Increasing citizen participation in e-participatory budgeting processes

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we explore ways of creating and strengthening e-democracy on the local government level by means of e-participatory budgeting projects. Having analyzed the existing realm of work on e-democracy values and outputs, we attempt to structure and delineate them by designing a theoretical framework. Its goal is to acquire an understanding of what features are required to generate relevance and participation in the projects. To test the validity of the framework, a case study of one of the Estonian local government e-participatory budgeting projects is selected for analysis. Additionally, the aspects and role of information systems are investigated that enhance digital transformation, decision-making processes, engagement of citizens, and public servants in the context of e-democracy.

KEYWORDS:

• E-participatory budgeting
• e-participation
• e-democracy
• e-democracy outputs
• theoretical framework

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anders Røsten Mærøe

Anders Mærøe, M.Sc., works in the Norwegian public sector as a consultant and project manager. Academic background in Political Science from the University of Oslo (B.S.) and e-Governance Technologies and Services at Tallinn University of Technology (M.Sc.). Is currently working in the EU Horizon 2020 ETAPAS research project, with the aim of introducing a practical framework to offer a first-time assessment methodology capable of measuring and mitigating ethical, societal, and legal risks of disruptive technologies.

Alexander Norta

Alex Norta is currently a research member at the Faculty of Software Science/TalTech where is the principal investigator of the Blockchain Technology Group and heads the IEEE Blockchain Estonia section. He was earlier a researcher at the Oulu University Secure-Programming Group (OUSPG) after having been a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He received his M.Sc. degree (2001) from the Johannes Kepler University of Linz, Austria, and his Ph.D. degree (2007) from the Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. His Ph.D. thesis was partly financed by the IST project CrossWork, in which he focused on developing the eSourcing concept for dynamic inter-organizational business process collaboration. His research interests include business-process collaboration, workflow management, e-business transactions, service-oriented computing, software architectures, and software engineering, ontologies, mashups, social web. At the IEEE EDOC12- conference, Alex won the best-paper award for his full research paper with the title Inter-enterprise business transaction management in open service ecosystems. For the blockchain-tech startups Qtum.org, Agrello.org, and Everex.io, Alex has worked on their respective whitepapers. Alex also serves as an advisor for several other blockchain-tech startups such as Cashaa and RecordGram.

Valentyna Tsap

Valentyna Tsap holds an M.Sc. in Computer Engineering degree from Tallinn University of Technology since 2017. Since 2017 she holds an Estonian Ph.D. state scholarship and, furthermore, is an early-stage researcher at Tallinn University of Technology. Her main research field is public acceptance of eID. She has been involved in several international projects with respect to developing various e-governance solutions.

Ingrid Pappel

Ingrid Pappel, Ph.D., is an Assoc. Prof., a faculty member of the School of IT, and the head of the Master's program e-Governance Technologies and Services at Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia. She has nearly 20 years of experience and has been active in different development projects related to e-governance solutions. Additionally, Assoc. Prof. Pappel is an active entrepreneur. She has been also actively involved in diverse projects aimed to consult different countries on digitizing governments and going paperless in cooperation with the Estonian e-Governance Academy. Additionally, she has been advising different universities on how to develop curricula in digital transformation.