Towards a balanced E-Participation Index: Integrating government and society perspectives

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2019.101404Get rights and content

Highlights

  • A comprehensive measurement of e-participation initiatives should evaluate the social and political readiness of countries.

  • The Balanced E-Participation Index (BEPI) includes both the government and society sides of e-participation initiatives.

  • Political rights and civil liberties are the most important criteria in the BEPI.

  • The BEPI concerns the willingness and empowerment level of citizens.

Abstract

Since 2003, the United Nations has introduced the E-Participation Index (EPI), the first index to evaluate e-participation initiatives worldwide. This index has been subject to criticism for not representing the society side of e-participation initiatives. The EPI assesses e-participation initiatives on the government side only and neglects the society side, which includes all kinds of civil e-participation initiatives. In this work, the society side is included by incrementally extending the EPI with the Human Development Index and the Democracy Index. To identify the weights of the index, the best–worst method (BWM) is used while surveying 23 experts. The results show that political rights and civil liberties are viewed as the most important criteria with which to evaluate e-participation initiatives. Using this ranking, the Balanced EPI (BEPI) is created, giving weight to both the government and society sides. The new index concerns the willingness and empowerment levels of citizens so that the public can influence policy and political decision-making. Dedicated e-participation measures should be developed in further research.

Introduction

Digital technologies, such as the Internet and social media, are changing traditional participation concepts. These technologies have overcome the time and distance limitations of physical participation. For example, decision-making no longer requires citizens to be in one location.

In recent years, the concept of electronic participation (e-participation) has been investigated by various scholars and international organisations (cf. Viborg Andersen et al., 2007; Baller, Dutta, & Lanvin, 2016; Islam, 2008; Grönlund, 2011; Sæbø, Flak, & Sein, 2011; Susha & Grönlund, 2014; OECD, 2009; UN, 2018). Macintosh (2004) defined e-participation as “the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to broaden and deepen political participation by enabling citizens to connect with one another and with their elected representatives” (p. 365). UNDESA (2013)1 described e-participation as “the process of engaging citizens through information and communication technologies in policy, decision-making, and service design and delivery in order to make it participatory, inclusive, and deliberative” (p. 61). According to UNDESA, e-participation is recognised as a political action that is facilitated by digital technologies in order to revive citizens' sovereignty, through participation in the processes of policy and political decision-making. Additionally, digital technologies are seen as a catalyst for the civil democratic processes of citizen consultation and participation (Coleman, 1999; Noveck, 2000; Shirazi, 2008). Although digital technology supports the engagement of citizens in direct democratic decisions, its materialisation depends on other factors, such as democratic structures, politicians, governments, and citizens.

It is all too often assumed that democratic governments are more disposed than authoritarian governments to creating online environments that engage citizens in decision-making and to influence the development of policies that affect their society. However, this might not be the case, as the input from e-participation can remain unused, and online environments may be used to exercise greater control rather than to enable democratic involvement. Repression can be facilitated by knowing who says what in the online environment (Rhoads & Fowler, 2011; Tufekci & Wilson, 2012; Whittaker, 2011; Wolfson, 2014). Nevertheless, there is a consensus that democratic governments should have higher e-participation rankings than authoritarian governments (Åström, Karlsson, Linde, & Pirannejad, 2012; Linde & Karlsson, 2013).

Various studies have introduced measures to assess progress and compare e-participation efforts at an international level (cf. Cantijoch & Gibson, 2011; Lappas, Triantafillidou, Yannas, & Kleftodimos, 2015; UN, 2018). Yet, measurement practice is all too often focused on low-cost measurement and remains at a generic level (Bannister, 2007). Measurement is driven not by the problem but by the data which is available (Kromidha, 2012); numbers can be presented and interpreted in different ways (Petrović, Bojković, Anić, & Petrović, 2012); there is no ‘best’ approach (Kunstelj & Vintar, 2004) and thus far success has been limited (Ojo, Janowski, & Estevez, 2011).

The United Nations (UN) has developed the E-Participation Index (EPI), which is used to evaluate e-participation initiatives in countries around the world. The index has been updated nine times since 2003. Although the EPI is the index most referred to by policymakers and scholars in the field of public participation, it has been subject to criticism. In particular, Åström et al. (2012) have argued that the bottom-up (society-led initiatives) aspect of e-participation is absent from the measurement method used in the index. They claim that if e-participation aims to measure aspects of democratic government that promote democratisation, then government-led and society-led initiatives should be taken into account. In a similar vein, Islam (2008) stated that “the EPI of [the] UN is not supplemented with a quantitative index and focuses only on the supply side of e-participation” (p. 5). Government efforts are included, while society initiatives are neglected. Coleman and Norris (2005) emphasised that e-participation has a key role to play in e-democracy and that it should contain both government-led and society-led approaches. They wrote that “it is both about the institutional processes of hierarchies and the more fluid arrangements of networks” (p. 32). Katchanovski and La Porte (2005) concluded that not including society-led e-participation initiatives leads to a higher ranking of non-democratic countries over democratic countries. Parra Beltran (2015) stated that “the EPI generated by [the] UN is only a supply-side assessment that does not take into account the citizen perspective” (p. 25).

