Blockchain and E‐Participation: New Affordances and Challenges for Digital Political Participation

ABSTRACT E‐participation has been regarded by e‐government practitioners and researchers around the world as an ultimate strategic goal of many innovative public service delivery models. However, one of the objective obstacles in advancing the concept in such political reforms was the fact that the public sector has always resorted to centralization of information management workflows in advancing related e‐government policies and platforms, rendering all related transactions top‐down by nature. Thus, the public sector has always been a conceptual initiator, decision maker, and implementer of these innovations in quite a directive manner. In this regard, this article aims to understand how blockchain technology changes the status quo in promoting adoption models for e‐participation services, elaborating on new democratic opportunities that make digital governance more participative and collaborative in an intrinsically decentralized and distributed way, as well as discussing new affordances and risks that can actually undermine digital participation and paradoxically enhance existing political inequalities in modern society.