Success factors in designing eParticipation initiatives
Introduction
The persistent problem of fluctuations of citizens' political interest and trust in modern democracies has been widely discussed over the last two decades (Hendriks, 2009, Miller and Listhaug, 1998, Newton, 1999, Van de Walle et al., 2008). Phenomena of political alienation and dissatisfaction of the public have been observed (European Commission, 2013, Lyons and Alexander, 2000) both amongst younger (Snell, 2010) and older populations (Jennings & Markus, 1988) of western societies. Literature suggests that political trust and dissatisfaction are interconnected, and that the declining political trust is a consequence of citizens' dissatisfaction from political leaders and political actions. However, it is also supported that declining trust is not merely a reflection of dissatisfaction but also a powerful cause of it (Chanley et al., 2000, Hetherington, 1998), implying thus a downward spiral phenomenon.
Literature further suggests that fluctuations on political trust and engagement are generally dysfunctional for democracy (Schyns and Koop, 2010, Van de Walle et al., 2008). Different solutions have therefore emerged, such as pursuing more participatory forms of democracy, citizen-centeredness and enhanced citizen empowerment (European Commission, 2006, McHugh, 2006). In fact, recent research shows that social forces such as the development of strong bonds and the sense of community exert positive and significant effects on political efficacy and political trust (Anderson, 2010). At the same time, the recent advancements of information and communication technologies (ICT) and the successful application of these advancements to other parts of social and business lives paved the road for harnessing similar benefits also in the governance and democracy field (Coleman and Gøtze, 2001, Mambrey, 2004). Research suggests that using the internet to interact with government and to improve policy participation can have a significant positive effect on restoring public trust (Moon, 2003, Parent et al., 2004). Thus, electronic government (eGovernment) and electronic participation (eParticipation) can be seen as a means towards restoring political trust and citizen satisfaction in western democracies. Although the exact boundaries between eGovernment and eParticipation are not clearly defined in the literature, eParticipation is widely considered as a part of eGovernment and quite often an eParticipation initiative is implemented as part of an overall eGovernment implementation and strategy. This approach is also adopted in this paper.
In recent years, the potential of ICT to increase political participation and to address the growing democratic deficit has been the subject of academic debate (Breindl and Francq, 2008, OECD, 2003). Scholars suggest that technology alone cannot provide a solution and that in-depth analysis of the eParticipation field is needed. In Europe, different approaches have emerged exploring this multidisciplinary field from multiple perspectives (political, social, technological, procedural, etc.). These include a characterisation framework by Macintosh (2004), a domain model by Kalampokis, Tambouris, and Tarabanis (2008), a literature review by Sæbø, Rose, and Flak (2008), an eParticipation analytical framework (Smith, Macintosh, & Millard, 2008) and other efforts for scoping the field, the research challenges and gaps (e.g. Aichholzer et al., 2007, Macintosh and Coleman, 2006, Macintosh et al., 2009, Tambouris et al., 2007). Over the last years, eParticipation research has been systematically funded in Europe providing the opportunity to pilot test a number of participatory tools and practices in different countries and settings. Between 1999 and 2010 the European Union has funded more than 35 eParticipation research projects with a total budget of over 120 M€ (Tambouris, Kalampokis, & Tarabanis, 2008).
At the same time, governments and local/regional authorities in Europe have started implementing eParticipation initiatives of different aims and scale. For example, an analysis of eParticipation initiatives and state-of-play across Europe is provided by Panopoulou, Tambouris, and Tarabanis (2009) and Tambouris et al. (2012) whilst national-level studies for Germany and the United Kingdom have been published by Albrecht et al. (2008) and Kearns, Bend, and Stern (2008) respectively. According to these studies, most initiatives in Europe focus on providing information, deliberation and consultation facilities with their scope and technical implementation varying significantly between simple polls and complex consultations. Most initiatives target the local and national levels with results indicating a more productive activity at the local level. Finally, most initiatives operate as an alternative, additional communication channel targeting mostly at “legitimisation” rather than active citizenship (Tambouris et al., 2013). Despite the differences in the quantity and type of eParticipation implementations in different European countries, results from the aforementioned national studies (Albrecht et al., 2008, Kearns et al., 2008) seem to agree on a few universal conclusions: (a) several lighthouse projects exist in different European countries in an otherwise fragmented, underdeveloped landscape consisting mostly of one-off initiatives such as pilots and trials; (b) there is a need for more wide-spread offerings that are also better integrated with public institutions; (c) current good practice should be highlighted and promoted in order to ensure wider take-up and inspiration; (d) although numerous descriptive reports on individual initiatives exist, there is still a lack of comparative empirical analyses, evaluations and longitudinal studies. According to Albrecht et al. (2008, p.5), this lack is the reason why “well-founded empirical, representative and generalizing statements concerning the effects or success factors of eParticipation are still not possible”.
