Political and Developmental Correlates of Social Media Participation in Government: A Global Survey of National Leadership Websites

Abstract

This study examines the extent to which national governments are using Web-2.0 applications to increase transparency and engage citizens in decision-making processes. Based on a typology of governmental websites that distinguishes among executive office sites, government web portals and personal websites of heads of government, 160 websites from 82 different countries were examined, and results show that 70 percent of the websites do not offer any participatory services and surprisingly no positive relationships were found between e-participation and variables traditionally associated with e-government implementation. However, a difference between broadband and Internet penetration levels was found: whereas Internet was positively related to e-participation, broadband was only related to the release of information by governments, which is consistent with citizen pressure models of policy change.

Towards a social network e-government agenda?

“…As was discussed in a previous study [13], research shows that the availability of web-based applications designed to distribute content through interactive information-sharing and user-centered tools may promote transparency in government institutions [43]. It does this by providing citizens with access to information stored on the data systems and new platforms for political and societal debates [7], creating a virtual dialogue with citizens, potentially opening up bureaucratic officials to scrutiny from the public and from outside of the narrow confines of political elites [44].…”

“…Research on this area generally focuses on the capability of ICT to increase citizen participation in democratic deliberation processes, and considers ICT as enablers [3], affecting the structuring of political practice by increasing the number of public consultations and direct interactions between citizens and government agencies [29]. For a more complete review of this evolutionary process see [13].…”

“…Furthermore, recent research has criticized the slow advances and practices in the online services offered by government websites and its limited possibilities for consultation [12,13], concluding that while governments are doing much to provide information and services to citizens, it is far from realizing the full potential of the Internet as a democratization tool.…”

La participation citoyenne en ligne au Québec : Conditions organisationnelles et leviers de transformation

“…Quant à l'explosion des médias sociaux, elle laisse présager une participation citoyenne plus engagée dans l'élaboration des politiques et dans l'amélioration des services publics. En tant qu'espace de conversation ouvert, ces nouveaux médias offriraient la capacité de démocratiser les institutions politiques (Katz et Halpern, 2013).…”

“…Il traduit aussi une réticence des acteurs gouvernementaux (par exemple, gestionnaires, conseillers et politiciens) à interagir en ligne avec les citoyens. Les autorités feraient, elles aussi, preuve de retenue dans l'utilisation des plateformes interactives de participation citoyenne, en particulier des forums, tant à l'échelle municipale (Bonsón et coll., 2012;Mossberger, Wu et Crawford, 2013), que nationale (Greitens et Strachan, 2011) ou internationale (Katz et Halpern, 2013). Soucieuses d'exercer un contrôle sur l'information et sur la prise de décision, les autorités semblent plus enclines à diffuser des contenus ou faire des sondages auprès des citoyens qu'à dialoguer avec ceux-ci (Mergel, 2012(Mergel, , 2013a(Mergel, , 2013bSusha et Grönlund, 2014).…”