Yannis Charalabidis
email: yannisx@aegean.gr

Manolis Maragoudakis

Euripides Loukis
email: eloukis@aegean.gr

Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis in Policy Formulation Initiatives: The EU-Community Approach

Keywords: Opinion Mining, Sentiment Analysis, Public Policy, Social Media

des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

Introduction

In the last decade there is extensive and continuously growing creation of political content in the Internet, and especially in the Web 2.0 social media, which has the form of numerous political postings, comments, articles and debates in various electronic spaces (e.g. web sites and social media accounts of political institutions and traditional or electronic media, political blogs, etc.). Citizens are increasingly using the above electronic media as efficient channels for the creation and exchange of extensive political content, and also for the quick organization of collective political action with large numbers of participants [START_REF] Chadwick | Web 2.0: New Challenges for the Study of E-Democracy in an Era of Informational Exuberance[END_REF][START_REF] Shirky | The political power of social media[END_REF][START_REF] Bekkers | Caught by surprise? Micro-mobilization, new media and the management of strategic surprises[END_REF]. This political content can be quite useful for government agencies, as it can significantly assist them to understand the needs and problems of society, and the perceptions and feelings of the citizens, and to formulate effective public policies. The 'wicked nature' [START_REF] Kunz | Issues as Elements of Information Systems[END_REF][START_REF] Conklin | gIBIS: A tool for all reasons[END_REF]Conclin 2003) and the continuously increasing complexity of social problems and needs makes this political content even more valuable, as it contains extensive knowledge of citizens concerning social problems and needs, which can be quite useful for understanding and managing their complexity.

For the above reasons a variety of ICT-based methods have been developed for the exploitation of this political content by government agencies (aiming at conducting various forms of 'citizensourcing'), initially simpler and later more sophisticated ones. In this evolution we can distinguish four discrete 'generations'. The first generation includes the creation of websites and social media accounts of government agencies, which provide information about existing and planned policies of the latter and allow citizens to create political content on them (e.g. comments, suggestions, etc.). As this citizens-generated political content becomes massive, it becomes difficult to process it manually, and this gives rise to the development of a second generation of ICT based methods, which automatically retrieve this political content from various sources using (e.g. various social media accounts and websites of the particular government agency) their APIs, and then process it in order to generate various kind of 'analytics' [START_REF] Kokkinakos | Citizens collaboration and co-creation in public service de-livery: The COCKPIT project[END_REF][START_REF] Wandhöfer | Engaging politicians with citizens on social networking sites: The WeGov toolbox[END_REF][START_REF] Charalabidis | Participative Public Policy Making Through Multiple Social Media Platforms Utilization[END_REF][START_REF] Ferro | Policy Making 2.0: From Theory to Practice[END_REF]. However, gradually it was realized that the most useful political content is generated beyond the websites and social media accounts, in numerous 'external' political forums, blogs, news websites, and also in various Twitter, Facebook, etc. accounts, without any stimulation from government; this gave rise to the development of a third generation of ICT based methods, which are oriented towards the automatic retrieval of this 'external' content using the APIs of the sources, and then its advanced processing [START_REF] Bekkers | Social media monitoring: Responsive governance in the shadow of surveillance[END_REF]; Loukis and Charalabidis, 2014; Charalabidis et al., 2014a). The above three first generations of ICT tools were oriented towards the political content generated by the general public. This can provide valuable insights into the perceptions of the general public concerning important social problems and existing or planned public policies, which are definitely quite important for the formulation of effective policies. However, in order to collect higher quality content concerning social problems and public policies it is necessary to target specific communities having strong interest and knowledge on them. This leads to the development of a fourth generation of such ICT based methods, which focus on the retrieval and processing of high quality content about social problems and public policies created by experts ('expertsourcing'); some first research in this direction is conducted in the European project EU-Community (partially funded by the 'ICT for Governance and Policy Modelling' research initiative of the European Union (EU) -see http://project.eucommuni-ty.eu/), which aims to exploit and leverage the extensive policy community of EU [START_REF] Charalabidis | Leveraging European Union Policy Community Through Advanced Exploitation of Social Media[END_REF][START_REF] Charalabidis | Social Media in Policy Making: the EU Community project approach[END_REF].

These ICT-based methods are increasingly based on the use of opinion mining (OM) and sentiment analysis (SA) techniques [START_REF] Maragoudakis | A Review of Opinion Mining Methods for Analyzing Citizens' Contributions in Public Policy Debate[END_REF][START_REF] Wandhöfer | Online Forums vs. Social Networks: Two Case Studies to Support eGovernment with Topic Opinion Analysis[END_REF], in order to automatically process the extensive political content collected from numerous sources, and extract from it useful elements (e.g. main topics discussed, sentiments (positive or negative), etc.), which enable better insights into social problems and needs, and provide substantial assistance for formulating public policies. However, the evolution of the ICT-based methods for the exploitation of the political content created in various web sites and social media accounts, creates new requirements with respect to OM/SA use, and necessitates the development of new ways of using OM/SA for meeting the particular needs and serving the objectives of each new method. This paper makes a contribution in this direction, by describing a novel approach to OM and SA use, created as part of the abovementioned fourth generation ICT-based method of exploiting political content created in the Internet, and especially in social media, by experts ('expertsourcing'), aiming to leverage the extensive policy community of the European Union. Furthermore, some first experimental results of it are presented.

In the following section 2 the EU-Community project is outlined. In section 3 the state of the art with respect to OM/SA use in similar project is discussed, together with the innovative features of the proposed OM/SA approach for the EU-Community project, which is described in section 4. Some first experimental results of it are presented in section 5, while the final section 6 summarizes the conclusions.

Context: the EU-Community project

As mentioned in the introduction, though the first three generations of ICT based methods for the exploitation of the political content created in the Internet, and especially in the Web 2.0 social media, were focusing on the general public, it was realized that in order to collect higher quality political content about the social problems and the public policies (existing and planned) it is necessary to adopt a more selective 'expertsourcing' oriented approach: to focus on content created by experts, who are highly knowledgeable on the specific topic/policy we are interested in and widely recognized. This is in line with previous research on policy networks [START_REF] Skogstad | Policy Networks and Policy Communities: Conceptual Evolution and Governing Realities[END_REF][START_REF] Rhodes | Policy Network Analysis[END_REF][START_REF] Rhodes | Understanding Governance: Ten Years On[END_REF], which has concluded that due to the growing complexity and of social problems and policy making, and also their dynamic nature (frequent changes), governments cannot design and implement public policies based only on their own information and knowledge resources; for this reason they are increasingly making use of 'external' information and knowledge resources of various nonstate actors (initially economic actors and later other social and scientific actors as well), and cooperate with them, in order to design and implement effective public policies, and this has resulted in the generation of public policy networks.