As discussed above, the exclusion of the society side has led to some criticisms and ambiguities regarding the use of EPI. An example in the latest version of the EPI (2018) is that Bahrain outranks Belgium, Russia beats Canada, China overtakes Switzerland, and United Arab Emirates ranks higher than Ireland. The expectation that democratic countries rank higher is not met. Such counter-intuitive examples can be found in all versions of the index published to date.

According to the literature (e.g., Åström et al., 2012; Coleman & Blumler, 2009; Islam, 2008; Katchanovski & La Porte, 2005; Qiang, 2011), one of the main reasons for such results is including government-led and excluding society-led initiatives. The government-led side, which is evaluated by the EPI, refers to government-driven attempts to facilitate citizen participation through digital technologies. This side is directly visible and easy to measure and, as a result, typically included in measurements (Maheshwari & Janssen, 2013). The society-led side refers to civil society's readiness to develop citizens' participation and their ability to influence the processes of policy and political decision-making that affect their society. This side is not considered by the EPI. Macintosh and Whyte (2006) emphasised the need to address both sides of e-participation simultaneously and highlighted the synergy between government-led and society-led engagement. Coleman and Blumler (2009, p. 91) emphasised that these initiatives should not be seen as a binary choice but as two extremes of a spectrum of e-participation initiatives. The risk of only considering government-led e-participation initiatives is that e-participation can appear to be enabled when, in fact, it is not. E-participation instruments may be used by governments to put forward and to disseminate their views and to identify and control those who do not agree with them (Tufekci & Wilson, 2012; Wolfson, 2014). In this way, e-participation could be used as a tool of suppression (Rhoads & Fowler, 2011; Whittaker, 2011) instead of a participation tool. There are several examples of this misuse of digital technologies such as smartphones and social networks sites in China, Russia, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia, countries that all have sought to suppress citizens' involvement and participation in the public realm while they have high EPI values on the global scale (Astrom et al., 2011; Bunkov, Bolgov, & Chugunov, 2013; Jones, 2015; Qiang, 2011).

In this study, we incrementally extend the EPI with society-led measures and develop a Balanced EPI (abbreviated as BEPI) which takes account of governmental and societal aspects of e-participation initiatives. The paper proceeds as follows. We briefly review the literature on e-participation initiatives from the government and society perspectives in Section 2, followed by conceptualizing the BEPI and explaining all three indexes which were used in the BEPI in Section 3. In Section 4 we describe the research methodology which clarifies the construction of BEPI, followed by illustrating the results of developing the new index in Section 5. We proceed with discussing different aspects of using the BEPI instead of EPI and also clarifying the similarities and differences in Section 6, whereas in Section 7 we provide our concluding remarks, identify the limitations of the study, and offer avenues for future research.

Section snippets

E-participation

E-participation emerged as a key concept in the fields of ICT and political science in the early 2000s. The origins of the concept lie in both e-government and e-democracy (Axelsson, Melin, & Lindgren, 2010; Islam, 2008; Sharma, Bao, & Peng, 2014; Vogt, Förster, & Kabst, 2014), resulting in two dimensions, namely society to administration and society to politics. The first concerns the interaction between citizens and public servants, and the latter how citizens interact with politicians.

E-participation index (EPI)

The EPI is part of a comprehensive E-Government Survey of the online presence of all 193 United Nations member states, which assesses national government portals based on their availability for civic engagement, service delivery and public participation in decision-making processes (UN, 2018). The EPI has been updated nine times since 2003 and measures the public participation status of every member state at three levels: e-information, e-consultation, and e-decision-making. E-information

Construct validity

To evaluate the measurement properties of the new index (BEPI) and the constructs (EPI, HDI, and DI), nomological validity, face validity, expert judge validity, and confirmatory factor analysis are examined in the study. Nomological validity addresses whether theory supports the correlation between different latent constructs. Face validity shows if theory supports the correspondence between measurement items and their corresponding latent constructs. Expert judge validity examines whether the

