Citizen Participation in Local Democracy Online: A Snapshot of Trends and Challenges in Adoption of Crowdsourcing Methods in Tanzania
Journal of Social and Political Sciences, Vol.2 No.4, 2019
18 Pages Posted: 15 Nov 2019
Date Written: November 7, 2019
Abstract
Although numerous studies concerning local democracy have been carried out in Tanzania, most of them have fallen short of analyzing crowd-sourcing citizen participation in local democracy online. Local democracy aims essentially to promote fundamental rights of the citizen to participate in policy and decision-making processes. On the other hand, crowd-sourcing in the modern digital age - is increasingly expected not only to transform relationships between local politicians and voters in democratic processes, but also to engage and empower ordinary citizens to have a voice in monitoring electoral procedures by new electronic means from below. Promotion of citizen participation with better platforms for monitoring local elections and information sharing in near real-time is a vital element for healthy local democracy. This is why in recent times; we have witnessed emerging of digitally empowered citizen voice platforms such as Uchaguzi open source and social media pages like Facebook for citizens' crowd-sourcing systems. In that regard this paper attempts to map citizen crowd-sourcing methods, trends and challenges of online participation in monitoring local elections in Tanzania. Crowd-sourcing methods through information and communication technologies create an agenda for collective citizen participation, collaborative production and sharing of local information.
Keywords: Local Democracy, Citizen Participation, Online Participation, Crowd-sourcing, Digitization, Tanzania
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation