Do social networks help to organize a community around e-participation portals in Russia?

Abstract

E-participation is recognized as a key element of a modern democratic society development. Social networking is considered to make a positive effect on citizens' participation increase. In this paper, we describe the social network communities organized around the users, supporters or just interested in e-participation Russian citizens.For the research, the groups supporting e-participation portals at federal, regional, municipal levels have been selected in the Russian most popular social network VKontakte. The research was conducted with the use of web-crawler for an automated analysis of the social network communities. The following parameters of the social network groups have been analyzed: number of vertices and edges, density, diameter, medium degree, average length and modularity.The conducted research underlined that social network groups are organized around e-participation portals form the communities of users. However, these communities have a heterogenous structure. A high level of modularity has been found in all the studied communities, that detected an obvious users' clustering within the community. The study proved that groups in social networks provide opportunities for information sharing. The study revealed the following parameters that influence on information sharing and the secondary audience attraction: a number of community members, the frequency of posts, the modularity of interconnections between the reposters.