Governments worldwide realize the importance of strengthening active participation of citizens in the political process. By recognizing the need for engaging the social intelligence of citizens, governments will be able to govern more effectively and credibly. The field of public participation has been recently enhanced with the adoption of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) thus...

This contribution explores the importance of independent organizations in authoritarian regimes. While some authoritarian governments delegate policy tasks to (relatively) autonomous agencies simply in order to improve their domestic or international image as modern political leaders or to build up democratic facades to conceal the actual nature of their regime, other political leaders do so in...

E-services have been gaining increasing importance in the public sector over recent years. But even though e-services help governments in many ways – for example by increasing agency efficiency or enabling citizens to participate in democratic processes – citizen e-services usage rates still lag behind expectations in many countries to date. This article analyzes the reasons why citizens do not...

Disputes concerning industrial legacies such as the disposal of toxic wastes illustrate changing pressures on corporations and governments. Business and governments are now confronted with managing the expectations of a society increasingly aware of the social and environmental impacts and risks associated with economic development and demanding more equitable distribution and democratic manage...

Social acceleration – the progressively faster rate of technological, social and life-pace change poses a dilemma for democratic problem solving: It increases amount new problems emerging on political agenda hence amplifies demand rapid effective policy solutions. Democratic politics is, however, slow. So either system speeds up decision making at cost democracy, or it holds to democracy solvin...

The use of Information Technologies in government (or e-government) has evolved during the last few years to make the interactions between government and citizens (G2C), government and businesses (G2B), and inter-agency relationships (G2G) more effective, democratic and transparent [1,6,8]. Moreover, in the most recent years we have observed two important trends with an impact in all these inte...

The trend towards more user contributions on the web and an increased interest in social media technology, from both governments and citizens, leads to new potentials and challenges in designing for citizen-government interactions. For several years now, governments have recognised the potential of the web 2.0 to bring citizens and their governments closer together. Indeed, the social web holds...

The article addresses the claim that the "left populist" governments of Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela failed to effectively reduce inequality in the 2000s. The author examines the econometric evidence presented by McLeod and Lustig (2011) that the "social democratic" governments of Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay were more successful and shows that McLeod and Lustig's results are highly...