eParticipation research: Moving characterization forward (2006–2011)

Government Information Quarterly 29 (2012) 346–360

Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect

Government Information Quarterly journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/govinf

eParticipation research: Moving characterization forward (2006–2011) Rony Medaglia Department of IT Management (ITM), Copenhagen Business School, Howitzvej 60, DK-2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Available online 12 May 2012 Keywords: eParticipation eDemocracy eGovernment Literature review

a b s t r a c t Research on the use of information technology to support democratic decision-making (eParticipation) is experiencing ongoing growth, stimulated by an increasing attention from both practitioner and research communities. This study provides the first longitudinal analysis of the development of the eParticipation field based on a shared framework, capturing the directions that the research field of eParticipation is taking in recent developments. Drawing on a literature search covering the period from April 2006 to March 2011, this study identifies, analyzes, and classifies 122 research articles within the categories of eParticipation actors, activities, contextual factors, effects, evaluation, and methods. Findings show that the field has a high level of dynamism, as foci on eParticipation activities, contextual factors, and effects have shifted in time, sometimes in counterintuitive directions. The study also suggests new analytical categories of research. Drawing on the analysis, inputs for a research agenda are suggested. These include the need to move beyond a technological perspective, encouraging the ongoing shift of research focus from government to citizens and other stakeholders, and the need to make eParticipation research methods more participatory in nature. © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

1. 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, Triantafillou, Koussouris, & Wimmer, 2011; Koussouris et al., 2011). While the term eParticipation can be argued to be competing with various other similar ones – eDemocracy, eGovernance, eGovernment –

E-mail address: [email protected]. 0740-624X/$ – see front matter © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.giq.2012.02.010

it is clear that, whatever the specific term used, the topic area related to the interplay between ICT and participation in government decisionmaking 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, Medaglia, & Nørbjerg, 2009; Macintosh, Coleman, & Schneeberger, 2009; Medaglia, 2007a; Sæbø, Rose, & Skiftenes Flak, 2008; Sanford & 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.

R. Medaglia / Government Information Quarterly 29 (2012) 346–360

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 stateof-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. 2. Method and selection strategy This article draws on the analysis of the most recent contributions on eParticipation. The literature search includes all eParticipationrelated 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 internationally relevant research contributions, coming from established journals and conferences. The three databases index more than 8000 journals in the fields of natural sciences, social science, and humanities, including important public administration journals, such as Government Information Quarterly and Public Administration Review, and the most important journals in the Information Systems field. Relevant conferences include, among others, the DEXA cluster (including EGOV and ePart conferences) and the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). A separate search was conducted through the AIS Electronic Library (AISeL) in order to include articles from the proceedings of the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS) and the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS). The literature review carried out in this article draws on the selection strategy adopted in Sæbø et al. (2008). The review by Sæbø et al. (2008) is deemed to be the eParticipation review that, together with featuring a large comprehensiveness due to the choice of search keywords, provides the most articulated attempt at systematizing the field with the use of

347

analytical categories. The relevance of the approach used in Sæbø et al. (2008) is also evidenced by the fact that it is by far the most cited eParticipation review, as of January 2012. Therefore, in order to retrieve a first comprehensive group of research articles related to eParticipation, the literature databases listed above have been searched using the following sets of keywords in the abstract and the title: 1. eDemocracy, using additional search phrases: eDemocracy, electronic democracy, democracy and internet, democracy and information system, and digital democracy. 2. eParticipation, using additional search phrases: eParticipation, electronic participation, eGovernment and participation, eGovernance and participation, eConsultation, and ePetition. 3. eInclusion, using additional search phrases: digital divide and participation (within the results of “digital divide,” since only the keyword “digital divide” returned ca. 450 hits). 1 These keywords used are intended to cover the topic area of ICT and democratic participation, including research contributions that do not explicitly use the term eParticipation. A first keyword search was performed in the period between July and October 2008, covering all publications in the period from April 2006, which is the first month not covered by the previous literature review by Sæbø et al. (2008), to October 2008 (included). A second keyword search was performed in March 2011, covering the period from November 2008 to March 2011. The approximate 500 bibliographical items retrieved through the keyword search had their titles and abstract scanned in order to identify contributions clearly falling under the scope of eParticipation, as defined by Macintosh (2004). The definition provided by Macintosh (2004) has also been extended to include eVoting, that is, the use of ICT to support the democratic process of voting. The understanding of the definition of eParticipation used includes both top-down and bottom-up initiatives of eParticipation (e.g., political activism using ICT). As a result, 122 full text articles were retrieved, analyzed and classified by the author, according to the categories described in Section 4. Management and storage of all bibliographical items were done by using the reference manager software Zotero™. It was possible for articles to be included in different categories, and therefore the total number of category occurrences is higher than the number of articles.

3. 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. Second, while the databases reviewed can be easily argued to be among the most comprehensive ones, the literature scan did not include some academic sources where eParticipation research can appear, such as the proceedings of the European Conference on E-Government and the International Conference on E-Government. Third, the choice of keywords might be considered as incomplete and therefore overlooking research that could be argued to fall within the domain of eParticipation. While the bias introduced by the choice of any limited set of keywords – as the one by Sæbø et al. (2008) – is unavoidable, the advantage of using the same set of keywords at

1 Alternative spellings for some of the keywords were also used to maximize the literature coverage (e.g.: e-democracy; e-participation; e-petition).

348

R. Medaglia / Government Information Quarterly 29 (2012) 346–360

different times has to be underlined, as it provides a robust foundation for longitudinal comparison. Fourth, the operational definition of eParticipation used in this review for selecting the articles can obviously be subject of debate. For instance, the definition set out by Macintosh (2004), here adopted as described in Section 2, can be criticized for not including studies that adopt a more “administrative” perspective on the eParticipation definition: one which is not only limited to the issues of ICT for democratic decision-making, but includes a range of participatory processes involving ICT, also not directly related to democratic decision-making (European Commission, 2009). Last, the classification process, following the categories presented in the next section, was carried out by the author only, trying to subjectively replicate the underlying criteria of the distribution of articles between the categories emerging in Sæbø et al. (2008), without external aid from other researchers. While this is clearly a limitation that can impact the validity of the findings, there are examples of well-cited reviews in high level outlets that have followed the same approach as this review (Yildiz, 2007). 4. 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 research analyzed, namely: ⁎ eParticipation actors (Citizens, Politicians, Government institutions, and Voluntary organizations); This set of categories covers the main actors involved in eParticipation activities, as focused in each of the studies analyzed. These include citizens, e.g., as users of eParticipation platforms, or as initiators of eParticipation processes; politicians, e.g., running for elections using ICT tools; government institutions, e.g., providing legal regulation of eParticipation phenomena, or setting up an official government online presence; voluntary organizations, e.g., in the form of grassroots movements exploiting existing eParticipation platforms, or establishing their own to pursue policy goals.

eParticipation actors Citizens Government institutions Voluntary organizations Politicians Researchers and scholars

conduct

⁎ eParticipation activities (eVoting, Online political discourse, Online decision making, eActivism, eConsultation, eCampaigning, and ePetitioning); Different studies covering eParticipation activities can focus on eVoting, e.g., by looking at the design, implementation, and use of ICT solutions for formal voting procedures; on online political discourse, that is the changes in public discourse linked to the emergence of eParticipation platforms; on online decision-making, by focusing on the process of making decisions with the support of ICT; on eActivism, which includes all activities of voluntary organizations and interest groups to use ICT to promote participation concerning their special interests and viewpoints; on eConsultation, including all activities in which ICT is used by different actors, usually public agencies, to obtain feedback from citizens; on eCampaigning, e.g., using ICT to organize campaign volunteers, fund-raising, advertising campaign events; on ePetitioning, e.g., when citizens establish and/or use eParticipation platforms to propose an issue for consideration in the political system. ⁎ Contextual factors (Information availability, Infrastructure, Underlying technologies, Accessibility, Policy and legal issues, and Governmental organization); The set of categories related to contextual factors includes all research focusing on issues that are not part of eParticipation activities but affect them by being part of the context in which these activities take place. Information availability refers to the role played by the amount and quality of information background to political discourse in affecting eParticipation activities; infrastructure is focused on in studies that look at the role of the presence or absence of contextual structures and facilities in eParticipation, and at their characteristics; underlying technologies are focused on by all studies that see the features of available technology as a factor influencing eParticipation; accessibility includes studies that look at how the quantity and quality of access to technology, infrastructure, and competences influence eParticipation; policy and legal issues are focused on in studies on policy and regulations that directly or indirectly affect eParticipation; the governmental organization category of contextual factors refers to studies that look at how the way governments are organized and work affects eParticipation. ⁎ eParticipation effects (Civic engagements effects, Deliberative effects, and Democratic effects); The set of categories of eParticipation effects includes all outcomes, desired or undesired, attributable to the impact of eParticipation

eParticipation activities eVoting Online decisionmaking Online political discourse eConsultation eActivism eCampaigning ePetitioning

eParticipation effects Deliberative Democratic Civic engagement

result in

determined through improve

in the context of Contextual factors Underlying technologies Governmental organization Infrastructure Policy and legal issues Fig. 1. The shape of the eParticipation field revisited (2006–2011).

eParticipation evaluation Transparency and openness Quantity Tone and style Demographics

