Heleen Kerkman

Including the Citizen: an Analysis of Citizen Participation on the Whitehouse Website Heleen Kerkman

?Including the Citizen? focuses on the way in which the Whitehouse employs its main website to involve the American citizen in its democratic processes. Recently, the relation between governments and their citizens has been changing due to the rise of the New Media, and especially the Internet. This change comprises a growing demand for citizens to communicate with their government and to participate in its decision-making process. Governments are left with the challenge to provide the necessary tools to transform their democratic processes in order to facilitate this participation. This book explores to what extent the Whitehouse uses its website to meet this new ethos towards citizen participation. The author argues that, although the Whitehouse describes how it aims to include citizens in its governmental processes through its main website, the official Whitehouse website does not sufficiently reach this goal.