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International E-Government Development pp 73–96Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Democratizing Government: What We Know About E-Government and Civic Engagement

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Abstract

Civic engagement is an ideal that is sought after as the fundamental basis of democratic societies. Civic engagement is, however, difficult to attain both from the perspective of citizens’ willingness and ability to participate and government’s ability to generate such engagement. E-government can play a role in enhancing civic engagement by allowing more and better opportunities for the same. In this chapter, I explore the theoretical and empirical literature on civic engagement, e-government, and their interaction. In the process, I identify key debates surrounding civic engagement through e-government, reveal some of the nuances associated with it, and through an operationalization of civic engagement through e-government, highlight the tools and techniques that are used to achieve it.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See (Bachen et al. 2008) for a conceptualization of youth civic engagement.

  2. 2.

    See (Kennedy 2007) for a list of public participation techniques and see (Coleman 1999) for a different version of this conceptualization.

  3. 3.

    One source for scholars interested in evaluating cases of participation in e-Governance is “Participedia,”which serves as a portal for decentralized collaborative decision making. It contains a roster of participatory governance cases from around the world. Please see: http://participedia.net/en. For a peer reviewed assessment of the Participedia project, see Fung and Warren (2011).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA

    Nina David

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  1. Nina David
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Accounting and Finance, University of Granada, Granada, Spain

    Laura Alcaide Muñoz

  2. Department of Accounting and Finance, University of Granada, Granada, Spain

    Manuel Pedro Rodríguez Bolívar

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David, N. (2018). Democratizing Government: What We Know About E-Government and Civic Engagement. In: Alcaide Muñoz, L., Rodríguez Bolívar, M. (eds) International E-Government Development . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63284-1_4

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