Understanding e-participation paths through network analysis

In new governance systems, the improvement of local communities requires the use of social capital from local networks and associations, to facilitate collaborative and collective actions. Participation is certainly a keyword to this aim, but to activate and use social capital, citizens should be protagonists of participation processes, moving them to a bottom-up direction. One of the challenges is to govern top-down participatory processes so that they meet the bottom-up ones, to ensure the active engagement of citizens and the activation of social capital, strengthening the \u201cparticipation chain\u201d. E-participation enables policy makers to involve many people at reduced costs, but it makes more difficult to control quality and dynamic of these processes. The paper argues that Social Network Analysis can contribute to the understanding of e-participation settings. It focus on some key issues. Allows network analysis to understand how people move through the web to participate? Do top-down and bottomparticipation meet somewhere? Is the use of quantitative analysis associated with the social network analysis an effective tool to study the main nodes of the network and their interactions in e-participation settings