Facilitators and Barriers of Marginalized Groups for the Engagement in Online Civic Activities

Digital inequalities are still present on a large scale in the European Union, as despite the significant progress towards digitization, many countries are struggling to close the gap. Digital inclusion becomes even more important for socially marginalized and vulnerable groups of citizens in the context of engagement and participation in civic activities. While online civic engagement platforms could contribute to reducing the gap, the design and development was not clearly accounting for the inclusion factors from the start, thus the needs, motivation and barriers of marginalized groups were not explored to the necessary extent. This study focuses on the identification of facilitators and barriers that contribute to motivating and enabling, or are blocking the online civic participation of people from such groups. As a result of the Delphi study conducted with the Representatives of marginalized and vulnerable groups, two aggregated ranked lists of enablers and respectively barriers were established. These results showed that besides the positive or negative impact that the technology could play in the motivation for online civic engagement, more actions are needed at policy making level in order to reach people of marginalized and vulnerable communities in a more efficient manner.