The rise of the information society has led to significant changes in citizens' expectations, organizational structures, cultures, processes and working relations. The OECD defines e-government as the use of information and communication technologies, particularly the Internet, as a tool to achieve the goal of better governance (OECD 2003). We observe that significant progress has been made on the way to becoming an information society. It is assumed that e-state practices will inevitably reflect on the relationship between the citizen and the state. One of the main purposes of this course is to examine e-government applications from a sociological perspective and to investigate the possible effects of these applications on e-democracy.

In this course, in the light of developments in information technologies, e-government applications in the world and in our country will be compared and the experiences of good example countries will be discussed. Dimensions of e-Government such as political, trade, security and citizenship services will be examined. Finally, in the context of e-democracy, how e-participation practices affect the relationship between citizen and state in our country and its possible contributions to participatory citizenship-democratic governance will be examined.