R. Medaglia / Government Information Quarterly 29 (2012) 346–360

activities. Civic engagement effects refer to changes in scope and reach of participation by citizens as an outcome of eParticipation; deliberative effects are concerned with phenomena of eParticipation enabling, facilitating, or hindering the debate of issues in a fair, egalitarian, and factual way; democratic effects include all eParticipation effects on the quantity or quality of democratic governance in a political system. ⁎ eParticipation evaluation (Quantity of eParticipation, Demographic of participants, Tone and style in online activities); Studies carrying out eParticipation evaluation focus on evaluating and measuring eParticipation effects, activities, and actors. Quantity of eParticipation is a category including all studies that measure eParticipation quantity in numerical terms, e.g., the number of participants, the number of messages posted on an online forum; demographic of participants refers to variables such as age, education, and socio-economic status of eParticipation actors; tone and style in online activities include studies that adopt a more qualitative insight into, e.g., the tone and style of posts to an online forum or a blog. ⁎ eParticipation research methods (Survey, Case study, Action research, Content and discourse analysis, and National state of the art). A number of considerations can be brought forward regarding the strengths and weaknesses of the categories used by Sæbø et al. (2008). While the categories can be deemed rather exhaustive of the range of actors, activities, contextual factors, effects, and methods actually used in eParticipation research, we also aimed at extending and updating the model in an inductive way, when necessary. Specific suggestions to include new categories in scoping the eParticipation research field are made. Ricciardi and Lombardi (2010), inspired by the experience of an eParticipation project in tourism and cultural heritage, highlight the shortcomings of the shape of the eParticipation field provided in Sæbø et al. (2008). They suggest including actors such as users and customers of the territorial system (e.g., tourists), businesses and business groups, lobbies and groups of interests, professionals involved in territorial planning activities, researchers and scholars, press and journalists; activities such as discussion and knowledge sharing (aimed at or related to civil participation in public-interest decision making); and effects such as improved civic awareness, enhanced civil rights, increased territorial value, and improved territorial services. However, except for the actor category of researchers and scholars, the focus of none of the studies in the sample analyzed is deemed to fall within these categories. We extended the range of categories only if new contributions in the sample analyzed did not fit into the existing categories. This resulted in introducing the actor category of researchers and scholars, the evaluation category of transparency and openness, and the method categories of experiments and focus groups. Each article was assigned to one or more categories, depending on the main research contribution(s) and on the method(s) used. Further details on each category are included in the Findings section. Lastly, it is to be acknowledged that the keyword list used in Sæbø et al. (2008), for obvious reasons, does not include concepts that emerged only in the last few years, such as, e.g., social media, which is arguably a very relevant phenomenon in relation to eParticipation. Nevertheless, the keyword list adopted from Sæbø et al. (2008) (which has been used to scan publications in both title and abstract) can be deemed fit to capture studies on, e.g., social media concerned with eParticipation (e.g. Andersen & Medaglia, 2009; Charalabidis, Gionis, Ferro, & Loukis, 2010; Johannessen, 2010; Lourenço, 2010; Sæbø, Rose, & Nyvang, 2009). In fact, the possibility that there are published studies on eParticipation and social media that do not have any of the keywords used in Sæbø et al. (2008), neither in the title nor in the abstract, can be expected to be modest and, in any case, outweighed by the strong advantages of having full comparability between the two review datasets.

349

The following section presents the findings from the analysis of the literature carried out using the method and the classification categories described above. 5. 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 time of the eParticipation field, in a systematic effort that has never been previously carried out, despite the existing need to deepen our understanding of the directions that the research field is taking over time. Furthermore, the approach followed in this study also aims at taking into account the possible emergence of new categories of eParticipation research that do not fall within the previous framework. These studies have been accounted for in new categories of analysis, which have been added inductively to enrich the analytical framework, and thus provide further added value to the goal of both providing a longitudinal overview of the field, and laying ground for future analyses of it. Table 1 provides an overview of the distribution of all bibliographical items on the categories of analysis. The following sub-sections discuss research contributions included in the table. 5.1. Actors and activities The role of actors in processes initiated within eParticipation is an important research issue that many contributions focus on. Actors focused on in eParticipation research are citizens, politicians, government institutions, and voluntary organizations. 5.1.1. Citizens A large number of eParticipation research contributions focus on citizens as playing a crucial role in eParticipation processes. Citizen can play a role as users of government services, to which they provide feedback. They can also be consulted by government via ICT-based platforms; or, on the other hand, they can be the initiators of participatory processes. In these cases, citizens assume a key role in bottomup eParticipation initiatives, which can either compete or collaborate with the ones dominated by other actors. The potential of eParticipation activities for engaging particular groups of citizens, such as youth, is highlighted (Edelmann, Hoechtl, & Parycek, 2009; Maier-Rabler & Neumayer, 2009; Scherer, Neuroth, Schefbeck, & Wimmer, 2009). Research focuses on how discussion interaction is initiated among participating citizenry (Ferber, Foltz, & Pugliese, 2006, 2007), highlighting the creation of spontaneous citizen mobilization enabled by ICT (Suárez, 2006). A number of studies point out that citizens do not gain actual inclusion in the political system as a result of ICT-enabled participatory devices, such as online voting (Trechsel, 2007), or the establishment of local government websites (Garrett & Jensen, 2011). Active involvement among citizens, contrary to the policy makers' intentions, is found to be limited to small groups (Hansen & Reinau, 2006). An explanatory factor for this is suggested to be the fact that citizens perceive little value in e-government as a tool of democratic participation (Kolsaker & LeeKelley, 2006, 2007). Overall, citizen values are found to be among the most important factors influencing online participation (Bosnjak, Galesic, & Klicek, 2008). On the other hand, citizen satisfaction of the participatory platforms is found to be dependent on factors such as government reform, regulatory structure, and managerial capacities (Chen, Huang, & Hsiao, 2006).

350

R. Medaglia / Government Information Quarterly 29 (2012) 346–360

Table 1 Overview of eParticipation research articles. eParticipation actors Citizens Politicians Government institutions Voluntary organizations Researchers and scholars

Bosnjak et al., 2008; Chen et al., 2006; Edelmann et al., 2009; Ferber et al., 2006; 2007; Garrett & Jensen, 2011; Hansen & Reinau, 2006; Kolsaker & LeeKelley, 2006, 2007; Maier-Rabler & Neumayer, 2009; Scherer et al., 2009; Suárez, 2006, Trechsel, 2007 Cardoso et al., 2006; Chappelet & Kilchenmann, 2006; Dai, 2007; Garrett & Jensen, 2011; Saglie & Vabo, 2009 Carrizales et al., 2006; Choi, 2006, Colombo, 2010; Jiang & Xu, 2009; Medaglia, 2007b; Moody, 2007; Setälä & Grönlund, 2006; Sæbø et al., 2010; Torres et al., 2006; Wright, 2006a, 2006b, 2007 Boyd, 2008; Jensen et al., 2007; Suárez, 2006; Suárez, 2009; Sudulich, 2008; Vromen, 2007 Sanford & Rose, 2008

eParticipation activities eVoting Online political discourse Online decision making eActivism eConsultation eCampaigning ePetitioning

Antoniou et al., 2007; Bannister & Connolly, 2007; Choi, 2006; Conrad et al., 2009; Geldermann & Ludwig, 2007; Ladner & Pianzola, 2010; Prosser et al., 2007; Qadah & Taha, 2007; Ramilli & Prandini, 2010; Salazar et al., 2008; Trechsel, 2007 Berthon & Williams, 2007; Boyd, 2008; Ferber et al., 2006, 2007; Lourenço, 2010; Päivärinta & Sæbø, 2006; Rose & Sæbø, 2010; Sæbø et al., 2010 Caceres et al., 2007; Geldermann & Ludwig, 2007; Insua et al., 2008; Kim, 2008; Lourenço & Costa, 2007; Phang & Kankanhalli, 2008; Renton & Macintosh, 2007; Williams, 2010 Jensen et al., 2007; Rodan & Balnaves, 2009; Suárez, 2009 Ferretti & Lener, 2008; Grönlund & Åström, 2009; Hilton, 2006; Hayashi et al., 2009; Macnamara, 2010 Andersen & Medaglia, 2009; Johannessen, 2010 Miller, 2009

Contextual factors Infrastructure Underlying technologies

Policy and legal issues Governmental organization

Hwang & Mohammed, 2008; Miah et al., 2009 Agnoloni & Tiscornia, 2010; Anadiotis et al., 2010; Bochicchio & Longo, 2010; Bosnjak et al., 2008; Bross, 2008; Caceres et al., 2007; Carenini et al., 2007; Cartwright & Atkinson, 2009; Charalabidis et al., 2010; Coleman et al., 2008; Conrad et al., 2009; Ekelin et al., 2010; Gatautis, 2010; Insua et al., 2008; Kim, 2008; Ladner & Pianzola, 2010; Loukis et al., 2009; Loukis et al., 2010; Lourenço & Costa, 2007; Lourenço, 2010; Panopoulou et al., 2010; Qadah & Taha, 2007; Ramilli & Prandini, 2010; Salazar et al., 2008; Scherer et al., 2009; Suárez, 2006; Sæbø et al., 2009; Teufl et al., 2009 Berntzen & Karamagioli, 2010; Molinari, 2010 Andersen et al., 2007; Bosnjak et al., 2008; Colombo, 2010; Glassey, 2010; Grönlund & Åström, 2009; Medaglia, 2007b; Jiang & Xu, 2009; Panopoulou et al., 2010; Sobaci, 2010; Torres et al., 2006; Vedel, 2006; Wright, 2006a

eParticipation effects Civic engagements effects Deliberative effects Democratic effects

Bosnjak et al., 2008; Carty, 2010; Coleman et al., 2008; Ferber et al., 2006; Goldfinch et al., 2009; Hirzalla et al., 2011; Jensen et al., 2007; Kim, 2006; Ladner & Pianzola, 2010; Scherer & Wimmer, 2010; Suárez, 2009 Dahlberg, 2007a, 2007b; Dralega et al., 2010; Ferretti & Lener, 2008; Loukis et al., 2010; Lourenço, 2010; Scherer & Wimmer, 2010; Wright, 2007; Wright & Street, 2007 Berthon & Williams, 2007; Boyd, 2007; Choi, 2006; Davis, 2010; Edwards, 2006; Han, 2009; Jiang & Xu, 2009; Suárez, 2006; Walton, 2007

eParticipation evaluation Quantity of eParticipation Demographic of participants Tone and style in the online activities Transparency and openness

de Cindio & Peraboni, 2009; Grönlund, 2009; Hilton, 2006; Maciel et al., 2008; Maciel & Garcia, 2007; Saglie & Vabo, 2009; Scherer & Wimmer, 2010; Scherer et al., 2009 Bosnjak et al., 2008; Hansen & Reinau, 2006; Trechsel, 2007; Saglie & Vabo, 2009; Vromen, 2007 Renton & Macintosh, 2007; Ferretti & Lener, 2008; Graham, 2010; Lourenço, 2010; Resca, 2009; Wright, 2006b, 2007 Akdogan, 2010; Cabiddu, 2010; Loukis & Xenakis, 2009; Loukis et al., 2010; Medaglia, 2007b; Jiang & Xu, 2009; Panopoulou et al., 2009; Rodan & Balnaves, 2009; Setälä & Grönlund, 2006; Sobaci, 2010; Sudulich, 2008

eParticipation research methods Survey

Case study

Content and discourse analysis National state of the art Experiment

Andersen & Medaglia, 2009; Bosnjak et al., 2008; Cardoso et al., 2006; Chappelet & Kilchenmann, 2006; Chen et al., 2006; Dai, 2007; Garrett & Jensen, 2011; Goldfinch et al., 2009; Hansen & Reinau, 2006; Hilton, 2006; Hirzalla et al., 2011; Kim, 2006; Kolsaker & Lee-Kelley, 2006; 2007; Ladner & Pianzola, 2010; Loukis et al., 2009; Loukis et al., 2010; Panopoulou et al., 2010; Prosser et al., 2007; Scherer & Wimmer, 2010; Scherer et al., 2009; Vromen, 2007 Andersen, 2006; Boyd, 2008; Cabiddu, 2010; Chen et al., 2006; Dralega et al., 2010; Ekelin, 2006; Garrett & Jensen, 2011; Hilton, 2006; Kim, 2008; Kolsaker & Lee-Kelley, 2006; Molinari, 2010; Moody, 2007; Parvez, 2006; Renton & Macintosh, 2007; Resca, 2009; Rose & Sæbø, 2010; Sæbø et al., 2010; Suárez, 2006; Wright, 2006b, 2007 Akdogan, 2010; Cabiddu, 2010; Ferber et al., 2006, 2007; Ferretti & Lener, 2008; Garrett & Jensen, 2011; Johannessen, 2010; Graham, 2010; Hayashi et al., 2009; Lourenço, 2010; Macnamara, 2010; Medaglia, 2007b; Jiang & Xu, 2009; Panopoulou et al., 2009; Rodan & Balnaves, 2009; Scherer et al., 2009; Setälä & Grönlund, 2006; Sobaci, 2010; Sudulich, 2008; Wright, 2007; Wright & Street, 2007 Aichholzer & Allhutter, 2009; Bannister & Connolly, 2007; Gowda & Gupta, 2010; Vedel, 2006; Welp, 2010; Wright, 2006a Conrad et al., 2009; Coleman et al., 2008

