Do Collaborative Platforms for Citizen Input Impact Government Service Delivery?

• In Event: Citizen Participation and Partnership in Urban Politics

Abstract

To what extent does better contact between citizens and government change government performance? Platforms such as 311 and SeeClickFix have improved and increased citizen information-sharing with government through service request submission and have revolutionized how local governments manage their service workloads. I consider how differing opportunities for citizen coordination through these platforms and the evolution of these platforms over time to increase access influence government service provision. Leveraging a novel panel of requests from 100 cities, I investigate whether the level of citizen activism (follows, comments) on SeeClickFix requests impacts how quickly requests are completed. Using a survival analysis approach, I find that requests with higher levels of citizen activism have a significantly higher probability of completion at each point in time after submission. This suggests the direction of government resources toward popular and high-profile issues, facilitated by the collaborative reporting infrastructure of SeeClickFix. I also contrast request completion in the same city through SeeClickFix with request completion through 311, a platform without such opportunities for citizen coordination on requests. Additionally, to evaluate the role of expanded access, I compare the completion of service requests before and after the rollout of websites and mobile apps. The results address the extent to which improved opportunities for citizen participation and coordination might amplify or offset the documented racial and socioeconomic disparities in service provision.

Author

• Kaylyn Jackson Schiff, Emory University