Evaluating parliamentary e-participation

Although many countries today exploit the potential of ICT for supporting citizenspsila engagement in the democratic processes and invest significant amounts of money in e-participation, have do not pay corresponding attention in evaluating these efforts. In this direction, this paper describes a framework that has been developed for evaluating e-participation pilots in the legislation development processes of parliaments. The proposed framework is based on a) the objectives and basic characteristics of the dasiatraditionalpsila public participation, the e-participation and the legislation development processes, and b) the existing frameworks for the evaluation of information systems, e-participation and traditional public participation. It includes four evaluation perspectives: process, system, context and outcomes evaluation, each of them being analysed into a number of evaluation criteria/variables; also, it includes the assessment of associations between the assessed values of outcomes evaluation factors on one hand and the assessed values of the context, process and system evaluation factors on the other, in order to identify the reasons of positive of negative outcomes.

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