5.1.2. Politicians The most recent eParticipation research focuses on politicians to a lesser extent. Politicians as actors of eParticipation can use ICT to gain consensus, e.g., as in eCampaigning activities. Or they can use eParticipation platform in their formal role as elected representatives, as e.g. members of parliament. Alternatively, politicians can play a key role in providing input to eParticipation regulation.

Elected officials are found to make use of digital channels in their activities (Saglie & Vabo, 2009), and those that are heavy users of internet tools are found to interact more intensely with stakeholders (Garrett & Jensen, 2011). However, while politicians claim to be enthusiastic of the potential of eParticipation tools, they appear to be ill-prepared on the many issues raised by their use (Dai, 2007). In general terms, studies point out that ICT in itself does not increase

R. Medaglia / Government Information Quarterly 29 (2012) 346–360

public participation, as long as politicians' attitudes towards the public do not change (Cardoso, Cunha, & Nascimento, 2006; Chappelet & Kilchenmann, 2006). 5.1.3. Government institutions A large number of studies focus on government as the main actor of eParticipation initiatives. Governments are the key actors in topdown eParticipation initiatives, that is ICT-enabled projects initiated and usually funded by public bodies. Levels of government include the local, national, and also supranational ones (Wright, 2007). eParticipation initiatives are identified as a key leg of national government ICT policy strategies (Wright, 2006a). Initiatives to be taken by governmental institutions, for instance, have the potential to improve the democratic efficacy of electronic voting (Choi, 2006), but can also be adopted instrumentally to disguise social control, legitimize authority, and contain public dissent (Jiang & Xu, 2009). Challenges faced by public authorities in adopting eParticipation initiatives include those of stakeholder engagement, management, design, evaluation, and of political process reshaping (Sæbø, Rose, & Molka-Danielsen, 2010). Empirical research on parliamentary websites (Setälä & Grönlund, 2006) underlines how publicity on those websites cannot replace the role of other mediating actors, such as political activists and parties. In government-run online fora, on the other hand, it is the role of the discussion moderator (and the consequential effects on deliberation freedom and censorship power) that is found to be of crucial importance for the success of government eParticipation initiatives (Wright, 2006b). At the local level of government, many assessments of municipality websites lead to the conclusion that the focus of the ICT applications is often on management and delivery of services, rather than on participation (Carrizales, Holzer, Kim, & Kim, 2006; Medaglia, 2007b; Torres, Pina, & Acerete, 2006). It is argued that the institutional setting of a government shapes the potential of participation in an ICT-enabled environment (Colombo, 2010; Moody, 2007). 5.1.4. Voluntary organizations Voluntary organizations can be considered the key organizational actor involved in bottom-up eParticipation initiatives. These include, for instance, grassroots movements that seek visibility and policy influence through eParticipation platforms. The role of voluntary organizations, also referred to as civil society organizations, is approached both as a dependent and as an independent variable with regards to eParticipation processes. The different characteristics of the nature of the voluntary organizations (e.g., size, source of funding, type of political objective) engaging in online activities are found to influence the type of discussions carried out in the digital environment (Suárez, 2009; Sudulich, 2008). Moreover, the involvement in traditional voluntary organization is found to be a powerful predictor of online political engagement (Jensen, Danziger, & Venkatesh, 2007; Vromen, 2007). Emerging types of voluntary organizations span from borderline phenomena – such as spontaneous citizen mobilization as enabled by mobile technologies during unexpected public opinion crises or a terrorist attack (Suárez, 2006) – to “eDemocracy parties,” grassroots organizations that provide online platforms for citizens to influence formal politics (Boyd, 2008). 5.1.5. Researchers and scholars The engagement of researchers with their object of study is argued to be very important in building relevant research knowledge (Van de Ven, 2007). In order not to stay isolated from their object of study in the “ivory tower” of scholarship (Medaglia, 2012), researchers themselves must engage with the relevant stakeholders of the eParticipation field, i.e., citizens, politicians, government practitioners, voluntary organizations.

351

In the research body on eParticipation there appears to be almost non-existent focus on the role of researchers in the processes of digitally-enabled participatory activities. There is very little awareness of, for instance, the potential of researchers to support the design endeavor of governments that aim at improving technology-mediated public participation in the policy making cycle (Sanford & Rose, 2008). The range of activities tackled in international eParticipation research includes eVoting, online political discourse, online decision making, and eActivism. 5.1.6. eVoting eVoting activities include all ICT used to enable and enhance the formal procedure of voting, e.g., electronic machine voting or electronic distance voting. A number of contributions focusing on eVoting consist of design proposals of new hardware and software architectures for electronic voting systems (Qadah & Taha, 2007; Salazar, Piles, Ruíz, & Moreno-Jiménez, 2008). These proposals try to overcome the limitations in opinion representation of traditional voting systems (Geldermann & Ludwig, 2007) and are aimed at increasing security (Ramilli & Prandini, 2010), citizen trust (Antoniou et al., 2007), and their usability and acceptance (Conrad et al., 2009; Prosser, Schiessl, & Fleischhacker, 2007). A minority of studies take a more research-based approach, e.g., by analyzing the proportion of gender groups using internet voting (Trechsel, 2007), or by focusing on the risks of eVoting systems and aiming at providing an eVoting risk assessment framework (Bannister & Connolly, 2007). The research demonstrates that the adoption of eVoting systems has the potential to positively affect democratic deliberation (Choi, 2006) and citizen engagement in politics (Ladner & Pianzola, 2010). 5.1.7. Online political discourse ICT environments constitute spaces where participation and deliberation in the political discourse take place. Research in this area highlights the changes occurring in political discourse as a result of the introduction of ICT, and tries to identify existing challenges, including those of stakeholder engagement, management, design, evaluation, and of political process reshaping (Rose & Sæbø, 2010; Sæbø et al., 2010). The transformations that are investigated include the emergence of new types of parties (Boyd, 2008); a new, open-source based model of politics that revolves around the role of voters as co-producers of the political discourse (Berthon & Williams, 2007); and private-run venues of online political discussion (Ferber et al., 2006, 2007), such as blogs (Lourenço, 2010). As a result, the need for framing this variety of changes is highlighted in a theoretical effort aimed at proposing different models of eDemocracy (Päivärinta & Sæbø, 2006). 5.1.8. Online decision-making Research on online decision-making focuses on the direct link between participants and the political decision-making process. Contributions in this category are mainly design proposals of digital platforms to enable, enhance, and guide decision-making. Frameworks of online decision-making can be generic and wide-encompassing (Phang & Kankanhalli, 2008; Williams, 2010). However, the majority of the studies in this category focus on platforms for specific decision-making purposes, including parliamentary debates (Renton & Macintosh, 2007), participatory budgeting (Caceres, Rios, De Castro, & Insua, 2007; Insua, Kersten, Rios, & Grima, 2008; Kim, 2008), collaborative drafting of policy documents (Lourenço & Costa, 2007), and urban planning (Geldermann & Ludwig, 2007). 5.1.9. eActivism The term eActivism refers to all activities carried out by voluntary organizations, interest groups, and individuals to promote viewpoints and interests using ICT tools. The few studies in this category focus on the interplay between the on-line and off-line dimension, and the relationship between activist initiatives and representative democracy

352

R. Medaglia / Government Information Quarterly 29 (2012) 346–360

(Rodan & Balnaves, 2009). The socio-economic status and demographic variables of eActivism participants is found to be different than the ones of off-line communities (Jensen et al., 2007). Moreover, different types of activist organizations appear to employ web tools to foster civic engagement to different degrees, depending on their nature (e.g., rights groups, environmental organizations, governmentsponsored movements) (Suárez, 2009). 5.1.10. eConsultation eConsultation is an activity of providing ICT-enabled feedback mechanisms from citizens to governments and public agencies, usually initiated by the latter. eConsultation initiatives are initiated at supra-national level, as in the EU (Ferretti & Lener, 2008), at national level (Hayashi, Rothberg, & Hayashi, 2009; Macnamara, 2010), or are a result of local government initiatives (Grönlund & Åström, 2009). In this case, eConsultation is seen as a temporary objective in the incremental progression from ICT-enabled information provision to active participation (Hilton, 2006). 5.1.11. eCampaigning Almost no studies in the sample focus on eCampaigning. The use of digital tools with participatory objectives by politicians in the context of electioneering is widespread, but there is a need for more research focus on this phenomenon. In particular, the potential of Web 2.0 tools in engaging citizens is to be investigated. The use of social network services, for instance, is paradoxically found to reflect the one-way communication structures of traditional political campaigning, and not to foster citizen involvement in decision-making (Andersen & Medaglia, 2009), or the use of social network services fails to build common grounds of discourse between citizens and politicians (Johannessen, 2010). 5.1.12. ePetitioning Online petitions are citizen initiatives aimed at influencing the decision makers' agenda by proposing themes or decisions to be discussed. Only one study focuses on ePetitioning, reflecting the uncertainty that still surrounds this particular eParticipation activity from a policymaker's point of view (Miller, 2009).

