E-GOVERNANCE AND E-PARTICIPATION VIA ONLINE CITIZEN BUDGETS AND ELECTRONIC LOBBYING: Promises and Challenges

Abstract

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Chinese

Proponents of e-government, e-governance, and e-participation are particularly excited about the inclusive and empowering nature of some of their recent platforms. Critics nevertheless remain skeptical about how empowering these technologies really are and to what extent they fruitfully contribute to direct democratic processes. This essay reviews online initiatives in two areas (citizen budgets and facilitating citizen lobbying practices) intended to enhance e-participation and e-government strategies in the United States and beyond. I suggest that although clear progress has been made in the innovation of e-governance and information and communication technologies with websites like LobbyForMe and online citizen’s budget initiatives, a long road lies ahead before any notable milestone can be acknowledged in respect to full-blown e-democracy.

Keywords

e-Government e-Governance e-Democracy e-Participation Electronic Voting Electronic Participation Participatory Politics Public Administration Citizen’s Budgets Representative Democracy Citizenship and Participation ICTs LobbyForMe United States

Governments across the board—local, state, federal, and international—are exploring and identifying ways to use technology to increase government efficiency and effectiveness, engage citizens, and streamline processes and public service provision. Digital government provides a framework where stakeholders, including ordinary citizens, can contribute viewpoints on policy options and strategies—and where government bodies can show they are listening (or not). It offers platforms for both government and interest groups to publicize information about existing and proposed policies at local, state, and federal levels. It provides an outlet for governments to demonstrate they are meeting the transparency and accountability standards that have become a large part of modern democratic legitimacy (see, for example, Organisation for Economic Co-operation [OECD] 2016). And it can also promote a closer connection between government and citizens that translates at least some of the spirit of Athenian democracy into the language of the enormous, complex, postmodern state.

The electronic potential for enhancing how informed the citizenry is on a wide range of policy issues is clear, as is the potential for enhancing the depth and duration of civic-political engagement and democratic participation through electronic means. Commentators have latched on to the promise for e-participation contained within this potential with enthusiasm. Yet the risks and difficulties are not altogether removed from the very complaints that Plato leveled against democracy 2,500 years ago in Book VIII of The Republic. Although the digital age promises positive leeway for democratic collaboration and enhanced civic e-participation, it also has a strong proclivity to encourage people to indulge their private whims publicly. As the many hold power and, on Plato’s account, not all of them in Athens were suited to govern well, democracy permitted all sorts of diverse interests to form a big, eclectic, inconsistent mess of laws, policies, and initiatives that run in all directions. For Plato, sociopolitical pandemonium is a natural tendency of democracy. For contemporary democracies, the challenge is to find mechanisms that can effectively negotiate a pathway through such a political reality; mechanisms in which all citizens and groups have a functional and functioning stake.

That e-government has contributed significantly to public democratic participation is well established (see, for example, Brake 2015; Bryer 2011; Chohan 2016; Knopp 2013; Radu, Zingales and Calandro 2015; van der Meer et al. 2014; Zheng and Liao 2015). Yet it has also been posited that it may exacerbate certain tendencies toward “cooperation without coordination” (Shirky 2012) in ways that Plato could never have imagined.¹ This essay reviews how some newer, innovative e-government/e-participation platforms—in the areas of online participatory budget simulators/initiatives and electronic citizen lobbying—certainly contribute positively to wider e-government and e-governance initiatives in contemporary western democracies and beyond. But they also run the risk of incurring some of the problems that have affected the democratic success of other contemporary citizen participation strategies. I contend that these e-participation initiatives may well help illuminate one step along the pathway toward more sustainable e-democracy in the future, but there are a number of rather important areas that require additional light if we are to avoid the associated pitfalls.

I begin with a brief discussion of how e-government and its cognate concepts have been defined in the literature and how pragmatic obstacles to contemporary e-governance stem from lack of agreement at the conceptual level. I then review citizen participatory budgets that have come to represent one of the most successful e-participation strategies to date worldwide where the benefits appear to outweigh the disadvantages very clearly. Next, I review one recent e-participation platform, Lobbyforme.org, which seeks to influence politicians via collective calling and grassroots-based campaign design. Finally, before concluding, I explore some of the more immediate predicaments associated with such strategies that make these applications promising yet volatile.

