This is the last effort to round up *all the research*, and it’s packed with findings on participatory budgeting design, e-government transformation and the conditions for responsive and accountable government. You’ll also find meaty overviews of community contributions, methodological deep dives, useful research and a pile of case studies.
These findings raise questions about whether the boundaries between dutiful and actualizing norms—and non-electoral and electoral participation, respectively—are still relevant in the contemporary media environment. That’s from a new paper in Political Studies, based on an analysis of US survey data (N = 2200), whose findings contradict established theories about how media use interacts...
Findings This paper looks at how two Swedish government agencies (police and social insurance) use social media to build legitimacy, highlighting the importance of institutionally integrating communication strategies, and how this can create tensions with highly interactive approaches to citizen engagement. An AidData report emphasizes the broader benefits of government engagement, noting that...
Whoa, week 26, half way through 2017. That went quick. Findings There are serious transparency and participation shortcomings in international transparency review mechanisms (like the UNCAC Implementation Review Mechanism and the OECD Working Group on Bribery, according to a new report from Transparency International. And a report on global internet censorship from @BKCHarvard finds...
Papers & Findings Using the internet leads to civic engagement. Sometimes. Kind of. This according to structural equation analysis of US college survey data (n=2000), which finds “both positive and negative effects” of internet use on engagement patterns (students who share political opinions online tend to have less political conversations offline) but also identifies...
OR: How digital media broke civic engagement. Civic engagement and political participation are a common dependent variable in studies that explore the political impact of digital media and the internet. They refer to the ways in which, or degrees to which, people engage and participate in civic issues and politics. But I’ve found the use of the terms to be confusing, simultaneously diffuse and...
Papers and Findings A cross-disciplinary team of researchers has developed an NLP method that can predict judgements in the European Court of Human Rights with 79% accuracy, based on an analysis of case documents. AI to replace judges? Perhaps. More comforting is their conclusion that this finding supports the theory of legal realism, “suggesting that judicial decision-making is...
The institutional language of engagement has been defined by its measurement. Chief engagement officers in corporations are measuring milliseconds on web pages, and clicks on ads, and not relations among people. This is disproportionately influencing the values of democracy and the responsibility of public institutions to protect them. Too often, when government talks about engagement, it is...