Search results

This study aims to predict the intention to participate (ITP) in public activities by utilizing five levels of e-participation reported in the literature. The study used the levels of e-informing, e-consulting, e-involving, e-collaborating and e-empowering as predictors of the intention to participate in e-government services.

An empirical test was adopted using a survey to measure the five levels of e-participation and the dependent variable, ITP in e-government initiatives. The survey included items from previous studies translated to Arabic. Subjects responded to a five-point Likert scale to measure their perceptions regarding the sub-dimensions of each e-participation level. Statistical analyses of the collected data were conducted to test the assumed hypotheses. Multiple regression of the five predictor levels was conducted to predict the ITP in e-government services.

All the estimated means of e-participation levels were moderately perceived. The regression results indicated a significant prediction of three levels: e-informing, e-consulting and e-empowering. The other two levels (e-involving and e-collaborating) failed to predict the ITP. The coefficient of determination R² resulting from the regression test was significant at the 0.001 level, which explained 61.9 per cent of the variance in the dependent variable.

The instrument used is a newly developed one in Arabic language, which might have influenced the results. The distinction between e-involving and e-collaborating might not have been recognized by subjects, which might have increased the limitations of the study. The results of this study call for more research to validate the instrument and try to see if new statements of e-consulting and e-involving might be employed. The other side could be to reduce the levels to three levels only or merge the insignificant ones into one (four levels only).

Governments need to assert the role of citizens in the decision-making process. Such assertion is done through the e-participation process.

Jordanians perceive the e-informing and e-consulting levels to be a foundation that can be easily attained, but jumping to the e-empowering level means that the society is keen on the partnership with the government.

This study is the first to use the participation levels (five levels) as predictors of the ITP. Most studies have utilized theories such as technology acceptance model (TAM), theory of reseaoned action (TRA) and unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) and other technology adoption theories. Also, this research has established ground for an Arabic survey to measure such levels, regardless of their prediction or description purpose.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how citizens’ perception of empowerment can influence the intention to use and intention to recommend e-participation.

A research model is evaluated using structural equation modelling. An online survey questionnaire was used to collect data from 210 users of e-participation.

The results show that psychological empowerment influences the intention to use and recommend e-participation. Performance expectancy and facilitating conditions were the strongest predictors of intention to use; effort expectancy and social influence had no significant effect on the prediction of intention to use e-participation.

The use of psychological empowerment as a higher-order multidimensional construct is still insufficiently researched. Future research may explore the effect of each dimension of psychological empowerment in different scenarios of e-participation adoption. Caution is needed when generalising our findings towards the adoption of e-participation in different locations or with different participants.

The findings can help the local governments to design strategies for the promotion and diffusion of e-participation amongst the citizenry. Those strategies should focus on citizens’ perception of empowerment, thereby creating a positive attitude towards intention to use and recommend e-participation.

An innovative research model integrates the unified theory of acceptance, use of technology and psychological empowerment; the last as a higher-order construct.

Due to the increasing demand for public services, as a new form of public governance, e-participation has emerged. Scholars from various disciplines have published plenty of research results on e-participation. This paper aims to reveal the research status frontiers directly by mapping knowledge domains.

The authors take 1,322 articles on e-participation published in Web of Science from 2001 to 2017 as research object. They then run the information visualization software CiteSpace to drill deeper into the literature data.

The study found that e-participation research has the obvious interdisciplinary feature; the author and institution cooperation networks with less internal cooperation are relatively sparse; the USA ranks first in the field of e-participation research, followed by the UK, with the other countries lagged behind; and e-participation through social media is gradually becoming the new research focus.

Based on the objective data and information visualization technology, the research intuitively reveals the research status and development trend of e-participation.

This paper aims to examine citizen interaction with e‐government using three e‐participation models. The two major research questions of this paper are: what is the current level of e‐participation in the USA?; and what factors explain why citizens participate in online government?

Survey evidence of citizens in the USA and their use of e‐participation is examined using quantitative methods.