E-government and E-governance

Traditionally, e-government referred simply to the practice of using websites, social media, and technology to perform a function. It involves the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to provide government services while exchanging information and integrating reciprocal lines of communication between government-to-citizen (G2C) and government-to-business (G2B) via online platforms, usually using applications or websites. Georgescu (2012, 370) argues (following Ndou 2004) that the reason why many e-government initiatives fail is because of inadequate definition and a consequent public failure to properly understand e-government objectives and functions (see also Wong et al. 2007). The 2001 World Bank definition of e-government—ascendant for years, yet 17 years later seems excessively catch-all and vague—makes it easy to see why:

eGovernment is the government owned or operated systems of ICT that transform relations with citizens, the companies and/or other government agencies so as to promote citizens empowerment, better service delivery, consolidate responsibility, increase transparency, or improve government performance. (World Bank 2001, cited in Georgescu 2012, 370)

Part of the problem is that e-government² and e-governance are often used interchangeably. It is certainly worth following Manoharan’s (2015) advice to preserve a distinct difference between them (see also Manoharan and Ingrams 2018; Ramnarine and Endeley 2008, 17; Sheridan and Riley 2010). Manoharan (2015, xi) defines e-government as “a one-way dissemination of information from government to citizens” and e-governance relates to “the two-way dialogue and interaction between government and its citizens.” “E-government refers to the practice of online public reporting by government to citizens and e-governance represents the initiatives in which citizens can participate and provide their opinion” (Manoharan 2015, xi; see also Manoharan and Ingrams 2018). Scholars and practitioners have subsequently flagged a need to add more depth to the way both e-government and e-governance are understood.

Difficulties in conceptualizing e-government also partly stem from the fact that it can be approached in manifold ways. If approached in terms of who is using it to communicate to whom, then Manoharan’s (2015) distinction above is informative. Conversely, it is common to read today that use of technology alone does not constitute a successful e-government practice. Like all areas of management and administration, success is driven by a thoughtful plan with a specific purpose measured against clear metrics. Defining e-government in terms of its success or performance thus concerns determining the specific goal, the audience, the platform that matches goal to audience, and appropriate measurement tools used to determine success levels (Georgescu 2012; Justice et al. 2015). Accounting for both approaches leads to further questions, such as how to identify the purpose(s) of an e-government or e-governance initiative or strategy, properly understand audience needs, or appropriately measure performance from both one-way and two-way perspectives. Taken together with the centrality of social media to contemporary e-governance, this suggests an important caveat should be added to the above definitions. E-governance may focus most strongly on formal two-way exchanges between governed and government. But many informal initiatives and exchanges between citizens themselves in the virtual public sphere impact on that two-way dialogue. On occasion, such public exchanges can even supplant that dialogue, as was the case in Egypt and across the Middle East during the 2011–2012 Arab Spring and beyond.

E-participation is clearly a concept and a practice connected intimately with e-governance (two-way), but citizens certainly have a stake in e-government (one-way) strategies and as such there is clearly a place for their participatory, or at least regulatory, voice to be heard within them. E-government is also sometimes used interchangeably with e-democracy. It is hoped, perhaps rather idealistically, that through ICTs e-democracy will pave the way for digital governance, where all adult citizens in a democracy would be able to participate equally in the proposal, development, and negotiation of policies and legislation—as well as their implementation—in a process mostly conducted online and accessible through Internet services.

ICTs focus on convenience and efficiency to more productively contribute to improving critical services such as intersocietal communication, education, safety, and protecting public servants (see, for example, Flecknoe 2002). When these aspects are emphasized, e-government has the opportunity to facilitate increased government transparency through providing, in theory, deeper, easier, or more intelligible access to government information, clearer signals of motivations behind specific resource allocation decisions and policies, and the chance to play a part in measuring government performance (see Justice et al. 2015). This, in turn, should help citizens become more aware of how governmental bodies function, how stages of policy are developed, or how exactly their tax dollars are being spent in those countries where Internet accessibility is widespread and Internet penetration by the populace is high.

