JeDEM - eJournal of eDemocracy and Open Government

Data Protection in AI-Driven Environments: The Model for Mapping Institutional Consciousness

Andre Afonso Silva — 2026-11-03

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems increasingly shape organisational decision-making, yet, the institutional capacities required to align these technologies with Brazil’s General Data Protection Law (LGPD) remain uneven. This article argues that many organisations, whether public or private, face institutional consciousness gaps, defined here as structural, cognitive, and cultural deficiencies that hinder their ability to understand and operationalise the ethical and legal implications of data-driven systems. Drawing on a theoretical–analytical approach, the study identifies how these gaps emerge in AI governance and how they distort accountability and normative interpretation. Building upon this analysis, the article introduces the Model for Mapping Institutional Consciousness (MMIC), a conceptual framework designed to support diagnostic assessment and strengthen governance practices in AI-mediated environments. The study argues that without addressing these internal deficiencies, organisations tend to reproduce formal compliance without substantive alignment with LGPD principles, resulting in governance structures that appear consistent but fail to adequately protect data subjects.

What Is Behind Open Data Country Scores? A Com-parative Study of Five International Benchmarks

Ievgen Bilyk — 2026-11-03

This paper aims to understand how the current international open data benchmarks are created and whether their methodologies are susceptible to bias. The publication of open data is claimed to be one of the most important indicators of government-citizen collaboration. Nonetheless, there are disparities in the advancement of open data around the world. Although many developed countries receive high scores on it, no consistent leaders emerge throughout global assessments. This article compares the existing benchmarks via the lens of sociology of quantification. A comparative analysis of the official reports is conducted to validate country scores and to provide qualitative insights into the methodologies used to obtain these numbers. As a result, I demonstrate that the current measurement tools continue generating inconsistent results because of their methodological issues. The study’s conclusion offers suggestions for improving the benchmarking of open data development, particularly by assessing how this data impacts local communities.

Analysing responses to digital activism in Indonesia and Malaysia using AIDA framework

Ganjar Widhiyoga — 2026-11-03

This article examines how six youth-led X accounts in Indonesia and Malaysia generated engagement and were associated with different forms of participation during the 2024 Indonesian presidential election and the 2022 Malaysian general election. Using the AIDA (Attention–Interest–Desire–Action) framework as a non-linear interpretive heuristic, it draws on platform metrics, interactional traces, and interviews with organisers. The study compares four candidate-centred volunteer accounts in Indonesia with two reform-oriented and civic education initiatives in Malaysia as an analytical contrast rather than a like-for-like national test. The findings show that spectacle and gamified formats scale Attention and affective Desire within platform attention economies, yet frequently remain associated with discursive, platform-proximate Action, revealing an action gap. In contrast, the Malaysian civic initiatives demonstrate stronger organisational and institutional linkages between online coordination, procedural participation and civic education. Situating AIDA within hybrid media ecologies and platform governance, the article argues that democratic effects depend less on visibility metrics than on organisational capacity and linkages to institutional processes. The study contributes to eParticipation research by distinguishing discursive-amplificatory, material-participatory, and institutional forms of Action and by specifying how platform logics condition their relationship to online engagement

Transparency Assessment Maturity in Open Government Data (TAM-OGD): a Hierarchical Decision Modeling Approach

Ratsuda Sakolkittinapakul — 2026-11-03

Despite national governments investing in open government data (OGD) to defend against corruption, the growth of OGD and the Corruption Perception Index are currently countering the situation. The inconsistent trend hinders the government agencies' achievement of the transparency performance in OGD. To facilitate the progress measurement of the organizational capabilities, this research employs a hierarchical decision modeling approach to introduce the Transparency Assessment Maturity in Open Government Data (TAM-OGD), which encompasses four dimensions: policy, dataset, portal, and accountability. Five maturity stages are represented by a desirability curve to determine the successful level. This model translates the theory of organizational transparency into practical implementation, serving as a tool for evaluating the public sector’s transparency level in OGD through three case studies in Thailand. The evaluated results advocate an evidence-based tool for public sector executives to diagnose transparency weaknesses and offer strategic investments by allocating the limited resources to maximize organizational capabilities.