The above lead to the development of a fourth generation of ICT based methods, which are focusing on the most knowledgeable and credible people on each topic/policy we are interested in. Such a method is developed in the European project EU-Community, which aims to exploit and leverage the extensive policy community of EU in order to support its policy making. An overview of this method is shown below in Figure 1. It consists of three main processes: the first two of them crawl at regular time intervals the most relevant external sources of EU policies knowledgeable and credible people, and also of relevant documents of various types, update the corresponding databases, and also process the retrieved data, and assess their reputa-tion/credibility of the former and the relevance of the latter. These databases are then used by the third process, which processes users' queries (e.g. concerning the most reputable/credible people, or the most relevant documents on a specific topic, etc.

State of the Art

In order to design the OM/SA approach in the EU Community, we have studied the use of these technologies in related recent EU projects, which all aim at the exploitation of various types of political content created by citizens in the Internet, with main emphasis on the social media (in order to develop knowledge models, recommendations, intelligent services, etc.). A review of this OM/SA use approaches is initially provided in this section, and then are described the innovative features of the proposed OM/SA approach for the EU-Community project with respect to these recent related projects.

3.1

Related Projects +spaces (2010-2012)

+Spaces ("Positive Spaces") was a research project research aiming at supporting the formulation of effective public policies by assessing the impacts of prospective policies, using political content created in various Facebook and Twitter, alongside virtual spaces (VS), like Open Wonderland. Modern VSs can be viewed as microsocieties, with dynamics resembling those of real world societies, the most evolved ones having virtual economies as well as regulations analogous to real-life legislative frameworks. Moreover, VSs are controlled environments in which all parameters of users' reactions and interactions can be tracked, so they can be very useful for assessing impacts of various policy options. In this project, information retrieval mechanisms and ON/SA were applied in order to collect data from VS and process them. Structured data from polls and petitions as well as unstructured data from VS blogs and debate logs were incorporated, together with relational information like social networks from user tracing.

E-policy (2011-2014)

The E-Policy ("Engineering the POlicy-making LIfe CYcle") project aimed at supporting policy makers for 'engineering' the policy making life-cycle, integrating both global and individual perspectives. Its objectives included assessment of social impacts through opinion mining on e-participation data from various thematic web sites and Web 2.0 platforms that allowed users to express their opinions on energy related topics through textual messages. In this project opinion mining identified social impacts that should be considered at both global and individual levels. At the global level, opinion mining aggregated individual opinions as trend line in order to conduct policy evaluation. Finally regression analysis was performed, in which text sentiment, estimated as a numeric score in the interval of [-2; 2], with negative (positive) values indicating negative (positive) sentiment, was used as one of many independent variables in impact simulation modules.

Render (2010-2013)

The Render ("Reflecting Knowledge Diversity") project targeted at leveraging diversity (viewed as a valuable asset and crucial source of innovation and adaptability) in information management, in order to allow for better communication and collaboration. Under this objective, they addressed the problem of sentiment analysis in multiple domains and several languages, such as English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. They exploited domain knowledge in the form of different sentiment lexicons, as well as the influence of various lexical surface features. Experimental results showed that the improvement resulting from using a two-layer model, sentiment lexicons, surface features and feature scaling is quite important, especially in social media textual datasets. Also, in this project, a tool was developed that performs sentiment classification and visualization of Twitter short texts, which enables the analysis and visualization of diversity in tweets.

Arcomem (2011-2014)

This project aims to enable memory institutions like archives, museums, and libraries to use and incorporate relevant social media content. A series of initial applications have been developed for opinion mining from social media using GATE, a freely available toolkit for language processing. Based on the work described in [START_REF] Maynard | Automatic detection of political opinions in tweets[END_REF], which focused on sentiments identification in tweets about political parties, their methodologies were extended to a more generic analysis of sentiment about any kind of entity or event mentioned, focusing on two specific domains: the current Greek financial crisis and the Rock am Ring rock festival in Germany in 2010. For both cases, first a basic sentiment analysis was performed, by associating a positive, negative or neutral sentiment to each relevant opinion target, together with a polarity score. As a next step, entity or event extraction was performed. A modified version of ANNIE, the default Named Entity (NE) recognition system in GATE, was used in order to identify mentions of persons, locations, organizations, dates, times and financial concepts. Sentiment analysis is performed by using a rulebased approach.

TrendMiner (2011-2014)

TrendMiner dealt with large-scale, cross-lingual trend mining and summarization of real-time social media streams. This project was very similar to the abovementioned project ArcoMem, involving more or less the same OM/SA methodology and tools. Again, the use of sentiment lexicons, special purpose gazetteers and rule-based approaches, under GATE platform, comprised the overall strategy for performing OM/SA on social media.

Padgets (2010-2012)

PADGETS ("Policy Gadgets Mashing Underlying Group Knowledge in Web 2.0 Media") focused on multilingual SA of citizens postings in government social media accounts, as a response to government policy campaigns and postings on specific topics/policies of interest. The main research objective of this project was to develop a methodology and a technological platform for the systematic and centrally managed exploitation of the emerging Web 2.0 social media by government organizations in their policy and decision making processes [START_REF] Ferro | Policy Making 2.0: From Theory to Practice[END_REF]. Citizens' postings (concerning opinions and comments) in government accounts in a variety of social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Blogger, etc., were analyzed in order to identify citizens' sentiments. Since texts in social media tend to be very small, a machine learning approach was followed, in which limited linguistic resources were required. There was also a sentiment analysis module that incorporated sentiment lexicons, but this proved to perform significantly worse than machine learning models. Moreover, inclusion of emotional writing style attribute was taken into account in order to augment the performance of SA. From a technical point of view, feature selection was performed using a hybrid scheme of Support Vector Machines and Genetic algorithms. The system was implemented using RapidMiner®.

Nomad (2012-2015)

The NOMAD project ("Policy Formulation and Validation through non-moderated crowd sourcing") aimed at enabling government agencies to exploit the extensive political content created in the social media beyond their own accounts, in multiple external sources (e.g. political blogs and forums, news websites, and various Twitter, Facebook, etc. accounts) [START_REF] Loukis | Policy practice and digital science: Integrating complex systems, social simulation and public administration in policy research[END_REF]. For this purpose there is extensive use of sophisticated OM/SA techniques, such as semantically driven textual data acquisition, sentiment analysis, thematic analysis, topics extraction and arguments extraction, and summarization. The main technology used was polarity lexica with some learning algorithms that exploit name entities.

Innovative Features of the OM/SA of the EU-Community Project

The EU-Community project, in order to meet its particular objectives and requirements, has developed a novel approach to OM/SA (described in the following section), which includes some interesting innovative features with respect to the above similar projects, shown below in Table 1.

