skip to main content
10.1145/3428502.3428584acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesicegovConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Problem areas in e-Participation: a systematic review

Published: 29 October 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Electronic Participation (e-Participation) allows that citizenry to use Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to take part in the government decision-making process and, consequently, in public policy-making. There are diverse initiatives to achieve e-Participation around the world, but effective participation has not been achieved yet. Additionally, the research in e-Participation is scattered and fragmented, that is why the main research topics in this field are still not defined. This paper aims to show the problems related to e-Participation in a structured way. For this purpose, a systematic literature review was carried out, which allowed identifying problems in e-Participation. Then, those problems were organised and classified into problem areas. Each problem area covers a general topic of e-Participation that needs research. This paper helps to focus on future research around the identified problems in the literature. Therefore, this study allows both driving the research in this field and advancing in the successful implementation of e-Participation initiatives. As a result, eight topics, eighteen problem areas, and seventy-three problems were identified.

References

[1]
Abu-shanab, E. 2013. E-Participation levels and Technologies. The 6th International Conference on Information Technology. (2013), 1--8.
[2]
Al-Jamal, M. and Abu-Shanab, E. 2016. The influence of open government on e-government website: The case of Jordan. International Journal of Electronic Governance. 8, 2 (2016), 159--179.
[3]
Alarabiat, A. et al. 2016. Electronic participation with a special reference to social media - A literature review. 8th IFIP WG 8.5 International Conference on Electronic Participation, ePart 2016. Springer Verlag.
[4]
Alharbi, A. 2016. An Investigation of the Impact Factors to Increase Citizens' Engagement in E-participation on E-government in Saudi Arabia. (2016).
[5]
Alharbi, A. and Kang, K. 2014. E-participation service in Saudi Arabian e-Government websites: The influencing factors from citizens' perspective. Proceedings of the European Conference on e-Government, ECEG (2014), 265--272.
[6]
Alomari, M.K. 2016. Digital divide impact on e-voting adoption in middle eastern country. 11th International Conference for Internet Technology and Secured Transactions, ICITST 2016 (Department of Accounting and Information Systems, Qatar University, Doha, Qatar, 2016), 409--412.
[7]
Arévalo, G. et al. 2007. The state of e-government and e-participation in European regions. International Multi-Conference on Computing in the Global Information Technology, ICCGI'06 (Rey Juan Carlos University, 28933 - Móstoles, Spain, 2007).
[8]
De Blasio, E. and Selva, D. 2016. Why Choose Open Government? Motivations for the Adoption of Open Government Policies in Four European Countries. Policy and Internet. 8, 3 (2016), 225--247.
[9]
Cobo, C. 2012. Networks for citizen consultation and citizen sourcing of expertise. Contemporary Social Science. 7, 3 (2012), 283--304.
[10]
Content - Scopus - Solutions | Elsevier: 2017. https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/scopus/content. Accessed: 2017-05-04.
[11]
Deligiaouri, A. 2013. Open Governance and E-Rulemaking: Online Deliberation and Policy-Making in Contemporary Greek Politics. Journal of Information Technology and Politics. 10, 1 (2013), 104--124.
[12]
Ganapati, S. and Reddick, C.G. 2012. Open e-government in U.S. state governments: Survey evidence from Chief Information Officers. Government Information Quarterly. 29, 2 (2012), 115--122.
[13]
Ganapati, S. and Reddick, C.G. 2014. The use of ICT for open government in U.S. municipalities: Perceptions of chief administrative officers. Public Performance and Management Review. 37, 3 (2014), 365--387.
[14]
Gascó, M. 2015. Special Issue on Open Government: An Introduction. Social Science Computer Review. 33, 5 (2015), 535--539.
[15]
Gberevbie, D. et al. 2015. E-Governance: Strategy for mitigating non-inclusion of citizens in policy making in Nigeria. Proceedings of the European Conference on e-Government, ECEG (2015), 117--124.
[16]
Ginsberg, W.R. 2013. The Obama Administration's open government initiative: Issues for congress. Government Transparency and Secrecy: Measures, Access, and Policies. 85--129.
[17]
Grimmelikhuijsen, S.G. and Feeney, M.K. 2016. Developing and Testing an Integrative Framework for Open Government Adoption in Local Governments. Public Administration Review.
[18]
Grönlund, Å. 2011. Connecting eGovernment to real government - The failure of the UN e-Participation index. 10th IFIP WG 8.5 International Conference on Electronic Government, EGOV 2011.
[19]
Harrison, T.M. et al. 2011. Open government and e-government: Democratic challenges from a public value perspective. ACM International Conference Proceeding Series (2011), 245--253.
[20]
Kitchenham, B. et al. 2009. Systematic literature reviews in software engineering - A systematic literature review. Information and Software Technology.
[21]
Koussouris, S. et al. 2011. A review of the European Union e-Participation action pilot projects. Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy. 5, 1 (2011), 8--19.
[22]
Lee, G. and Kwak, Y.H. 2012. An Open Government Maturity Model for social media-based public engagement. Government Information Quarterly. 29, 4 (2012), 492--503.
[23]
Linders, D. and Wilson, S.C. 2011. What is open government? One year after the directive. ACM International Conference Proceeding Series (2011), 262--271.
[24]
Liu, H.K. 2016. Exploring Online Engagement in Public Policy Consultation: The Crowd or the Few? Australian Journal of Public Administration. 76, 1 (2016), 33--47.
[25]
Lukensmeyer, C.J. et al. 2011. Assessing Public Participation in an Open Government Era: A Review of Federal Agency Plans. AmericaSpeakers. (2011), 70.
[26]
Majumdar, S.R. 2017. The case of public involvement in transportation planning using social media. Case Studies on Transport Policy. 5, 1 (2017), 121--133.
[27]
Medaglia, R. 2012. E-Participation research: Moving characterization forward (2006-2011). Government Information Quarterly. 29, 3 (2012), 346--360.
[28]
Panopoulou, E. et al. 2010. E-Participation initiatives in Europe: Learning from practitioners. 2nd IFIP WG 8.5 International Conference on Electronic Participation, ePart 2010.
[29]
Panopoulou, E. et al. 2009. Evaluating e-Participation sophistication of regional authorities websites: The case of Greece and Spain. 1st International Conference on Electronic Participation, ePart 2009.
[30]
Panopoulou, E. et al. 2014. Success factors in designing e-Participation initiatives. Information and Organization. 24, 4 (2014), 195--213.
[31]
Reggi, L. and Dawes, S. 2016. Open government data ecosystems: Linking transparency for innovation with transparency for participation and accountability. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics).
[32]
Rexhepi, A. et al. 2016. The social networking for egovernment: An initial assessment of Web 2.0 tools used by the kosovo central government. 2nd International Conference on Recent Trends and Applications in Computer Science and Information Technology, RTA-CSIT 2016 (Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Prishtina, Saudi Arabia, 2016), 80--89.
[33]
Rose, J. and Sæbø, Ø. 2008. Establishing political deliberation systems: Key problems. 16th European Conference on Information Systems, ECIS 2008 (Galway, 2008).
[34]
Smith, S. et al. 2011. A three-layered framework for evaluating e-participation. International Journal of Electronic Governance. 4, 4 (2011), 304--321.
[35]
Susha, I. and Grönlund, Å. 2012. E-Participation research: Systematizing the field. Government Information Quarterly. 29, 3 (2012), 373--382.
[36]
Zheng, Y. 2017. Explaining Citizens' E-Participation Usage: Functionality of E-Participation Applications. Administration and Society. 49, 3 (2017), 423--442.
[37]
Zheng, Y. and Schachter, H.L. 2016. Explaining Citizens' E-Participation Use: the Role of Perceived Advantages. Public Organization Review. Reference placeholder, delete if not needed

