E-Participation Without Democracy: Understanding Variation in Digital Engagement in Non-democracies

The variation in E-participation adoption and obstruction among non-democratic regimes is not sufficiently understood in earlier research. We attribute this to a lack of conceptual instruments for systematically studying the regime attributes of non-democratic states. Inspired by the work of Linz and Stepan (1), we demonstrate how a more fine-grained and multi-dimensional taxonomy of non-democratic regimes could differentiate between regime behaviours. Based on this categorisation, we further formulate expectations regarding four dimensions of E-participation in different types of non-democratic regimes. We argue that the proposed regime categorisation and identified expectations can form a basis for more nuanced comparative research on E-participation in non-democratic states.