A research framework for citizen participation via e-Consultation

Abstract

The objective of engaging citizens in government decision making is renewed with the opportunities offered by IT. One such instance of ICT applications is e-Consultation. In this paper we present a research framework for investigating citizen participation in the context of e-Consultation. The framework is developed by first examining existing participation theories from political science literature. The diverse perspectives offered by the different theories are compared and integrated to derive classes of factors pertinent to citizen participation. As we are interested in understanding how citizen participation can be facilitated via e-Consultation, we also investigate the IT factors that may be relevant to participation in the electronic context. The end result is the construction of an integrated framework that can guide research in the study of electronic participation in a systematic manner. Future research directions are also suggested.