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To reinforce or to mobilize?: tracing the impact of internet use on civic engagement in Taiwan

Since the 1990s, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have become popular instruments for delivering government services, encouraging citizen participation, and improving public trust. However, although governments around the globe have made enormous investments in e-Government initiatives, whether these efforts do indeed promote greater civic engagement is still under fierce debate between those optimistic and those pessimistic about technology's potential to change the way governments interact with the populace. This paper attempts to figure out whether the Internet can encourage civic engagement and whether its effect is "reinforcing" or "mobilizing" by analyzing Taiwanese national survey data.
 The findings show that ICTs appear to have a reinforcing, rather than mobilizing effect. These technologies encourage only those people who are already active in so-called real-world civic engagements to interact with their governments online. At the end of this paper, four policy recommendations are proposed, namely: (1) keeping spending resources that could engage people in ways other than technology; (2) allocating more resources to address the digital divide; (3) focusing future e-Government initiatives in Taiwan more strongly on users; and (4) including a synchronized reform in these initiatives between the online interface and offline back-office.