Traditionally, citizen participation has always required a very active attempt to engage. However, ICTs have yet to wholly address the difficulties associated with three distinctive obstacles that have perennially faced strong and sustained democratic citizen engagement and participation well before the digital age. The first involves the old argument on citizen apathy. Popular dissatisfaction, concern, or distrust promotes greater citizen engagement for a number of identifiable reasons. Citizens tend to engage more politically when they feel passionate, enthusiastic, or otherwise very positive about something—and less when they do not. Strong engagement can also stem from worry or fear that one’s particular interests are being rejected or ignored (pocketbook-driven engagement or not-in-my-back-yard [NIMBY] issues). Likewise, it can stem from a fear that the interests of others are being disrespected or violated. Strong and sustained popular political engagement can also refer to a fear that cherished popular values (e.g., of democracy—rights, privacy, transparency, etc.) are being ignored or violated. The first obstacle to any kind of popular participation, then, is that if people tend not to feel passionate about issues, they tend not to participate actively. This may not quite be the apathy it is often purported to be. It is not that citizens do not care, but rather that in most everyday policy matters they do not care enough to make the requisite effort worthwhile (Brun 2012), or feel that the costs of such efforts outweigh any benefits (Downs 1957). Second, low engagement is often attributed to lack of time, resources, and/or political enthusiasm. Third, contemporary policy making and implementation is complex and multidimensional. It therefore requires sufficient information gathering to understand and engage properly with policy issues, as well as some critical and analytic expertise. Many citizens have neither the time nor the inclination to acquire either unless circumstances make it essential.

Has the digital revolution changed this traditional picture in any significant ways? And have the strides already taken in e-government/e-governance strategies started to pave the way for more enlightened forays into the realms of electronic citizen political engagement? In many ways, they have. E-government can bring easier, quicker public access to fuller complex policy information. This does not, by itself, abrogate the need for citizens to spend time finding, reading, and analyzing it. However, it greatly reduces the time spent gathering it and can offer interpretation aids via useful breakdowns, summaries, synopses, wikis, graphic organizers, and so on, for nonexperts.

How can we engage in e-participation if we do not have time? We either make time, or we reduce the time it takes to engage—or a bit of both. ICTs plainly shrink obstacles concerning time and resource limitations by the effective use of virtual portals, e-voting, e-conferencing, webinars, social media, 24-hour news feeds, and so on. Those who are most excited about the positive potential of e-participation see this as the logical place to begin to widen its reach. And they are probably right.

Yet, regarding political enthusiasm and feeling sufficiently passionate about the benefits of participation to outweigh its costs, ICTs have been less successful. This is the area in which proponents of e-participation have the most work to do. It is one thing to reduce the costs and effort involved in participating. It is quite another to envision the kind of e-democracy that is pleasurable enough to engage in—to the point where it can fairly compete with the many other pleasant or essential activities we now choose, or are required, to do instead. No matter how efficient, well-thought-through, and well-designed any strategy for enhancing e-participation might be, it will not succeed if people do not use it (van der Meer et al. 2014, 498). And this claim holds regardless of whether citizens engage because they want to, or because they know they ought to. Either way, e-participation strategies need to concentrate on successful ways to draw citizens in and get them to make more time for engagement in public matters.

Scholars and practitioners in e-participation strategies have taken some very promising practical steps in the right direction. Through ICTs, e-government can increase citizen participation by “smoothing communication between citizens and government, providing new forms and more convenient ways to participate, supplying citizens with information needed, and reducing costs for participation” (Zheng and Liao 2015, 118). On its own this is clearly not enough to generate the widespread civic enthusiasm required for huge (and presumably joyful) leaps toward full-blown e-democracy. However, the idea shows promise in highlighting the important roles e-government and e-governance have in closing the distance between citizens and government and fostering a collaborative relationship based on e-participation. One strategy that appears extremely successful at increasing public enthusiasm for sometimes quite complex policy endeavors concerns the proliferation of pioneering online citizen budgets (CBs). It is to these I now turn.

