Political Participation and E-Participation

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2. Political Participation and E-Participation

According to Putnam (1993), a special attention has been drawn to the role of voluntary associations in developing civic attitudes and civic culture.

Organizations are believed to socialize their members into a democratic culture, teach them trust and cooperation, and instill habits of cooperation, solidarity and public-spiritedness in their members.

Participation in voluntary associations also provides a practical training in political skills, such as oral presentation, negotiating, bargaining, accommodation etc., and democratic procedures. It also has a positive effect on the psychological qualities of an individual regarding his civic responsibilities and capabilities including political efficacy and interest in politics.

In an early stage of his works, Putnam (1976)argues that participation also has an integrative function as it teaches solidarity, reciprocity, tolerance, mutual respect, trust, respect for justice, the rights of others and other civic virtues that allow more effective cooperation. Individual gains a greater sense of belonging to the society; this makes him understand that consideration of the public interest, not merely his immediate selfish interests, can be beneficial.

In general, these ideas stretch back to classical Greek philosophers and theorists of participatory democracy such as John Stuart Mill and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Coleman (1990) mentions that since engagement in all kinds of political activities takes time and resources, people evaluate potential consequences related to their action before doing anything. If they believe that they are likely to gain some benefits as a result of their actions and that these will improve their living standards, they are more likely to participate. Most civic activities are oriented towards the political system. If people do not believe in the responsiveness of political authorities or their own capability to have a real impact on political processes, they will probably choose not to waste their time, at least on activities oriented towards the political system.

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A number of studies have demonstrated the importance of political efficacy for political participation including voting and other time-based tasks (Almond & Verba, 1989; Verba et al., 1995). Efficacy is needed both for unconventional activities and for effective conventional political participation with involvement in civic associations. It affects both the extent and the character of participation. People who feel politically efficacious are much more likely to become actively in to follow politics, for example, to discuss politics, to be more active partisans and to be more engaged in political activities.

Shapiro and Winters (2008) emphasize that political participation in a democracy can be viewed in many forms, ranging from voting for representatives at regular intervals to voting on policies in referenda, forming political groups, and engaging in legal or illegal protest. The individuals engaged in such participation likely to expect, or at least, hope that these actions will have some impact on the content of government policies. However, in globalization, political participation is not limited in public space or political system. It can be found in cyber space or web 2.0 which is called e-participation.

On the other hand, Raya Al-Dalou and Emad Abu-Shanab (2013) argues that e-participation aims at achieving many goals such as using available technologies to support active citizenship, enabling broader participation for reaching a wider audience, and enabling more informed citizens’ contributions through providing accessible and understandable information to target audience. In this vein, many studies also have been done to differentiate whether this new digital form of participation (e-participation) is really an extension of the conventional participation or whether it is able to produce new forms of participation.

Moreover, Saebo and Flak (2008)introduce two forms of participation.

The first form is government driven participation where e-participation is the responsibility of the government, and it is also primarily enacted by governments. The second is citizen-driven participation which means that the technology adaption and development are not only the responsibility of the government but also a social movement made and driven by citizens and enabled by network. The European Commission (2005)declared that e-participation is reconnecting ordinary people with politics and policy-making and making the decision-making processes easier to

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understand through the use of new ICT. However, many other definitions focus on the same principles where most of them relate e-participation directly to e-democracy, focus on citizens and governments as major poles in the e-participation process, and introduce ICT as a facilitator for this process and an enabler for communication bypassing time or space limits.

As a result, based on the importance of e-participation, many initiatives have been launched to achieve better and greater participation of citizens. In doing so, many institutions and governments optionally implement the recommendations of international organizations such as the United Nations, OECD and the World Bank.

In some cases, many of them were constrained by the forces of globalism, economic crises and the change in technology.

The key dimensions of e-participation must be defined. Wimmer (2007) uses DEMO-net²and develops a model to present ontology for describing the most important dimensions of e-participations for many goals. These dimensions are the stages of policy-making, level of engagement, stakeholders in e-participation and participation areas. Participation areas are defined as being supported by different e-participation tools and these tools are based on different emerging technologies.

Machintoch (2004) introduces ten of these key dimensions as a benchmark for many e-participation research studies, these dimensions include the stages of policy-making, levels of participation, stakeholders in e-participation, rules of engagement, duration and sustainability, accessibility, resources and promotion, evaluation and outcome, e-participation areas and critical success factor.

The United Nation report(2012) recognizes the relevance of e-participation in all aspects which are e-information, e-consultation and e-decision making. It assesses how governments interact with citizens by using blogs, chats, SMS, Facebook, Twitter and others. The same report concludes that Web 2.0 tools and social networks have created a new environment that should be incorporated into the day-to-day activities for politicians and decision makers. In 2012, some developing countries were included to the e-participation top list together with Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Colombia and Chile.

2A European Community funded a network of Europe’s leading e-participation researchers.

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Therefore, initiatives nowadays bring groups and individuals together by using social media. They amplify their voices and make their expectations, desires and frustrations in public. Some of these initiatives have demonstrated the competence to mobilize people and networks and to push government for action.

Internet enables connection of various networked local events to occur in different parts of the world. While the network is global, events are local. New geographies are thus formed as exploding contextual limits and boundaries between localities and previous hierarchies of scale. We can say that the public sphere has become hybrid as it incorporates virtual and geographical spaces, and traditional and social media.