Challenges and opportunities of specific technologies, such as Natural Language Processing (Carenini, Whyte, Bertorello, & Vanocchi, 2007), computational argumentation (Cartwright & Atkinson, 2009), argumentation support systems (Gatautis, 2010; Loukis, Xenakis, & Tseperli, 2009; Scherer et al., 2009), webcasting (Bochicchio & Longo, 2010), Geographic Information Systems (GIS) (Loukis, Xenakis, Peters, & Charalabidis, 2010), and semantic technologies (Agnoloni & Tiscornia, 2010; Anadiotis et al., 2010; Teufl, Payer, & Parycek, 2009) are also focused on in an eParticipation context. Such technologies are focused on in application to e-voting (Conrad et al., 2009; Qadah & Taha, 2007; Ramilli & Prandini, 2010; Salazar et al., 2008), on participatory budgeting (Caceres et al., 2007; Insua et al., 2008; Kim, 2008), legislation formation (Agnoloni & Tiscornia, 2010; Loukis et al., 2009) or on innovative particular Problem Structuring Methods (PMS) in local participatory processes (Lourenço & Costa, 2007). Usable and well-structured websites are found to encourage citizen civic engagement (Coleman, Lieber, Mendelson, & Kurpius, 2008). The level of technological competence in citizens is found to be an important factor explaining online political participation (Bosnjak et al., 2008). The diffusion of mobile technology, for instance, is identified as a key factor enabling new forms of spontaneous political mobilization when formal politics faces extraordinary circumstances, such as terrorist attacks (Suárez, 2006). Surprisingly, little attention is provided by research to Web 2.0 tools, despite their potential for enabling citizen participation at different stages of the policy making process (Charalabidis et al., 2010). A handful of studies focus on blog platforms (Bross, 2008; Lourenço, 2010), wikis (Ekelin, Anderberg, & Reddy, 2010), or social networking services (SNS) (Sæbø et al., 2009).

5.2.3. Policy and legal issues Although very important in principle, the role of policy, regulation, and law in eParticipation is very seldom focused on. While there is awareness of the need for such studies, the relationship between technical and political requisites, and eParticipation initiatives has received little attention (Berntzen & Karamagioli, 2010; Molinari, 2010).

5.2. Contextual factors and effects This section analyzes research focusing on contextual factors affecting eParticipation. These are issues that are not part of eParticipation activities as such, but nevertheless affect eParticipation by being part of the context. 5.2.1. Infrastructure In the few studies that focus on this issue, the presence of a functioning and accessible infrastructure is seen as a necessary condition enabling the adoption of eParticipation tools. The role of infrastructure is focused on in the cases of initiatives taking place in developing countries (Hwang & Mohammed, 2008; Miah, Gammack, & Greenfield, 2009). 5.2.2. Underlying technologies The role of technologies underlying eParticipation is the single most focused on contribution in eParticipation research. Technologies employed in eParticipation initiatives are often referred to as independent variables. This can be argued to reflect the fact that eParticipation initiatives usually draw on available technologies, rather than on ad hoc technological innovations (Panopoulou, Tambouris, & Tarabanis, 2010), with few exceptions such as voting advice applications, which are specifically developed for an eParticipation purpose (Ladner & Pianzola, 2010).

5.2.4. Governmental organization The way governments are organized and work is argued to affect eParticipation processes, activities, and outcomes. Different characteristics of governments, such as size, political orientation (Colombo, 2010), the degree of transparency, the access to information provided to citizenry, and the availability of fora for discussion, have affected eDemocracy policies through time in different national contexts (Vedel, 2006; Wright, 2006a). The shape of existing political structures, routines, and cultures are focused on to provide an explanation for cases of poor degree of interactivity of online channels (Glassey, 2010; Medaglia, 2007b; Sobaci, 2010; Torres et al., 2006), including cases of countries that are not liberal democracies (Jiang & Xu, 2009). The success of eConsultation initiatives, for instance, is found to be more likely in the context of specific institutional designs, and when adopted in the later stages of the policy process (i.e., analysis or decision making stages) (Grönlund & Åström, 2009). The existing relationship between government and citizens is also found to be a powerful predictor of online participation (Bosnjak et al., 2008). Governmental budget constraints come into play when public agencies adopting eParticipation policies have to decide whether to allocate expenditures on either other activities for citizen involvement or on activities other than citizen involvement (Andersen, Henriksen, Secher, & Medaglia, 2007). Government commitment, together with the presence of thorough communication and promotion plans, is found to be key success factors for eParticipation initiatives (Panopoulou et al., 2010).

R. Medaglia / Government Information Quarterly 29 (2012) 346–360

Research on eParticipation effects focuses on the desired or undesired outcomes, as well as the impact of eParticipation activities, thus considered as an independent variable. 5.2.5. Civic engagement effects Civic engagement effects refer to changes in the scope and reach of participation by citizens as enabled by technology. Changes can concern actors, processes, and forms of participation. Online engagement is found to reduce the impact of constraints on participation, such as socio-economic status (SES) indicators, which are usually present in the offline world (Jensen et al., 2007). Civic engagement is also looked at as a dependent variable of different factors, such as the degree of usability of online participatory tools (Coleman et al., 2008) or the nature of the organization engaging in digital activities (Suárez, 2009). However, overall conclusions on this topic area are still somewhat contradictory. On the one hand, some contributions argue that the emergence of electronic social movements is increasingly broadening public opinion and the public sphere (Carty, 2010), and that the adoption of new technologies, such as eVoting, increases election turnouts and citizens' interest in politics (Ladner & Pianzola, 2010). On the other hand, other studies conclude that civic engagement effects are still limited (Ferber et al., 2006; Scherer & Wimmer, 2010) and, when present, are to be explained with existing deliberative and participatory practices in a community, rather than to be seen as a consequence of the availability of technologically-mediated fora (Bosnjak et al., 2008; Kim, 2006). These findings are in line with the hypothesis of the internet as a factor of normalization of political participation, rather than of mobilization (Hirzalla, van Zoonen, & de Ridder, 2011). The diffusion of government digital platforms might even extend the marginalization of already marginalized groups in society, and further empower those that are already powerful in society (Goldfinch, Gauld, & Herbison, 2009). 5.2.6. Deliberative effects Deliberation, as a characteristic of the way in which participation is expressed, refers to the idea of a liberal democratic participatory process in which issues are debated in a fair, egalitarian and factual way. eParticipation can be deemed to enable, facilitate or hinder the development of deliberative practices. Specific technical features, such as the design of different types of online fora (Scherer & Wimmer, 2010; Wright & Street, 2007) or the adoption of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) (Loukis et al., 2010), are found to shape the type of deliberation occurring in digitally-enabled participatory practices. Theoretical contributions point out the dangers of a fragmentation and polarization of the public sphere, as a result of the diffusion of internet-based forms of political participation (Dahlberg, 2007a, 2007b). Such dangers are confirmed in empirical studies. People engaging in discussions on political blogs tend not to get exposed to points of view different from their own (Lourenço, 2010). The intentions embedded in public fora run by institutions in order to foster representative, constructive debates often clash with fragmentary participation by citizens (Wright, 2007), or public fora end up being held hostage by partisan political protest and questioning of legitimacy (Dralega, Due, & Skogerbø, 2010). In these situations, attempts made by institutions to have participants' deliberation focus on specific technical issues are easily overshadowed by expressions of dissent and opposition to the institution's policies in their entirety (Ferretti & Lener, 2008). 5.2.7. Democratic effects The adoption of new forms of ICT-mediated channels is discussed as enhancing, challenging, or generally reshaping the way democratic systems work. In more general terms, speculations are brought forward either on the coming of a “modern global direct democracy” as a result of technology diffusion (Walton, 2007) or, in contrast, on a new elitist shift in which existing political trends are exacerbated,

353

and citizens fail to be engaged (Davis, 2010). Positive democratic effects are seen as a result of 1) ICT transforming citizens as co-producers of value, rather than passive consumers (Berthon & Williams, 2007; Han, 2009), especially with the emergence of ICT-enabled spontaneous citizen mobilization (Suárez, 2006), or 2) the reshaping of the role of traditional intermediaries between citizens and decision makers in contemporary democratic systems (Edwards, 2006). A mixed picture emerges in assessing the democratic impact of e-government initiatives in a one-party regime setting, in which the creation of a digital space for increased transparency and citizen feedback is inevitably intertwined with the government's agenda of enhancing its legitimacy and containing political dissent (Jiang & Xu, 2009). Research also puts an effort into sketching the democratic challenges of more specific ICT-enabled features, such as e-voting (Choi, 2006), user profiling, or systems of weighted voting (Boyd, 2007). 5.3. Evaluation and methods eParticipation research contributions differ in the research methods they adopt, and the presence of evaluation-oriented studies. Studies with a focus on the evaluation of eParticipation usually collect data on the quantity of eParticipation, on the demographic of participants, and on the tone and style in the online activities. 5.3.1. Quantity of eParticipation A simple way of measuring eParticipation is by focusing on the quantity of participation, referred to as, e.g., the number of participants, the number of messages posted on an online forum (de Cindio & Peraboni, 2009; Saglie & Vabo, 2009). However, while being previously more common (Sæbø et al., 2008, p. 15), focus on quantity of participation has been less frequent in recent research, that is, there are fewer studies in which more complex indicators than counting the number of participants are used. The research community is now faced with the need to go beyond one-dimensional evolutionary models of eParticipation in order to expel ideological biases and deterministic assumptions in evaluating eParticipation activities (Grönlund, 2009). Evaluation studies adopt multi-method approaches, including field tests with members of the public, online discussions, usage statistics, and online questionnaires (Hilton, 2006; Scherer & Wimmer, 2010; Scherer et al., 2009). Researchers also begin developing stage models for measuring the degree of maturity of web-based deliberative decision-making processes (Maciel & Garcia, 2007; Maciel, Roque, & Garcia, 2008). 5.3.2. Demographics of participants Recent studies have still focused on the demographic characteristics of participants. Traditional demographic variables include socioeconomic status (SES), age, and education (Bosnjak et al., 2008). The majority of studies assessing the role of demographic variables in eParticipation highlight the risks embedded in the phenomenon of the digital divide. For instance, middle-aged, well-educated males, featuring both education and income level above the average are found to participate more and more actively in online debates (Hansen & Reinau, 2006; Saglie & Vabo, 2009). Similar conclusions are reached when looking at political participation among young internet users (Vromen, 2007). As an exception, the gender of participants in e-voting activities is not found to be an influencing factor of the degree of involvement in eParticipation (Trechsel, 2007). 5.3.3. Tone and style in the online activities Evaluation research of eParticipation is also concerned with the tone and style adopted in eParticipation activities, particularly in ICT-enabled debates that are part of participatory processes. Studies discussing data on the activities occurring on online fora highlight the crucial role of discussion moderation (Resca, 2009; Wright, 2006a, 2007) and good platform design (Renton & Macintosh, 2007)

