Hany Abdelghaffar and Lobna Sameer
considered ( Hull , et all , 2011 ; Whyte et all , 2006 ), e‐democracy becomes unrepresentative , and potentially undemocratic ( Riley , 2003 ).
3 . Research proposed model and hypotheses development
Reviewing the literature shows that there is almost no research conducted on the use of social on improving e‐ democracy on the local government level and its impact on improving decision making . To overcome this gap , this research answers the following question : How social networks support the local government decision making to enhance e‐democracy ? Accordingly , a conceptual model is introduced ( figure 2 ) which is based on the e‐democracy lifecycle model developed by Williamson ( 2007 ). List of constructs and definitions are listed in table ( 1 ).
Figure 2 : Proposed conceptual model
3.1 Information provision
The first area of e‐democracy is information provision . Information provision is the use of internet applications by the government in a top‐down approach to provide citizens with important information ( Paivarinta and Sæbo , 2006 ). A citizen that is well informed is able to holistically see and understand the problems government could face and is better able to develop solutions for the government and effectively participate in its decision making process ( Irvin and Stansbury , 2004 ). The effect of information provision would be evident during the pre‐contemplation and contemplation stages , where citizens realize the problems in their society and start searching for solutions . Social network , as web 2.0 tool , is considered to be a powerful internet tool that allows users to access government information ( Murugesan , 2007 ). It is flexible which allows the government to customize the look and layout of their page with text and rich media contents that help citizens to understand the pushed information to them ( Cormode and Kirshnamurthy , 2008 ).
Using social networks help citizens to follow the information updates provided by the government without having to log into several governmental websites . Not only this , but the government has the ability to tag the content of the pages allows for the categorization of pages , photos and videos , making it easy for users to find information relevant to the keywords they are searching for ( Murugesan , 2007 ). The content creator on the social network can publish the content to subscribers on different web 2.0 websites , and then this information is pushed to citizens or pulled by them in different ways . Therefore , social networks would be a good tool for information provision to citizens as governments could easily update their pages online with the information
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