Digital technologies as a tool for citizen participation in local government
- DOI
- 10.5922/vestnikhum-2025-2-10
- Pages
- 127—133
Abstract
Local authorities are the closest level of government to the population, and it is at the municipal level that political and administrative decisions are made which directly affect the interests of every citizen. This underlines the importance of digitalizing the activities of local self-government bodies. The development of internet technologies creates new tools for citizen participation in municipal politics. The distinctive features of digital forms of political participation in the activities of local self-government bodies allow them to be regarded as an independent type of civic political engagement. At the same time, the problems of informational inequality among municipalities and technical limitations in the use of internet technologies remain relevant. Among the digital forms of citizen participation in the work of local selfgovernment bodies, one can identify crowdsourcing platforms for municipal referendums, municipal online elections, services for legislative initiatives and online appeals to municipal authorities, online meetings and citizen gatherings, as well as voting on budget planning projects.