354

R. Medaglia / Government Information Quarterly 29 (2012) 346–360

for effective deliberation. The analysis of tone and style in online activities often reveals that actual conversations occurring in online fora fail to match the objectives of fostering deliberation, as well as the exchange and shaping of argument-based political opinions. The use of humor and emotional comments appears to impede political talk (Graham, 2010), while fora designed for linking citizens to experts tend to end up hosting mainly expressions of pure dissent and opposition (Ferretti & Lener, 2008). Effective deliberation fails to be achieved also on blog platforms, where users tend not to get exposed to points of views different from their own (Lourenço, 2010). 5.3.4. Transparency and openness A number of studies aim at evaluating the degree of transparency and openness in eParticipation platforms. Government-run platforms are mostly focused on at all institutional levels, including national (Jiang & Xu, 2009), regional (Cabiddu, 2010; Panopoulou, Tambouris, Zotou, & Tarabanis, 2009), and local (Akdogan, 2010; Medaglia, 2007b). Studies on the websites of government institutions, such as parliaments (Setälä & Grönlund, 2006; Sobaci, 2010), are based on the assumption that the provision of rich information and of interactivity increases the transparency of decision-making. The degree of openness, richness in information, together with usability and perceived usefulness is also assessed in eParticipation projects that involve Geographic Information Systems (Loukis et al., 2010) and legal drafting (Loukis & Xenakis, 2009; Loukis et al., 2009). The potential for bilateral/multilateral communication is also evaluated in activist online platforms (Rodan & Balnaves, 2009; Sudulich, 2008). Finally, the choice of research methods adopted in current eParticipation research is rather varied, including surveys, case studies, content and discourse analyses, experiments, focus groups, and overviews on national states of the art. 5.3.5. Survey Surveys, together with content and discourse analysis, are the most widely used research methods adopted in recent eParticipation research (Cardoso et al., 2006; Chappelet & Kilchenmann, 2006; Chen et al., 2006; Dai, 2007; Garrett & Jensen, 2011; Goldfinch et al., 2009; Hansen & Reinau, 2006; Hilton, 2006; Hirzalla et al., 2011; Kim, 2006; Kolsaker & Lee-Kelley, 2006, 2007; Loukis et al., 2009, 2010; Panopoulou et al., 2010; Prosser et al., 2007; Scherer et al., 2009; Vromen, 2007). Given the technologically-enabled nature of the environment that they move in, eParticipation actors are investigated through increasingly popular on-line surveys (Andersen & Medaglia, 2009; Bosnjak et al., 2008; Ladner & Pianzola, 2010; Scherer & Wimmer, 2010). 5.3.6. Case study Case studies are the third most used methodological approach adopted in current eParticipation research. Most of the studies focus on pilots at local authority level (Cabiddu, 2010; Chen et al., 2006; Ekelin, 2006; Garrett & Jensen, 2011; Hilton, 2006; Molinari, 2010; Moody, 2007; Parvez, 2006; Resca, 2009; Rose & Sæbø, 2010; Sæbø et al., 2010). These can adopt a comparative approach (Dralega et al., 2010) or focus on famous ground-breaking cases, such as on-line participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre in Brazil (Kim, 2008). Fewer studies investigate national level initiatives (Kolsaker & Lee-Kelley, 2006; Suárez, 2006) or eParticipation in political parties (Boyd, 2008). A number of contributions focus on specific online experimental platforms (Andersen, 2006; Renton & Macintosh, 2007; Wright, 2006b), while studies specifically focusing on cases at the EU level are still a minority (Wright, 2007). 5.3.7. Content and discourse analysis Research focusing on the understanding of deliberative processes (Wright, 2007; Wright & Street, 2007) often adopts content and discourse analysis as a method for capturing the dynamics of discussions

occurring on on-line participatory platforms. Content analysis of user posts on on-line discussion fora is, in fact, deemed to help understand the way deliberation evolves and decisions are taken in an eParticipation environment. Such methods have been used both for 1) the analysis of discussions occurring on digital platforms run by individuals (Lourenço, 2010), private institutions (Ferber et al., 2006; Graham, 2010) as well as political ones (Ferber et al., 2007; Johannessen, 2010), and 2) government-sponsored platforms (Ferretti & Lener, 2008; Hayashi et al., 2009; Sabrina Scherer et al., 2009; Setälä & Grönlund, 2006). Further, many studies embark on analyzing the web features provided by eParticipation platforms (Akdogan, 2010; Cabiddu, 2010; Garrett & Jensen, 2011; Jiang & Xu, 2009; Macnamara, 2010; Medaglia, 2007b; Panopoulou et al., 2009; Rodan & Balnaves, 2009; Setälä & Grönlund, 2006; Sobaci, 2010; Sudulich, 2008). 5.3.8. National state of the art National state of the art contributions are analyses of government eParticipation visions and policies, or comprehensive investigations of eParticipation initiatives in one or more countries. They can provide a snapshot or a longitudinal account of eDemocracy and eParticipation policies in a country (Aichholzer & Allhutter, 2009; Gowda & Gupta, 2010; Vedel, 2006; Wright, 2006a), or in a group of countries in a geographical area (Welp, 2010). Some accounts focus on specific topic areas, such as eVoting (Bannister & Connolly, 2007). 5.3.9. Experiment The use of experiments for research in an eParticipation context is very limited. Contributions that draw on data collected in controlled experiments are limited to usability studies of websites (Coleman et al., 2008) and of e-voting systems (Conrad et al., 2009). 6. 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 eParticipationrelated 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 2006 by Sæbø et al. (2008), with the data from the period April 2006–March 2011 presented in this article. The picture of the international eParticipation research scenario first provides a number of interesting insights into the current state and future development of the field, when we look at the changes in focus through time. Fig. 2 shows the percentage of contributions in relation to the total number of contributions found in the pool of articles of each of the two periods. It is to be noted that the total number of contributions (169 for the period April 2006–March 2011) is higher than the number of articles analyzed (122 for the period April 2006–March 2011) since, as mentioned earlier, one article can provide more than one contribution in the different categories. Figures regarding the second period (April 2006–March 2011) are presented separately and are not cumulated with the ones of the first period (up to March 2006). Overall, research on eParticipation has experienced a big shift in focus away from activities, and towards the study of eParticipation effects and evaluation. This has happened within the context of a general redistribution of focuses, resulting in a more balanced picture of contributions focusing respectively on actors, activities, contextual factors, and effects and evaluation. The emergence of a balance between focuses on different aspects of eParticipation can be interpreted as a move towards a higher degree of maturity of the field: different dimensions of the eParticipation phenomenon are covered by a significant number of contributions, with neither side suffering from exceptional neglect. On the other hand, the impressive growth of contributions focusing

R. Medaglia / Government Information Quarterly 29 (2012) 346–360

355

Fig. 4. Contributions focusing on eParticipation activities (%).

Fig. 2. Contributions focusing on eParticipation actors, activities, contextual factors, effects and evaluation (%).

on eParticipation effects and evaluation, which has tripled, can be linked to the progress of the many eParticipation initiatives started earlier. As eParticipation projects move towards completion, research appears to move away from the description of activities and to focus on the evaluation of the impacts of such activities (Fig. 2). Even though it is now the least focused on aspect in the sample analyzed, the focus on eParticipation actors has remained stable through time, in absolute terms. Moreover, the overall balance between different types of actors (government institutions, politicians, and voluntary organizations) has remained almost identical, with the exception of an increased focus on citizens (Fig. 3). Without surprise, citizens and government institutions are the main object of the majority of the contributions focusing on actors. It appears that almost all of the overall slight increase of focus on actors in recent research is due to more studies investigating citizens as the main actors in eParticipation processes. Such a finding is in line with the rise of research interests in citizen-initiated eParticipation that would be expected as a consequence of the diffusion of Web 2.0 applications that occurred in the last five years. Web 2.0 applications, such as social networking services (SNS), wikis, and blogs, can, in fact, be argued to have the potential of putting the citizen as user of government services at the center of ICTenabled participatory processes (Effing, Hillegersberg, & Huibers, 2011). Our analysis clearly can provide some evidence of this shift, even if it is still in its nascent phase. On the other hand, as documented in the findings, surprisingly few contributions focus specifically on the design, adoption, management, and use of Web 2.0 tools in an eParticipation setting. Most of the studies still investigate, for instance, traditional institutional websites and government-run discussion fora. Overall, a large part of the body of research appears to reflect a topdown approach to eParticipation that has government, and not citizens, as the main focus.

Fig. 3. Contributions focusing on eParticipation actors (%).

Moreover, it is worth noting that there is a persistent neglect of the role of researchers and scholars in eParticipation activities. The design phase in eParticipation initiatives, as an example, is crucial, and there is little doubt that researchers can play an important part in it (Sanford & Rose, 2008). Moreover, the benefits of adopting an engaged scholarship perspective in research (Van de Ven, 2007), by involving practitioners and stakeholders in the research process, should clearly trigger the need to include researchers as a key actor in eParticipation activities. Focus on eParticipation activities, overall, has decreased. Within this focus, studies on eActivism, eCampaining, and ePetitioning are still at the periphery of the body of research on eParticipation activities (Fig. 4). The focus on online political discourse and online decision-making has decreased in both absolute and relative terms in recent years. The sample analyzed shows that the use of ICT for voting purposes is receiving increasing attention. While other “E”-political activities (activism, campaigning, petitioning) further decreased their already weak focus from research, eVoting appears to be the only eParticipation activity that has increased its appeal to researchers through time. Nevertheless, as discussed in the findings, it is to be noted that the majority of the contributions on eVoting consist of design proposals for voting systems, while only a few are research contributions in a strict sense. The number of studies focusing on contextual factors affecting eParticipation has remained roughly the same, with around 40 contributions focusing on this aspect (Fig. 5). The main change occurred in time has been the concentration of almost all contributions that deal with contextual factors on the role of underlying technologies, and of governmental organization, at the expense of all other factors. In the first period of eParticipation research, a number of independent variables were explored in the literature to a more balanced extent. The impact of

Fig. 5. Contributions focusing on contextual factors (%).

