11th Economics & Finance Conference, Rome

DETERMINANTS OF E-PARTICIPATION: AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS

AMAR IQBAL ANWAR, PRINCELY IFINEDO

Abstract:

This study examines the impact of political, economic, social and technological (PEST) factors on e-participation maturity. By taking the data from 193 countries, we investigated the e-participation determinants at global, regional and countries by income-level. Although, the existing literature explored the impact of PEST factors on e-government index (EGI), we argued that taking e-government as the dependent variable and including social and technological factors in the model create serious issues of collinearity among endogenous and exogenous variables as the EGI is a weighted average index and comprised of three main components, namely: (1) scope and quality of online services, (2) development status of telecommunication infrastructure, and (3) human capital index. Second, we investigated the role of PEST factors on e-participation at global as well as regional level. Third, we also explored the association between PEST factors and e-participation through arranging countries by income-levels (low-income, middle-income, and high-income countries). By using the fixed-effects model, our results show that e-participation is positively and significantly influenced by the social factors in low-income countries whereas the same association is positive but weakly significant for global as well as for high-income countries. Economic factors have positively and significantly influenced e-participation for global, Eastern and Western European countries only. Most of the political factors are insignificant at global as well as at the regional levels. Lastly, our results show that the telecommunication infrastructure index is the most important factor enhancing e-participation for global as well as for all regions. The implications of the study’s findings for research and policy-making are discussed.

Keywords: E-participation; E-government; Institutional Quality; Socio-economic Factors; Technological Factors

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