Table 1. Innovative Features of the OM/SA Approach of the EU-Community Project

Other Projects EU-Community Explanation OM/SA is mostly performed on short-sized texts from social media opinion channels. OM/SA is functioning in a dual manner, both for short-sized opinions posted by users in various social media channels, and for larger documents, such as articles, positions and RSS feeds While most existing projects focus on small texts, originating from social media platforms, our approach supports OM/SA in larger documents as well.

Are based on rule-based systems and polarity lexicons

It is using a hybrid model that combines polarity resources and machine learning

The proposed approach is utilizing both rule-based systems and classification rules extracted from data Provide a single polarity estimation for a whole document It can support a dual mode of both document and sentence-level OM/SA Usually, the sentiment score is a single number that describes the whole document. Our approach can support either a single score, or a detailed sentiment score for each sentence. Provide an OM/SA system that performs solely based on the sentiment of documents It can support topic-based OM/SA applied on a collection of documents (= extraction of sentiment for each topic separately) It allows extraction of sentiment for a document collection, based on the main topics are mentioned in them, for each topic separately. Users can focus on the documents posted by certain people, filter them according to their main topics, and see the corresponding sentiment of each.

An Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis Approach

The EU-Community project, aligned with the recent trends in OM/SA, is seeking to exploit key ICT ideas in order to leverage the huge amount of user-generated political content existing in multiple external sources, beyond government websites and social media accounts, focusing on the high quality content generated by experts, in order to support the formulation of public policies. In particular, the general idea of the project is that EU policy stakeholders need to be better informed on the most knowledgeable and credible people for each specific topic/policy they are interested in, and also the most relevant documents. The OM/SA module is mostly concerned with the analysis of the documents retrieved from various sources (either large ones such as positions, RSS Feeds, articles, etc., or small ones such as comments and posts in various social media sources).

This section describes the proposed OM/SA approach, which initially performs information extraction from crawled documents, aiming at conducting sentiment analysis on the document as well as on the sentence level, based on filtering according to a topic modelling procedure. The linguistic pipeline followed is shown in Figure 2.

Fig. 2.The linguistic pipeline of the proposed approach.

The first component activated is the crawler, which fetches data from various sources, such as RSS feeds, comments on the Euractory platform, Tweets, LinkedIn articles, etc. Since one of the main tasks of the EU-Community project is to identify relevant documents, we process the fetched documents using a topic-modeling procedure, which can identify the main "concepts" of a document. Topic modeling refers to a family of machine learning algorithms, most of them consisted of a probabilistic nature, which infer the hidden semantic structure within a set of input documents. The main idea behind topic modeling lies to the fact that documents are comprised of Document Collection some "concepts" (expressed through collections of terms). For the task at hand, we performed two different approaches. The former is the well-known Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) method (Blei et al., 2003) and the latter is an agglomerative hierarchical clustering approach. Upon grouping the documents according to their topics, the third module deployed was the subjectivity identifier, namely, a tool for discovering whether a document contains subjective or objective text. Work in opinion mining often adopts the hypothesis that the incoming documents are opinionated. However, in real-world situations there is a need to decide whether a given document contains subjective information or not, since the subjective sentences are of high importance for our purposes as they contain sentiment. The implementation of our subjectivity classifier is centered upon the methodology proposed by [START_REF] Riloff | Learning extraction patterns for subjective expressions[END_REF]. In fact, it is a bootstrapping approach that learns linguistically-rich extraction patterns for subjective expressions. The main principle is that high-precision classifiers, trained by a small dataset of labeled instances, perform labeling of a larger set of unannotated data in order to automatically create a large training set, which is then given to an extraction pattern learning algorithm. The learned patterns are then used to identify more subjective sentences. The bootstrapping process learns many subjective patterns and increases recall while maintaining high precision (recall measures the ability of the module to find all available subjective parts of a document, while precision measures the ability of identifying correctly parts as subjective).

The final step involves the core component, which performs sentiment analysis. In our approach, the subjective sentences are transformed into a vector of weights, according to the TF-IDF (Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency) model. Prior to this transformation, a series of pre-processing steps is undertaken, as shown in Figure 1. Tokenization includes the steps needed for removing any non-linguistic token and then taking care of contractions (e.g. didn't) and transforming all cases to lower for reducing the vocabulary size. Upon tokenization, the removal of noninformative, trivial tokens, called as "stopwords" was applied. Usually, these lists include tokens such as articles, personal pronouns, etc. In the present module, a custom list of stopwords was used as provided by RapidMiner®. Stemming is about keeping the core lexical form of a word from its various forms (e.g. say, says, saying, and said are all replaced by say). The next steps was about analyzing the part of speech of each token and keeping the most prone to contain sentiment such as adjectives, adverbs and verbs. In order to deal with text appearing in social media, which is characterized by idioms, abbreviations, emoticons, etc., a special gazetteer was tailored to identify them, and then replaced them by lexicons tokens (e.g. the emoticon  was replaced by happy). The gazetteer also took punctuation marks into account and transformed them into tokens as well, since it is evident that there is a certain style when using such marks in social media texts (e.g. !!! was transformed as frustration).

Afterwards, a sliding window of N tokens was considered, in order to retain neighboring lexical content. N-grams are well known in computational linguistics and provide useful information about the context of a given term. For example, when we consider N-grams of N=2 (i.e. bigrams) we could capture sentiment information such as "pretty stupid", while if we only consider single tokens then the word pretty would be assigned a positive sentiment and the word stupid a negative one. For our experiments, a value of N=2 and N=3 was respectively selected, with N=3 providing the best classification results. The next step utilized SentiWordNet, a sophisticated resource that encompassed semantic information [START_REF] Miller | WordNet: a lexical database for English[END_REF]. The motivation for this is based on the following idea: collection of affective words in a sentiment lexicon is tricky because such lexicons are limited to their domain and do not take into account the relation between words. Finally, due to the large amount of available features, generated by all the aforementioned pre-processing steps, we engaged a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier to weight each feature and eliminate those with lower weights.

Experimental Results

With respect to the data used in the experiments, initially we manually annotated some instances that were returned from the crawling component, upon removing non-English texts. As for evaluation, it was conducted for three different variations:  Using Polarity Lexicon (PL) only.  Using Machine Learning (ML) with all previous steps apart from the SentiWord-Net feature;  The hybrid ML method, i.e. the combined Polarity Lexicons and ML approach (HML).

In order to calculate the performance, a method of 10-fold cross-validation using stratification (i.e. keeping the ratio of the class instances in the training and test sets constant) was followed. The performance was measured using precision, recall and accuracy, using three ML algorithms (Naïve Bayes, Support Vector Machines and Multi-Layer Perceptron Neural Networks), also comparing with a baseline classifier (i.e. a majority vote classifier, which always replies by selecting the most represented class in the dataset). The distribution of classes in the data was as follows: 103 negative, 614 neutral and 118 positive. The equations of each metric are provided below:

Here, tp are the correct positive predictions (true positives), fp are the incorrect ones (false positives), tn are the correct negative predictions (true negatives) and fn are the incorrect ones (false negatives). In other words, recall is the relative number of the correctly classified instances that were actually classified, precision is the relative number of correctly classified instances among all those classified and accuracy is the proportion of the instances of the testing set that were classified correctly against all instances.

