The three papers in this special section focus on data driven computational intelligence for electronic governance, socio-political and economic systems. These papers reflect the design and development of computational tools and systems to exploit data generated through the interaction of citizens and organization to provide optimized e-governance services. Contagion in bank failures threatens world economics. Wireless sensing and distributed embedded computation is spurring a growth in connected computing artifacts - enabling accessibility to a plethora of new and diverse, multi-modal sources of quantitative, qualitative, environmental and user centered data. Examples of these data sources include geolocation, social media and online interaction from different personalized devices, mobile phone data, audio, visual, text, digitally associated opinions, human affect and sociometric sensor data. A key challenge is to harmonize and extract meaningful features and associations from these data streams as well as to handle dynamically and real-time generated data where quantities of interest might be spatially and temporally distributed in terms of their relationships for modelling and predicting particular events, behaviors and conditions.