Politicians' Complaint Response: E-Governance and Personal Relationships

• In Event: Civic Media: Local Government and Elected Officials' Use of Digital Tools

Abstract

When do politicians respond to citizen public service requests, complaints, and grievances? Despite agreement on their importance, the provision of public services is often sporadic and inconsistent in developing nations. Existing literature has highlighted technological solutions as ways to increase the efficiency of the complaint process and to more easily involve politicians as arbiters of complaints. This work has mostly occurred in country-contexts with few pre-existing citizen-politician links, meaning that the introduction of complaint management technology coincides with the development of citizen-politician relationships. I look to local government in India — where informal, private relationships between citizens, bureaucrats, and politicians have long existed — to evaluate the effect of complaint management technology on politician responsiveness, absent other factors. I hypothesize that the benefits of using personal connections to resolve grievances outweigh the efficiency of complaint management technology for both citizens and politicians, implying that politicians will be less responsive to complaints registered using complaint management technology than those delivered personally to them. Using a mixed-methods approach with a quantitative analysis of politician responsiveness to citizen complaints, text analysis of complaint responses, and field interviews, I find support for my hypothesis. Politicians rarely respond to citizens who file complaints using complaint management technology, but are responsive to complaints registered with them personally. In keeping with this year’s conference theme, this paper shows how shifting institutional context can influence the effectiveness of technological solutions to solve public service delivery problems.

Author

• William O'Brochta, Louisiana Tech University