Abstract—The impact of ICT on public service delivery has
been debated in the form of e-government, e-democracy
e-participation and e-governance. The article examines the way
e-government is defined operationally in the international
statistics such as the
e-Government benchmark (European
Commission) and the
e-government survey (United Nations) in
order to understand the concept measured. E-government, as
defined empirically, seems not to consider government
responsiveness to bottom-up forms of e-participation. Thus,
judgments based on these statistics may be biased. Indeed, the
analysis and evaluation of a citizen-driven system for local
public service improvement – DecoroUrbano.org – which uses
the internet to voice public services concerns or reporting issues,
suggests that the unbalance highlighted in international
statistics between a high level of supply (from governments) and
a low level of demand (from citizens) may be inverted when
considering these forms of distributed democracy.
Index Terms—Citizen-centric e-government, e-governance,
distributed democracy, e-citizenship, e-participation, citizen
sourcing.
Angela Delli Paoli and Stefania Leone are with the Department of
Political, Social and Communication Sciences of the University of Salerno,
Fisciano (SA), 84084 Italy (e-mail: adellipaoli@unisa.it, sleone@unisa.it).
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Cite: Angela Delli Paoli and Stefania Leone, " Challenging Conceptual and Empirical Definition of
e-Government toward Effective e-Governance," International Journal of Social Science and Humanity vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 186-194, 2015.