In the Figures 3, 4 and5 we can see the evaluation results for each metric (accuracy, precision and recall respectively). It is evident that the hybrid method HML of combining Polarity Lexicons with Machine Learning (Support Vector Machines) gives the best results.

Subjectivity Identification Results

In order to evaluate this task, a set of well-known datasets, also used by other relevant works, was adopted. Specifically, as a lexicon we used both the subjectivity lexicon considered in [START_REF] Rodrigues | Hierarchical clustering of time series data streams[END_REF], as well as a slang lexicon created by our team. The subjectivity lexicon consisted of about 8.000 words, stored in a form that retains the following information: Term, Subjectivity Type (strongsubj or weaksubj), POS tag and Polarity as returned by SentiWordNet. Furthermore, for our subjectivity and polarity classification we used the datasets of IMDb movie reviews used also in [START_REF] Pang | Thumbs up? sentiment classification using machine learning techniques[END_REF] and [START_REF] Wiegand | Bootstrapping polarity classifiers with rule-based classification, Language Resources and Evaluation[END_REF]. In the following Table 2, we can see the results (accuracy, precision and recall metrics). By observing the outcome, the proposed system can predict subjective sentences quite satisfactory (79.1%) however, it has some difficulties in identifying all of the existing subjective sentences in the dataset.

Table 2.Subjectivity Identification Results

Accuracy

Precision Recall 66.3% 79.1% 58.6%

Conclusions

Governments are increasingly interested in exploiting the extensive political content created in various web sites and social media accounts, in order to obtain a better understanding of the needs and problems of society, and also the perceptions and feelings of the citizens, and to formulate effective public policies. This has led to the development of a variety of ICT based methods for this purpose, which are rapidly evolving and become increasingly sophisticated. The most critical technology for their effectiveness is the OM/SA. The evolution of these methods creates new requirements with respect to OM/SA use, and necessitates the development of new ways of using OM/SA for meeting the particular needs and serving the objectives of each new method.

In the previous sections of this paper has been described a novel approach to OM and SA use, as part of an advanced ICT-based method of exploiting political content created in the Internet, and especially in social media, by experts ('expertsourcing'). It includes interesting innovative features: it performs OM/SA both for short-sized opinions posted by users in various social media channels, and for larger documents, such as articles, positions and RSS feeds; it is using a hybrid model that combines polarity resources and machine learning; it can support a dual mode of both document and sentence-level OM/SA; and also it can support topic-based OM/SA applied on a collection of documents (= extraction of sentiment for each topic separately).

The first experimental results are encouraging. However, it requires further evaluation using more real life data (so that a better training of the classifiers can be made), which will identify strengths and weaknesses, and lead to improvements. This is already in progress, as part of the EU-Community project: pilot applications of the whole ICT-based expertsourcing method developed in this project (Figure 1) have been planned for the near future, which will enable a better evaluation of the proposed OM/SA approach with more data. Also, further research is required on the combination of such fourth generation methods (oriented towards expertsourcing) with the ones of the previous generations (oriented towards the general public), so that knowledge, perceptions, opinions and ideas from the general public on one hand and from experts on the other hand can be combined for the formulation of better public policies.

  ) and presents the results, making use of visualization/visual analytics techniques. More information about this ICT based expertsourcing method are provided by Charalabidis et al. (2014b) and Charalabidis et al (2014c). The research presented in this paper concerns the second of the above processes (shown in the right part of Figure 1), and focuses on the advanced processing of the retrieved documents through an innovative use of OM/SA techniques.

Figure 1 :

 1 Figure 1: An overview of the ICT-based expertsourcing method developed in the EU-Community project

Fig. 3 .Fig. 4 .Fig. 5 .

 345 Fig. 3. Evaluation results of the proposed approach -Accuracy


Wairagala Wakabi
email: wairagala.wakabi@oru.se

Åke Grönlund
email: ake.gronlund@oru.se

Citizen-to-Citizen vs. Citizen-to-Government eParticipation in Uganda: Implications for Research and Practice

Keywords: Uganda, eParticipation, citizen participation, online participation

The use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) is growing globally, as is interest in the use of digital technologies to improve citizens" participation in governance. In African countries, where ICT use remains low and where there is a democratic deficit, the nature and extent of citizens" participation via ICT is unknown. Based on a print questionnaire with 322 internet users in Uganda, this paper compares citizen-to-citizen (C2C) participation and citizen-to-government (C2G) participation, examines the factors that hinder greater C2C and C2G online participation, and explores the implications for greater eParticipation in future. For effective eParticipation, the majority of Ugandan internet users need to become more active as creators of online content, as well as conversationalists and critics. Results show that regardless of whether it is engagements among citizens or between citizens and leaders, most citizens are spectators.

Introduction

Growing recognition of the role that Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can play in social, political and economic transformation is not always matched by research on the utility of digital technologies, notably in African countries. The state of the art of e-government in Africa is poorly documented, and only such research has only been conducted in a quarter of the countries on the continent [START_REF] Dombeu | African E-Government Research Landscape[END_REF]. Likewise, empirical evidence on the use of ICT in governance in East Africa is limited despite growing interest and investment in this area [START_REF] Sika | Promoting Citizen Participation Using Low-Tech[END_REF]; and throughout sub-Saharan Africa, there are few examples of direct political action facilitated by mobile devices and networks [START_REF] Hellström | Crowdsourcing as a tool for political participation? The case of Uganda Watch[END_REF].

Similarly, a review of literature on ICT and participation in Africa concluded that although there was much excitement and optimism about the role of ICT in governance, the evidence of actual impact was thin [START_REF] Gagliardone | Search of Local Knowledge on ICTs in Africa[END_REF]. In America and Europe, research abounds on how ICT is enabling citizens to participate in various governance processes. The growing ICT use in Uganda could offer an avenue for addressing aspects of the country"s democracy deficit. However, numerous obstacles to eParticipation in Uganda have been identified by previous research such as [START_REF] Hellström | Crowdsourcing as a tool for political participation? The case of Uganda Watch[END_REF], [START_REF] Grönlund | Citizens" use of new media in authoritarian regimes: case study of Uganda[END_REF][START_REF] Zanello | Strengthening citizen agency and accountability through ICT[END_REF]. This creates the need for research to understand the nature and extent of, and obstacles to, online participation becomes imperative. This paper investigates the differences between the ways ordinary citizens engage online with other citizens and with political leaders, as well as the primary impediments to greater use of ICT by citizens to engage with political leaders and with other citizens. The research fills a gap concerning the nature of and challenges to eParticipation in a developing country with a democracy deficit, distinguishing between citizen-to-citizen and citizen-to-government engagements. It is important to make this distinction because with the emergence of Web 2.0 platforms supporting eParticipation, citizens have the potential to become the main actors of eParticipation activities, which necessitates a research shift of focus from government to citizens and other stakeholders [START_REF] Medaglia | eParticipation research: A longitudinal overview[END_REF]. Moreover, in authoritarian countries, citizens tend to have scarce connections to their government and mostly interact with other citizens on political matters [START_REF] Grönlund | Citizens" use of new media in authoritarian regimes: case study of Uganda[END_REF].

