E-Participation Within E-Government: A Bibliometric-Based Systematic Literature Review

Introduction

The concept and practice of e-participation are gathering interest and significance in 2020. The United Nations defined e-participation as “the process of engaging citizens through ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) in policy and decision-making to make public administration participatory, inclusive, collaborative and deliberative for intrinsic and instrumental ends” (UnitedNations, 2020). A large body of research has already pointed to the relative advantages of e-participation from the perspective of citizens and governments (Ergazakis, Metaxiotis, & Tsitsanis, 2011). The e-participation appeared as one of the top trends in the review paper (Yusuf, Adams, & Dingley, 2016) and stood as the number one published research topic in the field of Public Administration and Information Science (Jiang, Wang, & Yao, 2021). It seems apparent that citizens can benefit from their e-participation in decision making and policy formulation processes while politicians can improve their performance by better aligning policymaking and governance to public opinion as the future growth of any country is completely dependent on the quality of public policy (Dias, 2019). This is especially the case given that social networking services are increasingly ubiquitous in many countries, enabling ready-made platforms for citizens to interact and participate in governance via e-government services.

The literature review is a common approach to identify current trends and research gaps within a body of knowledge. Many types of literature reviews are available that help researchers to identify the current trends in the existing literature. One type of literature review, known as a Traditional Literature Review (TLR), provides a critical approach, evaluation, and summary of the research topics that are available in the existing research literature. However, the outcomes of this type of literature review are based on subjectivity, so it is less helpful for policy development (Jesson, Matheson, & Lacey, 2011). In addition to this, a TLR does not follow any systematic procedure to perform analysis and evaluation, so results may be varied based on the skills of the researchers. Another type of literature review is known as a Meta-Analysis Review (MAR). As statistical methods are confined in this type of review, it is essential for researchers to have a basic knowledge of statistics. The statistical techniques can be developed to combine quantitative results obtained from independent studies. However, meta-analysis is very much dependent on the quality of data; therefore, it is necessary to avoid any attempt to combine the data from dissimilar studies (Jesson et al., 2011). Besides the above types of literature reviews, there is another type of literature review called a Systematic Literature Review (SLR), which is very effective and common nowadays. SLR utilizes a standardized, structured, protocol-driven methodology that identifies trends in relevant studies using scientific methodology. The main goal for conducting this type of literature review is to minimize the bias and provide maximum transparency using a rigorous model to work in line with the objectives of specific review questions (Jesson & Lacey, 2006). A detailed analysis of the existing literature is presented in the next section.