This roundup dumps 3 months of links, with evidence that participation boosts, trust and policy satisfaction, but info might not empower communities as we like to think. Plus insights on boosting civic engagement, the state of ICT4D, and lots of useful research for designing open data and government crowdsourcing initiatives.
This month saw a series of research collections guides and databases, plus several assessments of open gov research, and research on what motivates citizens to take action, why M&E is broken, the demand side effects of R2I portals, and lessons from the civic tech graveyard.
Last week's research links document gateway drugs for political mobilization, and suggests that countries democratize most when tyrants get sloppy. Plus lots and lots of case studies on social accountability and european poetry as linked data.
Findings: A review of 133 cross-sectional studies finds that the most significant political effects of social media use across contexts have to do with expression of political views on social networking sites, while an experiment with Belgian legislators confirms the WUNC thesis of protest influence on elite opinion (ie: size matters, so does coherence). An experiment on public sector...
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...
Findings An assessment of 100 Indian smart city initiatives supports previous findings regarding the lack of correlation between digital literacy, infrastructure citizen and participation in municipal e-government. A comparison of national log data with select case studies further suggests that national centralization of e-government services may have a negative consequence on citizen engagement...
Findings There’s lots of findings on inclusion and exclusion this week. A study of Fix My Street platforms in Brussels suggests that they “marginalize low-income and ethnically diverse communities,” while a Dutch survey suggests that citizen forums aren’t increasing political engagement as much as we’d like. primarily due to problems with representation and drop-out...
Papers and Findings Text analysis of Swiss media during national referenda on smoking bans finds that the use of evidence in political debates is rare, and usually used only to increase speakers’ credibility. Monitoring the activity of Swiss parliamentarians, meanwhile, is directly and positively affected by monitoring (explicitly via video recording parliamentary sessions) according to a...
4 weeks’ worth, yikes. #summer Papers/Findings Citizen Engagement FTW! The Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory just released a “virtual issue” on citizen engagement, collecting the most important articles with that focus in that journal since 1995, to make some sense of how citizens actually engage with governance across the policy cycle. The editors’ take...