eParticipation research: Moving characterization forward (2006–2011)
Highlights
► I analyze 122 research articles on eParticipation published in the period 2006–2011. ► I provide a longitudinal view of the shifts in eParticipation research foci. ► I highlight evidence-based inputs for a revised eParticipation research agenda.
Introduction
The eParticipation research field has received attention from a number of different disciplines and scientific backgrounds thus far. The emergence of new forms of citizen participation in political activity through information and communication technologies (ICT) has attracted attention from both research and practitioner communities, as shown by the mushrooming of government-initiated eParticipation projects at all levels and by the increasing number of research contributions populating the scientific literature.
In the past half decade, in particular, initiatives of eParticipation at all levels of government have started to consolidate, after a starting phase characterized by experimentation and trial-and-error approaches. Recent years have seen, for instance, an increase in the degree of achievement of sustainable combinations between legacy and emerging technologies for citizen participation, as proposed in publicly financed eParticipation projects (Koussouris, Charalabidis, & Askounis, 2011). On the other hand, while the size of the eParticipation audience keeps increasing – for instance with the emergence of social media – there are still challenges in turning this audience into active users of eParticipation platforms (Bicking et al., 2011, Koussouris et al., 2011).
While the term eParticipation can be argued to be competing with various other similar ones – eDemocracy, eGovernance, eGovernment – it is clear that, whatever the specific term used, the topic area related to the interplay between ICT and participation in government decision-making is of increasing relevance, and therefore is receiving increasing attention.
In this contribution we refer to eParticipation as the use of ICT to support democratic decision-making, drawing on the definition by Macintosh (2004), where eParticipation is related to the issues of enabling opportunities for consultation and dialogue between government and citizens by using a range of ICT tools.
The growing body of knowledge on eParticipation has also confirmed the interdisciplinarity of the field. Contributions come from both the areas of social sciences and of information systems research. Perspectives from political science, sociology, management, psychology, and economics stand beside contributions that are more technical in nature. Such a varied scenario of disciplinary backgrounds is also accompanied by a variety of methodological stances, and normative perspectives characterizing eParticipation research (Parvez & Ahmed, 2006).
Within this status, a few attempts at scoping the research field have been carried out thus far (Freschi et al., 2009, Macintosh et al., 2009, Medaglia, 2007a, Sæbø et al., 2008, Sanford and Rose, 2007). These contributions attempt at providing comprehensive snapshots of the research area, in the perspective of allowing the growing number of researchers in the field to refer to a common ground in order to understand the state of eParticipation research and to share a pool of epistemological tools in bringing the research area forward.
However, the research area is still in need of refinement, as far as describing the scenario of up-to-date research availability is concerned. From a quantitative perspective, the need for an update on the eParticipation research scenario stems from the growing amount of eParticipation publications that have appeared in recent years in conferences and scientific journals. If we take as a reference the most cited recent review of eParticipation literature by Sæbø et al. (2008) (73 citations on Google Scholar as of January 2012), which discussed studies published up to March 2006, it is striking to see that, in the period April 2006–March 2011, 122 new eParticipation contributions have been published. In other words, in the past five years an average of almost two new eParticipation studies have been published every month.
Furthermore, the existing overviews of studies in the field of eParticipation currently do not build on top of each other. The various attempts at reviewing the field have so far used different approaches and different frameworks to analyze research, and therefore failed to provide the possibility to look at the evolution of the field from a longitudinal perspective. Such a systematizing effort is required since we still need to understand the directions that the field of eParticipation is taking in its development through time.
This article brings forward the effort carried out thus far in understanding eParticipation research, by updating and refining the state-of-the-art of scientific literature on eParticipation, and by providing the first longitudinal analysis of its developments. In particular, this article builds on the work by Sæbø et al. (2008) published in Government Information Quarterly, and uses its analytical framework.
The rest of the article is structured as follows. The following section presents the method used and the selection strategy adopted for collecting the literature data on eParticipation research. Section 3 discusses some limitations of the approach adopted. Section 4 highlights and discusses the categories used for the literature analysis. Section 5 reports the findings, distinguishing between six categories of research focus: eParticipation actors, eParticipation activities, contextual factors, eParticipation effects, eParticipation evaluation, and eParticipation research methods. Section 6 is dedicated to moving the characterization of the eParticipation research field forward, by providing a longitudinal analysis of the field, pointing out its progress direction and its development. The conclusion section summarizes the contribution of the article and highlights inputs for an eParticipation research agenda.
Section snippets
Method and selection strategy
This article draws on the analysis of the most recent contributions on eParticipation. The literature search includes all eParticipation-related research contributions published in international journals and conferences in the period April 2006 to March 2011 included.
The search was conducted via EBSCO, ISI Web of Knowledge, and IEEE Explore databases, in line with the guidelines provided by Webster and Watson (2002). This has been done in order to capture what are deemed to be all the
Limitations
A number of limitations in this approach have to be taken into account. First, the scope of the literature search includes only contributions written in English, implying that significant pieces of research on eParticipation written in languages other than English have not been taken into account. Such a limitation is significant if we consider that, in theory, a relevant portion of eParticipation research at national and local level can be published in national languages other than English.
Classification of the research domain
The main categories used to classify and capture the development of the eParticipation field were initially drawn from the model of the field presented by Sæbø et al. (2008), to ensure a good degree of continuity and longitudinal comparability in the analysis of the development of the eParticipation research field (Fig. 1).
The list of categories in the model, without reference to the relationship between them, is here adopted as a guideline. Each category refers to a focus adopted by the
Findings
This section outlines the eParticipation field by exploring international eParticipation research contributions related to the following categories: actors, activities, contextual factors, effects, evaluation, and methods.
The main underlying reason for adopting these categories is to ensure comparability between the literature review results presented in Sæbø et al. (2008) and the ones of this study. The added value of such an approach is in providing a longitudinal view on the development in
Discussion: moving characterization forward
The research field of eParticipation is growing rapidly, even though it can still be considered to be in its early stages. The period of this study, April 2006–March 2011, features 122 eParticipation-related contributions. In other words, since the last literature overview, an average of almost two new eParticipation studies has been published every month. This section discusses the development through time of the eParticipation field, by comparing the data covered in the period up to March
Conclusions and a research agenda
This article has provided an overview and a longitudinal analysis of the development of the rapidly growing research field of eParticipation, drawing on previous literature analysis work (Sæbø et al., 2008). The analysis of the most recent literature contributions, based on 122 selected research articles from internationally acknowledged sources, has led to identifying the transformation occurring in the field regarding research focuses, approaches, and methods. The choice of drawing on an
Acknowledgments
Research carried out in this article has been partially supported by DEMO_net, the eParticipation Network of Excellence, funded under the European Commission's sixth framework program: Information Society Technologies IST (FP6-2004-27219).
Rony Medaglia is Assistant Professor at the Department of IT Management (ITM) at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark. His research focus is on IT in the public sector, and he has authored publications in international journals and conferences, including Government Information Quarterly, the International Journal of Public Administration, Communications of the Association for Information Systems, Information Polity, Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy, the International
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Rony Medaglia is Assistant Professor at the Department of IT Management (ITM) at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark. His research focus is on IT in the public sector, and he has authored publications in international journals and conferences, including Government Information Quarterly, the International Journal of Public Administration, Communications of the Association for Information Systems, Information Polity, Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy, the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), and the International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA).