Amalia Triantafillidou

Greek Local E-Government 2.0: Drivers and Outcomes of Social Media Adoption

Are Greek local governments moving towards e-government 2.0 model? What are the factors that impact adoption of Web 2.0 tools? What is the effectiveness of these tools in terms of citizens’ awareness, interest, and engagement? The present study addresses these questions by investigating the usage and effectiveness of Web 2.0 applications employed by the 325 Greek local governments. Results indicate that local authorities in Greece are moving towards an e-government 2.0 era, albeit slowly. Local governments originating from municipalities with a large number of educated inhabitants who have made use of e-government services are more likely to be adopters of Web 2.0 tools. In addition, findings suggest that Greek citizens are beginning to be more aware of the Facebook pages of their local governments while they seem more interested in their YouTube channels. Hopefully, local governments can increase their citizens’ engagement by being active on Facebook. Officials of local governments should increase their presence on social media such as Facebook and YouTube but their strategies should be differentiated for each social medium in order to benefit from their potential.

The Role of Facebook in the 2014 Greek Municipal Elections

The purpose of this study is to examine the use of Facebook by candidates running for the 2014 Greek Municipal Elections by addressing the following questions: (1) which factors affect Facebook adoption by municipal candidates?, and (2) whether Facebook usage along with the popularity of candidates’ Facebook pages influence candidates’ vote share. Results indicate that Facebook is not a very popular campaigning tool among municipal candidates in Greece. This implies that Greek candidates still rely on traditional ways to lure their voters. Furthermore, findings reveal that candidates running in large municipalities who hadn’t been elected before are more likely to utilize Facebook as a means of political marketing. Despite the low adoption rate, results suggested that candidates who made use of Facebook won more votes compared to non-Facebook candidates. Moreover, it was found that a candidate’s Facebook page popularity is a good indicator of the candidate’s vote share.

Facebook Content Strategies and Citizens’ Online Engagement: The Case of Greek Local Governments

This paper analyzes the communication strategies used by Greek local governments through the utilization of Web 2.0 technologies, specifically Facebook, and the effectiveness of these strategies in relation to citizens’ online engagement. More specifically, it examines Facebook communication strategies and levels of citizens’ engagement. For this purpose, we conducted a content analysis on the active and official Facebook pages of local municipalities in Greece from January 2017 until the end of September 2017. Our results suggest a rise in the percentage of active Facebook pages maintained by local governments in comparison to our 2014 study. Our results also show that local governments in Greece are using Facebook in a predominantly top-down manner to promote events organized by the municipality and to push one-way information to citizens about their services and actions. Local authorities have, however, made significant progress in relation to posts that support transparency and accountability and that enhance or mobilize citizens’ participation. Our evaluation of local government Facebook strategies indicates that marketing the municipality to external public, such as tourists, and providing information about services are effective strategies that drive citizens’ online attitude expression (liking), engagement (commenting), and advocacy behavior (sharing). According to our analysis, local governments in Greece prefer the strategies that we found to be the least engaging. In addition, our study provides interesting details of how specific characteristics and modes of Facebook messages (photos, videos, URLs, hashtags, and mentions) impact on citizens’ engagement. Finally, our results provide valuable insights for social media managers in local government who aim to increase the impact of their municipal Facebook pages.

Attack, Interact, and Mobilize: Twitter Communication Strategies of Greek Mayors and their Effects on Users’ Engagement

The aim of the present study is to examine the communication strategies used by Greek mayors in Twitter across different periods of an electoral cycle (pre-campaign, campaign, and post-campaign). Moreover, this study tries to delineate the effects of Twitter strategies on users’ engagement and identify the most effective ones. To that end, a content analysis is performed on 32,810 tweets of Greek mayors for a six-year period. Moreover, quantitative metrics such as the number of favorites and retweets are also obtained for each tweet. Results suggest that Greek mayors mainly use Twitter as a press release bulletin board for dissemination of information about the main events taking place in municipality. Moreover, they also use impression management strategies to promote a distinct personal, political and professional image. Results also show that during different periods of an electoral cycle mayors utilize a different mix of Twitter strategies. Furthermore, aggressive (attacking opponents), interactive (direct communication), and mobilization (requesting feedback) strategies are found to be the most effective in enhancing followers’ attitude expression (favorites) and advocacy behavior (retweets). The present study provides valuable practical implications for social media political marketers as well as politicians.

