Proceedings of the 13 th European Conference on e - Government University of Insubria Varese , Italy 13 - 14 June 2013

Electronic democracy has been in use in many countries around the world with mixed success. With the power of the web 2.0 technologies, there are more opportunities to enhance the democratic process through the use of social networking tools. Social networks showed potential for facilitating democracy and democratic change during the Arab spring revolutions, suggesting that they could be utilized as an e‐democracy tool. This research proposed a new model of how the decision making process for local governments in Arab spring countries could be improved via social networks. Quantitative approach was used to investigate how the use of a social network amongst people living in the same suburb could improve decision‐making on the local level. Findings showed that awareness building, deliberation and consultation factors could be used to affect the decision making for their local governments.