356

R. Medaglia / Government Information Quarterly 29 (2012) 346–360

a wider range of factors was focused on, including policy and legal issues, information availability, infrastructure, and accessibility. Through time, it is striking to see how some aspects, such as accessibility and information availability, have disappeared from the research agenda, leaving room for contributions focusing only on how technologies and governmental organization as independent variables affect eParticipation processes. This steady strong focus by researchers on the role of government in eParticipation is in line with findings related to research on key actors as outlined above, and highly relevant as far as the discrepancy between these findings and the growing visibility of the Web 2.0 discourse is concerned. Again, it seems as the increasingly popular stress on the central role of citizens as users that many see as brought about by the concept of Web 2.0 (Effing et al., 2011; Sæbø et al., 2009), does not match the actual research focus of eParticipation. The most dramatic shift in the overall research focus has occurred in relation to the study of eParticipation effects and to eParticipation evaluation. First, the share of contributions focusing on eParticipation effects and evaluation has grown remarkably in the last five years. Second, the distribution of focuses within this share, which mainly concentrated on civic engagement effects, is now much more evenly balanced, with different types of evaluation studies and different types of eParticipation effects focused on to comparable extents (Fig. 6). As far as effects are concerned, recent research shows a vast increase of the share of contributions focusing on the deliberative effects of eParticipation, which was neglected in previous years. There has been a shift of focus from the sheer amount of participation towards a deeper insight into the impacts of ICT on the quality of democratic discussion. This can also be used as an interpretative key for looking at eParticipation evaluation research. The share of contributions focusing on the evaluation of eParticipation has, overall, almost doubled. Within this share, studies focusing on quantity of eParticipation have decreased and, at the same time, there has been a remarkable growth of contributions assessing the tone and style of online activities. These two phenomena can be interpreted as two sides of a single trend: as the focus on deliberative effects increases, so does the use of methods of evaluation that assesses the tone and style of online discourses occurring within deliberation activities. Lastly, a new category of studies evaluating the degree of transparency and openness of eParticipation platforms has been introduced, to account for the emergence of this type of focus within the area of eParticipation evaluation studies. A relevant number of contributions focus on evaluating the extent to which eParticipation initiatives result in increased transparency and openness of actors, policies, and processes. Regarding research methods, it is striking to see how the number of contributions that employ some type of codified research method has increased (Fig. 7). Case studies are not any longer the dominant form of data collection and presentation; instead, surveys and, more remarkably, content and discourse analyses have gained a share of the methods

Fig. 6. Contributions focusing on eParticipation effects and evaluation.

Fig. 7. Methods used in eParticipation research.

used in eParticipation research. The increased focus on eParticipation effects and evaluation, such as the focus on tone and style of online activities, as discussed above, can be argued to benefit from the increasingly frequent adoption of content and discourse analysis as a method. While online surveys are widely adopted, it is striking to see how eParticipation researchers do not appear to engage in action research at all. This is in line with our previous considerations on the lack of a perspective of engaged scholarship (Van de Ven, 2007) that emerges when looking at eParticipation research, and also in line with findings from studies on other ICT-related research fields, such as Information Systems (Mathiassen & Nielsen, 2008; Simonsen, 2009). On the other hand, the analysis of the literature suggests that case studies are benefiting from a refinement of qualitative approaches to investigate technologically-enabled participatory processes more in depth: the incidence of simple case descriptions, more frequent in the past, appears to be decreasing. This can be argued to have the potential to provide a further development of our understanding of the grassroots processes of eParticipation. 7. 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 existing framework of analysis of the literature provides the eParticipation research community with the added value of a first longitudinal view on the development in time of the eParticipation field, in a systematic effort that has never been previously carried out. Such an approach, in fact, enables researchers not only to capture the characteristics of this area in a given point in time, but also to characterize the field development through time. Furthermore, this review has proposed a revised framework of analysis of eParticipation research, by introducing new categories, which have been added inductively in the analysis of literature. This provides further ground for future analyses of the eParticipation field. Findings point out that, overall, the eParticipation research area shows great dynamism. The number of contributions in the field has grown remarkably, and encompasses a wide range of perspectives. The research agenda has changed in time, and it has done so radically in some aspects. Some changes, in particular, are of a counterintuitive nature, when compared with existing popular assumptions on the impacts of ICT on participation, and the transformation of democratic systems. This is the case, for instance, with studies on eParticipation activities, contextual factors, and effects. Such key areas, which represent the core of a research field, have experienced dramatic shifts.

R. Medaglia / Government Information Quarterly 29 (2012) 346–360

Some shifts can be argued to be, to some extent, more predictable or less surprising than others. The findings summarized in the previous section can be read as a basis for sketching a research agenda, grounded on the gaps, trends, and potentials of current eParticipation research. These are presented in the following propositions. Focus on a wider range of contextual factors beyond the technological ones It can be argued that one of the indicators of the maturity of a research field is its internal balance between different focuses on actors, activities, contextual factors, effects, and methods. In the eParticipation research field we are witnessing, overall, a move towards a more balanced distribution of focuses as far as these macro-categories are concerned. Within the domains of actors, activities, contextual factors, effects, and methods, this is also happening as far as eParticipation effects or the use of methods is concerned. On the other hand, it is striking to see how, within research on contextual factors affecting eParticipation, the field has moved from featuring a wide range of factors to focus on, to an almost exclusive focus on underlying technology determinants. In the past five years, the share of studies on contextual factors of eParticipation focusing mainly on underlying technologies has more than doubled, at the expenses of all other factors. While contributions often formally highlight the dangers of technological determinism, and call for a deeper, more sophisticated view on contextual factors affecting eParticipation processes (Wright, 2005; Wright & Street, 2007), the large majority of studies that should do so has instead focused solely on technological determinants. Future research on eParticipation should revert this trend by including a stronger focus on important factors such as policy and legal issues, accessibility, and information availability, which are still very scarcely focused on. It is difficult to argue that traditional digital divide factors, such as the role of infrastructure or of information availability, will not play a role in eParticipation in the near future (Helbig, Gil-Garcìa, & Ferro, 2009). As eParticipation initiatives spread in different countries, research should make an effort in diversifying the array of contextual factors that can explain the success or failure of IT initiatives aimed at improving citizen democratic participation. Encourage the shift of research focus from government to citizens and other stakeholders The array of actors focused on in eParticipation activities is to be extended. With the emergence of Web 2.0 platforms supporting eParticipation, theoretically, citizens have the potential of becoming the main actors of eParticipation activities. Collaborative platforms, such as wikis, the horizontal distribution of communication channels in social networking services (SNS), and the emergence of platforms based on user-generated content ideally make it easier for citizens to coordinate, communicate, produce, and share political power vis-à-vis the traditional government institutions dedicated to decision-making (Sæbø et al., 2009). The amount of research attention on these new types of grassroots participatory experiences has increased in the past years, but it is still largely lagging behind the mushrooming initiatives that is occurring in the real world, and the exponential boom in popularity of tools that carry this potential, such as in the examples of Twitter, Facebook, and the likes (Effing et al., 2011). Moreover, the shift of focus from top-down, government-led towards bottom-up, citizen-led eParticipation initiatives must be accompanied by an extension of the range of actors to be focused on in research. It can be strongly argued that no longer do only government institutions, politicians, and citizens form the triangle of eParticipation activities, but that there are also voluntary organizations, actors from the industry, and researchers themselves that are an important part of eParticipation processes. The need for digital

357

participatory processes to be as inclusive as possible increases with the increase in complexity of the policy issues to be decided upon, and with the spread of the access to the technological capabilities that enable them. Voluntary organizations, in particular, are a particular type of actor that should enjoy a greater attention from the eParticipation research community. The use of ICT in democratic engagement by grassroots movements can be argued to represent the real novelty in the eParticipation arena. While the initiation of eParticipation activities by governments and politicians can be seen as the establishment of yet another channel by actors that traditionally already dominate the political discourse, initiatives of eParticipation that originate from voluntary citizen organizations clearly have the potential to introduce radical changes in the existing political relationships. Such a potential will not have to be overlooked in future eParticipation research. eParticipation research should be more participatory A closer look at the array of methods used in eParticipation research clearly shows that: 1) there is an increasing, but still limited, variety of methods used in carrying out eParticipation research, and 2) ironically, eParticipation research is not participatory, as the absence of a method such as action research testifies. As far as method variety is concerned, findings show that the research community tends to use the same research methods in investigating eParticipation, and that these methods are used to an extent greater than before. Consolidation regarding research methods is somewhat in contrast with the observed shifts in research themes. An elaboration on this is that the rapid and substantial changes in most of the core research focuses cannot lead anymore to simply concluding that we are dealing with the typical case of an immature research field that is still in search of identity (Medaglia, 2007a). The stabilization and consolidation of common research methods and approaches can be argued to indicate that the eParticipation field is entering, or at least has the potential for entering, a new phase in becoming a more mature field of research. However, the diversity of stakeholders involved in eParticipation activities, together with the increased availability of technological platforms to collect and analyze data, gives solid ground for a call to widening the array of methodological tools to be employed in eParticipation research. In particular, we have seen that the number of studies on evaluating the tone and style in the online activities has remarkably increased, and that the share of studies that focus on the deliberative effects of eParticipation has more than tripled. The increasing attention on these topic areas should be supported with new methods for mining knowledge in the vast amounts of data produced by stakeholders on the digital platforms. These should include involving all stakeholders (besides the researchers) in carrying out eParticipation research. Regarding the involvement of stakeholders as a method of more effective research, we here draw on the concept of “engaged scholarship” by Van de Ven (2007), which calls for the involvement of the widest possible range of stakeholders in co-producing relevant knowledge, one that is actionable also outside the “ivory tower” of academic communities. While too often research knowledge is produced and then packaged for practitioners (Medaglia, 2012), eParticipation research would benefit from co-creating knowledge with relevant stakeholders, such as practitioners, citizens, politicians, and voluntary organizations, by involving them in different research phases. As findings have shown, action research in eParticipation has never been used as a research method in the past five years. But action research is to be considered only one, and arguably the most radical and resource-demanding, method of a wider array of available approaches to involve stakeholders in research activities. For instance, citizens and voluntary organizations can be involved in formulating research problems, using the increasingly popular platforms of social