Background and Motivation

Internet access in Africa stands at 20%, while mobile access is 69%, according to 2014 numbers from the International Telecommunications Union. Growing use of ICT makes it worth exploring its role as a tool for participation. eParticipation is defined as the use of ICT to support information provision and "top-down" engagement i.e. government-led initiatives, or "ground-up" efforts to empower citizens, civil society organizations and other democratically constituted groups to gain the support of their elected representatives [START_REF] Macintosh | Towards an Evaluation Framework for eParticipation[END_REF]. The purpose of eParticipation is to increase citizens' abilities to participate in digital governance [START_REF] Saebø | The shape of eParticipation: Characterizing an Emerging Research Area[END_REF]. Governance processes that comprise participation may concern administration, service delivery, decision making and policy making [START_REF]Understanding eParticipation: Contemporary PhD eParticipation Research in Europe[END_REF] and can take place within the formal political process by means such as voting, or outside it by means of political activism [START_REF] Sanford | Characterizing eParticipation[END_REF]. A literature review of various models on eParticipation [START_REF] Saebø | The shape of eParticipation: Characterizing an Emerging Research Area[END_REF], [START_REF] Sanford | Characterizing eParticipation[END_REF][START_REF] Grönlund | ICT Is Not Participation Is Not Democracy -eParticipation Development Models Revisited[END_REF][START_REF] Kalampokis | A Domain Model for eParticipation[END_REF][START_REF] Grönlund | Connecting eGovernment to Real Government -The Failure of the UN eParticipation Index[END_REF], shows that common features of participation include Informing, Consulting, Involving, Engagement, Empowerment, and Collaboration. Seeking news and information, joining online networks and political conversations also constitute eParticipation activities [START_REF] Tambouris | A Framework for Scoping eParticipation[END_REF]. In drawing the link between media use and participation, the role of ICT as a communications channel and an enabler of online networking has been noted [START_REF] Cullen | Participatory Democracy and the Value of Online Community Networks: An Exploration of Online and Offline Communities Engaged in Civil Society and Political Activity[END_REF], while social network sites (SNS) have been noted as a great source for political news and a way of influencing contacts for the politically-inclined individuals [START_REF] Gustafsson | The subtle nature of Facebook politics: Swedish social network site users and political participation[END_REF].

With 27 African countries under an authoritarian regime, 13 under regimes that have both democratic and autocratic elements, and a further nine characterized as flawed democracies [START_REF]Power in Africa: democracy mapped[END_REF], the possibility to advance democratic governance and citizen participation through eParticipation becomes compelling. However, there is a paucity of literature on the nature and utility of eParticipation in Africa. Equally, there is a grey area regarding security concerns in using ICT in political processes. Given the poor state of democracy in many African countries, there is widespread self-censorship by citizens due to fear of reprisals for expressing opinions that state authorities find objectionable [START_REF] Grönlund | Citizens" use of new media in authoritarian regimes: case study of Uganda[END_REF], [START_REF] Cipesa | State of Internet Freedoms in East Africa[END_REF][START_REF] Laverty | The Missing Connection: ICTs and Democracy in Africa[END_REF]. Freedom House"s Freedom on the Net Report 2013 report ranks Uganda, the focus of this study, as "partly free". An example of the limits of freedom is that in 2013 a cabinet minister announced that the country would establish a social media monitoring centre "to weed out those who use [the web] to damage the government and people"s reputation". Moreover, citizens in Uganda have become skeptical about their ability to impact political change, as seen in a decline in voter turnout [START_REF] Hellström | Crowdsourcing as a tool for political participation? The case of Uganda Watch[END_REF]. President Yoweri Museveni, who grabbed power via a guerrilla war in 1986, has been president for 29 years, and is accused of condoning corruption, stifling the opposition, and harassing independent media. The Government has in the past ordered service providers to block access to SMS services, Facebook and Twitter in order to deny the opposition an opportunity to mobilize supporters for anti-government protests.

Indubitably, ICT is increasingly being used in political processes in Africa, including for promoting human rights monitoring [START_REF] Gagliardone | Search of Local Knowledge on ICTs in Africa[END_REF], in election campaigns and for monitoring elections [START_REF] Hellström | Crowdsourcing as a tool for political participation? The case of Uganda Watch[END_REF], [START_REF] Kretchun | Will Kenya"s Digitally Engaged Have an Effect on this Election[END_REF], and for promoting transparency and accountability in government operations [START_REF] Zanello | Strengthening citizen agency and accountability through ICT[END_REF], [START_REF] Ndavula | Social networking sites in Kenya: Trigger for non-institutionalized democratic participation[END_REF]. ICT is helping to amplify citizens" voices, increasing civic awareness and empowering citizens to monitor the delivery of services [START_REF] Subhajyoti | Reinforcing accountability in public services: an ICT enabled framework[END_REF][START_REF] Arpit | E-Government and Social Media as Openness and Anti-Corruption Strategy[END_REF][START_REF] Woro | Enhancing Trust, Transparency And Accountability in The Local Development Process[END_REF]. The spread of mobile phones, crowdsourcing technologies, and social networks have particularly enabled messages to be amplified, information flows to be accelerated, and new spaces to be opened up for the involvement of individuals and communities [START_REF] Coyle | New Technologies in Emergencies and Conflicts: The Role of Information and Social Networks[END_REF]. In Kenya, social networks act as communication spaces that promote democracy through individuals" "articulation of democratic ideas" [START_REF] Ndavula | Social networking sites in Kenya: Trigger for non-institutionalized democratic participation[END_REF]. Research has found that in Uganda and East Africa, some social accountability initiatives that use ICT are giving voice to individuals who otherwise would not participate in community affairs, improving citizens" civic skills and helping to hold local leaders and service providers accountable [START_REF] Gagliardone | Search of Local Knowledge on ICTs in Africa[END_REF], [START_REF] Asiimwe | Using technology for enhancing transparency and accountability in low resource communities: Experiences from Uganda[END_REF][START_REF] Wamala | Empowering local people and communities to monitor districts services delivery through ICTs: Results and Lessons Learned[END_REF].