Participatory Budgeting (PB): CBs Simulators and Initiatives

Long before the advent of the Internet, scholars and practitioners touted the benefits of PB (also known as CBs) since the first full PB in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 1989, which was conducted through local and city assemblies (see, for example, Berner 2001; Ebdon and Franklin 2004). As model and simulation technology has advanced alongside communications tech since that time, PB has been globally embraced in every continent at the local, state, and even federal levels in well over 1,500 cities worldwide—from the United States and Canada to Portugal (Caçador 2014), Slovenia (Center of Excellence in Finance [CEF] 2016), and in several African States (Chohan 2016) to isolate but a few.³ Hundreds of thousands of citizens have participated worldwide, increasingly by electronic means. A growing host of (often open-source) software products and platforms to facilitate CBs, either in terms of budget visualization or, more latterly, online simulators and even more interactive, two-way versions designed to affect real budgetary policy.⁴

The range of PB functions is diverse and context-specific, but the (rather impressive) perceived benefits include: simplifying financial information for citizens; increasing government transparency and accountability surrounding fiscal policy through enabling the public to monitor and regulate government budgets, public spending, and resource allocation; enabling the public to better understand the roles and responsibilities of public officials; enhancing understanding of how trade-offs and project prioritization affect the budgetary process; acting as a responsive popular consultation tool for public administrators; simulating (often in real time) how spending decisions on municipal, state, and federal budget resources would affect the overall budget; understanding the consequences of prioritizing resource allocation; turning discussions and ideas into concrete policy proposals; and making citizen-led decisions on actual spending plans for fairly large municipal revenues allocated to a plethora of community projects.⁵

The vast majority of the literature on PBs focuses on its successes (see, for example, Cabannes 2004; Jabola-Carolus 2015; Knopp 2013; Shah 2007; Spada and Gilman 2015). Indeed, the sheer global proliferation of PBs over the last three decades, and online CBs more recently, indicates that the benefits are indeed considerable and salient in both established democracies and emerging ones. The authors cited above mention, inter alia, reduction of corruption and undermining of patronage networks, increased citizen-government understanding and trust, better citizen-public official relations, expanding participation to those previously marginalized, reduction of cynicism toward government, increased citizen perceptions of being active stakeholders in government, and clear advances in citizen education on at least some of the complexities, trade-offs, and compromises involved in government fiscal planning. One potential hope is that kind of measure could stimulate the type of political enthusiasm that can motivate citizens to get politically involved in other areas. However, some of the less-touted disadvantages suggest this may be a tad idealistic.

Fewer studies have been devoted to the less successful side of CBs, although Wampler’s (2007) comparative study attempts to isolate why CBs have been successful in some municipalities in Brazil and not others.⁶ Among the disadvantages he highlights, we might legitimately apply the following to electronic CBs outside of Brazil: for marginalized citizens, particularly the very poor, finding the time to participate, or participate in a sustained manner, remains economically impossible; CBs often attract participants with limited objectives which, once achieved, do not stimulate continued participation; local issues are often prioritized at the expense of wider (regional, national, global) concerns; urgent and immediate citizen demands tend to take precedence over requisite longer term planning; and the necessary strong government support may not be forthcoming everywhere, may be hampered by institutional constraints, or can be obstructed by electoral transitions (Tadamun 2013; Wampler 2007; see also Knopp 2013). Several of these disadvantages—especially those concerning limited objectives and local, immediate, or short-term citizen interests—relate to the Platonic point highlighted earlier that democracy encourages people to indulge their private whims publicly at the expense of a larger, more long-term, less self-interested picture. They also do little to ensure that diverse interests are not permitted to form an eclectic, inconsistent mess of citizen-driven initiatives that run in all directions.

