13th European Conference on eGovernment – ECEG 2013 1 | Página 396

Donald Norris and Christopher Reddick

Two activities approached half of local governments reporting. The first, enabling citizens to post comments( 49.9 percent), was not asked in 2006. The second, enabling citizens to participate in a poll or survey( 47.9 percent), was asked in 2006, when a quarter of governments( 25.2 percent) said that they had conducted web surveys. Assuming that the different wording of the questions on the two surveys did not elicit greatly differing answers, the number of governments indicating that they conduct polls or surveys nearly doubled between 2006 and 2011. Posting comments and responding to surveys or polls represents a type of active citizen participation, but it this is one‐way communication( citizen to government). As such, we cannot know the extent to which comments and survey responses actually produced meaningful results. That is, did the receiving governments use the comments and survey results? Thus, even though nearly half of governments reported adopting these e‐participation activities, the activities themselves do not permit two‐way participation.

Next in order of frequency, nearly one in three governments( 31.8 percent) had implemented online public consultations by 2011, and public consultation represents a meaningful method of active citizen participation. Moreover, the adoption of consultations increased substantially from 2006, when only 6.7 percent of governments reported them. Of the six remaining activities, none had been implemented by more than 20 percent of governments, of which three had been adopted by fewer than 10 percent.

We also asked whether local governments had future plans for undertaking e‐democracy activities. If adoption rates of these activities were low, local government plans for future adoptions were abysmal( Table 2). Here, planned adoptions rose above 10 percent of governments in 2011 for only one of the listed activities( enable citizens to view a hearing or meeting, 13.3 percent). Fewer than 10 percent of governments reported plans to adopt each of the remaining activities. These data suggest that there is unlikely to be much change in the current pattern of e‐participation among American local governments in the foreseeable future.

Table 2: Does your local government have any concrete plans for doing any of them electronically within the next 12 months?

Note: Blank spaces indicate that the question was not asked in that year.

Next we inquired about why local governments engage in e‐participation projects and activities( Table 3). We did not ask this question in 2006. The great majority( 82.5 percent) responded that it was“ the right thing to

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