Measure to Improve: A Study of eParticipation in Frontrunner Dutch Municipalities

Abstract

Abstract. eParticipation is still in its early phases of development, in which government organizations undertake many experiments. There is no systematic overview of these experiments, which inhibits learning from each other. Measuring and benchmarking eParticipation provide the opportunity to inspire new developments by sharing best practices. This paper presents the development of a measurement instrument that is subsequently used to investigate eParticipation in frontrunner Dutch municipalities. This instrument combines factors related to the role of citizens, the type of media deployed, and the organization of the municipality. Using these factors to measure eParticipation in seventeen municipalities we found a large focus on traditional media forms usually supporting informative and consultative practices for policy development. This study, however, has been largely limited to measuring the type of ICT that is used to facilitate eParticipation. Therefore, we recommend extending it with measurements that give insight into the actual use, effectiveness, and the inclusion of citizens' input in policy making.

Determinants of e-government implementation at the local level: an empirical model

“…To overcome the first of the mentioned limitations, both specialized models (e.g. Concha et al , 2012; Veljković et al , 2014; Veenstra et al , 2011) and multidimensional models (e.g. Dias, 2011; Dias and Costa, 2013) have been developed.…”

Social Media and Local Governments

“…investigating 15 large European cities found that local governments are not utilizing to a great extent social media platforms. Low to moderate usage of social media platforms by local governments were also found in countries like Germany Van Veenstra et al 2011 ), Sweden (Larsson 2013 ), Finland (Christensen 2013 ), and Italy . In a similar vein, municipalities in Egypt have been exploiting social media in their web pages quite slowly ) while poor levels of interactive communication were also found in the websites of several Mexican local government authorities .…”

Interactive cities? Local political online communication in Switzerland

“…Twitter), video platforms (e.g. YouTube), discussion forums, blogs and chats (Gibson & Ward, 2000;Macintosh, 2008;Schweitzer, 2005Schweitzer, , 2010Tambouris et al, 2007;van Veenstra et al, 2011): Because 46 percent of Swiss internet users access online communication from mobile tools (Latzer et al, 2013), we also coded mobile apps offered by the cities. We also included online-surveys because they are intended to generate popular feedback; newsletters and RSS feeds, because they require subscription, and blogs or wikis, because they may be primarily content sharing sites (Go & You, 2016), but invite user feedback nevertheless.…”

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