Methodology of Comprehensive e-participation Index

Abstract

The e-participation refers to participation of citizens in the governance process through ICTs. Importance of e-participation is growing with rapid technological changes and increasing use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), overcoming limitations of physical participations in terms of time and distance. Ignoring the issues relating to augmentation of dimensions and indicators, the paper describes methodological shortcomings of existing measures of e-participation and suggests a method of comprehensive e-participation index ( covering both supply and demand sides. CEPI involves transformation of each sub-indices and component indices to normally distributed scores. Normality enables meaningful arithmetic aggregation of scores of sub-indices, dimensions and CEPI as sum of dimension scores. The proposed CEPI avoids scaling and satisfies desired properties enabling meaningful comparisons, better ranking, classification of countries and also facilitates testing hypothesis of equality of CEPI means for two countries, assessment of progress and testing significance of growth registered by a country or a group of countries. Elasticity of dimension as ratio of change in CEPI due to unit change in the dimension can be used to rank the dimensions. Policy makers and researchers may take advantages of the proposed method to find relationship between supply and demand sides of e-participation.