Towards a social network e-government agenda?: measuring participation 2.0 in the Arab world

Inspired by the reported use of Web 2.0-based applications to stir national revolutions in the Arab World, and the potential of this technology to increase transparency and engage citizens in decision-making processes as documented by research in e-government, this study explores to what extent Arab League nations are using "democratic" features in their government websites and how citizens have responded to these initiatives. It does this by comparing (1) the information access and opportunities for participation offered in their portals with non-Arab countries, (2) and the traffic to governmental websites and number of citizens (viewers, fans, followers) engaged by their social media applications. For this purpose, 160 websites from 82 different countries were examined. Results show that although non-Arab countries allow users to get access to more information and present more social media applications with a higher number of citizens participating on them as viewers, fans, and followers, surprisingly no differences were found in terms of participatory features and local traffic rank in governmental websites. Six countries were selected as case studies to lend evidence to the results.