INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY FOR DEVELOPMENT
https://doi.org/10.1080/02681102.2022.2046533

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Digital citizen empowerment: A systematic literature review of
theories and development models
Swapnil Sharma
Marijn Janssen

a

, Arpan K. Kar

a

, M. P. Guptaa, Yogesh K. Dwivedi

b

and

c

a

Department of Management Studies, Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, India; bSwansea University,
Swansea, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland; cTechnische Universiteit Delft, Delft, Netherlands
ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS

Governments worldwide invest heavily in digital initiatives to develop
information societies with connected and actively engaged citizens, but
problems like lacking sustained engagement and quality of
participation still plague them. We undertook a systematised literature
review on the Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) databases, covering
dispersed literature surrounding Digital Citizen Empowerment (DCE)
from the past two decades.Categorising the literature under four
thematic categories or strategies of DCE: Digital Activism (DA), Multichannel Service Delivery (MCSD), Participatory Budgeting (PB), and
Deliberative Governance (DG) critical comparative analysis is done. A
conceptual model of DCE, covering how theories from different interdisciplinary areas of political, social, and information science influence
the development of information societies and DCE is presented. Action
points in our conceptual model are mapped to policy objectives
targeting improved delivery of empowering policy goals by
practitioners, and future research opportunities in the context of DCE
are discussed.

Digital empowerment; eGovernance; digital society;
digital activism; citizen
empowerment

1. Introduction
After the 2000s, the world shifted from New Public Management (NPM) towards ‘digital-era governance’ (DEG), focusing on reintegrating and transformative digital changes in administrative infrastructure to provide holistic services to citizens (Margetts & Dunleavy, 2013). These fundamentals
are seen as key drivers in different initiatives worldwide, which help facilitate state–citizen interactions over digital media (Navarra & Cornford, 2012; Touchton & Wampler, 2014). In their latest
e-government survey, the UN has noted that 65% of the 130 nations are at a high or very high
level of the E-Government Development Index (EGDI) (United Nations, 2020). The three-level
process of information dissemination, feedback and consultation, and collaborative decisionmaking using the internet aims to change the state of citizens from passive to active, improving
the democratic process and overall governance (Naranjo-Zolotov et al., 2019).
Empowered citizens form the backbone of a well-functioning democracy (Sørensen, 1997). For
some time, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have been accepted and promoted
by governments and civil society organizations (CSOs) as being instrumental in empowering their
citizens by improving their capabilities and the control they have over their own lives (Chohan &
CONTACT Swapnil Sharma
swapnil.sharma2007@gmail.com
C/O Swapnil Sharma, 4th floor, Department of Management Studies, Vishwakarma Bhawan, IIT-Delhi, Hauz Khas, New-Delhi-11016
Nancy Pouloudi is the accepting editor for this manuscript.
© 2022 Commonwealth Secretariat