The Current State of Social Media Research for eParticipation in Developing Countries: A Literature Review

Predicting Citizens Acceptance of Government-led e-Participation Initiatives through Social Media: A Theoretical Model

“…It could be argued that previous literature seems to be underestimating the complexity of the environment that surrounds citizens participation initiatives, which is turbulent, confused, and comprise various political, social, behavioral, cultural, and technological dimensions [24,35,56], particularly when those initiatives are implemented through social media [23,56]. The latest reviews of eParticipation literature suggests an ongoing shift of the research from a more purely technological focus to a more holistic view, where other social and technological issues could be integrated to investigate citizens' engagement [37,60].…”

“…A closer look in social media for e-Participation literature reveals that while several studies have examined the use of social media in the government context, they have not investigated their use specifically for e-Participation purposes [3,23,25,30,45]. Despite the fact that social media is changing general expectations surrounding the interactions with government, previous research works focus on the influence of using social media on government openness, transparency, and improved service delivery but not on e-Participation [10,41].…”

“…This is especially relevant in e-Participation context, where the majority of research works are widely criticized due to the lack of clear explanations of how the used theories were selected [23,35,55]. Hence, TPB is considered a steering theoretical framework for the current study for the following reasons: 1) TPB capacity to explain acceptance.…”

“…In this respect, the Organization for Economic Co-operation & Development explains that not all citizens are willing to participate, and certain citizens segments are able but unwilling to participate [44]. Consequently, even the usage of social media is expected to bring e-Participation to a new stage [3,14,23,30,38,56], a low level of success has been reached and citizens involvement is still limited [10,30,41,43].…”

“…The construct reflects the features of social media networks as a mean, platform, or IS artefact [23] that might foster citizen to involve in e-Participation activities and to interact with government. Such technological characteristics or features are: PEOU, PU, COMP, and ATTRACT, which derived from [21,54,62].…”