Mapping eParticipation Research: Four Central Challenges

Abstract

The emerging research area of eParticipation can be characterized as the study of technologyfacilitated citizen participation in (democratic) deliberation and decision-making. Using conventional literature study techniques, we identify 105 articles that are considered to be highly relevant to eParticipation. We develop a definitional schema that suggests different ways of understanding an emerging socio-technical research area and use this schema to map the research contributions identified. This allows us make an initial sketch of the scientific character of the area and its central concerns, theories, and methods. We extend the analysis to define four central research challenges for the field: understanding technology and participation; the strategic challenge; the design challenge; and the evaluation challenge. This article thus contributes to a developing account of eParticipation, which will help future researchers both to navigate the research area and to focus their research agendas.

Computational Social Science, the Evolution of Policy Design and Rule Making in Smart Societies

“…This information asset is today exploited only to a limited extent by policy-makers due to the variety and the growing amount of information available. Alongside the first web-based e-consultation tools, accepting only textual contributions (e.g., online voting and survey or discussion forums), there are more recent solutions allowing increasingly advanced contributions that span from posts on social media to comments on YouTube videos [61][62][63][64].…”

“…These methods today may produce innovative solutions to assess citizens' sentiments (positive, negative or neutral) towards the policies and also to extract the main issues they raise. Sentiment analysis [64] is a particularly promising technique in this perspective. The application of computational techniques to determine the attitude of the author of a text (an entire document or even single sentences within it) with respect to a particular topic or, more generally, his or her state of mind is going to offer more insightful knowledge compared to that achievable through the methods that are more traditionally used to evaluate the perception of policies (e.g., the surveys based on the Worldwide Governance Indicators defined by the World Bank to measure the perception of citizens, companies and experts about the quality of governance using six distinct dimensions).…”

Evaluating parliamentary e-participation

“…see [8], [9]; there are only some high level frameworks suggesting dimensions and criteria that should be taken into account for evaluating e-participation. These frameworks include elements that can be useful for the development of a framework for the evaluation of e-participation in the legislation development process; in the following paragraphs are briefly reviewed the most important of them.…”

“…A similar gap can be observed in e-participation research. Rose & Sanford [8] from an extensive review of the existing research literature in the domain of e-participation conclude that there is a lack of evaluation methodologies and studies. Similarly, Macintosh & Whyte [9] argue that there is an 'evaluation gap' in this area and that the evaluation of both off-line and on-line participation 'is still a new and emerging area', which needs much more further research.…”

An exploratory study of users’ experiences with e-participation: a case study of Malaysia

“…Similarly, [12] argue that the evaluation of both offline and online participation is still new and needs significantly further research. In [13], presumes that from their extensive literature on e-participation, there is a lack on both evaluation studies and established evaluation methodologies. In [14], likewise concur that the citizen online participation is the less evaluated concept of egovernment websites.…”