E-Democracy Systems and Participation Outcomes in Urban Governance

The concept of democracy has a long tradition of research in the political science domain. In recent years, advances in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have provided opportunities for governments to deploy systems to actively engage citizens in the agenda-setting and decision-making processes for urban governance. Consequently, e-democracy and e-participation efforts have emerged and attracted researchers’ attention in the Information Systems (IS) field. Information systems lay the foundations of active citizenry, which may impact on the participation outcome. However, in order to maximize the potential of this evolving form of democracy, researchers and practitioners need to address a number of challenges in the design of participation structures for city governance. This chapter sets out to explore e-democracy systems and their impact on a number of e-participation outcomes. Outlining both promoters and barriers of ICT use for e-democracy, the authors also uncover gaps in the previous literature and identify an agenda for future research.