Despite these drawbacks, CBs appear to be highly successful e-participation strategies in terms of the success of their outcomes—for expanding e-participation and citizen education as well as for enhancing more responsive, one- and two-way collaboration between citizens and public officials. Much appears to have been learned since the early 2000s, when, for example, Ebdon and Franklin (2004), found that sustained citizen input had scant effect on budget decisions in two cities in Kansas, although other purposes—education on fiscal policy and support for specific proposals—enjoyed some success as a result of these particular CB initiatives. The more recent CB simulator in Montreál, for instance, has shown how CBs can bring more people into the policy decision-making process by creating “feedback loops” with public officials (Brun 2012; see also Brake 2015). Nevertheless, it seems clear that, to retain and expand genuine citizen enthusiasm and sustained motivation in CBs and other similarly successful e-participation strategies that might arise from them in future, government responsiveness and subsequent resource allocation decisions need to reflect that citizen time and effort in participating is indeed being taken seriously and acted upon. To remain a central tool of e-governance able to foster a fruitful G2C relationship, this involves the kind of two-way government responsiveness that can lead to direct political change that reaches beyond mere government department performance measurement.

In other areas, this is not always yet the case. Some non-web-based ICTs have been instituted in the United States since the mid-1990s, such as 311 (3-1-1) call center systems for nonemergency government services that permit citizens to telephone to ask questions, file complaints about public service provisions, or make reports on public health and safety issues. Clark and Guzman (2016) recently found that, despite the enthusiasm and interest produced by such participatory initiatives in Boston and San Francisco from 2005 to 2013, there is “no significant resource benefit” for those departments using dedicated 311 systems as compared with those that do not. “[W]hile data generated in the 311-enabled citizen participation are increasingly used to measure departmental performance . . . this information has little to no effect on the allocated share of the budget for departments” (Clark and Guzman 2016, 945).

A logical corollary to salient government accountability, transparency, and responsiveness to citizen e-participation should also be emphasized as a way to begin to counter at least some of the issues that bothered Plato, and should concern us, about democracy as a whole. As e-participation grows, new methods and mechanisms of bringing citizens to account for their politically engaged actions should also become an increasingly important part of e-participation theory and practice (Zheng and Liao 2015). A case could be made that bringing in citizen accountability measures at this rather early point in the evolution of e-participation might do more to squash any budding citizen engagement than encourage it. However, a working balance between encouragement and regulation seems paramount if a genuine and responsive two-way collaboration between citizens and government is to progress—in CBs and beyond them. On the understanding of e-governance emerging from the above discussion, such future two-way openness and responsiveness should not only involve G2C, it should stress C2G.

Relatedly, van der Meer et al. (2014, 495–97) find evidence supporting a significant correlation between the level of e-government website and social media interactivity and government openness and responsiveness. Their argument derives this conclusion not because most of the websites reviewed were highly interactive and open, but the converse. The authors’ collation of findings from several studies indicates that the majority of governments are not yet providing enough opportunities for citizens and officials to genuinely interact electronically on a range of e-government issues. They also suggest that most government agencies are not being sufficiently responsive even if they do provide interactive website components. Openness is where e-participation measures are the least developed.

Van der Meer et al.’s (2014) study points to the conclusion that e-participation initiatives focusing on providing interactive services and generating adequate “feedback loops” that might promote C2G as well as G2C need to better figure out how to collect, sort, interpret, and become practically responsive to the information posted by the public. It is all very well to design a website with interactive features that register user (voter) opinions and preferences. The expectation is, of course, that these will be usefully collated, effectively reported to public officials, and subsequent actions taken accordingly to increase efficiency and responsiveness as has occurred in the more recent CBs. When this is not occurring, the disconnect between user (voter) reporting and provider (non)action may well obstruct any popular enthusiasm for future e-participation practices—even if they turn out to be better equipped to promote responsiveness.

