E-participation in the era of web 2.0: factors affecting citizens' active e-participation in local governance

• Authors: Jooho Lee;Soonhee Kim
• Venue: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance
• Year: 2012

The study develops a model of active e-participation and tests it in the context of local governance. By building on and extending the existing literature on citizen participation, technology acceptance model and social networks, the study asserts that citizens' perceptions of the intrinsic and instrumental value of participation, and the strength of their social networks are associated with their active e-participation. Using the 2009 E-Participation Survey data collected from Seoul Metropolitan Government, we found that e-participants actively use e-participation when they perceive a greater intrinsic value of e-participation. By further analyzing Male and Female models separately, we also found that male e-participants who perceive greater instrumental value of e-participation are likely to use e-participation actively. The findings, however, indicate that women who perceived a greater intrinsic value of e-participation and are embedded in weaker offline social networks are likely to actively use e-participation.