scholarly journals The Effect of Political Institutions on the Use of Citizen Participation Programs

2013 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-48
Author(s):  
Oh Young Min ◽  
Park Jong Sun
Keyword(s):  
Citizen Participation ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Form Of Government ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
Institutional Contexts ◽  
Participation Mechanisms ◽  
Nonpartisan Elections ◽  
Political Uncertainties ◽  
Functional Areas

Local governments` use of citizen participation programs is influenced by external environments, especially in the form of political institutions. Local governments decide to expand or limit citizen participation in administrative decision-making processes in response to political uncertainties created by different types of political institutions. Despite the importance of institutional contexts, few studies have examined the effects of these political institutions on the use of citizen participation programs. This study empirically tested whether political institutions affect the adoption of citizen participation programs. The results suggest that the council-manager form of government increases both the adoption of citizen participation mechanisms and the use of citizen participation programs in functional areas, while nonpartisan elections are associated only with the adoption of citizen participation mechanisms. At-large elections show no statistical association with either type of citizen participation. These findings suggest that local political contexts play important roles in the adoption of bureaucratic practices such as citizen participation programs and still support the classical assertion that public administration is closely connected to politics.

Why Permit Telework? Exploring the Determinants of California City Governments’ Decisions to Permit Telework

2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 239-262 ◽  
Author(s):  
Myungjung Kwon ◽  
So Hee Jeon
Keyword(s):  
Citizen Participation ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Census Bureau ◽  
Population Diversity ◽  
State Legislators ◽  
Primary Data ◽  
City Governments ◽  
Management Association ◽  
External Forces

This study examines what factors influence a local government’s decision to permit its employees to telework. Drawing on insights from contingency theory, this study investigates how external forces influence California local governments’ decisions regarding whether or not to permit telework for their employees. To examine this question, this article uses the 2010 International City/County Management Association survey data and the 2009 American Communities Survey by the U.S. Census Bureau as its primary data sources. The findings show that various contextual factors such as municipal climate protection efforts, citizen participation, population diversity, political institutions, and support from state legislators play a significant role in a city government’s decision to permit telework for city employees.

scholarly journals Local E-Government and Citizen Participation

2013 ◽  
pp. 235-258 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Freeman
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Citizen Participation ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Policy Frameworks ◽  
Online Spaces ◽  
Institutional Contexts ◽  
Italian City ◽  
The City ◽  
Comparative Examination

This chapter explores local e-government and the provision of online spaces for citizen participation. It highlights how different approaches to e-government development and implementation contribute to the likely success of participatory practices in informing decision-making and enhancing civic engagement with government. A comparative examination is drawn from the experiences of two local governments – the City of Casey in Australia and the Italian City of Bologna. The City of Casey’s e-government prioritises service delivery, with opportunities for participation largely restricted. In contrast, the City of Bologna facilitates two-way online citizen discourse and deliberation, which is used to enhance public policy. This chapter highlights that institutional contexts, including insufficient policies and the understandings and motives of political actors, affect the development of participatory e-government and the use of citizen contributions in decision-making. It suggests that successfully facilitating civic participation and engagement through e-government requires strong policy frameworks guiding online content and applications, and a broader change in governmental culture so that representatives are receptive to civic views.

scholarly journals Differentiating Participation: Identifying and Defining Civic Capacities Used by Latino Immigrants in Participatory Budgeting

2021 ◽  
pp. 153568412199347
Author(s):  
José W. Meléndez ◽  
Maria Martinez-Cosio
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Citizen Participation ◽  
Participatory Planning ◽  
Immigrant Community ◽  
Participatory Budgeting ◽  
Civic Discourse ◽  
Spanish Speaking ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
Civic Skills ◽  
Budgeting Process

Participatory planning has faced challenges engaging predominantly Spanish-speaking immigrants beyond the bottom rungs of Arnstein’s ladder of citizen participation. Participating at any level of the ladder requires individual civic skills, or capacities, that are integral to participatory processes. However, the specific skills necessary for collective action are less certain, due in part to a lack of clear definitions and a lack of clarity about how these capacities work in practice. Drawing on two years of data from a participatory budgeting process in an immigrant community in Chicago, Illinois, the authors identify key civic capacities that Spanish-speaking immigrants activated while engaging in civic discourse, and they explore the role these capacities played in moving ideas toward collective decision making. The authors present an organizational schema that aligns the study’s findings of 17 unique civic capacities with capacities identified in the literature as helping participants engage more meaningfully in decision-making processes.

Bargaining, Networks, and Management of Municipal Development Subsidies

2011 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 481-497 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hyunsang Ha ◽  
Richard C. Feiock
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Bargaining Power ◽  
Impact Analysis ◽  
Cost Benefit Analysis ◽  
Cost Benefit ◽  
Organizational Networks ◽  
Control Mechanisms ◽  
Fiscal Impact

This article investigates why cities use fiscal analyses such as cost–benefit analysis and/or fiscal impact analysis to manage offers of economic development incentives to business. We advance an approach to understanding economic development subsidies and control mechanisms that integrate political bargaining and network theories. Municipal bargaining power, institutional incentives, and organizational networks are hypothesized to influence development subsidy decisions. The results confirm that local governments’ bargaining power and political institutions influence the degree to which cities use fiscal analyses. In addition, public/private organizational networks that bridge public and private sectors by linking quasigovernmental organizations and local governments increase information and credibility thus leading to greater use of fiscal analyses.

scholarly journals Citizen Participation and Machine Learning for a Better Democracy

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Procter ◽  
Miguel Arana-Catania ◽  
Felix-Anselm van Lier ◽  
Nataliya Tkachenko ◽  
Yulan He ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Citizen Participation ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Information Overload ◽  
City Council ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
Development Goals ◽  
Democratic Systems ◽  
The City

The development of democratic systems is a crucial task as confirmed by its selection as one of the Millennium Sustainable Development Goals by the United Nations. In this article, we report on the progress of a project that aims to address barriers, one of which is information overload, to achieving effective direct citizen participation in democratic decision-making processes. The main objectives are to explore if the application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning can improve citizens? experience of digital citizen participation platforms. Taking as a case study the ?Decide Madrid? Consul platform, which enables citizens to post proposals for policies they would like to see adopted by the city council, we used NLP and machine learning to provide new ways to (a) suggest to citizens proposals they might wish to support; (b) group citizens by interests so that they can more easily interact with each other; (c) summarise comments posted in response to proposals; (d) assist citizens in aggregating and developing proposals. Evaluation of the results confirms that NLP and machine learning have a role to play in addressing some of the barriers users of platforms such as Consul currently experience.

scholarly journals Limits and benefits of participatory agenda setting for research and innovation

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Niklas Gudowsky
Keyword(s):  
Political Institutions ◽  
Agenda Setting ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Research And Innovation ◽  
Societal Challenges ◽  
Social Shaping ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
Development Goals ◽  
Societal Problems ◽  
Current Governance

AbstractCurrent governance of science, technology and innovation (STI) faces tough challenges to meet demands arising from complex issues such as societal challenges or targets, e.g. the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. For decades, scholars and civil society institutions have called for increased public participation in STI, and political institutions have been taking up the request to integrate engagement activities into their decision-making processes, at least in the form of consultations. Moving engagement in research and development further upstream makes early interventions and social shaping of technologies and innovation possible. Since research has also faced repeated requests towards taking on more responsibility for solving societal problems, engagement processes thus help in shaping research. Here, the earliest point for possible engagement can be found within the constituting phase of research agendas as topics, general lines of enquiry and targets are shaped in this phase. These are the boundaries in between which researchers later navigate. This article serves as introduction to this journal’s topical collection on participatory agenda setting for research and innovation (PASE). It provides a review of the literature on theory and practice of PASE activities, summarises the topical collection’s contributions regarding current international cases and analyses respective PASE limits and benefits, thereby promoting its conceptual and practical understanding.

Evolution of e-participation in Greek local government

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Constantina Costopoulou ◽  
Maria Ntaliani ◽  
Filotheos Ntalianis
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Big Data ◽  
Local Government ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Local Community ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Mobile Apps ◽  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
The Impact

Local governments are increasingly developing electronic participation initiatives, expecting citizen involvement in local community affairs. Our objective was to assess e-participation and the extent of its change in local government in Greece. Using content analysis for 325 Greek municipal websites, we assessed e-participation status in 2017 and 2018 and examined the impact of change between these years. The assessment regards two consecutive years since the adoption of digital technologies by municipalities has been rapid. The main findings show that Greek local governments have made significant small- to medium-scale changes, in order to engage citizens and local societies electronically. We conclude that the integration of advanced digital technologies in municipalities remains underdeveloped. We propose that Greek municipalities need to consider incorporating new technologies, such as mobile apps, social media and big data, as well as e-decision making processes, in order to eliminate those obstacles that hinder citizen engagement in local government. Moreover, the COVID-19 outbreak has highlighted the need for enhancing e-participation and policymakers’ coordination through advanced digital technologies.

Trolls Just Want To Have Fun

2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 21-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shefali Virkar
Keyword(s):  
Information And Communication Technologies ◽  
Citizen Participation ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Public Confidence ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Digital Platforms ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
The Government

Over the last two decades, public confidence and trust in Government has declined visibly in several Western liberal democracies owing to a distinct lack of opportunities for citizen participation in political processes; and has instead given way instead to disillusionment with current political institutions, actors, and practices. The rise of the Internet as a global communications medium and the advent of digital platforms has opened up huge opportunities and raised new challenges for public institutions and agencies, with digital technology creating new forms of community; empowering citizens and reforming existing power structures in a way that has rendered obsolete or inappropriate many of the tools and processes of traditional democratic politics. Through an analysis of the No. 10 Downing Street ePetitions Initiative based in the United Kingdom, this article seeks to engage with issues related to the innovative use of network technology by Government to involve citizens in policy processes within existing democratic frameworks in order to improve administration, to reform democratic processes, and to renew citizen trust in institutions of governance. In particular, the work seeks to examine whether the application of the new Information and Communication Technologies to participatory democracy in the Government 2.0 era would eventually lead to radical transformations in government functioning, policymaking, and the body politic, or merely to modest, unspectacular political reform and to the emergence of technology-based, obsessive-compulsive pathologies and Internet-based trolling behaviours amongst individuals in society.

scholarly journals Elections and local government performance in Brazil

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (83) ◽  
pp. 580-599
Author(s):  
Pedro Luiz Costa Cavalcante
Keyword(s):  
Local Government ◽  
Citizen Participation ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Electoral Competition ◽  
Institutional Arrangement ◽  
Policy Outcomes ◽  
Government Performance ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
National Analysis

Abstract The 1988 federal Constitution introduced a complex and innovative institutional arrangement that not only reestablished political rights and democratic procedures, but also reinforced decentralization as a fundamental guideline for policy implementation in Brazil. As a result, municipalities have become pivotal actors in the policymaking process. Scholars of Latin American politics have given much emphasis to the causes and determinants of decentralization, but not much has been done toward a more general understanding of how this increased decentralization has affected policymaker behavior and policy outcomes. This paper aims to do exactly that. Specifically, it investigates how institutional arrangements and electoral competition affect local government performance. The theoretical basis is the electoral democratic theory that broadly highlights elections as instruments of citizen control in retrospective and prospective voting approaches. The research employs a large-N cross sub-national analysis based on a dataset of electoral, partisan, socioeconomic and public financial information collected from over 5500 municipalities. Local governments’ performance, our dependent variables, are synthetic indicators formulated from 2009 nationwide surveys on public education, health, housing and welfare services. The OLS regression results confirm the hypothesis that politics variables do matter in how politicians make decisions and implement policy under the new Brazilian democratic Era. The empirical evidences suggest that electoral competition does not present a direct effect on government performance, however, ideology and citizen participation do. Therefore, this paper helps to expand our understanding of a political system’s impact on public policy outputs, which is extremely important not only for academic purpose but also to support policymakers’ decisions.

Social media responsiveness in the public sector: A study of social media adoption in three functional areas of local government

2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel J. Seigler
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Public Sector ◽  
Local Government ◽  
Citizen Participation ◽  
The Public ◽  
Organizational Influences ◽  
Online Social Media ◽  
Social Media Tools ◽  
Similar Path ◽  
Functional Areas

Based on the importance of citizen participation and the collaborative potential of online social media tools, this study tests four proposed influences on administrators who are deciding whether or not to adopt these tools to engage citizens. A survey of 157 department managers from large U.S. cities shows that 82% report using some form of social media to engage citizens and that perceived organizational influences and administrator preconceptions have the strongest impact on the respondentsʼ decision to adopt social media. Possible explanations for the results are that the use of online social media in the public sector may be following a similar path of adoption as earlier forms of e-government or managers may be operating in a rational environment when deciding whether or not to adopt online social media tools.

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