A slightly earlier commentary by Bryer (2011) draws out the negative implications of this kind of disconnect and the lack of foresight in policy design that underpins it. Despite lauding many of its initiatives, Bryer questions the sustainability of the public online participation in the first Obama administration along with several of the central elements of the policy strategy itself. The argument is that the “democracy bubble” that lack of foresight in the strategy has created could well end up doing “more harm than good” (Bryer 2011, 1). Raising citizen expectations about the promises of e-governance without ultimately being able to deliver on them may therefore do far more to disillusion a fledgling e-participatory polity in the future than encourage it.

The wider point is that getting citizens and groups to use a well built, interactive government website that successfully collates information to which public officials are committed to respond is a vital step toward better e-government, as the CB experiments are starting to demonstrate in their narrower, but nevertheless powerful, enclave within e-governance. Developing effective strategies for managing the resulting information and then acting on it is important to show that citizen participation has a real impact without fomenting unrealistic expectations. Although we wait for these to be operationalized, some other recent e-participation innovations that attempt to promote better G2C responsiveness from the citizen-led side of the equation might come in useful. The following section looks at just one.

Lobbyforme.org

LobbyForMe is a new online tool that helps give U.S. citizens a potentially more responsive gateway for e-participation and C2G as well as G2C. By offering citizens a tool to “create shareable campaigns that allow supporters to call their reps in just a few taps,” it promises to offer “collective action with impact” via a portal to aid citizens to “influence politicians with collective calling” (Lobbyforme.org 2018).⁷ In the words of cofounder Todd O’Brien,

Following the 2016 presidential election, one thing became clear to me—Americans of all political stripes don’t feel represented by their government. That’s why I, along with co-founder Ben Koren, created LobbyForMe, an online platform that makes it easy for activists to create, share, and track campaigns on any political issue or government vote. (Newsbreaks 2017)

One of the most effective ways for citizens to influence policy is to call their representatives collectively and in great numbers. This kind of activist unity is nevertheless difficult to achieve—a fundamental problem that the founders of LobbyForMe felt the need to address. It therefore comprises a website designed with some of the most effective and convenient components of online petitions—including, importantly, a user-friendly interface—combined with potentially high-impact actions such as directly calling or messaging government representatives at the federal and state levels. Serving as a citizen lobby platform, this ICT promotes public mobilization via fast electronic communications to leverage law makers and power holders toward more responsive policy development and more satisfying results.

Citizens who want to become more actively involved in U.S. politics can, upon accessing the website, choose to create an account with their name, e-mail, and password; or immediately start and share a new campaign. Supporters of the campaign enter their address and leave a voicemail directly at the representative’s office where they will be received, at the latest, the following day. Cofounder Ben Koren notes that the company, “tried out a number of different ways to route calls and messages” but that, “having congressional aides tabulate the messages that next day and pass them on [to] the representative” was, “by far the easiest and most efficient way to make people’s voices be heard” (Rubin 2017). In addition, supporters can share campaigns via social media, increasing the chances of proposals on upcoming votes to “go viral.”

To monitor penetration rates of the campaign spread, the platform has prepared analytics on its reach, size, and overall performance to measure impact, substantiate support on issues, and inform on future associated action (Lobbyforme.org 2018). The potential impact that could be generated is distinguishable from other similar applications by anonymously publishing constituents’ messages to their representatives online, which is accessible to the public and the media, and can in this way be used to hold politicians accountable if they are not representing the interests of the public.

The interface itself is compatible and friendly to almost all users.⁸ Campaigns can focus on targets from the federal or state levels of government. Federal messages relay to the president, the Senate, or the House of Representatives. At the state level, lobbyists are promised access to specific representatives within the state House, Senate, or the governor. Campaign details must then be elaborated, describing what the campaign is about and why it is important, illustrated through talking points and photos, if desired. The website asserts that it is most effective to be as specific as possible when demanding actions on upcoming votes because general messages about policy are often not considered or imparted to elected delegates (Lobbyforme.org 2018). This implies that although practically anyone with access to the Internet can start a new campaign, the impact of any real policy influence is dependent upon how viral that campaign becomes, as well as how relevant it is to current developments in policy, pending policy drafts, or other “upcoming votes.”

