Participatory policy process design: lessons learned from three European regions

Electronic Participation (eParticipation) generally refers to the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to enhance people's activism and citizens' involvement in public affairs—with a particular emphasis on legislation and policy-making—of modern democratic societies. Recently the fastest growth of both 'top-down' (i.e. Government-driven) and 'bottom-up' (i.e. spontaneously emerging from the citizenry) eParticipation experiments in Western Europe and elsewhere, has inspired a number of interpretive frameworks, which have been developed by several leading scholars, such as Anttiroiko, ¹ Macintosh, ² Tambouris et at., ³ Kalampokis et al., ⁴ Aichholzer and Westholm, ⁵ and Bicking and Wimmer, ⁶ with the aim of scoping, characterizing and evaluating this relatively new phenomenon and its reported impact on civic engagement, as well as on Public Administration's innovation.