Explaining Citizens’ E-Participation Use: the Role of Perceived Advantages

This article analyzes some of the reasons people choose e-participation over traditional involvement forums as a way of having public policy input. The research aimed to see whether people perceived that e-participation has time, cost, quality, and transparency advantages over traditional participation channels which some researchers have suggested is the case. The study also wanted to investigate whether perceiving one or more of these advantages has an impact on whether a person uses e-participation. Using data from the 2012 EU eGovernment Benchmark-User survey we found that people who perceive these advantages are more likely to use e-participation but the various advantages have different impacts. Saving time has the strongest impact on use. Perceiving quality and transparency advantages also impacts use, but a perceived cost advantage does not. In addition, we found that people are more likely to use e-participation if they are satisfied with a jurisdiction’s website and application design. These findings have implications for how governments should design and market websites if they want to increase e-participation.