358

R. Medaglia / Government Information Quarterly 29 (2012) 346–360

media to reach them. Researchers in eParticipation can engage in dialogue with politicians and government practitioners for building theory, and cooperatively make sense of research findings. There are endless possibilities of engaging with stakeholders in all stages of eParticipation research, including problem formulation, theory building, research design, and problem solving. Moreover, there are various degrees to which citizens, politicians, practitioners and other stakeholders can be involved by the eParticipation researcher community. Citizens and voluntary organizations can be involved in describing and explaining phenomena, taking part in what can be labeled as collaborative basic research (Van de Ven, 2007). On the other hand, a wide range of relevant stakeholders can be consulted by researchers to design or evaluate eParticipation policy implementation. 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). References Agnoloni, T., & Tiscornia, D. (2010). Semantic web standards and ontologies for legislative drafting support. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 6229, 184–196. Aichholzer, G., & Allhutter, D. (2009). Public policies on eParticipation in Austria. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 5694, 24–35. Akdogan, I. (2010). Evaluating and improving e-Participation in Istanbul. Journal of E-Governance, 33(3), 168–175. Anadiotis, G., Alexopoulos, P., Mpaslis, K., Zosakis, A., Kafentzis, K., & Kotis, K. (2010). Facilitating dialogue—Using semantic web technology for eParticipation. The Semantic Web: Research and Applications, 258–272. Andersen, K. V. (2006). e-Participation behind closed doors: Online evaluation of teaching performance. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, 4084, 119–127. Andersen, K. V., Henriksen, H. Z., Secher, C., & Medaglia, R. (2007). Costs of e-participation: The management challenges. Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy, 1(1), 29–43. Andersen, K. N., & Medaglia, R. (2009). The use of Facebook in national election campaigns: Politics as usual? Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 5694, 101–111. Antoniou, A., Korakas, C., Manolopoulos, C., Panagiotaki, A., Sofotassios, D., Spirakis, P., et al. (2007). A trust-centered approach for building e-voting systems. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, 4656, 366–377. Bannister, F., & Connolly, R. (2007). A risk assessment framework for electronic voting. International Journal of Technology, Policy and Management, 7(2), 190–208. Berntzen, L., & Karamagioli, E. (2010). Regulatory measures to support eDemocracy. International Conference on the Digital Society (pp. 311–316). Los Alamitos, CA, USA: IEEE Computer Society. Berthon, P., & Williams, C. B. (2007). Stages of e-democracy: Towards an open-source political model. International Journal of Information Technology and Management, 6(2), 329–342. Bicking, M., Triantafillou, A., Koussouris, S., & Wimmer, M. (2011). Lessons from monitoring and assessing EC-funded eParticipation projects: Citizen engagement and participation impact. Proceedings of IST Africa 2011 Conference, digital proceedings as CD. Bochicchio, M., & Longo, A. (2010). Service guidelines of public meeting's webcasts: An experience. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, 6229, 174–183. Bosnjak, M., Galesic, M., & Klicek, B. (2008). Determinant of online political participation in Croatia. Drustvena Istrazivanja, 17(4–5), 747–769. Boyd, O. P. (2007). What are the future possibilities of eDemocracy? A discussion paper. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, 4656, 401–411. Boyd, O. P. (2008). Differences in eDemocracy parties' eParticipation systems. Information Polity: The International Journal of Government & Democracy in the Information Age, 13(3/4), 167–188. Bross, J. F. M. (2008). Weblogs, a promising new form for E-democracy? International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology, IEEE/WIC/ACM, Vol. 3. (pp. 667–671)Los Alamitos, CA, USA: IEEE Computer Society. Cabiddu, F. (2010). The use of web services for inclusive decision process: Towards the enhancement of e-Democracy. Information systems: People, organizations, institutions, and technologies (pp. 39–47). Heidelberg: Springer. Caceres, P., Rios, J., De Castro, V., & Insua, D. R. (2007). Improving usability in e-democracy systems: Systematic development of navigation in an e-participatory budget system. International Journal of Technology, Policy and Management, 7(2), 151–166. Cardoso, G., Cunha, C., & Nascimento, S. (2006). Bridging the e-democracy gap in Portugal. Information, Communication and Society, 9(4), 452–472. Carenini, M., Whyte, A., Bertorello, L., & Vanocchi, M. (2007). Improving communication in e-democracy using natural language processing. Intelligent Systems, IEEE, 22(1), 20–27.

Carrizales, T., Holzer, M., Kim, S. T., & Kim, C. G. (2006). Digital governance worldwide: A longitudinal assessment of municipal web sites. International Journal of Electronic Government Research, 2(4), 1–23. Cartwright, D., & Atkinson, K. (2009). Using computational argumentation to support e-participation. Intelligent Systems, IEEE, 24(5), 42–52. Carty, V. (2010). New information and communication technology and grassroots mobilization. Information, Communication & Society, 13(2), 155–173. Chappelet, J., & Kilchenmann, K. P. (2006). From market squares to homepages: A survey of Swiss MPs' interactivity. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, 4084, 83–95. Charalabidis, Y., Gionis, G., Ferro, E., & Loukis, E. (2010). Towards a systematic exploitation of Web 2.0 and simulation modeling tools in public policy process. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 6229, 1–12. Chen, D. Y., Huang, T. Y., & Hsiao, N. (2006). Reinventing government through on-line citizen involvement in the developing world: A case study of Taipei city mayors e-mail box in Taiwan. Public Administration and Development, 26(5), 409–423. Choi, J. W. (2006). Deliberative democracy, rational participation and e-voting in South Korea. Asian Journal of Political Science, 14(1), 64–81. Coleman, R., Lieber, P., Mendelson, A. L., & Kurpius, D. D. (2008). Public life and the internet: If you build a better website, will citizens become engaged? New Media & Society, 10(2), 179. Colombo, C. (2010). e-Participation experiences and local government in Catalonia: An explanatory analysis. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 6229, 82–94. Conrad, F. G., Bederson, B. B., Lewis, B., Peytcheva, E., Traugott, M. W., Hanmer, M. J., et al. (2009). Electronic voting eliminates hanging chads but introduces new usability challenges. International Journal of Human Computer Studies, 67(1), 111–124. Dahlberg, L. (2007a). The Internet, deliberative democracy, and power: Radicalizing the public sphere. International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, 3(1), 47–64. Dahlberg, L. (2007b). Rethinking the fragmentation of the cyberpublic: From consensus to contestation. New Media & Society, 9(5), 827–847. Dai, X. (2007). Prospects and concerns of e-democracy at the European Parliament. Journal of Legislative Studies, 13(3), 370–387. Davis, A. (2010). New media and fat democracy: The paradox of online participation. New Media & Society, 12(5), 745–761. de Cindio, F., & Peraboni, C. (2009). Fostering e-participation at the urban level: Outcomes from a large field experiment. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 5694, 112–124. Dralega, C. A., Due, B., & Skogerbø, E. (2010). Community engagement of youth: eParticipation realities in Uganda and Norway. Information Technologies and International Development, 6(1), 94–108. Edelmann, N., Hoechtl, J., & Parycek, P. (2009). eParticipation for adolescent citizens (in Austria). Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 5694, 163–174. Edwards, A. (2006). ICT strategies of democratic intermediaries: A view on the political system in the digital age. Information Polity: The International Journal of Government & Democracy in the Information Age, 11(2), 163–176. Effing, R., Hillegersberg, J., & Huibers, T. (2011). Social media and political participation: Are Facebook, Twitter and YouTube democratizing our political systems? Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 6847, 25–35. Ekelin, A. (2006). To be or not to be active: Exploring practices of e-participation. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, 4084, 107–118. Ekelin, A., Anderberg, P., & Reddy, K. (2010). The AUGMENT project: Co-constructive mapping and support of accessibility and participation. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 6229, 95–103. European Commission (2009). European eParticipation Summary Report, European Commission — Information Society and Media. URL http://ec.europa.eu/information_ society/activities/egovernment/docs/reports/eu_eparticipation_summary_nov_09.pdf Ferber, P., Foltz, F., & Pugliese, R. (2006). Community networks and public participation: A forum for civic engagement or a platform for ranting irate malcontents? Bulletin of Science Technology in Society, 26(5), 388–397. Ferber, P., Foltz, F., & Pugliese, R. (2007). Cyberdemocracy and online politics: A new model of interactivity. Bulletin of Science Technology Society, 27(5), 391–400. Ferretti, M. P., & Lener, M. (2008). Lay public or experts? e-Participation in authorization for GMO products in the European Union. Review of Policy Research, 25(6), 507–525. Freschi, A. C., Medaglia, R., & Nørbjerg, J. (2009). A tale of six countries: eParticipation research from an administration and political perspective. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 5694, 36–45. Garrett, R. K., & Jensen, M. J. (2011). E-Democracy writ small. Information, Communication & Society, 14(2), 177–197. Gatautis, R. (2010). Creating public value through eParticipation: Wave project. Economics & Management, 15, 483–490. Geldermann, J., & Ludwig, J. (2007). Some thoughts on weighting in participatory decision making and e-democracy. International Journal of Technology, Policy and Management, 7(2), 178–189. Glassey, O. (2010). A survey on participation at Geneva's constituent assembly. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, 6229, 151–161. Goldfinch, S., Gauld, R., & Herbison, P. (2009). The participation divide? Political participation, trust in government, and e-government in Australia and New Zealand. Australian Journal of Public Administration, 68(3), 333–350. Gowda, R., & Gupta, H. (2010). Tracking and explaining e-participation in India. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 6229, 66–81. Graham, T. (2010). The use of expressives in online political talk: Impeding or facilitating the normative goals of deliberation? Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 6229, 26–41. Grönlund, Å. (2009). ICT is not participation is not democracy — eParticipation development models revisited. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 5694, 12–23.

