The role of e-government in building democratic governance: with a special focus on Latin America

Abstract

Traditionally e-government studies have focused on technology and not enough on governance issues. One of the reasons behind this is that e-government has often been defined in a very limited way. To tackle this problem, this work introduces the modern concept of governance and how it evolved over time. The evolution of e-government followed a similar path, however in the last stages, the evolution of e-government concepts did not keep up with the modern concept of democratic governance, with aspects such as social exclusion being left out of the e-government discussion. Although relatively rare, this paper discusses some examples of Latin American countries that attempted to implement such typically ignored aspects. The paper concludes with a new, expanded definition of democratic governance and e-government and provides initial directions for future e-government work in Latin America.