Last week's roundup of civic tech research had a lot of absurdity, from presidential tweets to SCIGen, plus findings on when online activism provokes responses from authoritarians and who adopts online reporting platforms first.
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.
Lots of findings in civic tech research last week. Evidence on how to build open procurement and citizen participation initiatives, field experiments on degrees of responsiveness and accountability workshops gone wrong. New resources on crowdsourced legislative processes and evaluating police accountability, plus insights on citizen policy preferences and lots of cases studies. All of this...
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...
Papers and Findings A field experiment among county governments in the US last April showed that municipal governments are more likely to fulfill public records requests if they know that their peers already have, suggesting profound implications for peer conformity and norm diffusion in responsive government. A recent commentary in Public Administration Review builds on these insights, to...