Online Presence of the Members of the Turkish Parliament: Evaluation of the Turkish MP Web Sites

Literature Review

Political systems are experiencing decreasing levels of trust and increasing cynicism towards the actors and institutions of politics, which is made explicit by decreasing levels of election turnouts. ICTs are presented as one of the remedies that can be used to overcome the crises of legitimacy of the representative democracy system (Lawrence, 2004; Lusoli et al., 2006, p. 24; Sawer & Zappala, 2001). In fact, Lusoli et al. (2006, p. 29) emphasizes that the importance of the opening of meaningful and useful interaction opportunities via ICTs. They add that the majority of the citizens are expecting to use more ICTs in the future, but not necessarily for political purposes. Hilbert (2009) argues that newer opportunities presented by the technology such as social networking opens up new venues for political deliberation and meaningful participation. There are others, who argue that the use of ICTs does not solve important political problems, such as political participation inequalities based on socio-economic status (Sclozman et al., 2010).