E-governance and E-democracy in South Korea : Civil Participation

E-governance and E-democracy in South Korea : Civil Participation

ABSTRACT

What everyone is hailing as a new phenomenon is the coming to the fore of e-government and e-democracy . The phenomenon is new and had been around only for ten years . It started at around the beginning of the 1990s following in the wake of the advent of the Internet (UOC 2002 There had been various technology advances that came into existence that had shown good result in the private sector by enabling the availability of numerous services and information online . The members of

the private sectors had exploited these new introductions effectively by putting them to good use . Some concerned citizens had been asking why the various governments are not doing what the private sector had been doing for some time now . Governments also in their quest to be efficient in what they are doing had been examining these new technologies from a while back where there had been effort to implement them effectively in what the various governments are doing . Currently both the citizens and the various governments are working to harness these new technologies in to put them to a constructive use However , it is not easy as there is cost involved , as well as it would take time for all introductions to be effective simply because there is a lot of work involved . In addition , there is effort to create some kind of a balance between the demand-pull and the supply-pull that this will discuss further so that the whole undertaking will be productive

INTRODUCTION

The whole idea of e-government and e-democracy rotates around the government policy making process , the kind of citizen participation that is prevalent , and the kind of public work conducted through the existing interaction . The advent of the Internet at around the year 1991 had altered the interaction , whereby the traditional way of carrying governmental duties had evolved eventually to uphold what is stated in the participatory theory . What used to be the norm was the citizens would elect their representatives and pay their taxes . Those elected representatives will form the various governmental bodies that will come up with policies and allocate the available resources based on what the priority is . That includes the up-keeping of existing programs , where the requirement is to conduct the measures taken according to what the law requires . The outcome of such a governing method had always created a barrier making it difficult for the political leaders to know what kind of change in the need as well as priority of the citizen had been introduced simply because there was a lack of citizen participation There was also a lack of mechanism through which the government could find out what the citizens need or what their stand is as far as certain aspects of implementing measures were concerned . This was due to the lack of mechanism through which citizens can input what they want to communicate to those they have elected them into the various offices

Since...