How IT allows E-Participation in Policy-Making Process

TL;DR

This paper reviews how information and communication technologies enable e-participation in policy-making, analyzing performance indicators and tools, highlighting challenges and potential for future growth.

Contribution

It provides a unifying definition of e-participation and assesses its current limitations and potential based on interdisciplinary literature.

Findings

E-participation has significant potential for enhancing citizen engagement.

Current implementations often fall short of expectations.

There is a need for better policies and tools to realize e-participation's full potential.

Abstract

With the art and practice of government policy-making, public work, and citizen participation, many governments adopt information and communication technologies (ICT) as a vehicle to facilitate their relationship with citizens. This participation process is widely known as E-Participation or Electronic Participation. This article focuses on different performance indicators and the relevant tools for each level. Despite the growing scientific and pragmatic significance of e-participation, that area still was not able to grow as it was expected. Our diverse set of knowledge and e-participation policies and its implementation is very limited. This is the key reason why e-participation initiatives in practice often fall short of expectations. This study collects the existing perceptions from the various interdisciplinary scientific literature to determine a unifying definition and demonstrates the strong abilities of e-participation and other related components which have great potential in the coming years.