Variations in Urban E-participation

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

Abstract

The technological determinism that permeated the early scholarly literature on e-participation, has since been refuted by a range of empirical studies. Contrary to the overtly optimistic predictions that e-participation would become omnipresent as local governments’ digitalization efforts progressed, citizen participation is not a central component to most authorities’ e-efforts. This does not mean that e-participation schemes do not occur, but rather that its adoption varies greatly from place to place. The e-participation literature has tried to explain this variation through quantitative studies either based on surveys with government officials or a mapping of features on government websites. But the success of these mapping exercises is also the literature’s weakness. Due to the quantitative and cross-sectional nature of these inquires, their findings remain on a very high level of abstraction. Another shortcoming is that the literature do not distinguish very well between variations in e-participation technologies. The modest ambition of this paper is to supply the e-participation literature with a study of the actors, processes and strategies — a focus that hardly exist in the literature — that lead to the establishment of three specific e-participation platforms in the following cities: Melbourne, Madrid and Oslo. The not-so-modest ambition is suggest more theoretically refined hypotheses of the drivers of different forms of e-participation. The main research questions is: What drives some governments to adopt electronic consultation tools, whereas other choose to include Internet users in decision-making processes? To elicit the factors that drive cities to involvement citizens in policy, the explanations in this paper focus on the motivations of those that adopt the platform, the characteristics of the political system and the context in which the adoption process occurs, as well as the power struggles that occur when institutions are altered.

Author

• Sveinung Legard