Citizens were most likely to use e‐participation for management activities. Citizens were much less likely to use the internet for more advanced consultative and participatory activities. Using regression analysis, factors such as demand by citizens for e‐government, the digital divide, and political factors influenced the level of e‐participation.

The results of this study imply that governments should do more to stimulate demand for e‐government, address issues of the digital divide, and provide for more open and transparent government. A limitation of this study is its focus on e‐participation through a survey instrument, which does not consider all possible forms of e‐participation.

For e‐participation to blossom, governments should do more to promote citizens' demand for e‐government, bridge the digital divide, and promote more open and transparent government.

Existing research on e‐participation has focused on theory building and case studies; this paper provides empirical evidence, through a survey, of the level of e‐participation and factors that promote e‐participation.

There are Increasing applications of e-procurement by government along with active e-commerce by the private sector in an advanced information society. The Korea e-Procurement System (G2B) is recognized as a successful example of substantially enhancing procurement process efficiency by making it transparent and professional. An analytic work is needed to systematically assess the functionality and role of the system. This paper's purpose is the exploratory study on a mature indicator of evaluation of public e-procurement systems. This paper compares Korea’s case with those of the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand to show that in Australia and New Zealand, which are adopting a as dispersive supply method, the e-procurement system is not developed on a large scale in comparison with the US and Korea that are adopting a central supply method. There are some differences among the four countries according to the trait of their procurement institution and base value in terms of capability of system. Different usefulness for e-procurement depends on the public procurement institution in each country. This paper suggests that eprocurement systems can be used helping purchasing goods and services most reasonably. This paper can help us evaluating substantial value of eprocurement system clearly.

The purpose of this paper is to depict the present situation of e‐participation initiatives of Austrian municipalities and derives recommendations to further enhance the e‐participation sophistication level.

The findings are based on hypotheses we verified against a dataset obtained from an electronic survey among all Austrian municipalities, conducted in 2008.

The technical basis for e‐participation in Austria is well developed, yet accessibility of municipal web sites and the phrasing of information leaves space for improvement. E‐participation in Austria is still in a nascent state and requires the convergence of technical, political, legal and socio‐economic factors, which has not yet fully arrived at the municipal level.

The raw material of the survey did not allow a qualitative assessment of e‐services.

Change of law and reconsideration of opening hierarchical structures.

Recommendations of implementing e‐participation on municipal level.

Owing to the broad fragmentation of e‐government strategies and relevant regulations, the detailed results of the survey are only of limited use for comparability to other surveys in this domain. The identified factors for e‐accessibility and the derived measures for e‐participation thereupon are a new approach and will help further research and surveys to define an e‐participation assessment framework.

The purpose of this study is to explore whether immersive virtual reality (VR) can complement e-participation and help alleviate some major obstacles that hinder effective communication and collaboration. Immersive virtual reality (VR) can complement e-participation and help alleviate some major obstacles hindering effective communication and collaboration. VR technologies boost discussion participants' sense of presence and immersion; however, studying emerging VR technologies for their applicability to e-participation is challenging because of the lack of affordable and accessible infrastructures. In this paper, the authors present a novel framework for analyzing serious social VR engagements in the context of e-participation.

The authors propose a novel approach for artificial intelligence (AI)-supported, data-driven analysis of group engagements in immersive VR environments as an enabler for next-gen e-participation research. The authors propose a machine-learning-based VR interactions log analytics infrastructure to identify behavioral patterns. This paper includes features engineering to classify VR collaboration scenarios in four simulated e-participation engagements and a quantitative evaluation of the proposed approach performance.

The authors link theoretical dimensions of e-participation online interactions with specific user-behavioral patterns in VR engagements. The AI-powered immersive VR analytics infrastructure demonstrated good performance in automatically classifying behavioral scenarios in simulated e-participation engagements and the authors showed novel insights into the importance of specific features to perform this classification. The authors argue that our framework can be extended with more features and can cover additional patterns to enable future e-participation immersive VR research.

