One of the ways we expect OGP to improve governance in member countries is by telling governments (how) to be more participatory. But a close read of the participation norms and policies promoted and adopted in an OGP context suggests that even if government’s did everything they were told, it might not be such a game changer for responsiveness and accountability.
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.
Civic tech research saw some exciting findings last week, including experimental work on factors affecting civic voice and representation across multiple country and municipal contexts. Also some useful research for advocating feedback within organizations, great research-driven resources for better advocacy and some deep deep weeds on merging human rights databases.
Here’s a long-ranging exploration of the literature on international relations, policy diffusion, public administration, global policy assessments and multi-stakeholder initiatives, where I try to draw some conclusions about what we know and what we don't. I wrap it up by proposing six research questions that could directly inform the design of global do-goodery. There’s a bulleted summary up top.
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...
I’m going to start prioritizing brevity, leaving out some of the absurdity and academic opps, let me know if you miss anything. Findings How to improve the quality of crowdsourced citizen science data? Technical measures help, but only when accompanied by instructions, according to an empirical study of four cases. Meanwhile, open data on public safety and transportation are the most...
Findings Do international norms and evaluations influence country performance? New evidence on the Aid transparency Index suggests they do. Combination of original panel data and interviews gives some pretty fascinating insights into institutional processes in government. Community & Resources A couple of new (and arguably redundant) efforts to open data in the US this week: The US State...
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...