Cited By

View all
  • (2025)E-participation in energy transitions: What does it mean? Chances and challenges within Germany's EnergiewendeTechnological Forecasting and Social Change10.1016/j.techfore.2024.123839210(123839)Online publication date: Jan-2025
  • (2024)Heterogeneous distributed problem-solving involving visual objects as boundary objectsFrontiers in Communication10.3389/fcomm.2023.12756958Online publication date: 17-Jan-2024
  • (2024)Hear Me Out: Supporting Citizens to Create Comprehensible Contributions on Urban Participation PlatformsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36869718:CSCW2(1-26)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Problem areas in e-Participation: a systematic review

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Other conferences
    ICEGOV '20: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance
    September 2020
    880 pages
    ISBN:9781450376747
    DOI:10.1145/3428502
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

    In-Cooperation

    • University of the Aegean: University of the Aegean

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 29 October 2020

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. Electronic Participation
    2. Problem areas
    3. Research
    4. e-Participation

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article
    • Research
    • Refereed limited

    Conference

    ICEGOV 2020

    Acceptance Rates

    ICEGOV '20 Paper Acceptance Rate 79 of 209 submissions, 38%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 350 of 865 submissions, 40%

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)41
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)7
    Reflects downloads up to 10 Feb 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2025)E-participation in energy transitions: What does it mean? Chances and challenges within Germany's EnergiewendeTechnological Forecasting and Social Change10.1016/j.techfore.2024.123839210(123839)Online publication date: Jan-2025
    • (2024)Heterogeneous distributed problem-solving involving visual objects as boundary objectsFrontiers in Communication10.3389/fcomm.2023.12756958Online publication date: 17-Jan-2024
    • (2024)Hear Me Out: Supporting Citizens to Create Comprehensible Contributions on Urban Participation PlatformsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36869718:CSCW2(1-26)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
    • (2024)An Overview on E-ParticipationDesign Thinking as a Strategic Approach to E-Participation10.1007/978-3-031-72160-1_3(31-56)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2024
    • (2024)The Theoretical Background on E-ParticipationDesign Thinking as a Strategic Approach to E-Participation10.1007/978-3-031-72160-1_2(11-30)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2024
    • (2024)IntroductionDesign Thinking as a Strategic Approach to E-Participation10.1007/978-3-031-72160-1_1(1-9)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2024
    • (2023)An empirical study juxtaposing the importance of implementing an e-participation model by the government for compliance intention and satisfaction level among Djiboutian generation zJournal of Governance and Administrative Reform10.20473/jgar.v4i1.457764:1(44-69)Online publication date: 6-Jun-2023
    • (2023)Sicherheit und Datenschutz in der elektronischen BeteiligungHandbuch Digitalisierung und politische Beteiligung10.1007/978-3-658-31480-4_62-1(1-13)Online publication date: 22-Apr-2023
    • (2022)Participation in Software DevelopmentInternational Journal of E-Planning Research10.4018/IJEPR.30756311:1(1-15)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2022

    View Options

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Figures

    Tables

    Media

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media