Many obstacles stand in the way of meaningful eParticipation in Africa, including low levels of literacy (both informational and ICT), high costs of accessing ICT, shortages of electricity. In Uganda, where the present study was conducted, only 23% of the population uses the internet relative to 19% for sub-Saharan Africa, 65% in the Americas, 75% percent in Europe, 41% in Arab States, 32% in Asia and the Pacific [START_REF]The World in 2014: Facts and Figures[END_REF]. Information illiteracy hampers the efficient adoption and utilization of ICT on the continent [START_REF] Tilvawala | Information literacy in Kenya[END_REF].

However, Gagliardone et al noted that in spite of the refrain common in literature on eParticipation in Africa that access to ICT will spur particular democratic behaviours and political and democratic outcomes, it evades to evaluate how particular cultural and sociological contexts drive ICT use [START_REF] Gagliardone | Search of Local Knowledge on ICTs in Africa[END_REF]. A study has found that Kenyan citizens had no trust or confidence in using mobiles for communicating with government and service providers [START_REF] Moraa | Technology in solving society"s water problems in Kenya[END_REF]. In Uganda, citizen-to-citizen participation is the predominant form but still at low levels, while citizen-to-government participation is negligible [START_REF] Grönlund | Citizens" use of new media in authoritarian regimes: case study of Uganda[END_REF]. This is primarily due to perceived risks of retribution and intimidation for expressing a particular opinion or supporting a political cause. An analysis of citizens" motivations for utilising ICT in citizen participation and democracy showed that despite widespread awareness of ICT-based tools for participation, a significant proportion of Ugandan citizens preferred non-ICT spheres for engaging in democratic processes [START_REF] Cipesa | Uganda: User and non-user profiles and their [de] motivations for Utilizing ICTs in Citizen Participation and Monitoring of Democracy[END_REF].

There is under-utilization of ICT for the provision of efficient government services in Africa [START_REF] Asogwa | The state of e-government readiness in Africa: A comparative web assessment of selected African countries[END_REF], while bandwidth is insufficient to spur efficient online service delivery. Also, most eGovernance initiatives in many countries are largely dependent on external funding, which put their sustainability into question [START_REF] Waiswa | To what extent have ICTs contributed to e-Governance in Uganda? Library Philosophy and Practice[END_REF]. Lack of financial sustainability, as well as bad design, poor implementation, and political interference were noted as primary factors that prevented ICT-for-governance projects in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda from moving beyond the pilot phase [START_REF] Zanello | Strengthening citizen agency and accountability through ICT[END_REF]. A study on the participation platform Uganda Watch found that user concerns that hindered greater use by citizens were related to costs, trust, and safety [START_REF] Hellström | Crowdsourcing as a tool for political participation? The case of Uganda Watch[END_REF].

In South Africa, too, the public has a generally poor opinion of government services [START_REF] Bagui | Listening to the Ground: Key Indicators of e-Participation in Government for Africa[END_REF]. An analysis of the Facebook pages of South Africa"s two leading political parties found that the parties did not participate in political discussions online and when they posted information on the sites, it was to impart knowledge and information, and not to engage in a conversation with the public [37]. Meanwhile, a survey of 1,044 South African students found that although they had a considerable social relation engagement online, they did not engage politically online [START_REF] Oyedemi | Participation, citizenship and internet use among South African youth[END_REF].

Ochara argues that under the alienating conditions of digital exclusion in Africa, there is an evolution of public administration towards a technocracy and increasing the efficiency of government bureaucracy through "managerialization", which reinforces digital exclusion and thus hinders effective eParticipation [START_REF] Ochara | An Organizing Vision for E-Participation Projects in Africa[END_REF]. Drawing on data from 20 African countries, Isaksson argued that the "lack of resources" hypothesis does a poor job at explaining (the lack of) political participation in Africa, as poorer citizens and people with little time on their hands were more likely to participate [START_REF] Isaksson | Political participation in Africa: The role of individual resources[END_REF].

This brief literature review shows that the nature of eParticipation in Africa is not well studied. It also shows that many factors hamper eParticipation in Africa, and that in countries where there is a democracy deficit, the activities which citizens participate in are likely to be constrained. Generating knowledge on these issues is the focus of this paper. It is particularly concerned with Uganda, as the nature of participation and the role of social media in enabling participation in authoritarian, developing country contexts remains an under-studied issue. The Arab spring, for one, provided some evidence of the role social media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube can play in creating safe communication channels for citizens to coordinate collective opposition, to express their dissent in the public sphere [START_REF] Tufekci | Social Media and the Decision to Participate in Political Protest: Observations From Tahrir Square[END_REF][START_REF] Aman | ICT, Social Media, and the Arab Transition to Democracy: From Venting to Acting[END_REF][START_REF] Howard | Opening Closed Regimes: What Was the Role of Social Media During the Arab Spring? Project on Information Technology & Political Islam[END_REF], and to gather and spread information to counter the propaganda and apparatus of the repressive state [START_REF] Manrique | The Role of New Media and Communication Technologies in Arab Transitions[END_REF][START_REF] Allagui | Waiting for Spring: Arab Resistance and Change[END_REF]. Social media generally serve to reduce transaction costs for protest organizers and present rapid and powerful channels for disseminating messages and images [START_REF] Lynch | After Egypt: The Limits and Promise of Online Challenges to the Authoritarian Arab State[END_REF]. Nonetheless, it has been suggested that the role of ICT in instigating, organizing and reporting on socio-political change in the Arab uprising may have been overstated [START_REF] Lynch | After Egypt: The Limits and Promise of Online Challenges to the Authoritarian Arab State[END_REF][START_REF] Reuter | Online Social Media and Political Awareness in Authoritarian Regimes[END_REF][START_REF] Wojcieszak | Will Politics be Tweeted? New Media Use by Iranian Youth in 2011[END_REF][START_REF] Wojcieszak | Finding a Way: How Iranians Reach for News and Information[END_REF].

Research Questions and Methodology

In order to understand the nature of participation and the factors that motivate engagement among citizens and with public officials, this research sought to answer the following questions:

1. What is the difference between the way individuals engage online with other citizens and with political leaders? 2. What are the key impediments to greater use of ICT by citizens to engage with political leaders and with other citizens?

A survey was conducted between June and October 2014 through physical administration of a pre-tested questionnaire among 322 internet users in nine districts of Uganda -Lira, Gulu, Iganga, Mayuge, Mbale, Mpigi, Masaka, Kabarole and Kasese. The questionnaire consisted of 20 questions, which were based on the review of participation models and the various activities they entail. Respondents, who included both people who were members of online political groups and those who were not, were asked about their informational and ICT skills and needs; and frequency of use of different ICT tools and services. These included Google and other search engines, Email (including for sharing photos and documents as attachments), contributing to online discussion groups/ chats, use of social media such as Twitter, Whatsapp, Facebook, and MySpace, SMS on mobile phone, blogging, downloading documents and media, and video conferencing.

