Conference Paper

This paper will evaluate the e-democracy strategy and levels of citizen involvement in the Republic of Macedonia while attempting to compare the Macedonian case with e-democracy strategies and citizen involvement that may be found in EU Member States today. The questionnaire used in the EPACE project (Exchanging good practices for the promotion of an active citizenship in the EU) served as a basis for our research and it was distributed to all the ministries within the Government of the Republic of Macedonia, focusing on the following issues: strategies related to e-democracy and their main objectives; and, e-participation tools and projects for the future. Relevant officials from the Macedonian Ministry of Information Society and Administration were contacted for more detailed information about strategy and cases. In order to gain an insight into e-democracy at a local level, we analyzed the web portals of local governments, with a special emphasis on the e-tools used. As the findings suggest, both EU Member States and the Republic of Macedonia have a document which can be considered as part of a National Strategy which refers to the development of an Information Society as a whole whilst paying only modest attention to e-democracy. In contrast to the EU Member States, where more or less all three levels of citizen involvement are present, the findings in the Republic of Macedonia suggest that only citizen involvement at an information and consultation level is currently in existence. Further research on this topic should be undertaken in order to investigate the extent to which the applied e-tools in the Republic of Macedonia provide communication and feedback in both directions.