Modern Applied Science; Vol. 12, No. 11; 2018 ISSN 1913-1844E-ISSN 1913-1852 Published by Canadian Center of Science and Education 351 Increasing Citizen Engagement and Participation through eGovernment in Jordan Raed Kareem Kanaan 1 & Ra’ed Masa’deh 2 1 Amman Arab University, Amman, Jordan 2 Department of Management Information Systems, School of Business, The University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan Correspondence: Raed Kareem Kanaan, Amman Arab University, Amman, Jordan. E-mail: rk@aau.edu.jo Received: May 10, 2018 Accepted: September 20, 2018 Online Published: October 29, 2018 doi:10.5539/mas.v12n11p351 URL: https://doi.org/10.5539/mas.v12n11p351 Abstract Supporters of e-Government believe that this technology will be a panacea for enhancing the engagement and participation of citizens in politics and government. However, there is little empirical support for this assertion. Due to the rapid proliferation of e-Government in Jordan there is an impetus to determine how e-Government impacts citizen participation and engagement in politics and government within the country. Using qualitative phenomenological focus group interviews with 40 citizens who utilize e-Government, an effort was made to understand how this technology influences outcomes with regard to participation and engagement with government. The results indicate that those using e-Government were politically active before using the technology and have extensive experience with technology use. E-Government for the politically active serves to extend participation in the process. For individuals that lack technological savvy and/or are not politically active, e-Government alone may not be enough to increase citizen engagement and participation in politics and government. Keywords: citizen engagement, citizen participation, eGovernment, Jordan 1. Introduction Modern governments face a wide range of challenges when it comes to effectively meeting the diverse needs of citizens. The inability of governments to meet the needs has, in some instances lead, to the disenfranchisement of many prompting concern regarding the willingness and ability of citizens to take an active role in political discourse (Wirtz et al., 2014). Initially, scholars called for research concerning exploiting the benefits of crucial electronic systems for job scheduling services (e.g. Karajeh & Maqableh, 2014; Maqableh & Karajeh, 2014) among other fields such as on cloud computing (e.g. Tarhini et al., 2017a), e-learning (e.g. Almajali& Al-Dmour, 2016; Tarhini et al., 2017b), e-services (e.g. Almajali & Maqableh, 2015; Khwaldeh et al., 2017; Obeidat et al., 2017), online banking (Tarhini et al., 2015),e-learning systems (Almajali et al., 2016), and on e-government (e.g. Alenezi et al., 2017). In an effort to address some of these challenges e-Government initiatives have been increasingly adopted. As reported by Ifinedo& Singh (2011) e-Government involves “the utilization of the Internet and World Wide Web for delivering government information and services to citizens and other stakeholders in a country” (166). These authors go on to argue that the purpose of e-Government is to make resources and information more accessible to individuals, increasing citizen engagement in government. Smith (2016) further argues that e-Government has the potential to improve the image of the public sector while increasing citizen trust in government and well as increasing citizen participation in government. Clearly, the use of e-Government holds the potential for substantially altering citizen engagement, participation, and interaction with government at all levels. 2. Research Background 2.1 e-Government Adoption The adoption of e-Government by various countries across the globe appears to represent the intersection of a broad range of social, economic and political variables. On one hand, the transactional nature of government has become laborious due to the number of services provided, requiring governments to utilize e-Government as a