Refining the UN E-participation Index: Introducing the deliberative assessment using the Varieties of Democracy data

Abstract

The E-Participation Index of the United Nations E-Government Survey (EPI) has become an important data source on e-participation progress around the globe. However, its validity is often questioned by scholars, pointing out that the EPI measures technological aspects only and overlook the socio-political context. As a refinement, researchers usually utilize composite liberal democracy indices which, in turn, create new problems with the interpretation of the index, conceptualization, operationalization and measurement of e-participation success. This paper proposes an alternative refinement, based on the approach to the deliberativeness evaluation proposed by the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project. This brings the refined EPI closer to the original understanding of e-participation and leads to a more accurate measurement of government e-participation policies, as a twofold capacity to build technological infrastructure of e-participation and sustain a dialogue with citizens in policymaking. The new index reveals important distinctions between and within democratic and non-democratic countries, bridging the quantitative assessments with the existing case-studies.