There were also questions on the perceived usefulness of ICT for monitoring of government programmes and public services delivery and whether respondents used ICT to monitor or report on public services delivery. Other questions related to the ways and frequency with which respondents use ICT to engage with other citizens and with duty bearers (government officials, public services organisations) on issues of community or national concern (social, political, economic).

Interviewer-administered questionnaires have the advantage that unclear questions can be clarified to the respondent and open-ended questions can be used to collect a range of possible responses [START_REF] Williams | How to Write and Analyse a Questionnaire[END_REF]. Furthermore, since our research was about a subject many people found sensitive, having face-to-face interviews helped create trust about the identity and intentions of the researchers, which may have been difficult if the research was conducted through email, Skype or online survey tools. However, in a society where citizens fear that expressing certain political opinions could attract reprisals, and since the research was about a politically related issue, this may have affected the nature of some of the responses relative to those that could have been provided via a more anonymous survey. This was minimised by assuring survey respondents about the anonymity of their contributions.

Responses to survey questions were coded to generate statistical descriptions of the different datasets representing the various responses received. Qualitative responses were analyzed and interpreted with a focus on what was specific to the question, unique to the respondent or deviant from the other responses received for the same question. The subjective descriptions given by respondents in the open-ended questions provided a deeper contextual picture of the statistical data generated from quantitative responses.

Results

Profile of respondents and proficiency in using ICT

Fifty-nine percent of the respondents were male, 41% female. Ages 18-24 comprised 41% of the sample while 38% were in the 25-34 age bracket. The majority (66%) were educated to university level holding either diplomas or degrees. The mobile phone was the primary tool for access to the internet for 45% of those surveyed, followed by desktop and laptop computers at home or work (29%).

Respondents were asked about their knowledge of ICT tools and services and proficiency in using them. Social media emerged as the top tool most survey participants (79%) had good or excellent knowledge and proficiency in using, followed by Short Messaging Services (SMS) at 76%, and search engines at 73% (Table 1).

Usefulness of ICT for social accountability

Eighty eight percent of respondents agreed that it was faster, effective and more productive to use ICT for monitoring government programmes. In a separate question about the use of ICT to contact government officials, 68% of respondents agreed that ICT would make it easier to communicate with public officials; only 15% disagreed. These results showed a high perception about the potential of ICT to enhance interactions between citizens and leaders. It followed then that when respondents were asked whether the "use of ICT "ICT makes monitoring of public services easier and simple", 78% agreed. However, only a third of respondents (31%) were actually involved in social accountability, which indicated a disconnect between the positive perceptions most respondents held of ICT use and whether they went ahead to engage in ICT-enabled social accountability.

How citizens use ICT to engage with other citizens

Forty-three per cent of the respondents engaged with other citizens on issues of community and national concern through posting social media updates on Facebook and Twitter. This was followed by 39% who shared concerns through text messages and seeking information and news (Table 2).

How ICT is used to engage with political leaders

Table 3 shows that seeking information and news was the most frequent form of engagement with duty bearers (54%). Social media was the second most commonly used form of engagement with duty bearers at 43%. Among the least forms of engagement were participating in live call-in and SMS strips on radio and TV debates, commenting on political websites, and participating in online discussion forums.

Factors hindering greater use of ICT to engage with citizens and duty bearers

The main factors that most hindered greater use of ICT to engage with fellow citizens included literacy (66%), language (62%), cost (59%), and lack of awareness of availability of tools. 69% of respondents stated that security concerns did not hinder use of ICT for engagment with citizens. Regarding hinderances to greater use of ICT to engage with duty bearers, security concerns emerged top at 61%, followed by low confidence in receiving feedback and responses (45%). Cost emerged as the third factor (38%).

Discussion and Conclusions

The results showed a high belief in the utility of ICT to make it easier and simple for citizens to engage with leaders and with citizens, with nearly half of the respondents (88%) agreeing that ICT could enable swift and more effective social accountability. This was because most respondents had experience of using ICT and had first-hand experience of its potential to improve the ease, speed and efficiency of interactions between scattered individuals and groups. But most respondents feared reprisals for expressing political opinions, particularly those against a president in power for 29 years, and whose government has stifled freedom of expression online and offline. This fear factor, combined with the widespread perception that leaders are extremely unresponsive to issues raised by citizens, worked greatly against eParticipation. There was markedly high proficiency in using technologies, with 79% reporting good or excellent proficiency in using social media, plus very frequent use of Facebook, in particular. Relative to other social media such as Instagram and Twitter, Facebook has a longer legacy in Uganda, which partly explains its position as the most popular SNS in Uganda. Another factor that works in its favour is that subscribers on two of Uganda"s biggest telecom services providers -MTN and Orange Telecomcan use the so-called "Facebook Zero" which allows a subscriber free access to a text-only version of this social network, update their status, and read and comment on posts. The user is only charged if they make downloads, stream audio or video, or upload pictures. Facebook and Twitter were the most used tools for eParticipation.

There were notable differences in the way individuals related with other citizens and with leaders. For citizen-to-citizen communication, posting social media updates was the most pursued activity, followed by seeking information and news, emailing information (including forwarding documents), and commenting on other citizens' posts. The least interest was paid to participating in politics-related online discussions, participation in radio and TV debates, and writing in the local press or in community newsletters. There was much less engagement between citizens and leaders. Seeking information and news, following leaders on Facebook and Twitter, and engaging via social media were the most prominent activities. Worth noting is that the first two activities are unlikely to expose one to reprisals or even to show their stand on a political issue. Many citizens therefore had trust that they could engage in them without compromising their safety. It was also telling that commenting on political websites was the least engaged in of the activities respondents were asked about, followed by participating in online discussion forums with leaders, and participation in radio and TV debates. Thus, where in C2C we see more actively engaged citizens (postings SNS updates, seeking and sharing information, commenting on other citizens posts), in C2G the citizens tend to be spectators or followers, engaging on fewer ICT platforms and in less active areas.

These results show a desire to engage with the leaders on the one hand and, on the other, a detachment from them and from politics. The reasons for not engaging were telling too: with leaders it was security concerns first, then lack of trust in the engagement resulting into any change or citizens receiving a response to issues they raised; and third, was cost. With C2C, security concerns were less prominentin fact, 69% stated that security concerns did not hinder their engagement with other citizens. The implication here is that for as long as leaders remain unresponsive to issues raised by citizens, and provided citizens have a fear of reprisals for expressing opinions online, eParticipation will remain minimal, in particular as concerns the citizen-togovernment relation.

