Örebro Studies in Informatics 11 I
ÖREBRO 2016 ÖREBRO STUDIES IN INFORMATICS 11 2016W
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wairagala wakabi is a PhD student at Örebro University School of Business, Sweden. His research interests include Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and citizen participation in Africa, the use of new media in authoritarian regimes, and open governance. Wakabi is a practitioner in the field of ICT for Development, working through the Collaboration on International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa (CIPESA). He holds an MSc in eGovernment from Örebro University and an M.A. in Journalism and Media Studies from Rhodes University, South Africa.
How can digital technologies, notably social media, contribute to a more democratic system and engaged public in countries where open expression is limited? This thesis studies Social Networking Sites (SNS) as Information Systems (IS) artefacts, including individuals’ motivation for using them, how their features enable participation - or not - and the impacts of their use in an authoritarian country. The thesis proposes ways to increase eParticipation in authoritarian contexts, citing the social accountability sector (where the thesis shows evidence of eParticipation working) as a pathway to greater citizen par-ticipation and government responsiveness. The thesis also contributes to the Information Systems artefact discourse by illuminating the political, social, technological, and information artefacts in SNS when used for eParticipa-tion. Moreover, the thesis shows how, in contexts with a democracy deficit, resource-based theories such as the Civic Voluntarism Model fall short in explaining what motivates political participation. It also explains how social networks contain the various constitutive aspects of the IS artefact – social, technical, informational and political - and how these various aspects need to be aligned for eParticipation to work.
isbn 978-91-7529-136-9
