Students of humanities and social sciences and e-democracy

The purpose of this paper is to find out whether the students of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (FHSS) in Osijek, Croatia, interact online with any sort of e-democracy or e-government information.

This paper presents the findings of a pilot-study conducted among the undergraduate and graduate students of the FHSS in Osijek. The research was conducted in May 2015 on a sample of 246 students. The research was carried out by means of an online and paper survey and reached 59.91 per cent of the population of students enrolled in the first year of undergraduate and graduate studies.

Students in our sample spend a lot of time online. They are relatively active online when it comes to finding information connected with their academic responsibilities (e.g. 77.2 per cent of the students of the sample have gone online for finding information about exams, scholarships, etc.), but rarely engage in democratic processes within the academic community (only 11.8 per cent have contacted their student representative on the University Student Board). They are even less interested in democratic processes within the local community (8.1 per cent have contacted their local authority representatives regarding an administrative or communal matter).

This is the first research of FHSS students’ perceptions and views regarding their engagement and their information behavior regarding e-democracy and e-government processes and one of the very few such researches in Croatia.