Advances in information and communication technologies (ICTs) have offered governments new opportunities to enhance citizen participation in democratic processes. The participation opportunities afforded by ICT may be particularly pertinent for youths, who are more likely to be ICT-savvy and yet are reported to show declining participation in politics. The currently increasing exclusion of yout...

This study investigates the influence of citizens’ socio-economic characteristics on the presence of social media in county-level government. E-government is ostensibly citizen-driven and therefore variation in an area’s demographics would likely impact a government’s utilization of emerging technology, such as social media. Despite its transformative potential and widespread adoption, e-govern...

the concepts of democracy have been around for centuries in different fields of human sciences. however, in most of these fields the idealistic and far-fetched features attributed to democracy have not been manipulated yet. it should be mentioned that there have been only a few serious attempts to find proper go-between elements, which could make such a concept as comprehensible and tangible as...

Some literature on E-government has envisioned that the internet would foster a linear progression toward new, productive, and more democratic relationships between governments and citizens (Layne and Lee, 2001). Recent literature has questioned the pace at which these relationships are developing (Coursey and Norris, 2008). This chapter presents empirical results relating to citizen-government...

the current economic crisis that plagued the west since 2008 and followed by the occupy wall street movement in 2011, were the results of the processes started since the last years of the cold war and has turned the western capitalist system into an unstrained ideology. the neoliberal economic model, globalization of economy, limitation of the power of the national governments, the emergence of...

“transition to democracy” is one of the significant results of social movements. inefficient domination using hardware method by the control system led the west to encourage liberal democracy using software method in order to change non-democratic governments, referred to as “transition period” or velvet revolution- the approach of transition theory holds that change is also necessary in iran (...

The stability and functioning of any kind of political regime—including democratic or representative ones—relies on the combination of the capacity of rulers and government officials to use coercion and the development of political legitimacy. Political legitimacy can be described as people's recognition and acceptance of the validity of the rules of their entire political system and the decisi...