The Citizen Participation Continuum: Where does the US Stand?

Active citizen participation facilitated by information technology can have profound implications for democracy and civic discourse. In this paper we describe a continuum of tools that encourage active participation by citizens. We use a comprehensive review of the web-sites of the 50 States of the U.S. to chart the current position of the country on this continuum. We find that these G2C initiatives provide some tools for passive citizen participation (e.g. on-line feedback) but ignore two important tools for active citizen participation (electronic voting and discussion forums). The lack of discussion forums is especially surprising since they are a low cost scalable tool for fostering deliberation and works equally well under both representational and direct democracy systems. In conclusion, the paper discusses the future implications of the participation continuum.