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Significance of socio-cultural, political and historical factors for the introduction of e-participation in Switzerland

Published: 27 October 2014 Publication History

Abstract

The arrival of new technologies in the public sector and the connected re-definition of ways public administrations interact with citizens is currently a burning topic. Despite numerous research projects exploring the introduction of electronic government (e-Government) from the citizens' perspective, insights on the topic from the point of view of public officials and politicians stay vastly unexplored. The objective of the present project is to respond to this gap. By evaluating the influence of factors such as the political tradition, institutional system or organisational culture, we aim to explain the relative underdevelopment of electronic participation (e-Participation) tools in Switzerland. Despite the excellent potential that Swiss authorities have at their disposal in this regard, the level of e-Participation development ranks the country far behind the leaders in the field. The main outcome of the present research will be, in the first place, exposure of principal problematic points connected to the aforementioned factors that impact on the comparative immaturity of e-Participation instruments in Switzerland and, secondly, suggestions of solutions that could open a way towards the further advancement of digital democracy.

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ICEGOV '14: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance
October 2014
563 pages
ISBN:9781605586113
DOI:10.1145/2691195
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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  • Macao Foundation, Macao SAR Govt: Macao Foundation, Macao SAR Government
  • Municipio de Guimar�es: Municipio de Guimar�es

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 27 October 2014

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Author Tags

  1. citizen-centric government
  2. civic engagement
  3. digital democracy
  4. direct democracy
  5. e-government
  6. e-participation
  7. empowerment of citizens
  8. organisational culture
  9. sociology of organisations

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ICEGOV2014
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  • Macao Foundation, Macao SAR Govt
  • Municipio de Guimar�es

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ICEGOV '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 30 of 73 submissions, 41%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 350 of 865 submissions, 40%

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