicators in three Swedish municipalities reveal that the motivation for using social media is often difficult to turn into action. Tensions emerging in the use of social media result in hesitation, uncertainty and a slowing down of work practice. The processes of managing the tensions are characterized by boundary crossing between different communities, such as municipal communicators, elected officials and citizens, with social media itself as an equally important actor. The processes of boundary crossing by the municipal communicators are discussed in terms of learning processes and new emerging competences that might redefine the role of the municipal communicator and hence perhaps the public servant in general.

This paper reports results on presumably the first city-wide mobile participation trial (Living Lab) examining citizen participation in urban planning, conducted in Turku, Finland, in 2015. The questions examined are the socio-economic characteristics of the application users, as well as their motivations to participate. The inclusion of online participation has been discussed widely in literature on e-participation and the digital divide, arguing for a great influence of socio-economic factors, interest in the topic, and users’ online skills. The results reveal that this application, too, was used predominantly by young adults and middle-aged, highly educated, and technology savvy citizens, who were already interested in urban planning. Their use of the application was motivated primarily by the opportunity to bring their own ideas and issues to the city authorities’ attention, rather than participating in missions given by the municipality or discussing planning issues with fellow citizens, indicating a rather individualistic usage interest. The location-based features and ease of use of a mobile application were valued highly. Those who idled reported predominantly technical challenges with the app.

Reliable and timely information about current economic and environmental conditions is crucial for policy makers to take decisions and for steering agents’ expectations formation about the state of the economy. While the usefulness of monitoring expectations, opinions and sentiments of economic agents is undoubted, one can argue that existing indices are based on a selected number of surveys and a low monitoring frequency resulting in a partial view of more complex dynamics. In this paper we present a web based tool based on the concept of Information Markets that can be used to aggregate expectations on policy indices and provide accurate and timely information to policy makers and policy modellers.

The public sector gradually starts exploiting the crowdsourcing ideas initially developed in the private sector. However, there is much less knowledge on efficient and effective methods and practices for public sector citizen-sourcing in comparison with private sector crowd-sourcing, so extensive research is required in this area. This paper contributes to filling this research gap, by presenting an ICT-based method for ‘passive expert-sourcing’, with the latter term denoting the collection of policy relevant information, knowledge and ideas from experts, which aims at supporting policy making by the European Union (EU) by leveraging its large policy community. Its theoretical foundation is previous theoretical work on the relationships between democracy and technocracy, and also on policy networks. The main technological pillars of the proposed method are: EU policy experts’ profiling and reputation management, relevant documents’ opinion mining and relevance rating, and finally advanced visualized presentation of them. Finally, a first evaluation of the proposed method is presented, leading to encouraging results.

While the simulation-based impact assessment of public policy proposals allows policy makers to identify the feasible policy options and verify their economic, social and environmental impacts, it does not provide the explicit evaluation of policy options. Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) techniques can support an in-depth performance evaluation of policy options taking into account the preferences of decision makers and stakeholders. These preferences reflect acceptable trade-offs of performance among objectives. This study reviews multi-attribute decision-making (MADM) technique and presents a common policy appraisal format using main evaluation criteria linked to a set of measurable, context dependent attributes. We argue for a rank-based approach for eliciting preferences, select a novel method for attribute weight elicitation, and show how it can be integrated within a public policy multi-criteria evaluation framework. A use case for policymaking, ‘Ultra-Low Emission Vehicles (ULEV) Uptake in UK’, is used for demonstration of the proposed approach for policy decision analysis. This approach seeks to couple systems modelling and simulation of policy scenarios with MCDA, stakeholder analysis and preference elicitation. The outputs can further provide analytical insights in controversy/acceptability of policy options, and consequently guide further policy formulation and the design of better options.