R. Medaglia / Government Information Quarterly 29 (2012) 346–360 Grönlund, Å., & Åström, J. (2009). DoIT right: Measuring effectiveness of different eConsultation designs. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 5694, 90–100. Han, J. (2009). Korea's beef crisis: The internet and democracy. Australian Journal of International Affairs, 63(4), 505–528. Hansen, H. S., & Reinau, K. H. (2006). The citizens in e-participation. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 4084, 70–82. Hayashi, M. C. P. I., Rothberg, D., & Hayashi, C. R. M. (2009). Scientific knowledge and digital democracy in Brazil: How to assess public health policy debate with applied Scientometrics. Scientometrics, 83(3), 825–833. Helbig, N., Gil-Garcìa, J. R., & Ferro, E. (2009). Understanding the complexity of electronic government: Implications from the digital divide literature. Government Information Quarterly, 26(1), 89–97. Hilton, S. (2006). Developing local e-democracy in Bristol: From information to consultation to participation and beyond. ASLIB Proceedings, 58(5), 416–428. Hirzalla, F., van Zoonen, L., & de Ridder, J. (2011). Internet use and political participation: Reflections on the mobilization/normalization controversy. The Information Society: An International Journal, 27(1), 1–15. Hwang, J., & Mohammed, A. B. (2008). Approaching e-Democracy: A case study analysis from Jordan. International Conference on Convergence Information Technology, Vol. 2. (pp. 932–939)Los Alamitos, CA, USA: IEEE Computer Society. Insua, D. R., Kersten, G. E., Rios, J., & Grima, C. (2008). Towards decision support for participatory democracy. Information Systems and E-Business Management, 6(2), 161–191. Jensen, M., Danziger, J., & Venkatesh, A. (2007). Civil society and cyber society: The role of the internet in community associations and democratic politics. The Information Society, 23(1), 39–50. Jiang, M., & Xu, H. (2009). Exploring online structures on Chinese government portals: Citizen political participation and government legitimation. Social Science Computer Review, 27(2), 174–195. Johannessen, M. (2010). Genres of participation in social networking systems: A study of the 2009 Norwegian Parliamentary Election. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, 6229, 104–114. Kim, J. Y. (2006). The impact of Internet use patterns on political engagement: A focus on online deliberation and virtual social capital. Information Polity: The International Journal of Government & Democracy in the Information Age, 11(1), 35–49. Kim, J. (2008). A model and case for supporting participatory public decision making in e-democracy. Group Decision and Negotiation, 17(3), 179–193. Kolsaker, A., & Lee-Kelley, L. (2006). “Mind the gap”: e-Government and e-democracy. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, 4084, 96–106. Kolsaker, A., & Lee-Kelley, L. (2007). Mind the Gap II′: e-Government and e-governance. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, 4656, 35–43. Koussouris, S., Charalabidis, Y., & Askounis, D. (2011). A review of the European Union eParticipation action pilot projects. Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy, 5(1), 8–19. Ladner, A., & Pianzola, J. (2010). Do voting advice applications have an effect on electoral participation and voter turnout? Evidence from the 2007 Swiss Federal Elections. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, 6229, 211–224. Loukis, E., & Xenakis, A. (2009). Evaluating parliamentary e-participation. Third International Conference on Digital Information Management, 2008. ICDIM 2008. (pp. 806–812). Loukis, E., Xenakis, A., Peters, R., & Charalabidis, Y. (2010). Using GIS tools to support E_Participation—A systematic evaluation. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, 6229, 197–210. Loukis, E., Xenakis, A., & Tseperli, N. (2009). Using argument visualization to enhance e-participation in the legislation formation process. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 5694, 125–138. Lourenço, R. P. (2010). Political deliberation in the blogosphere: The case of the 2009 Portuguese Elections. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, 6229, 115–125. Lourenço, R. P., & Costa, J. P. (2007). Incorporating citizens' views in local policy decision making processes. Decision Support Systems, 43(4), 1499–1511. Maciel, C., & Garcia, A. C. B. (2007). Design and metrics of a “Democratic Citizenship Community” in support of deliberative decision-making. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, 4656, 388–400. Maciel, C., Roque, L., & Garcia, A. C. B. (2008). Measuring the e-participation in decisionmaking processes through online surveys. Proceedings of the International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2008), Vol. 10. (pp. 426–434). Macintosh, A. (2004). Characterizing e-participation in policy-making. Proceedings of the 37th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (pp. 117–126). Macintosh, A., Coleman, S., & Schneeberger, A. (2009). eParticipation: The research gaps. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 5694, 1–11. Macnamara, J. (2010). The Quadrivium of online public consultation: Policy, culture, resources, technology. Australian Journal of Political Science, 45(2), 227. Maier-Rabler, U., & Neumayer, C. (2009). eParticipation for political education: Challenges and opportunities. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 5694, 56–66. Mathiassen, L., & Nielsen, P. (2008). Engaged scholarship in IS research. Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems, 20(2), 3–20. Medaglia, R. (2007a). The challenged identity of a field: The state of the art of eParticipation research. Information Polity: The International Journal of Government & Democracy in the Information Age, 12(3), 169–181. Medaglia, R. (2007b). Measuring the diffusion of eParticipation: A survey on Italian local government. Information Polity: The International Journal of Government & Democracy in the Information Age, 12(4), 265–280. Medaglia, R. (2012). Engaged scholarship in research on information technology in government: Stuck in the ivory tower? Information. Communication & Society, 15(2), 246–259. Miah, S. J., Gammack, J., & Greenfield, G. (2009). An Infrastructure for implementing e-Participation services in developing countries. 3rd IEEE International Conference on Digital Ecosystems and Technologies, 2009. DEST'09. (pp. 407–411).

359

Miller, L. (2009). e-Petitions at Westminster: The way forward for democracy? Parliamentary Affairs, 62(1), 162–177. Molinari, F. (2010). On sustainable eParticipation. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, 6229, 126–139. Moody, R. (2007). Assessing the role of GIS in e-government: A tale of e-participation in two cities. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, 4656, 354–365. Päivärinta, T., & Sæbø, Ø. (2006). Models of e-democracy. Communications of AIS, 17, 818–840. Panopoulou, E., Tambouris, E., & Tarabanis, K. (2010). eParticipation initiatives in Europe: Learning from practitioners. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 6229, 54–65. Panopoulou, E., Tambouris, E., Zotou, M., & Tarabanis, K. (2009). Evaluating eParticipation sophistication of regional authorities websites: The Case of Greece and Spain. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 5694, 67–77. Parvez, Z. (2006). Informatization of local democracy: A structuration perspective. Information Polity: The International Journal of Government & Democracy in the Information Age, 11(1), 67–83. Parvez, Z., & Ahmed, P. (2006). Towards building an integrated perspective on e-democracy. Information, Communication & Society, 9(5), 612–632. Phang, C. W., & Kankanhalli, A. (2008). A framework of ICT exploitation for e-participation initiatives. Communications of the ACM, 51(12), 128–132. Prosser, A., Schiessl, K., & Fleischhacker, M. (2007). E-voting: Usability and acceptance of two-stage voting procedures. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, 4656, 378–387. Qadah, G. Z., & Taha, R. (2007). Electronic voting systems: Requirements, design, and implementation. Computer Standards & Interfaces, 29(3), 376–386. Ramilli, M., & Prandini, M. (2010). An integrated application of security testing methodologies to e-voting systems. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, 6229, 225–236. Renton, A., & Macintosh, A. (2007). Computer-supported argument maps as a policy memory. The Information Society, 23(2), 125–133. Resca, A. (2009). Enacting e-participation tools: Assemblages in the stream of life. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 5694, 78–89. Ricciardi, F., & Lombardi, P. (2010). Widening the disciplinary scope of eParticipation. Reflections after a Research on Tourism and Cultural Heritage. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, 6229, 140–150. Rodan, D., & Balnaves, M. (2009). Democracy to come: Active forums as indicator suites for e-participation and e-governance. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 5694, 175–185. Rose, J., & Sæbø, Ø. (2010). Designing deliberation systems. The Information Society: An International Journal, 26(3), 228–240. Sæbø, Ø., Rose, J., & Molka-Danielsen, J. (2010). eParticipation: Designing and managing political discussion forums. Social Science Computer Review, 28(4), 403–426. Sæbø, Ø., Rose, J., & Nyvang, T. (2009). The role of social networking services in eParticipation. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 5694, 46–55. Sæbø, Ø., Rose, J., & Skiftenes Flak, L. (2008). The shape of eParticipation: Characterizing an emerging research area. Government Information Quarterly, 25(3), 400–428. Saglie, J., & Vabo, S. I. (2009). Size and e-democracy: Online participation in Norwegian local politics. Scandinavian Political Studies, 32(4), 382–401. Salazar, J. L., Piles, J. J., Ruíz, J., & Moreno-Jiménez, J. M. (2008). E-cognocracy and its voting process. Computer Standards & Interfaces, 30(3), 124–131. Sanford, C., & Rose, J. (2007). Characterizing eParticipation. International Journal of Information Management, 27(6), 406–421. Sanford, C., & Rose, J. (2008). Designing the e-participation artefact. International Journal of Electronic Business, 6(6), 572–589. Scherer, S., Neuroth, C., Schefbeck, G., & Wimmer, M. A. (2009). Enabling eParticipation of the youth in the public debate on legislation in Austria: A critical reflection. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 5694, 151–162. Scherer, S., & Wimmer, M. (2010). A regional model for e-participation in the EU: Evaluation and lessons learned from VoicE. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, 6229, 162–173. Setälä, M., & Grönlund, K. (2006). Parliamentary websites: Theoretical and comparative perspectives. Information Polity, 11(2), 149–162. Simonsen, J. (2009). A concern for engaged scholarship: The challenges for action research projects. Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems, 21(2), 111–128. Sobaci, Z. (2010). What the Turkish parliamentary web site offers to citizens in terms of e-participation: A content analysis. Information Polity: The International Journal of Government & Democracy in the Information Age, 15(3), 227–241. Suárez, S. L. (2006). Mobile democracy: Text messages, voter turnout and the 2004 Spanish general election. Representation, 42(2), 117–128. Suárez, D. F. (2009). Nonprofit advocacy and civic engagement on the internet. Administration & Society, 41(3), 267–289. Sudulich, M. L. (2008). An empirical study of e-participation in social movement organisations. International Journal of Electronic Business, 6(6), 651–665. Teufl, P., Payer, U., & Parycek, P. (2009). Automated analysis of e-participation data by utilizing associative networks, spreading activation and unsupervised learning. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 5694, 139–150. Torres, L., Pina, V., & Acerete, B. (2006). E-Governance developments in EU cities. Reshaping government's relationship with citizens. Governance, 12(9), 277–302. Trechsel, A. H. (2007). Inclusiveness of old and new forms of citizens' electoral participation, representation. Representation, 43(2), 111–121. Van de Ven, A. H. (2007). Engaged scholarship: A guide for organizational and social research. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vedel, T. (2006). The idea of electronic democracy: Origins, visions and questions. Parliamentary Affairs, 59(2), 226–235. Vromen, A. (2007). Australian young people's participatory practices and internet use. Information, Communication & Society, 10(1), 48–68. Walton, D. C. (2007). Is modern information technology enabling the evolution of a more direct democracy? World Futures, 63(5), 365–385. Webster, J., & Watson, R. T. (2002). Analyzing the past to prepare for the future: Writing a literature review. MIS Quarterly, 26(2), xiii–xxiii.

360

R. Medaglia / Government Information Quarterly 29 (2012) 346–360

Welp, Y. (2010). ICT's for democracy in Latin America? Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 6229, 42–53. Williams, S. N. (2010). A twenty-first century Citizens' POLIS: Introducing a democratic experiment in electronic citizen participation in science and technology decisionmaking. Public Understanding of Science, 19(5), 528–544. Wright, S. (2005). Design matters: The political efficacy of government-run online discussion forums. The Internet and Politics: Citizens, Voters, and Activists (pp. 80–99). London: Routledge. Wright, S. (2006a). Electrifying democracy? 10 years of policy and practice. Parliamentary Affairs, 59(2), 236–249. Wright, S. (2006b). Government-run online discussion fora: Moderation, censorship and the shadow of control. British Journal of Politics & International Relations, 8(4), 550–568. Wright, S. (2007). A virtual European public sphere? The Futurum discussion forum. Journal of European Public Policy, 14(8), 1167–1185.

Wright, S., & Street, J. (2007). Democracy, deliberation and design: the case of online discussion forums. New Media & Society, 9(5), 849–869. Yildiz, M. (2007). E-government research: Reviewing the literature, limitations, and ways forward. Government Information Quarterly, 24(3), 646–665.

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).