Findings

Adding two extensions (HDI and DI) to the current version of the EPI to develop the BEPI, which covers the government and society sides of e-participation initiatives simultaneously, generates some changes to the evaluation results of e-participation initiatives on a global scale. Comparing the BEPI to the EPI, several major and minor changes occurred in the ranking of the UN member states (see Table 6). To provide a clear comparison between two indexes (EPI and BEPI), the values of the HDI and

Discussion

As the main purpose of the study, we incrementally extended the EPI, which evaluates e-participation initiatives exclusively from the government perspective, by adding two extensions (HDI and DI), which represent the society perspective, to assess e-participation initiatives. In other words, the EPI only evaluates government attempts to provide digital facilities for citizens to participate in policy and political decision-making processes. However, the realisation of real citizen participation

Conclusions and future research

The object of this study was to develop a Balanced E-Participation Index (BEPI) in order to evaluate e-participation initiatives from both the demand side (bottom-up) and the supply side (top-down) simultaneously, on a global scale. The study adds the society perspective, as a representative of the demand side of e-participation initiatives, to the E-Participation Index (EPI) which was developed by the United Nation (UN) and evaluates e-participation initiatives among the UN member states

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank the experts who participant in our study and willingly shared their precious time during the process. The authors would also like to thank Professor Tomasz Janowski and the anonymous reviewers, for their insights and comments in giving a clearer focus to this paper.

Ali Pirannejad is associate professor at the Department of Public Administration, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran. Also he is researcher at the Department of Information and Communication Technology, Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), Netherlands. His main research concerns open government, government as a platform, ICT & political development, e-government, e-participation, and e-democracy.

References (185)

  • T. Janowski

    Digital government evolution: From transformation to contextualization

    Government Information Quarterly

    (2015)
  • S. Kheybari et al.

    Bioethanol facility location selection using best-worst method

    Applied Energy

    (2019)
  • E. Kromidha

    Strategic e-government development and the role of benchmarking

    Government Information Quarterly

    (2012)
  • K. Layne et al.

    Developing fully functional E-government: A four stage model

    Government Information Quarterly

    (2001)
  • D. Maheshwari et al.

    Measurement and benchmarking foundations: Providing support to organizations in their development and growth using dashboards

    Government Information Quarterly

    (2013)
  • P.R. Abramson et al.

    The decline of electoral participation in America

    American Political Science Review

    (1982)
  • D. Acemoglu et al.

    Income and democracy

    American Economic Review

    (2008)
  • N. Ahmed

    An overview of e-participation models

  • R. Al-Dalou et al.

    E-participation levels and technologies

  • M. Alomari et al.

    Predictors for e-government adoption in Jordan: Deployment of an empirical evaluation based on a citizen-centric approach

    Information Technology & People

    (2012)
  • K.V. Anderson et al.

    The first leg of e-government research: Domains and application areas 1998-2003

    International Journal of Electronic Government Research (IJEGR)

    (2005)
  • A. Avdic et al.

    Understanding eParticipation: contemporary PhD eParticipation research in Europe

    (2007)
  • K. Axelsson et al.

    Exploring the importance of citizen participation and involvement in e-government projects: practice, incentives, and organization

    Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy

    (2010)
  • G.I. Balch

    Multiple indicators in survey research: The concept ‘sense of political efficacy

    Political Methodology

    (1974)
  • J.M. Balkin

    Digital speech and democratic culture: A theory of freedom of expression for the information society

    NyuL rev.

    (2004)
  • S. Baller et al.

    Global Information Technology Report 2016

    (2016)
  • F. Bannister

    The curse of the benchmark: an assessment of the validity and value of e-government comparisons

    International Review of Administrative Sciences

    (2007)
  • E. Barendt

    Freedom of speech

    (2005)
  • L.M. Bartels

    Economic inequality and political representation

  • D. Beetham

    Freedom as the Foundation

    Journal of Democracy

    (2004)
  • W.L. Bennett

    Changing citizenship in the digital age

  • M. Benz et al.

    Are voters better informed when they have a larger say in politics?–Evidence for the European Union and Switzerland

    Public Choice

    (2004)
  • P. Birkinshaw

    Freedom of information and openness

    Fundamental human rights. Admin.L. Rev.

    (2006)
  • A. Boudjelida et al.

    Electronic citizens participation: Systematic review

  • H.E. Brady et al.

    Beyond SES: A resource model of political participation

    American Political Science Review

    (1995)
  • Y. Breindl et al.

    Can Web 2.0 applications save e-democracy? A study of how new internet applications may enhance citizen participation in the political process online

    International Journal of Electronic Democracy

    (2008)
  • A. Bunkov et al.

