Several studies came out in August with evidence for what works and what doesn't work in civic tech, especially regarding anti-corruption programming, open data and institutionalization. Plus there are several important of research collections, how-to methods guides, and oodles of case studies.
A recent Oxford white paper proposes mechanism modelling as a method to determine when results of policy evaluations should be scaled or adapted to other contexts. This is an compelling contribution to ongoing debates about external validity of RCTs, more importantly, it's a simple and useful tool for thinking about when and how civic tech programs work across different contexts.
Findings Politically marginalized groups have less access to the internet, worldwide. This shocker based on network measurements over 8 years and identification of politically relevant groups as defined by the Ethnic Power Relations (EPR). The relationship between online and offline activism is messy, according to a survey of 1023 adolescents from five Balkan countries, while a year-long study in...
The civic tech and open government community spends a fair amount of energy persuading government counterparts to get in the game, measuring how well they do, and encouraging them to do more and better. There seems to be based on a general assumption that doing so works best when appealing to government incentives, either to make their work easier, to increase their legitimacy or to get on the...
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...
Papers / Findings Squeaky wheels get the grease. Analysis of policy crowdsourcing for urban planning in California uses natural language processing to show that (1) whether or not citizen contributions are included in policy depended on their “volume and tone,” (2) that the contributing crowd was more representative of the community than elected representatives contributions, and (3)...
Papers and Findings Nordic Open Access to Research Data. A new research paper reiterates important conditions for effective open access, and offers 3 recommendations for Nordic research communities that take advantage of their countries’ size and position. A psychology study in Zimbabwe suggests that for political activism in repressive political contexts, psychological resilience in the...
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...