The Impact of ICT on Democratic Governance: A Case for Botswana e-Democracy
Understanding the link between ICT implementation outcomes and e-democracy in the African region has been difficult to justify due to; the perceived lack of research data and limited access to internet that facilitate democratic governance. Literature on ICT and related disciplines seems to suggest that regular replications have been well researched with a focus on the internet and much less has been reported on ubiquitous ICT applications and their evolving new media convergence technologies through the means of mobile telephone, radio and television.
Using critical realist perspective, this qualitative case study validates idealized theories on e-democracy models in literature and redefines the role of ICT to encompass other domains of the empirical such as mobile phone, radio and television. This research study would therefore argue that; contemporary models of e-democracy framework (Paivarinta & Saebo, 2006) are empirically generalizable in the case of Botswana and, to some extent, for developing nations of the world ICT facilitated democracy has more potential for ubiquitous application such as mobile phone, radio and television, which are more pervasive than internet applications.