The major reasons cited by previous research, such as by Hellström [START_REF] Hellström | Crowdsourcing as a tool for political participation? The case of Uganda Watch[END_REF], Grönlund and Wakabi [START_REF] Grönlund | Citizens" use of new media in authoritarian regimes: case study of Uganda[END_REF], and Zanello and Maassen [START_REF] Zanello | Strengthening citizen agency and accountability through ICT[END_REF], such as high cost and low trust, were validated by this research. Other common factors cited in the literature that are related to accessibility, affordability, and illiteracy were also borne out by this research. The place of unresponsive government officials, fear of reprisals and selfcensorship are not well articulated or studied in the previous literature but emerged as the major impediment to eParticipation in this study, notably by those for whom access and ICT skills were not problematic. A fear of reprisals was entrenching a widespread culture of self-censorship (as previously found by Gagliardone et al., CIPESA, and Laverty [START_REF] Grönlund | Citizens" use of new media in authoritarian regimes: case study of Uganda[END_REF][START_REF] Cipesa | State of Internet Freedoms in East Africa[END_REF][START_REF] Laverty | The Missing Connection: ICTs and Democracy in Africa[END_REF]) and this was further negating participation in both the C2C and C2G contexts. Moreover, the engagement of ordinary citizens with leaders depends not only on the citizens' wish to do so but also on the availability of engagement mechanisms (not just lack of awareness of their existence). With Ugandan political leaders having a negligible, and often perfunctory, online presence, C2G engagement cannot go far.

For effective eParticipation, the majority of Ugandan internet users need to become more active as creators of online content, and as conversationalists and critics. These results show that regardless of whether it is engagements among ordinary citizens or between citizens and leaders, most citizens are inactive, and either they are spectators or engage in passive activities. Only a few citizens fall in the active participation category yet these would be the ones to push most of the needed citizento-government participation that would enhance good governance.

Conclusion

This research has found that ICT has enabled only a fraction of connected Ugandans to participate and they are doing this in a few domains, and rarely with political leaders. The much-touted benefits of eParticipation in amplifying voices and raising civic awareness as advanced by Subhajyoti [START_REF] Subhajyoti | Reinforcing accountability in public services: an ICT enabled framework[END_REF], Arpit [START_REF] Arpit | E-Government and Social Media as Openness and Anti-Corruption Strategy[END_REF] and Woro and Supriyanto [START_REF] Woro | Enhancing Trust, Transparency And Accountability in The Local Development Process[END_REF] or enabling citizens to "articulate democratic ideas" as was found by Ochara"s study in Kenya [START_REF] Ochara | An Organizing Vision for E-Participation Projects in Africa[END_REF], are hardly visible in the Ugandan case. And with few citizens engaging with political leaders, ICT is not living up to its potential to raise government transparency and accountability, to promote human rights monitoring, and to accelerate information flows between citizens and leaders.

This research has produced empirical evidence on the nature of eParticipation in Uganda, a developing country with a democratic deficit. It has developed an understanding of both citizen-to-citizen and citizen-to-government participation. The results tell us that citizens see more benefit in engaging with other citizens than with leaders. It is safer, more fulfilling in terms of the gratifications which citizens derive from engaging with other citizens, as opposed to the non-responsiveness of leaders and other duty bearers to concerns raised by citizens. There is also citizens" perceived inability to change the status quo even if they engaged public officials, which has dulled citizens" appetite for C2G engagements.

Furthermore, this research has produced empirical results on the factors that make citizens shun eParticipation even when they are aware of the benefits which could result from their online participation. On the balance, the fears and frustrations that citizens have outweigh the benefits of eParticipation. In most instances, these fears are not lived but are based on perceptions or the experiences of others. The sum total of this is that if these fears are not addressed, the great majority of Ugandans, including those with ample access to ICT, and who are aware of the benefits of online participation, will for many years remain out of the fold of eParticipation. Citizen-tocitizen participation will likely grow, as it faces fewer hurdles that are also easier to navigate in the short term relative to the hurdles to engagements between citizens and the government. In the circumstances, what are the implications for eParticipation in Uganda? More efforts are needed to deepen citizen-to-citizen engagements because if citizens" skills, trust and experience in this area is cultivated, in future these skills and experience will form the basis for their eParticipation with government.

Going forward, there is need for more research to understand better the needs and motivations of the more active citizens, particularly those who, in spite of the factors ranged against C2G engagement, still participate. That could help find ways to bring into the actives fold many citizens who currently are inactive. Other research that helps to bring more citizens to participate, in spite of the obstacles observed in Uganda, would be welcome. Larger scale studies in Uganda and similar countries to develop a keener understanding of how citizens use ICT more gainfully with other citizens and with government officials, in low-income countries with a democracy deficit is equally needed.

Table 1 :

 1 Rate the level of your knowledge and proficiency in using the following technology tools and services:

Tool/Service Knowledge and proficiency in use None Poor Workable Good Excellent

	Google and other search engines	3%	9%	15%	41%	32%
	Email (including sharing photos and	3%	8%	17%	44%	28%
	documents as attachments)
	Contribute to online discussion	11% 10% 21%	38%	20%
	groups/chats
	Use of social media (Twitter,	5%	4%	12%	40%	39%
	Whatsapp, Facebook, Myspace, etc)
	SMS on mobile	3%	8%	13%	35%	41%
	Blogging	38% 18% 19%	17%	8%
	Downloading files (documents and	7%	12% 18%	38%	25%
	media)
	Video conferencing (Skype, Google	20% 20% 19%	29%	12%
	plus etc)

Table 2 :

 2

	Form of engagement with	Frequency of engagement
	fellow citizens	Always Often Sometimes Rarely Never
	Emailing information (including	23%	20%	25%	15%	17%
	forwarding documents)
	Posting social media updates	43%	18%	21%	9%	9%
	(Facebook and Twitter)
	Participating in politics-related	13%	14%	20%	25%	29%
	online discussions
	Mobilizing via SMS	26%	16%	21%	19%	19%
	Participating in radio/TV debates	13%	8%	21%	24%	34%
	(live call ins, SMS strips)
	Writing in the local press or	9%	10%	13%	22%	46%
	community newsletters
	Seeking information and news	39%	21%	22%	11%	8%
	Commenting on other"s posts	33%	26%	25%	8%	9%
	Sending/Receiving text messages 39%	19%	20%	12%	10%

In what ways and how often do you use ICT to engage with other citizens on issues of community or national concern (social, political, economic, etc.)?

Table 3 :

 3 In what ways and how often do you use ICT to engage with duty bearers on issues of community or national concern (social, political, economic)?

	Form of engagement with duty	Frequency of engagement
	bearers	Always Often Sometimes Rarely Never
	Email requesting information/	18%	17%	25%	17%	25%
	documents

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the Collaboration on International ICT Policy in East and Southern Africa (CIPESA) for supporting this research. We are also grateful for Ashnah Kalemera"s support in analysing the data.