This research emphasizes technical means of supporting future e-participation research with a focus on immersive VR technologies as an enabler. This is the very first use-case for using this AI and data-driven infrastructure for real-time analytics in e-participation, and the authors plan to conduct more comprehensive studies using the same infrastructure.

The authors’ platform is ready to be used by researchers around the world. The authors have already received interest from researchers in the USA (Harvard University) and Israel and run collaborative online sessions.

The authors enable easy cloud access and simultaneous research session hosting 24/7 anywhere in the world at a very limited cost to e-participation researchers.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the very first attempt at building a dedicated AI-driven VR analytics infrastructure to study online e-participation engagements.

The purpose of the present paper is to attempt to examine the determinants of citizens’ electronic participation with respect to the communication aspects. To accomplish this objective, using the extant literature, the paper delineated factors that determine and the theories that can explain citizens’ e-participation. An analysis of citizens’ democratic communication through multiple e-participation forums is carried out, and the determinants of electronic participation are described in the paper.

In light of the literature, e-participation services were classified on the basis of characteristics of democratic communications. The factors that determine citizens’ online democratic participation were also identified and validated. Indian citizens who often e-participate were surveyed through online and offline questionnaires. A regression analysis of the 407 responses was carried out to predict the influence of individual, governance and technology components on various e-participation initiatives.

Citizens’ participation efficacy, value system and participation freedom were found to determine different e-participation initiatives. Further, e-participation is also found to be varyingly determined by the governance and technology components.

The theoretical contribution of this study includes the classification of determining factors and the illustrative labeling (I, G and T) for an e-participation framework. The delineation of e-participation from democratic communication aspects also contributes to the e-participation literature. However, this research had considered only one set of e-participation services and had incorporated only select forms of e-participation that are in coherence with the services selected.

Past studies often consider separate e-participation forums and infrequently report a simultaneous analysis of multiple e-participation forums. The factors that determine citizens’ e-participation from a democratic communication aspect are also inadequately discussed. The significant contribution of this study includes policy recommendations to improve e-participation in different information and communication technologies initiatives.

The purpose of this study is to measure the impact of demographic factors as determinants of citizens’ perceptions toward two dimensions of e-governance, namely: e-openness and e-participation.

A questionnaire was administered to collect data from three locations in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Demographic data were analyzed to test two dimensions, namely: e-openness and e-participation of e-governance underpinning five demographic variables. More specifically t-test and the Scheffe method of multiple comparisons were conducted on a sample of 1,500 respondents to measure the significance of gender, age, educational level, nationality and type of employment in relation to the aforementioned dimensions of e-governance.

Findings indicate that, with the exception of nationality, all other demographic variables including gender, age, education and type of employment clearly explain differences among the respondents of e-governance. Furthermore, our findings suggest that respondents perceive moderate satisfaction with one dimension, namely, e-openness, but less satisfaction with the other dimension of e-governance, namely: e-participation.

The study is limited by the exclusive emphasis of the influence of five independent demographic factors on only two dimensions of e-governance. In addition, the sample represents highly educated and experienced respondents of Internet use and thus the results might be biased. Future studies may look beyond the demographic variables by evaluating UAE citizens’ attitudes and behavior towards the adoption of e-services. Furthermore, future research could be an in-depth examination, through focus groups, of the factors that impede an active interaction in the UAE. To overcome the possibility of biasness of the results, future work should include non-users and comparing the adoption behavior of online and offline users.

The key findings are useful for policy-makers and decision-makers for a real understanding of the needs of the citizens and to re-conceptualize the government Web sites as an interactive channel of communication in enhancing transparency and participation and, therefore, to contribute to democratic process.

The primary value of this research lies in extending the understanding of citizens’ perceptions of two dimensions of e-governance according to their demographic attributes. The two dimensions of e-governance identified in this study are neither studied before in the context of Arab countries nor explored in relation to the identified demographic variables. Furthermore, this study combines the two dimensions (e-openness and e-participation) and is in contrast with previous studies which examined these two dimensions separately.