This application offers several merits that could smooth two-way G2C communications. However, one very obvious challenge is the lack of effective marketing this platform has, as yet, delivered. To recall an earlier point, no matter how efficient, well-thought-through, and well-designed any strategy for enhancing e-participation might be, it will not succeed if people do not use it. There is certainly great content available, but people also need to know where this lobbying platform is, how easy it is to use, and what exactly it can do for them (preferably with well developed examples). Reaching out to third parties such as academic journals and news outlets are resourceful promotional beginnings. But LobbyForMe as a brand could do worse than consider building more online partnerships—using YouTube, for instance—to consolidate a larger audience and build sustainable public relations. Also, continuing to build a stronger presence in social media is imperative for an organization whose platform revolves around the repetitive use of sharing on social media networks. It is surprising to discover that LobbyForMe, albeit a new website, had a mere ten likes and total of twelve followers as of November 25, 2017.

LobbyForMe seems to understand what people need on the surface, though more could be done to explore, pinpoint, and incorporate the specific needs of people who are, or will be, using the service. Whether users are from the public or any branch or level of government, policy makers need real people to help prioritize, design, and develop policy, and the clear mission statement for this platform can potentially aid in that endeavor. Today’s clients understand that the service interaction experience is essential to any platform that seeks to utilize human resources. As such, understanding the ways people are likely to engage with the platform as well as its intuitive design and interface are major benefits that the creators have extrapolated. One critical drawback is still the dependency on the “viralability” of campaign movements. The factors that contribute to a campaign or story going viral on social media are not well-understood (except to Google’s search algorithm creators) and are, in many ways, effectively based on sheer luck as much as good marketing of an idea. This could make each lobbying campaign little more than a wildcard in any attempt to attract supporters in a volatile political marketplace where attention spans are short and “likes” turn out to be extremely hard currency even if the motivation behind such support is short lived, or unreflected, or uninformed. Again, recalling Plato’s view, this aspect of popular digital engagement indeed has a strong proclivity to encourage the public indulgence of private whims without much counsel to the contrary or thought devoted to understanding what may be in the best interests of the public as a whole. This spells potential danger for activists working to inform the populace of laws being passed through Congress while citizens are distracted by what is happening center stage in the political theater, as Astitha Nagesh (2017) points out.

Generally, the organization of information throughout LobbyForMe is optimized and formatted with enough multimedia to maintain the attention span of the average user. There seems to be, however, a lack of iterative praxes built into the site and efficient user feedback opportunities—other than directly emailing Koren—are limited. Furthermore, not much information can be found on the development methods of the platform except some references to the cofounders and third parties involved in keeping up with refining product requirements as the platform expands. However, it is also important to consider open-source alternatives to newer and more innovative services that the platform could provide in the future. A principal question is thus: How will LobbyForMe adapt to the ever-changing technological environment? Is the site flexible enough to implement newer technologies as they are introduced into the market? Time will certainly tell, as ICTs like the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, big data, and artificial intelligence become more integrated into the services of technologically advanced countries like the United States.

The team behind LobbyForMe are experienced in their respective fields—seasoned in product management, engineering, and design. This, paired with reliable third party contractors, make up the delivery of strong and effective new digital services. The results of this particular service becoming popularized and sponsoring high-traffic content remains to be seen, as would its flexibility in response to traffic spikes. But its strength lies in its open and collaborative decision to publish messages publicly and anonymously—improving e-government by offering an alternative means to hold politicians accountable, and ultimately providing an additional platform to pressure them to pay closer attention to the demands of the public.

