Governments across Europe are confronted with a growing public indifference and lack of interest towards formal political processes. A decrease in voting activity and factions of decision-making power are common concerns for all European countries. Modern western democracies suffer from a decline of trust by their citizens and the model of representative democracy is being disputed.

In this context, governments seek to promote participation in order to improve the efficiency, approval, and legitimacy of political processes.

Efforts to engage people in the political process have led to ‘public participation’ which can be defined as the process by which public concerns, needs, and values are incorporated into governmental and corporate decision making.

The value of public participation is that “administration can learn from the citizen and vice versa in an environment of mutual enrichment”.

Public participation encompasses a group of procedures designed to consult, involve, and inform the public in order to allow those affected by a decision to have an input into that decision. As technological developments mature and are diffused widely, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) can play an important role in helping to address new challenges in the involvement of citizens in decisions-making. The field of public participation has recently been facilitated with ICT, thus leading to the field of eParticipation.  Associated concerns exist as to the extent which such activities widen representative participation, or amplify existing participation .

eParticipation has thus emerged as a field of study in order to address these challenges.

Therefore, a definition of eParticipation according to FP6 DEMO-net project is: “eParticipation describes efforts to broaden and deepen political participation by enabling citizens to connect with one another and with their elected representatives and governments by using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). 

The research field of eParticipation is multidisciplinary whose definition is still under development.  Therefore, there are a number of different perspectives and approaches that are often difficult to relate to a common framework.

A layered eParticipation framework begins with the democratic process, which includes participation areas where citizens can interact with their representatives or between themselves.  This is followed by: participatory techniques which include the methods used to engage and involve citizens in the democratic process, ICT tools that can be used to enhance and support techniques, and the technological tools that are used.

A simpler framework suggests that eParticipation consists of three main domains of interest: participation areas, tools, and technologies.

Participation areas are the specific area or areas of citizen engagement and involvement in the democratic process.  These participation areas are all supported by one or more tools.  These tools include Web logs and Web portals to the more sophisticated consultation platforms, e-Petitioning systems, and virtual communities. Finally, there is a strong dependency between eParticipation tools and ICT technologies. Some of the technologies that underpin typical eParticipation applications and tools are the following: Web Services, Data Mining, Ontological Engineering and Semantic Web, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Mobile Technologies (e.g. WAP)

Some researchers suggest that the involvement of public in decision-making represents a redistribution of power from authorities to citizens. Since eParticipation involves researchers from technological domains as well as those from the political sciences, cross disciplinary practical and theoretical perspectives need to be merged in order to gain a more holistic view of eParticipation.

Dr. Efthimios Tambouris, tambouris@uom.gr