Digital Citizen Participation in the Policy Process of the Post-Pandemic Era

• In Event: The Use of Narratives in Shaping Discourse and Beliefs in the Policy Process

Abstract

Public policies face special challenges when there are local stakeholders who are particularly affected. The pandemic has opened a window of opportunity to test new forms of conflict negotiation that can deal with these challenges. These include, in particular, digital forms of participation, which became necessary during the pandemic and whose effects can also be evaluated for the post-pandemic era.
Digital participation formats can help increasing the inclusiveness, transparency and accessibility of decision-making processes. However, they can also increase the escalation potential of existing conflicts. The opportunities and risks of digital participation in the decision-making process depend on various conditions that can be modeled theoretically and tested empirically.
Our paper explores the impact of digital citizen participation using a railroad planning tool as an example. The tool has been developed by a team of German university researchers and companies with the participation of the authors of this paper. In a first step, we discuss theoretical challenges of digital participation by using a framework that takes into account classical dimensions of negotiation theory such as conflicts of interest and conflicts of beliefs, and complements them with the importance of trust between participants of decision-making processes. Second, we provide empirical evidence through 30 semi-structured interviews with local stakeholders from politics, planning officials, and various interest groups that have been involved in the planning of railroad lines in Germany. As our research group is also involved in the ongoing application of the participation tool in the decision-making process of a specific railroad project in Germany, the paper can ideally also incorporate results of a first evaluation of the tool with vignette studies.
The interviews confirm the expectation that digital participation can help to find appropriate and fair solutions in the decision-making process based on trust. At the same time, however, there is a risk that digital participation can exacerbate conflict escalation characterized by mistrust and opacity. For the practical application of digital participation, it therefore seems important to first identify the conflict dimensions and, above all, the existing trust relationship among the stakeholders. To this end, various bases of conflict and trust must be considered. These include (1.) the congruence of interests, (2.) the congruence of (policy core) beliefs, (3.) the congruence of social identities, and (4.) processual factors that have already contributed to building or destroying mutual trust in the course of the conflict so far. With regard to processual factors, in addition to the results of escalation research, previous findings on the emergence of devil shift and angel shift from public policy research (especially from ACF research and NPF research) can be used. Digital tools are based on mutual trust, but are less able to generate trust than face-to-face contacts. Especially under conditions of little mutual trust or high risk of loss of trust, it is therefore necessary to use digital participation not as a substitute but as a complement to analog participation.

Authors

• Nils C. Bandelow, TU Braunschweig

• Johanna Hornung, University of Bern

• Ilana Schröder, TU Braunschweig