Conclusion

Digital communications certainly reduce the costs and efforts involved in citizen political participation, though they have yet to fully address the age-old difficulty of encouraging people to make more time for sustained engagement in political and policy-making activities to which government officials are adequately responsive. It remains to be more deeply studied how much of a democratic impact the applications discussed in this essay will have as time passes. Yet existing e-participation practices have made some important steps in the right direction, particularly through engagement in CB simulation exercises and participatory budget initiatives that really affect certain policies. One suggestion to be drawn from the present study is that if software for simulators similar to budgetary ones in other policy areas can be developed and piloted, more participants could be drawn into cognate virtual and real policy-making endeavors to enhance a variety of citizenship skills as well as more formal participation in e-government and e-governance strategies. Research shows that governments are not yet providing enough opportunities for citizens to interact electronically in e-governance matters. Plus, where they do appear, actionable feedback loops are not always backed by procedures for effectively collecting the information and/or acting on it to demonstrate a strong enough commitment to responsiveness. This area is one likely candidate for key scholarship and practical progress in the future. Another concerns in-depth surveys and initial comparative analyses of very new digital services, like LobbyForMe, that appear promising in theory, and sound in design.

LobbyForMe is useful as an initial example that captures underexploited niches in e-participatory services that could further streamline processes, speed up or otherwise enhance citizen engagement, and/or contribute to more effective, efficient, and responsive government or public service provision through e-participation. Future research may well confirm that strategic crowd-sourcing (which is already being discussed and piloted in some circles), for instance, could be used to prevent e-governance from winding up as yet one more broadcasting channel for public delivery service (e-government only), as opposed to a dynamic instrument for wider, more two-way, policy change and innovation.

Despite the promise of a more inclusive e-participatory future, Bryer’s (2011) caution remains worth heeding today. Raising citizen expectations about the promises of e-governance without ultimately being able to deliver on them may do more to disillusion a fledgling e-participatory polity in the future than encourage it. The point is a somber one, but it underscores why it is still important not to be overzealous in our enthusiasm for the next generation of two-way e-participation initiatives without adopting a critical distance on what is actually feasible for both governments and citizens to commit to. CBs have proven to be both technically and popularly feasible across time, different countries, divergent contexts, and the waxing and waning of civic enthusiasm. The next wave of feasible and sustainable e-participation strategies would do well to borrow from their multifaceted example, while taking care to avoid the pitfalls that responsible and responsive democratic participation via any means needs to be keenly aware of.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to the editor, Dr. Emma R. Norman, for several detailed discussions throughout the evolution of this manuscript, for making available her unpublished notes on e-governance, and for valuable assistance in structuring the article. The author’s gratitude also goes to the anonymous reviewers who helped shape this published version.

1

Examples of the many commentators that critique some e-participation strategies as well as laud others include, for example, Bryer (2011), Wampler (2007), and .

2

For comparative purposes, a range of widely used alternate definitions are gathered in the , 8–10) report.

3

See the 2018 interactive map from Participatory Budgeting (PB) Project for a global breakdown of the most important PB to date. Available at (accessed on March 1, 2018).

4

Examples of such software include Citizen Budget, Budget Simulator, and Budget Allocator.

5

An example of the last item on this list involves Seattle’s “Your Voice, Your Choice: Parks & Streets” PB initiative (Seattle.gov 2018). “[R]esidents democratically decide how to spend a portion of the city’s budget on small-scale park and street improvements.” In 2018 that portion amounted to US$3 million. A list of the 2017 Seattle Participatory Budget Voting Results is available at (accessed March 1, 2018).

6

His specific findings are that the “most important factors explaining the variation are the incentives for mayoral administrations to delegate authority, the way civil society organizations and citizens respond to the new institutions, and the particular rule structure that is used to delegate authority to citizens” ().

7

The website was cofounded by Ben Koren, cofounder of Frameology, and Todd O’Brien, Senior Director of Engineering at Warby Parker. It was designed by Andrew Vilchez who specializes in Web Development, and Danielle Tremonte in UX design.

8

Anyone of 13 years or under attempting to use any of the website’s services would be violating the child privacy policy, which falls under its Terms of Use ().

About the Author

Davin J. Baxter is a researcher in international politics at the University of the Americas, Puebla, Mexico. He has also been head Editorial Assistant for the international peer-reviewed journal Politics & Policy (Policy Studies Organization/Wiley) based in Washington, D.C., since 2017. His research interests include political philosophy, deliberative democracy, science and technology in politics, and e-governance innovation.

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