A Comparative Analysis of Local Agenda 21 Websites in Turkey in Terms of E-Participation

Local Agenda 21 (LA 21) is a democracy project aiming to enhance the public’s participation in the processes of political and administrative decision-making. E-government, in its own right as a facilitator of participation, is a functional instrument for LA 21s in terms of ensuring the public participation and implementing governance model. In this context, this study aims to examine whether the LA 21s benefit from the e-participation opportunities over the websites in Turkey. According to the findings of empirical research, the LA 21s in Turkey do not offer a wide of number of e-participation services on their websites. LA 21s do not provide real e-participation practices allowing an interaction among the citizens, partners and the officials, elevating the citizens to the position of partners, enhancing their participation and improving the notion of democracy in Turkey.

Ontology Driven E-Government

Expectations of citizens concerning the quality of electronically available public services are steadily increasing. Thus more and more of these services are fully transactional (Layne und Lee, 2001) and offer tight integration of electronic access and underlying processes. Whereas this leads to better results in the terms of time, convenience and correctness, software systems become more complex and development effort rises as well. On the other hand, in the field of software engineering there exist several recommendations and approaches to reduce development time and increase the degree of software re-use. Some of these recommendations are known for decades (McIlroy, 1968). One approach that tries to tackle this problem at the very beginning of the development circle is Model Driven Architecture (MDA) (Miller et al, 2001). The core idea behind MDA is the creation of a comprehensive system model that is based on several abstraction levels (OMG, 2002). These different modeling layers as well as a set of transformations between them allow for the automatic generation of most of the code needed. Whereas typically UML 2, which is also based on the same multi-layer modeling approach, is used to create the required abstract descriptions, there already exist some efforts to extend MDA to semantic web technologies as well (OMG, 2006). This chapter describes an approach to apply an MDA-like methodology, which is entirely based on a semantic model to the e-Government domain. The goals are to ease access to e-Government services, provide a new level of user experience and of course to reduce the implementation and maintenance effort while significantly improving the overall quality of service.

Helping to Bridge the Digital Divide with Free Software and Services

The growing importance of digital media in citizens’ participation in government is a major issue in obtaining government services, elections and campaigning in the 21st century. In order to participate in the consumption and creation of online media, citizens must have access to, and knowledge of, appropriate technology resources. There exists a gap between those who have access to technology and those who do not A gap commonly referred to as the digital divide. While there are many different aspects to the digital divide one of them is access to the software necessary to participate in digital media. A potential solution to the software component of the digital divide is the use of open source software and free online services. Implementing these solutions can play a part in narrowing the digital divide and producing better informed citizens more capable of participating in the modern electoral process.

"Potential" Barriers to E-Government Implementation in Developing Countries

Developing countries interested in initiating E-Government will confront a number of issues and challenges in this endeavor. These issues and challenges often manifest themselves as “potential” barriers to implementation including: the lack of infrastructure; sustainability; culture; knowledge, skills, abilities, and attitudes; and, privacy and security. However, as this article shows many of these will not be “real” barriers. This article also presents a number of solutions and recommendations for the potential barriers discussed. Furthermore, research has found that local customization of E-Government will be crucial in developing countries; and, that privacy and security issues do not appear to be as big a concern as may be thought. The intent of this article is to outline the issues and challenges (potential barriers) for E-Government implementation and discuss potential solutions to these barriers, in order to generate a dialogue to establish a solid, technological and social foundation for E-Government.

Citizen Consultation from Above and Below

Citizen engagement and e-government initiatives in Australia remain somewhat underdeveloped, not least for a number of fundamental structural reasons. Fledgling initiatives can be divided into a number of broad categories, including top-down government consultation through blogs and similar experimental online sites operated by government departments; bottom-up NGO-driven watchdog initiatives such as GetUp!’s Project Democracy site, modelled on projects established in the UK; and a variety of more or less successful attempts by politicians (and their media handlers) to utilise social networking tools to connect with constituents while bypassing the mainstream media. This chapter explores these initiatives, and discusses the varying levels of success which they have found to date.

