The Challenges of Deliberative Decision Process: an Italian Case

The potential impact of new ICT on efforts to enhance citizen engagement in the policy process is now widely recognized, but the academic research on design, use and evaluation of e-engagement tools is still in its infancy. Through the use of an explorative case study, the aim of this paper is to consider how new ICT tools can be used to reinforce e-democracy and how the design of technology can facilitate citizen engagement. To this intent, we apply a new framework to evaluate the efficacy of some electronic tools used by a specific e-democracy project that involve, with different results, eight Italian Administrations. We have assessed the level of e-democracy developments based on four different dimensions: transparency, interactivity, usability and web site maturity.