Table 5: Barriers
Donald Norris and Christopher Reddick
2006 2011 Number Percent Number Percent
Lack of funding 504 75.7 515 83.5 Need to upgrade technology infrastructure 408 62.2 403 69.6
Lack of technology staff 419 63.3 359 60.7
Concerns that the digital divide would prevent participations |
290 |
47.2 |
299 |
55.7 |
by some citizens |
|
|
|
|
Concerns that unrepresentative groups would dominate e‐ |
188 |
31.4 |
263 |
49.3 |
participation channels |
|
|
|
|
Difficulty justifying the cost of e‐participation applications |
‐ |
‐ |
259 |
48.2 |
When we have provided opportunities or mechanisms for e‐ |
173 |
30.9 |
247 |
47.8 |
participation, few citizens participated |
|
|
|
|
Issues around security |
335 |
53.9 |
262 |
47.1 |
Lack of demand by citizens 396 60.3 257 45.8 Lack of technology expertise 265 41.7 240 42.9
Issues around privacy 267 44.1 227 42.5 Lack of demand by elected officials 377 57.7 233 42.1 Lack of demand from elected officials 169 27.7 190 36.5
Lack of information about e‐participation applications ‐ ‐ 169 32.9 Inadequate bandwidth ‐ ‐ 142 27.0
Lack of support from top administrators ‐ ‐ 68 13.0
Note: Blank spaces indicate that the question was not asked in that year. Table 6: Do elected officials in your local government actively promote or give attention to e‐participation?
2006 2011 Number Percent Number Percent
Don’ t promote, give little or no attention to 363 49.5 243 38.0 Promote some, give some attention 207 28.2 199 31.1 Actively promote, give great attention 163 22.2 198 30.9
Table 7: Do top appointed officials in your local government actively promote or give attention to e‐ participation?
2006 2011
Don’ t promote, give little or no attention to 260 35.9 152 24.1 Promote some, give some attention 210 29.0 203 32.2 Actively promote, give great attention 253 35.0 275 43.6
Finally, we wanted to know whether these local governments perceived any citizen demand for e‐participation( Table 8). This, too, could be important to an understanding of why so few local governments had adopted e‐ participation. Here we asked whether citizens or grassroots organizations actively pushed for e‐participation opportunities. We asked the respondents to answer based on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 meaning no citizen demand and 5 meaning significant citizen demand. For ease of analysis, we collapsed responses 1 and 2 to mean little or no citizen demand, 3 to mean some citizen demand, and 4 and 5 to mean significant citizen demand.
The data suggest a slight trend in the direction of greater citizen demand, but the trend is so small that it could be an artifact of the survey, rather than an indication of anything substantive. The percentage of governments indicating the existence of significant citizen demand nearly doubled between 2006 and 2011, but only from
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