Evaluating Social Networking in Public Diplomacy

While many e-government applications have focused on governments connecting with their citizens, recently social networking tools have begun to transform the practice of public diplomacy by permitting governments to build and maintain direct relationships with citizens of other countries. In this chapter, we describe several such initiatives undertaken by the U.S. Department of State (DOS). Our particular focus is on efforts aimed at South Korea. We present results from interviews with DOS officials responsible for technology-based relationship-focused public diplomacy as well as with U.S. Embassy officials tasked with managing one of these initiatives–Café USA–and South Korean participants in Café USA. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the implications of e-government applications that cross national boundaries for our understanding of citizenship and suggestions for further research aimed at evaluating the effects of e-government applications within public diplomacy.

Perception Differences of Online Voting Between Young and Senior Voters

This chapter presents a research study that examines the antecedents to voting intention with regard to the use of computer-based, online voting systems. The research is based on the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) model. Subjects from two different age groups (18-to-25 and 60+ years) in the United States are surveyed to determine the factors affecting their intent to use online voting systems. The results indicate that performance expectancy, social influence, and computer anxiety are factors affecting the intent to use online voting. Significant differences were found between the young adults (18-to-25) and seniors (60+ years) study groups on all four independent variables as well as on intent to use online voting. For young adults performance expectancy, social influence, and computer anxiety are significant factors affecting the intent to use online voting, while for senior citizens, performance expectancy and computer anxiety are significant factors. Ease of use was not a significant indicator of intent to use online voting for either group.

Deliberation, Participation, and "Pockets" of E-Democracy

Over the past few decades, researchers have attempted to unravel the puzzle of whether or not democracy exists online. According to recent evaluations (Norris, 2001; Hindman, 2009), while we find that the ‘Net may have the potential to help spread democracy through its open-endeddiscussions and mass appeal, it has deteriorated into an elite-level discourse due to what is commonly referred to as the “Long Tail” effect (Anderson, 2006) by researchers. This chapter reevaluates the popular theories of democracy online and calls into question the relevance of the question “does digital democracy exist?” Instead, I propose that digital democracy should be evaluated in terms of the sustainability of democratic tendencies within a given site, rather than its mere existence. I argue that scholars have jumped to the conclusion that the potential for democracy online has withered because they have focused too heavily on how a few key websites function to control the majority of traffic on the Web, and have not looked deeper into the infrastructure that is built within these websites and others to evaluate whether or not at a micro-level these sites act and public forums for the open deliberation of ideas and common questions. Instead of viewing democracy through a democratic lens based on liberal proceduralism, we should think of digital democracy existing in “pockets” – self-contained, community-based, democracy based on small, semi-autonomous, group dynamics.

24-7 Government, the Permanent Campaign, and e-Democracy

This chapter traces the evolution of Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick’s website through content analysis of its features and functionality, participation rates and website traffic data, reactions of legislators, media and public, and interviews with the site’s designer and director of the Governor’s political committee. The chief attributes of the permanent campaign, polling, fundraising and public posturing, are all in evidence on the site. Devalpatrick.com provides informative resources on a variety of policy questions that are designed to promote his legislative agenda. It also supports features that allow visitors to interact with the Governor’s team, such as posts and contributions, although visitors cannot contact the Governor, state or local officials, or other political entities directly from the site. Although devalpatrick.com is not able to deliver on high level e-participation goals, the level of citizen engagement it does offer is unique among U.S. elected officials.

UK E-Voting

This chapter evaluates the UK government strategy to promote electronic voting through the public policy process as an integral part of the e-government agenda to enhance participatory democracy. It argues that the formulation of the present policy is flawed as it lacks a diffusion strategy to enhance the likelihood of policy adoption. The electoral modernisation policy arose from concerns regarding the falling voter turnout at elections and is being introduced via local authorities through a series of voluntary pilot schemes. If issues influencing local authority pilot participation are not resolved e-voting may be permanently rejected by local elected representatives and so will not be available to citizens. This author identifies variables influencing pilot participation and suggests a revised public policy model incorporating selected diffusion concepts at the formulation stage of the linear policy process. The model is used to propose recommendations to enhance the likelihood of voluntary adoption of a policy introduced by central government for voluntary implementation by local government.