eParticipation: Citizen Engagement, Challenges, and Technologies for a Two-way Relationship

Abstract

Digital technologies and social networks have transformed the ways citizens interact with governments and participate in democratic and consultative processes. This article reviews eParticipation as the use of Internet-based technologies to support active citizenship, broaden access to participation, and foster more open relationships between institutions and society. It also emphasizes that providing digital channels does not automatically produce meaningful engagement and that technologies can introduce risks such as censorship, information control, misinformation, and declining institutional trust. The work focuses particularly on citizen engagement in electronic media and social networks and discusses approaches for studying and quantifying that engagement in the context of a genuinely bidirectional relationship.

Publication
_SADIO Electronic Journal of Informatics and Operations Research, 23(2), pp. 287-306, https://doi.org/10.24215/15146774e064_