Electronic Participation

This analysis of how the ability to participate in society online affects political and economic opportunity finds that technology use matters in wages and income and civic participation and voting. Just as education has promoted democracy and economic growth, the Internet has the potential to benefit society as a whole. Digital citizenship, or the ability to participate in society online, promotes social inclusion. But statistics show that significant segments of the population are still excluded from digital citizenship. The authors of this book define digital citizens as those who are online daily. By focusing on frequent use, they reconceptualize debates about the digital divide to include both the means and the skills to participate online. They offer new evidence (drawn from recent national opinion surveys and Current Population Surveys) that technology use matters for wages and income, and for civic engagement and voting. Digital Citizenship examines three aspects of participation in society online: economic opportunity, democratic participation, and inclusion in prevailing forms of communication. The authors find that Internet use at work increases wages, with less-educated and minority workers receiving the greatest benefit, and that Internet use is significantly related to political participation, especially among the young. The authors examine in detail the gaps in technological access among minorities and the poor and predict that this digital inequality is not likely to disappear in the near future. Public policy, they argue, must address educational and technological disparities if we are to achieve full participation and citizenship in the twenty-first century.

This book analyzes e-participation in smart cities. In recent decades, information and communication technologies (ICT) have played a key role in the democratic political and governance process by allowing easier interaction between governments and citizens, and the increased ability of citizens to participate in the production chain of public services. E-participation plays and important role in the development of smart cities and smart communities , but it has not yet been extensively studied. This book fills that gap by combining empirical and theoretical research to analyze actual practices of citizen involvement in smart cities and build a solid framework for successful e-participation in smart cities. The book is divided into three parts. Part I discusses smart technologies and their role in improving e-participation in smart cities. Part II deals with models of e-participation in smart cities and the organization issues affecting the implementation of e-participation; these chapters analyze the efficiency of governance models in relation to the establishment of smart cities. Part III proposes incentives to motivate increased participation by governments and cititzenry within the smart cities context. Written by an international panel of experts and practitioners, this book will be a convenient source of information on e-participation in smart cities and will be valuable to academics, researchers, policy-makers, public managers, citizens, international organizations and anyone who has a stake in enhancing citizen engagement in smart cities.

Media Studies.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a [CC BY-NC-ND 4.0] License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com. Exploring academic and policy thinking on e-participation, this book opens up the organizational and institutional 'black box' and provides new insights into how public administrations in 15 European states have facilitated its implementation.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th IFIP WG 8.5 International Conference on Electronic Participation, ePart 2016, held in Guimarães, Portugal, in September 5-8, 2016. The 14 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 31 submissions. The papers reflect completed multi-disciplinary research ranging from policy analysis and conceptual modeling to programming and visualization of simulation models. They are organized in four topical threads: theoretical foundations; critical reflections; implementations; policy formulation and modeling.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 15th IFIP WG 8.5 International Conference on Electronic Participation, ePart 2023, held in Budapest, Hungary, in September 2023, in conjunction with the IFIP WG 8.5 Conference on Electronic Government (EGOV 2023) and the Conference for E-Democracy and Open Government Conference (CeDEM 2023). A total of 38 full papers has been carefully reviewed and selected from 106 submissions. Eight of the accepted papers are included in this book. They were organized in topical sections as follows: E-participation; digital transformation; digital technology; and digital sovereignty.

This book explores the potential of the Internet for enabling new and flexible political participation modes. It meticulously illustrates how the Internet is responsible for citizens' participation practices from being general, high-threshold, temporally constricted, and dependent on physical presence to being topic-centered, low-threshold, temporally discontinuous, and independent from physical presence. With its ethnographic focus on Icelandic and German online participation tools Betri Reykjavík and LiquidFriesland, the book offers plentiful advice for citizens, programmers, politicians, and administrations alike on how to get the most out of online participation formats.

The development of social technologies has brought about a new era of political planning and government interactions. In addition to reducing costs in city resource management, ICT and social media can be used in emergency situations as a mechanism for citizen engagement, to facilitate public administration communication, etc. In spite of all these advantages, the application of technologies by governments and the public sector has also fostered debate in terms of cyber security due to the vulnerabilities and risks that can befall different stakeholders. It is necessary to review the most recent research about the implementation of ICTs in the public sector with the aim of understanding both the strengths and the vulnerabilities that the management models can entail. Digital Government and Achieving E-Public Participation: Emerging Research and Opportunities is a collection of innovative research on the methods and applications of ICT implementation in the public sector that seeks to allow readers to understand how ICTs have forced public administrations to undertake reforms to both their workflow and their means of interacting with citizens. While highlighting topics including e-government, emergency communications, and urban planning, this book is ideally designed for government officials, public administrators, public managers, policy holders, policymakers, public consultants, professionals, academicians, students, and researchers seeking current research on the digital communication channels between elected officials and the citizens they represent.