Because Political Knowledge Matters: The Impact of Deliberation on Young Citizens’ Opinions

This paper addresses the importance of “knowledge” and “access to information” in the formation of young citizens’ opinion through deliberative procedures. The research presented in this paper is grounded in the theoretical framework of deliberative democracy as a democratic model and procedure that allows participants to be engaged in a rational and open dialogue before deciding on a particular issue. Our research draws empirically upon a deliberative event that took place in October 2014 at the Western Macedonia University of Applied Sciences in Greece. The topic of deliberation was “Political Public Opinion Polls.” The results of this study are commensurate with the dominant thesis in the relevant literature, which underlines that the deliberative procedure enriches the knowledge of citizens and thus enables them to participate effectively in the decision making process.

DO GREEK MUNICIPAL WEBSITES MEET CITIZENS’ PERCEPTIONS ON ISSUE IMPORTANCE?

The purpose of the present study is first to evaluate local e-government initiatives in Greece from a citizen perspective and then to test how well Greek municipalities perform on the most important e-government applications as perceived by citizens. Towards this end, a citizen survey was conducted using an instrument that contained 14 indices and assessed citizens’ perceived importance of e-government as well as e-democracy features incorporated in municipal portals. Results indicate that Greek citizens are not ready to move forward with the adoption of more participatory and deliberative tools of local governments’ websites. Moreover, Greek citizens want easy to complete online services while they place emphasis on the informational content of the local governments’ websites. In addition they desire simple ways to communicate with their local governments such as contact or email forms and suggestion boxes. Based on the citizen survey results, a quantitative website analysis was conducted to examine the level of sophistication of Greek municipal portals in regards to the most important e-government features. Results suggest that Greek local governments can be regarded as laggards in the provision of online services to citizens and businesses as well as the inclusion of information for tourists.

A Comparison of the Effects of Face-to-Face and Online Deliberation on Young Students’ Attitudes About Public Opinion Polls

This study compared the effects between face-to-face and online deliberation on young citizens’ attitudes about opinion polls. Two parallel experiments were conducted to test the outcomes of the two modes of deliberation in terms of (a) significance, (b) direction, and (c) valence of changes. Results suggest that online deliberation affected more respondents’ attitudes compared to its face-to-face counterpart. Both modes of deliberation induced more opinion shifts towards the opposite direction of the initial attitudes instead of opinion reinforcements. Interestingly, the effect of the online deliberation was considered as more positive compared to the face-to-face deliberation, as online participants became more in favor of polls, pollsters and their relationships with politicians and the media. On the contrary, face-to-face participants became less in favor of the mediatization of polls and their impact on citizens-government communication and voting behavior. Hence, findings of this research highlight the potential role of online settings in facilitating effective deliberations.

Local E-Government and E-Democracy: An Evaluation of Greek Municipalities

The purpose of this study is the development of a citizen-centric framework for the evaluation of local e-government projects that is validated in the context of Greek municipalities. The proposed model consists of four categories, 14 factors/indices and 83 criteria. The framework incorporates the different aspects of e-government as well as e-democracy. To develop and validate the model two research undertakings were conducted: one survey that captured citizens’ opinions about the important e-government features and a website analysis to inquire about the level of e-government sophistication of Greek local government websites. Results of citizens’ survey served as input for the weighting of the model metrics. The analysis of the Greek municipal websites indicated that municipalities performed moderately well with regard to the disclosure of one-way information while they scored low in the provision of online services for citizens and businesses and the opportunities offered for citizens’ interaction and participation.