Digital Disruption and Democratic Distrust: Internet Shutdowns, Social Media Use, and Institutional Trust in Sub-Saharan Africa

Oluwatosin Adebayo — 2026-11-03

Government-imposed internet shutdowns are a recurrent feature of political life across sub-Saharan Africa, yet their relationship to citizen trust in state institutions remains poorly understood. Using Afrobarometer Round 9 data (N = 35,799; 35 countries) merged with shutdown records and governance indicators, this study estimates whether shutdown exposure moderates the association between digital media use and institutional trust. Multilevel models show internet use is negatively associated with trust in core institutions (β = -0.025, p < 0.001), and social media news consumption has a similar association (β = -0.035, p < 0.001). This association is larger in shutdown countries: each standard deviation increase in internet use is associated with an additional 0.059-unit decline in trust (p < 0.001). These results suggest connectivity restrictions do not protect regime legitimacy among digitally connected citizens, though the cross-sectional design does not permit causal inference.

Conceptualizing Chatbots in the Public Sector

Carlos Jiménez-Cid — 2026-11-03

Chatbots have emerged as a new communication tool adopted by public sector organizations, yet their conceptualization remains overwhelmingly shaped by technological determinism. This study reconceptualizes chatbots as sociotechnical artifacts through a PRISMA-based systematic literature review of 76 peer-reviewed articles. The findings expose a structural imbalance in the literature, where technical development is prioritized while organizational embedding, institutional dynamics and public value implications are largely overlooked. Drawing on sociomateriality, the paper foregrounds imbrication as a critical condition for successful integration, emphasizing the inseparability of technological systems and organizational contexts. The analysis identifies key tensions, including the gap between prototyping and institutionalization, the need to restructure public sector workflows, the growing dependence on private sectors, and the risks of anthropomorphic design biases and service dehumanization. By moving beyond technology-centric accounts, this study positions chatbot adoption as a contingent and governance-sensitive process, and advances a research agenda centered on sociotechnical alignment, institutional capacity and the protection of core public values.

AI Adoption in ASEAN Higher Education as a Digital Governance Challenge: A Scoping Review

Dhita Widya Putri — 2026-11-03

Across the ten ASEAN member states, governments and regional bodies have produced more artificial intelligence (AI) policies for higher education (HE) in three years than the indexed empirical literature has generated to evaluate them. This scoping review treats that policy–evidence mismatch not as an educational-technology problem but as a digital-governance problem: a question of how policy ambition, institutional governance capacity, and educational-informatics infrastructure interact as one socio-technical system. Following Arksey and O’Malley (2005), refined by Levac et al. (2010) and reported under PRISMA-ScR, the Scopus records were screened alongside grey literature from ASEAN, UNESCO, and the World Bank. There are three contributions: we document the mismatch as a structural, not transitional, governance pattern; the Policy–Governance–Informatics (PGI) framework is also proposed, and its falsifiable weakest-layer-binds proposition; it is specified that the theoretical, methodological, and stakeholder gaps in a governance-focused research agenda must be addressed.

Digital Bureaucracy and the Paradox of Participation in Indonesia

Wimmy Haliim — 2026-11-03

This study explores the relation between digital bureaucracy, public engagement, and challenges in Indonesian governance via an ILR consisting of 57 articles indexed in Scopus (2021-2024). Though Indonesia strongly advocates for digital transformation, the results of the study indicate a significant gap. Despite implementing Digital Bureaucracy, Indonesia has been unable to overcome its governance deficit. Indeed, what the study has found is the Paradox of Participation, whereby digital technology aimed at empowering individuals is being used by entrenched patrimonial groups. In other words, without proper institutions, digitalisation becomes a source of oppression in that it helps elites in their practices of digital despotism and surveillance rather than democracy. This indicates that technology merely amplifies the power dynamics already existing in the society. Thus, solving the problem of Challenges for Public Policy Governance will require addressing the underlying extractive nature of the institutions rather than technological problems.

Editorial 18(2): Governing Digital Transformation in an Era of AI, Participation, and Democratic Ac-countability

Noella Edelmann — 2026-11-03