    Web 2.0 in Russian Open Government

  • A. Campbell et al.

    The voter decides. Evanston IL: Row, Peterson. Bennet, S.(Comp.) Knowledge of politics and sense of subjective political competence

    American Politics Research

    (1954)
  • H.E. Campbell

    Influencing Bureaucracy? A Research Note on Implications of Measuring Participation in Public Utility Rate Cases

    Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory

    (1995)
  • M. Cantijoch et al.

    Conceptualising and measuring e-participation

  • M.D. Carpini

    Mediating democratic engagement: The impact of communications on citizens’ involvement in political and civic life

  • K. Chakraborty et al.

    Psychological and clinical correlates of functional somatic complaints in depression

    International Journal of Social Psychiatry

    (2012)
  • S. Coleman

    Can the new media invigorate democracy?

    The Political Quarterly

    (1999)
  • S. Coleman et al.

    The Internet and democratic citizenship: Theory, practice and policy

    (2009)
  • S. Coleman et al.

    A new agenda for E-Democracy

    International Journal of Electronic Government Research

    (2005)
  • A.B. Costello et al.

    Best practices in exploratory factor analysis: four recommendations for getting the most from your analysis

    (2005)
  • S.C. Craig

    Efficacy, trust, and political behavior: An attempt to resolve a lingering conceptual dilemma

    American Politics Quarterly

    (1979)
  • S.C. Craig et al.

    Political efficacy and trust: A report on the NES pilot study items

    Political Behavior

    (1990)
  • R.A. Dahl

    Democracy and its critics

    (1989)
  • L. Diamond

    Economic development and democracy reconsidered

    American behavioral scientist

    (1992)
  • Cited by (36)

    • Understanding issues with stakeholders participation processes : A conceptual model of SPPs' dimensions of issues

      2022, Government Information Quarterly
      Citation Excerpt :

      Pidgeon et al., 2005; Webler & Tuler, 2006) and “How can progress/outcomes be measured in the near term”? ( O'Meara et al., 2011; Pirannejad et al., 2019). First, DMs should maintain realistic expectations about the process and its potential outcomes (Ianniello et al., 2019).

    • Refining the UN E-participation Index: Introducing the deliberative assessment using the Varieties of Democracy data

      2022, Government Information Quarterly
      Citation Excerpt :

      The most visible manifestation of this shortcoming has so far been associated with the high positions of authoritarian countries in the rankings, especially since the early 2010s (Åström et al., 2012; Grönlund, 2011; Karlsson, 2013). In order to refine the index and to deal with the paradox of “authoritarian” e-participation, several conceptual alternatives have been proposed (Kneuer, 2016; Sonntagbauer & Sonntagbauer, 2014), and several refined indices have been designed (Lidén, 2015; Pirannejad, Janssen, & Rezaei, 2019; Sundberg, 2018). What all of the proposed measurement techniques have in common, is an attempt to refine the EPI using the available democracy scores, with the assumption that democracies should outweigh non-democracies in their e-participation efforts (Lidén, 2015; Pirannejad et al., 2019; Sundberg, 2018), while the latter often utilize online tools for façade purposes only (Åström et al., 2012; Linde & Karlsson, 2013).

    View all citing articles on Scopus

    Ali Pirannejad is associate professor at the Department of Public Administration, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran. Also he is researcher at the Department of Information and Communication Technology, Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), Netherlands. His main research concerns open government, government as a platform, ICT & political development, e-government, e-participation, and e-democracy.

    Marijn Janssen is a full Professor in ICT & Governance and head of the Information and Communication Technology section of the Technology, Policy and Management Faculty of Delft University of Technology (TU Delft). He is Co-Editor-in-Chief of Government Information Quarterly, Associate Editor of the International Journal of Electronic Business Research (IJEBR), Electronic Journal of eGovernment (EJEG), International Journal of E-Government Research (IJEGR), Decision Support Systems (DSS) and Information Systems Frontiers (ISF). He was ranked as one of the leading e-government researchers in a survey in 2009 and 2014 and has published over 350 refereed publications. More information: www.tbm.tudelft.nl/marijnj.

    Jafar Rezaei is associate professor at the Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands, where he also obtained his Ph.D. One of his main research interests is in the area of multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) analysis. He has published in various academic journals, including the International Journal of Production Economics, the International Journal of Production Research, the International Journal of Systems Science, Industrial Marketing Management, Expert Systems with Applications, Applied Soft Computing, Applied Mathematical Modelling, and the European Journal of Operational Research.

    View full text