Online PhD defence Dobrina Stoyanova Poirier

Keywords: E-participation, Meaningful outcomes, Supply-side, Demand side perspectives

"Meaningful E-Participation Outcomes Through the Interplay of Supply and Demand-Side Drivers"

The dissertation addresses a key gap in the e-participation literature, which has often examined adoption through fragmented supply-side (government and institutions) or demand-side (citizens and users) perspectives. It examines how supply and demand-side drivers interact to shape both e-participation adoption and meaningful outcomes. Using a mixed-methods research design, the study combines longitudinal panel data from European regions (2010–2022) with two qualitative case studies from Rwanda: the Citizens’ Guide to the Budget and Irembo.Gov. Rwanda was purposefully selected for its extreme e-participation environment. The findings establish the centrality of demand-side drivers, showing that they are at least as important as supply-side drivers in shaping e-participation. The study further demonstrates that adoption does not necessarily translate into meaningful outcomes. It reconceptualizes e-participation as a mediated governance process in which outcomes depend on how the interplay between supply and demand-side drivers is mediated, governed and institutionalized, distinguishing between instrumental and transformative outcomes and proposing a Revised E-participation Framework for Meaningful Outcomes.

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