Although more and better eParticipation offerings that exploit current good practice seem to be in evidence, practitioners' experience in eParticipation is still poorly addressed in current publications and research efforts across Europe, including efforts to produce tangible success factors and practical guidelines for designing an eParticipation initiative. So far, researchers have proposed different evaluation instruments to measure success at a post-implementation phase (Aichholzer and Westholm, 2009, Loukis et al., 2010, Macintosh and Whyte, 2008). The proposed success indicators are measured during or after an eParticipation initiative and typically include the number of participants and the level and quality of participation. However, there is a lack of publications focusing on identifying the factors that should be considered when designing an eParticipation initiative with the aim to ensure its proper implementation and operation and to maximize its potential for success. This is exactly the research gap targeted in this work. Additionally, our work addresses the lack of empirical research on eParticipation success factors by organising and conducting the first European-wide survey of eParticipation practitioners.
The main objective of this paper is to identify a concrete set of success factors to be taken under consideration when designing an eParticipation initiative. Thus, work reported in this paper focuses on a proactive, pre-implementation success factors' model rather than on a post-implementation success measuring tool as the ones proposed in the literature so far. We set out towards this objective examining both the available literature and actual practitioners' experience. In specific, we perform a systematic literature review on eParticipation and eGovernment success from which a set of success factors is extracted. Then, we undertake a questionnaire survey and a desktop research (i.e. examining initiatives' websites and searching online for official documentation, media references, articles in journals and conferences) amongst eParticipation practitioners in Europe and use the findings to validate the success factors identified from literature. Finally, we construct and present our proposed model of eParticipation success factors.
The rest of the paper is structured as follows. The methodology followed in this work is presented in Section 2. Section 3 reports the literature review and the success factors as derived from literature. The practitioner survey and desktop research is reported in Section 4 along with a discussion of results. The final proposed model of success factors for designing eParticipation initiatives is presented in Section 5, whilst Section 6 discusses and concludes our work.
Section snippets
Methodology
The methodological approach followed in our work is comprised of two distinct phases: the literature review phase and the survey and model phase, each presented in the following subsections.
Literature review
This section presents the results of our literature review. As explained previously, the literature review has been conducted in the field of both eGovernment and eParticipation. We therefore present the results of each field in the relevant sub-sections followed by a discussion.
Practitioner survey
In this section we present and discuss the results of the practitioner survey and desktop research. Before that, we provide information on the profile of the surveyed initiatives.
Proposed model of eParticipation success factors
In this section we present and discuss the proposed model of success factors for designing eParticipation initiatives. We constructed the model using the 23 success factors extracted from the literature and practitioners. The corresponding activities associated with success factors were also collected through the literature review and practitioner survey. The final, proposed model of success factors for designing eParticipation initiatives is provided in Table 4.
Discussion and conclusion
Although there is ample literature for assessing success after an eParticipation initiative has ended, little evidence exists on what to consider when preparing an eParticipation initiative so that the best possible results can be achieved. We believe that the model proposed in this paper narrows this literature gap by proposing a concrete set of success factors and associated activities for the design phase of an eParticipation initiative. The proposed success factors and activities are
Acknowledgement
Authors would like to acknowledge that the work reported in this paper has been partially funded by the European Union under the “Study and supply of services on the development of eParticipation in the EU (European eParticipation)”, a study conducted on behalf of the European Commission—more details at http://islab.uom.gr/eP/. In addition, the authors would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers and the editor for their useful comments which assisted in substantially improving the quality
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