E-democracy: the fruit of e-government

Abstract

E-democracy is becoming an important topic for research after the global boom in the internet and the social media influence on societies. Using electronic channels for different aspects of democracy is becoming a necessity more than a luxury. This research tries to investigate the influence of e-government on the democratic process. E-democracy is conceptually linked to e-government, where previous research indicated such inclusion. This research proposed a framework that depicts the dimensions of e-government as a research domain. Also, utilising secondary data from two distinct sources of archival reports, this research tried to build a model for predicting the democratic level in a country (represented by the Economist Intelligence Unit democracy index) using the e-government readiness index (represented by United Nations e-government readiness index). Results indicated that a significant relationship exists between UN-EGRI and EIU-DI for 163 countries of the world. Conclusions and future work are stated at the end.